Unfortunately, some misuse science. Some of their intentions, are far from benevolent. They see science as a mechanism for political power and control. There is great danger from those who would use science for political control over us.

How do they do this? They instill, and then continuously magnify, fear. Fear is the most effective instrument of totalitarian control.

Chet Richards, physicist,

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/03/science_in_an_age_of_fear.html

Monday 12 August 2013

Climate Control Freakery: a disturbed academic in Australia has his sights on the children

Writing on the Wall, or just the zealotry of someone disturbed out of all proportion by the talk of climate catastrophe?  It is shocking to note that this man is a lecturer in a university.  Here is what he has in mind for children:

5. Children
Hundreds of millions of children are already the victims of the worsening climate crisis and it is estimated that 6 billion under-5 year old infants will die avoidably this century due to unaddressed climate change. All children are acutely threatened by man-made climate change. Some ideas for climate action re children:
5.1 Carefully-designed, ethical, science-informed (e.g. Climate Commission-informed), clear summaries of the climate crisis and solutions should be provided to all primary school children as a booklet, book mark, and refrigerator magnet.
5.2 Carefully-designed, ethical, science-informed, clear summaries of the climate crisis and solutions should be provided to all secondary school children as a booklet, book mark, and refrigerator magnet.
5.3 Green apparel as a badge of environmental concern (children can declare themselves for their future; make every day St Patrick’s Day).
5.4 Carefully-designed, ethical, science-informed, clear summaries of the climate crisis and solutions should be provided to all parents, school teachers, clergy, sports coaches, music teachers and indeed all those involved with children activities.
5.5 Smart ways of explaining to children that we have just One Planet and that any species extinction is unacceptable.
5.6 Awards to children (from badges to books) for good works for the Biosphere.
5.7. Local, state, national and global awards for outstanding environmentalism by children.
5.8 Children must be ethically encouraged to boycott ecocidal and terracidal products and services.
5.9 Children should be ethically encouraged to ask what their elders are doing in the War on the Planet. and instructed about the terms intergenerational equity, intergenerational justice, intergenerational inequity and intergenerational injustice.
5.10 Climate activists must educate and mobilize children who have the time and energy to help save their world.
5.11 Children and young people in general instructed about intergenerational equity, intergenerational justice, intergenerational inequity and intergenerational injustice.
5.12 Just as a children were ethically instructed about the consequences of nuclear war in “When the wind blows” by Raymond Briggs (1982), so they should be similarly made aware of the consequences of climate change inaction


Perhaps if someone pointed out to him that there is no sign of a 'climate crisis' anywhere, let alone of 'the worsening climate crisis', it might help him understand that the crisis projected as a possibility by such as the IPCC is not due to arrive for many more decades.  Their alarm is based upon crude and inadequate computer models which have enjoyed a dismal track record to date, and which show little sign of real improvement despite the billions of dollars thrown at and around them for the past 20 years or more.

So far, this century and last, the climate has done nothing extraordinary.   But we have seen some extraordinary actions proposed for the control and manipulation of society.  Such as the above.

Hat-tip: Greenie Watch: http://antigreen.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/dotty-warmist-aiming-for-minds-of.html#links

PS It would make a good exercise for senior pupils to Fisk or otherwise comment on the implications of each point.

Wednesday 7 August 2013

Satellite graphics show the Earth's surface cooling during the years 1982 to 2006

"The amazing finding of the present study is that we do not observe global warming in the period 1982-2006, but significant cooling."
Source: Andries Rosema, Steven Foppes, Joost van der Woerd

Surface temperature as in 'temperature of the surface' is not what is routinely measured or referred to in meteorology.  Surface temperature in meteorological observations usually refers to air temperature close to the ground, usually around 5 feet (1.25 to 2.0 metres) above the surface - the height at which weather stations are meant to take this measurement.

But what of the actual surface temperature?  This is tricky to measure given the wide variety of surfaces, and the lack of any convention as to depth.  But a geostationary satellite can take a broad view, in the case of Meteosat this mainly has a 5km resolution for temperature estimates.  Looking down from above, that level of coarseness will help reduce the variation that would be expected at finer scales.

In their study published this year in the journal Energy & Environment, the three authors report how they took 25 years worth of satellite imagery from Meteosat from noon and midnight each day, and extracted estimates of surface temperatures from them.  They used infra-red wavelengths for which the atmosphere is largely transparent in cloudless skies.  But of course, there is always cloud to be seen in any hemisphere image.  Their method to reduce the effect of clouds was to look at successive time periods (of 10, 20, and 30 days) and choose the highest temperature found (the 'brightest pixel') within each period.  The hope is that that is likely to be from a relatively cloud-free day since cloud tops are much cooler than the surface.
There are other adjustment and computations to be made as described in the paper, but the authors seem reasonably confident that their results are sensible.  They provide subsets of their data plotted as time-series for typical and atypical locations, and find the results plausible in each case.

