Sloppy Science in a Nutshell: head of climate analysis says drought is permanent 4 years before record floods

It seems that whenever prominent CO2-driven folks condescend or blunder into making falsifiable statements about the climate system, the system duly responds by revealing them to be false.  Real Science has this beauty, using quotes from the Sidney Morning Herald:

January 4, 2008
IT MAY be time to stop describing south-eastern Australia as gripped by drought and instead accept the extreme dry as permanent, one of the nation’s most senior weather experts warned yesterday.
“Perhaps we should call it our new climate,” said the Bureau of Meteorology’s head of climate analysis, David Jones.
March 13, 2012
Changes to the system are almost certainly due to human activity.
The past two years have been Australia’s wettest two-year period since at least 1900

Yet the show goes on.  They have the money, the politicians, big agencies, big finance, big green, and of course virtually all of education from nursery schools upwards. Their scandals are numerous - the list at NoTricksZone is now up at 129 items, and is surely incomplete.  I suspect there are also many thousands more on smaller scales, within and around all the uncounted initiatives on the climate crisis bandwagon. 

But thoughtful teachers everywhere must be asking themselves how long they must go along with this madness.  On the one hand are to be found agitated activists and all the power that effective PR (such as the IPCC) and financial prizes can win, and on the other, are calmer citizens and all the integrity that careful observation and reflection can bring.

 It is clear to me which side has won the financial and political battles.  It is also clear which side has won the moral and intellectual ones.  Which side should teachers best be on?  The educational battles have also been lost, but the war is surely not yet over.  I think it is in the field a war between irresponsible adults who cannot contain or cope with speculations about CO2-driven catastrophe, and responsible ones who are dismayed by over-the-top reactions to something so poorly supported by observation and experiment.

Note added 14 March 2012: Real Science has more examples here of stupid, irresponsible, and subsequently refuted claims by scientist-activists.

Climate Week UK - a weak week weaker than ever in 2012?

That time of year again, and here I nearly missed it.  Climate Week, 12-18 March 2012.  It must be getting harder and harder to stir up enthusiasm for it.

It has as ever a list of supporters that would provide a decent resource for any sociologist researching into the spread of climate madness through a society.  Here's how it starts, with a few politicians, one a reformed terrorist, and how it continues with various 'eminent individuals' such as Al Gore and Nicholas Stern, two famous alarmists, and a star of the 10:10 terror film 'No Pressure', Gillian Anderson:

'Political leaders

The Prime Minister, David Cameron
The Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg
The First Minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond
The First Minister of Wales, Carwyn Jones
The First Minister of Northern Ireland, Peter Robinson
Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, Martin McGuinness
The Leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband

Eminent individuals

Al Gore, former US Vice President
Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary General
Lord Anthony Giddens, sociologist
Lord Nicholas Stern (author of the Stern report)
Sir Paul McCartney
Michael Palin, presenter
Gillian Anderson, actress'


The whole, far longer, list can be found here.

It does not seem to include CRU, but it does have the Royal Society and the Foundation of Holistic Therapists on board, to name but a few.  On the business front, alternative energy companies and the like are well-represented, the Prince's Mayday Trust is there, as is the UK Rainwater Harvesting Association and the Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership.  Climate Week is not just about scaring and misinforming people, not least the very young, but there is money to be made through promotions and image-building events.


One construction company,  possibly in a time warp, is proposing to run public showings of the notorious and ludicrous 'An Inconvenient Truth'.   Another company is encouraging their employees to have good lunches that week:
'Each day during Climate Week, Sunvil Holidays will be providing our staff with a daily buffet of local and British produce.
On Thursday 15 March, all staff are encouraged to bring in their own local/British dish and the office will hold a lunchtime picnic.'

In Devon, students are helping out with a cider and ale festival.  Well, who said CO2 was all bad?


Chester Zoo on the other hand is more mainstream - it seems they might be going to shut themselves down for a week: 'We are having a Big Switch Off at Chester Zoo' 
We shall have to hope for good sunny week for any tropical beasties that may be there.  Chilling children is bad enough, but imagine the uproar if animals were to be so mis-treated.


On the education front, what do we see?
One school in Surrey announces 'During lunchtime break,members of the Green Team will be offering a ‘plant your own sweet pea’event.'  Now that does not show much in the way of self-sacrifice, self-criticism, and general flagellation that this great 'crisis of a trace gas' calls for.  They might wish to learn from National Star College where 'Students & staff are being asked to focus on switching off lights, computers & electrical items on standby as well as turning down heating.'  That's more like it.  Next year, they might like to try boarding up any north-facing windows, or perhaps just try sitting still in classes while volunteers put ice cubes on their heads to symbolise both the disappearing icecaps and the gross indulgence of past students wanting to be warm all day.  Meanwhile near Glasgow another school is being even more ambitious - their charges are being encouraged to control the very cosmos:
We are holding two competitions within our school. The infant department are completing a climate-related dot-to-dot challenge. The upper school are to design inventions to help reduce climate change. We are excited!  I'd be excited too, if I could somehow convert my dismay into something more positive.

So what will it be like, this 'Climate Week'.  In last year's post on it, I added this footnote when it was all over:
'...hard to get data for an overview, but my impression is that Climate Week has been a low-key, low-profile, low-impact event.  Thank goodness.'

Same again this year? 

 An article yesterday in Forbes Magazine by James Taylor of the now more famous Heartland Institute:

Global Warming Alarmists Rally Around Classroom Propaganda

 (Hat-tip: Tom Nelson)

 A short article, well worth a read.  He puts in revealing juxtaposition some of the propaganda initiatives in schools deployed by those who want children to be alarmed about airborne CO2:

'Force impressionable young students to watch, at least eight times apiece, an Al Gore global warming propaganda movie? – Check!

Keep showing the propaganda movie even after a court of law found numerous important factual errors in the movie? – Check!

Set up National Teach-Ins with environmental activists and other propagandists, while at the same time freezing out participation from non-alarmists? – Check!

Flood the Internet and school district mailboxes with activist global warming curricula? – Check!'

 beside this quotation from Michael Mann:

 “[T]here was this program to indoctrinate K-9 school children with climate change denial propaganda. To me that is so pernicious, and I am genuinely horrified by it. I’m all too aware that those who will bear the brunt of our emissions today are going to be our children and grandchildren. They’re going to bear the costs of our cheap energy today. So there’s this effort to misinform the very people who will bear the greatest cost of climate change. To me that is so amoral it’s almost hard to put into words.”

He puts in revealing juxtaposition an appeal for a 'rational public debate' by Peter Gleick :

 'In his letter in which he admitted stealing Heartland Institute internal documents, engaging in fraud, committing identity theft, and distributing to the media forged documents designed to cast the Heartland Institute in a false and pernicious light, Fakegate perpetrator Peter Gleick claimed he did so because “a rational public debate is desperately needed” and there are coordinated efforts to “prevent this debate.”

beside this observation that that this self-same man was intent on poisoning public discourse and turning down a debate:

 '...Gleick, on the very same day that he perpetrated his acts of fraud and theft against the Heartland Institute, turned down a Heartland Institute invitation to publicly debate global warming and share his climate concerns at the Heartland Institute’s annual benefit dinner...'

The moral qualities of some those on the 'other side' of this inadequately debated topic are not at all impressive.  The double-speak, the deviousness, the projection, the ruthlessness, and the intolerance are all short of being edifying.  And of course, some of them call for no debates at all since since they would give undesirable publicity and recognition to calm, moderate, and well-informed views on climate,  And, of course, in the few public or publicised debates that have taken place, such views have been so much more impressive, usually winning the day. 

They may win the 'days', but meanwhile the years of climate alarmism accumulate in schools.

Church of CO2 Alarm tenets challenged in a university - junior priests and a missionary are startled by this

I try not to get spread too thin here, but this one is hard to ignore (hat-tip: Greenie Watch).  It is, I think, revealing of the narrow-minded, ill-informed yet animated attitudes that have led to the production of so much execrable material on climate aimed at schoolchildren.  The people responsible for it are just the kind that I hope will change their minds soon if this dreadful corruption of the young is to stop.

You have to put yourself in their place to understand their inner turmoil.  They are believers.  They have been brought up in the faith.  They learned about the threat of the evil deniers, paid by evil corporations to spread lies and deceptions - mostly to stupid, gullible people, or to other wicked people.   That's simple and clear enough, and would have been reinforced all but daily in the media, and within their circles of chosen ones.  Imagine their horror then to come across a professor in a university delivering an entire lecture course which undermined the Revelations of Gore and the Holy Insights of Hansen.  Surely, of all sheltered, solidly socialist places, a university should be a safe haven from such non-conformist views?  You can see they would be upset and puzzled.

Four junior priests of the faith took it upon themselves to study videos of the offending lectures, and then put together a 96 page document to capture the horror of them, and add some attempts of their own to refute the heresies.    Hearing of this report, the missionary agreed to do a telephone interview with the heretic himself, and thereby no doubt display both her courage and willingness to deal with such people in the name of the cause.  Perhaps she might show him the error of his ways, or at the very least publicise more awfulness to bring shivers of horror to her own small band of followers.   But, goshdarnit, it turned out that the heretic was polite and rational and well-informed and not at all obviously unhinged or evil.  Listen to the call, or read the transcript, and see how her faith is tested, and how she sometimes remembers her catechisms about Consensus, Deniers, Big Oil, Heartland, Catastrophe, and suchlike.  Yet these potent words, words that produce automatic cheers of agreement amongst the faithful and deep declarations of solidarity with the cause, were brushed aside or even challenged to good effect!  But although she stumbled, and failed in her hopes for this call, she made the best of a bad job and reported next of nothing of it.  Why expose her converts and hangers-on to what she had to endure?  No,she concentrated on the report of the junior priests instead.  A report which even now, the bad guys are having some fun with.  It seems it is a foolish piece of work, one which will bring nought but shame and embarassment to the new church.