There are no equivalent ground-based measurements to provide a cross-check for these results, but perhaps it may be possible to construct estimates of what they might be for simpler locations, e.g. sea areas.

These results will hopefully be subjected to considerable scrutiny and review, but I report them here at this stage simply as an illustration of 'unsettled science'.  We have here results which on the face of it contradict the claims of relentless warming pushed by such as James Hansen in the late 1980s, including at the infamous hearing of 1988 in Washington.  So many people have subsequently picked up on such claims and treated them as gospel that we are today in a very unsatisfactory position of having zealots for alarm poisoning discourse in this area, be it political or be it scientific discourse.  Good teaching should help pupils step back from this unedifying spectacle, and form calmer and more considered opinions of what is going on.

Hat-tip: Greenie Watch which provides a link to this article on the above paper.

Note added a few hours after posting  Some recent comments on this paper can be found here: http://objectivistindividualist.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/earth-surface-cooled-from-1982-to-2006.html
Note added 09 August 2013  Project for the reader.  The site CO2 Science provides a temperature plotter which can be used to look at temperatures attributed to zones 5deg (lat, long) on the side.  It might be interesting to see how these computed mean surface air temperatures plots compare with those for specific locations provided in the paper over the same time periods.

Tuesday 6 August 2013

Ten-minute trainer: a case against the establishment case for alarm over CO2

For teachers with 30 minutes to spare, and a suitable class (perhaps one whose important exams in this area have been completed successfully), here is a brief YouTube clip which does a cool, calm, and collected job of undermining the case for alarm over CO2 - a case which may be taken for granted in your curricula.  He is particularly critical of the 'positive feedbacks' which are a crucial part of the case for alarm:


This is a short video of about 13 minutes (no 10-minute trainer takes exactly 10 minutes!) linked to at the NoTricksZone which notes it was linked to in a tweet by Tallbloke.

The video is the work of David Evans in Australia. More details of his case can be found here:

and he has also produced some very good, but longer videos here: http://joannenova.com.au/2012/04/david-evans-explains-the-skeptics-case-youtube/


Some minor points. 
(1)   The claim that positive water-vapour driven feedback is ‘assumed’ in the models is not quite correct.  What they assume is that global relative humidity stays constant as temperature rises.  This necessarily means water vapour levels will increase in the models, and this is what is believed to lead to the positive feedback that appears in them.  In practice, there is some evidence that relative humidity has been decreasing in recent decades. 



















(2)    The first graphic in the short video shows ‘observed temperature increase’ as the output of models.  If it was in fact the observed temperature increase, then the models would be doing a perfect job on them.  Actually the output of models is ‘expected temperatures’, or 'predicted temperatures'.  When these are compared with observed temperatures, the discrepancies are obvious.

Sunday 21 July 2013

Towards a Calmer Curriculum on Climate: some human impact possible on global warming, but too small to identify with assurance

"My overall view of the influence of humans on climate is that we probably are having some influence, but it is impossible to know with any level of certainty how much influence. The difficulty in determining the human influence on climate arises from several sources: 
(1) weather and climate vary naturally, and by amounts that are not currently being exceeded;
(2) global warming theory is just that – based upon theory; and
(3) there is no unique fingerprint of human caused global warming.

 My belief that some portion of recent warming is due to humans is based upon my faith in at least some portion of the theory: that the human contribution to atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations has resulted in an estimated 1% reduction in the Earth’s ability to cool to outer space, and so some level of warming can be expected to occur from that change

Exactly how much warming will occur, however, depends upon something we call “climate sensitivity” (Spencer & Braswell, 2010; 2011), and relatively few researchers in the world – probably not much more than a dozen – have researched how sensitive today’s climate system is based upon actual measurements. This is why popular surveys of climate scientists and their beliefs regarding global warming have little meaning: very few of them have actually worked on the details involved in determining exactly how much warming might result from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

Our most recent peer-reviewed paper on this subject, Spencer & Braswell (2013), has arrived at a climate sensitivity of only 1.3 deg. C for a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide, based upon a variety of global measurements, including warming of the global oceans since the 1950s. This level of warming is below the lower limit of 1.5 deg. C minimum predicted in the last (AR4) IPCC report. It is also in line with (an admitted minority of) other estimates of low climate sensitivity published in the peer review literature.