I hope, but experience tells me it is a forlorn one, to have time to return to this myself.  In the meantime, and that may be for a long time, here is the inestimable Watts at work on it: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/03/fake-moral-outrage-translated-to-smear-media-upset-that-students-can-choose-to-take-an-elective-course-on-climate-change-at-carleton/#more-58227

Here is some of what he has written:  [note Goldenberg is the missionary in my scribbles above, and Mr Harris is the heretic]

'Contrary to Goldenberg’s statement that the review of the Earth Sciences course was “an expert audit”, Mr. Harris in his telephone interview (from the transcript linked above) explained to her that it was conducted by two biologists and a writer, none of whom apparently have significant expertise in Earth Sciences or Climate Science.

According to Mr. Harris, contrary to assertions in the Guardian piece, the 2011 version of the ERTH2402 course was well supported by peer reviewed science literature and was in no way extreme. It merely concluded that we are a long way from understanding the science well enough to be able to make reliable forecasts about future climate. Harris says the course was completely nonpartisan politically and avoided any sort of commercial endorsement.

Goldenberg wrote in her Guardian article:

“A team of scientists, who reviewed the videotapes of Mr. Harris’s lectures provided by the university, found 142 false, biased and misleading claims”.

Mr. Harris advises me that he will release an appropriate response to those claims when he has thoroughly reviewed the CASS “audit” report. However, as of this writing, no problems have yet been raised by Carleton in the course material as taught in 2011. It appears that Carelton University itself has no issue with the course material, only the CASS group and the media seem to have issues.

Suzanne Goldenberg’s Guardian piece condemning ERTH2402 is itself riddled with logical fallacies, misrepresentations, omissions, and errors, some of which were described in a letter to the editor sent by Mr. Harris to The Guardian early on February 29. So far, The Guardian has not responded or published the necessary corrections in either their Letters to the Editor or “Corrections and clarifications” sections.

If they don’t, and I’m predicting they won’t, I’ll carry the letter from Mr. Harris here as a separate post.'

Note added 9 March 2012:  That promised post has been posted today.  Strong stuff for WUWT:

Editiorial: The Guardian doesn’t give a damn about accurate reporting nor its own editorial code

Posted on March 9, 2012 by Anthony Watts

Funders of school materials on climate: vested interests in the The Scare vs The Heartland Institute

CartoonsByJosh

Most of these state-funded bodies have grown hugely bigger, richer, and more powerful by jumping on the CO2 Scare bandwagon with alacrity.  I suspect they also all produce materials for schools with some of their funds.  They no doubt see children as a means of influencing their parents as well as voters of the future.  Meanwhile, some climate alarmists have tried to frame, abuse, and attack the tiny Heartland Institute for daring to consider producing some educational materials on climate themselves.  The moral and intellectual mess which Peter Gleick has got himself into in this smearing and deceit is tragic for him, and has itself drawn out more reprehensible comments from his 'side' (for examples, see this post by Donna Laframboise ).  

The reality is the funding of that institute is minimal in comparison with those who push the establishment's line, while their integrity may well be orders of magnitude greater than that of their critics.  I would hazard a guess that the science and reasoning and basic humanity in any climate materials they might produce for schools will be outstanding compared to the alarmist dross currently polluting the minds and spirits of the young.

Josh (Cartoons by Josh) captures a sense of the funding discrepancy with his superb graphic shown above.  Ben Pile does the same, also superbly but using prose:
'The environmental movement is as promiscuous with its ‘ethics’ as it is with ‘The Science’. You can make stuff up, apparently, just so long as you do so in order to ‘save the planet’. And this is why sums as paltry and insignificant as $1,000 are so important to their perspective. It is only by amplifying the trivial that the myth of ‘networks’ of ‘well-funded deniers’ can be sustained. It’s only when you lose a sense of proportion that a few million dollars can stop global action on climate change. Trivia, vanity and mythology allows environmentalists to turn ordinary facts of politics – funding, associations of people, and campaigning organisations – into secret conspiracies to explain their own failure to create a popular movement.'


(hat/tips: Bishop Hill)

Those wealthy agencies may well turn on a sixpence as and when their political masters change tack.  They will continue to do as they are bid.  The glossy materials, the fancy websites, the PR machines, the outreach to the young - all of it could look the same from the distance, but, and here is the dream, one day the words will be different, the fearmongering will go, the manipulation, the condescension and the authoritarianism will vanish.  Proper science, respect for others - especially for the trust and vulnerability of the young - and a sense of calm perspective about what we know and don't know about the climate system will take their place, along with more respect for the great industrial achievements of the past and for our ability to rise to the challenges of the future.

And all on greatly reduced budgets!  There's the rub.  And there's the value for money in small outfits like the Heartland Institute.  I hope they do proceed with their climate materials for schools - they could scarcely fail to improve on some of the stuff out there, and they might just help with the long climb out of this pit of fear and smear we find ourselves in thanks to the political and financial power of people driven crazy by their phobia concerning CO2.