It should also be noted that the fact that I believe at least some of recent warming is human-caused places me in the 97% of researchers recently claimed to support the global warming consensus (actually, it’s 97% of the published papers, Cook et al., 2013). The 97% statement is therefore rather innocuous, since it probably includes all of the global warming “skeptics” I know of who are actively working in the field. Skeptics generally are skeptical of the view that recent warming is all human-caused, and/or that it is of a sufficient magnitude to warrant immediate action given the cost of energy policies to the poor. They do not claim humans have no impact on climate whatsoever."


Extract from the testimony made by Roy W. Spencer on 18th July 2013 to the Environment and Public Works Committee of the US Senate.  

His statement includes this description of his relevant background: "I have been performing U.S. government-sponsored research for the last twentyeight years, publishing peer reviewed papers on global temperature monitoring with satellites, on the amount of warming we might expect from greenhouse gas emissions, how to monitor hurricane strength from satellites, and quantitatively explaining ocean heat content changes. 
 Prior to my current position as a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, I was Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. I am also the U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-E flying on NASA’s Earth-observation satellite Aqua. I am a recipient of NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement."

Sunday 30 June 2013

Climate-Related Hazards: time to warn your nearest and dearest about irresponsible adults howling at the moon over carbon dioxide and climate

If you are not careful, you can pick up foolish ideas in the same way as you can catch the flu – simply by contact with someone already afflicted.  No thinking is required on your part, no analysis, no checking things out for yourself – you just acquire the opinion along with some superficial support for it.  Thus you decide that CO2 emissions must be dramatically reduced because CO2 is a greenhouse gas that is ‘trapping’ heat in the atmosphere.  Suitably debilitated by this, you are vulnerable to secondary infections such as the facile attribution of any or all bad weather to ‘climate change’, and you are already using those two words not as a platitude (since climate has always changed) but as shorthand for ‘catastrophic anthropogenic global warming’ (cagw).

In some cases, the afflicted ones feel driven to share, or spread, their troubles with others and take to campaigning and lobbying.  It seems that the condition is aggravated if all the people around you don’t suffer from it, or if you learn of large groups who seem to have some kind of immunity.  

In the worst cases, there emerges an evangelical zeal reminiscent of religious zealots who have achieved a state in which all contrarian appeals to reason are shrugged off as the work of the devil.  In the climate-related cults, fossil-fuel companies are seen as the source of much evil, and are held to be providing colossal levels of funding to help devils pursue their wicked ways.  No one has yet found any evidence of this, but of course that goes to show just how clever Big Coal etc have been.  

One High Temple and One Cheerleader for Alarm

Source
 One of the high temples of climate alarm has been the UK Meteorological Office, led as it has been by such as John Houghton (a key schemer in the IPCC), and Robert Napier (a man who helped lead the WWF and other bodies into climate-alarm evangelism ). 

This commitment to giving CO2 a driving role in the climate system has not been a success as far the public is concerned, since the warm-bias this has given their seasonal predictions has been seriously misleading both for winters which turned out to be colder and snowier than we were told to expect, or summers which turned out to be cooler and wetter.


A few days ago, an anonymous (sad to say) commenter called 'ntropyalwayswins' on one of their web sites urged the MetOffice to get back to concentrating on weather forecasts:

The Met Office should stick to what it is good at – namely forecasting the weather and should only do this for a period of time where forecasts can be relied upon. To issue a longer term forecast that suggests 30% hot 30% cold 40% somewhere in between is really not very useful and invites ridicule.

You need to continue to rein back heavily on your embarrassingly overconfident statements on climate. Recent announcements from the MO indicate that at long last you are admitting that you do not understand natural variability. Until you do it is ok to answer all questions about the future climate of Britain and the world with a simple ‘We do not know’

As your false confidence has already caused immeasurable harm to the citizens and economy of the UK you should issue a statement encouraging the UK government to disregard all prior climate advice from the MO and, lest they do not have the good sense themselves to see the implications thereof, suggest that they may need to re-assess the need for the Climate Change Act which the rest of the world rightly sees as the Economic Suicide Act.

Plus it would do no harm to issue a public apology for getting it consistently wrong. That is the grown-up thing to do.


In the States, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) has emerged as a major cheerleader for climate alarm, choosing a decidedly non-geophysical Chris Mooney to be one of their directors for a while – he is a graduate in English who has spotted climate agitation as a means of furthering his left-wing views, and appointing to lead their Ethics Committee, of all things, a Peter Gleick who shortly thereafter resigned in disgrace after displaying decidely unethical behaviour to further his own crusade for more alarm.  A podcast interview on this with the president of the AGU during that unhappy time is available on David Appell's blog, an interview in which this president reveals himself as also being afflicted with climate alarm (‘the evidence is pretty much incontrovertible’).

Source
The new president seems also to be a victim.  The picture shows her speaking at one of their conferences.  A conference about which the physicist Norman Rogers has written a scathing report, extracts from which follow:

"What they are doing is howling at the moon that the sky is falling.  The president of the AGU, Carol Finn, who, incidentally, is employed by the federal government, opened the lobbying/communications workshop on the first day of the conference with this:

'AGU's mission is to promote discovery ... for the benefit of humanity[.] ... I live in Colorado[.] ... [L]ast week's Black Forest fire ... was the worst wildfire in Colorado's history[.] ... I live in Boulder County[.] ... [T]he county and the city of Longmont have just outlawed fracking[.] ... [A]ll these communities need to be able to try to figure out how to balance energy development and putting drill rigs next to schools[.]'

The subtext here, repeated over and over at the conference, is that global warming causes forest fires and that hydrocarbon development is undesirable, if not dangerous.  But perhaps forest fires are started by matches.  Maybe hydrocarbon development is preferable to riding around on horses.

How trustworthy is an organization that claims to be organized for the "benefit of humanity," anyway?

The illogical thinking and ever-changing stories about global warming doom are puzzling.  What motivates the global warming proselytizers?  Is there a root belief that explains their behavior?  My suggestion is that their behavior is religious in nature and can be explained if we postulate that they believe in the following commandment:

Thou shalt not add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

If you realize that the story is not really about global warming, but rather about changing the composition of the atmosphere, it becomes easy to understand why the believers are not disturbed by the fact that global warming, as measured by surface temperature, stopped 16 years ago.  They easily find other scientific theories to buttress their faith.  They ignore or discredit any science that challenges their faith.  They tell us that if we don't stop adding carbon dioxide to the air, we will have extreme weather and the oceans will become acidified.  The polar bears will die.  The wine will lose its flavor.  We will catch exotic diseases.  If one theory of doom is refuted, or becomes boring, there are plenty of others to take its place.  Embarrassing information, such as the fact that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere makes plants grow faster, with less water, is dismissed.  They say plants grow faster, but they are less nutritious, or they grow faster, but they deplete the soil of its nutrients.

What we have is an obsession with the evil of carbon dioxide -- a carbon cult.

The great majority of people who are members of the AGU are interested in science, not in a new religion centered on carbon.  They have not woken up to the fact that their organization has been infiltrated by a carbon cult." ...

... "The attendees were told to explain why the weather would be more extreme by comparing carbon dioxide to steroids.  If an athlete takes steroids, he will still play the game, but his performance will be more extreme.
 
One difference between a cult and a legitimate religion is that the cults usually hide their true nature.  The more bizarre the cult, the greater the imperative to hide its doctrines.  The general public must not be allowed to realize that the advocates of global warming alarmism are in reality making up the story to propagate a fanatical faith that carbon dioxide is bad.

The science behind global warming is very shoddy.  Yes, there is a nugget of real science buried in all the alarmist, made-up stuff.  Carbon dioxide does absorb infrared radiation, and increased carbon dioxide probably will warm the Earth by a small amount.  The mechanism is quite complicated, involving the atmospheric lapse rate and a slight relocation of the tropopause.

The complicated and jargon-laden science is reduced, by the missionaries of the carbon cult, for public consumption, to "carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping gas."  The formal predictions of global warming from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are the product of an opinion poll of computer models that disagree with each other and that have been manipulated to make them look better than they really are.  The carbon cultists accept those predications as serious and profound scientific truth, because the predictions provide support for their faith."
                                        ----------------------------------------------

So, how are we to warn our nearest and dearest about these people who are seized with an urge to scare the wits out of us?  I do not have any new ideas for this.  Until the Fabled Fossil Fuel Funds or something like them are located, and there is not the slightest sign of them even existing, it will have to be through low-cost means.  Fortunately we still have the Internet for the fast sharing of thoughts, and to take part in discussions to test and sharpen our criticisms of the harmful zealotry of climate alarm.  There are books which contain the bigger picture, including at least one specifically aimed at helping parents talk with their children about climate and other eco-scares.   We can all help those nearest to us to listen more calmly to the panic-stricken calls for more alarm and more radical actions on CO2, and help them get these calls into perspective.  From there, the word will surely spread through the mass media and into the political class, where there are already leaders of this school of thought writing and campaigning.  Eventually, even state-controlled schools will surely want to be less welcoming to alarmists, and to be vigorously pro-active at helping their pupils handle their insidious views and methods. 

Friday 28 June 2013

Climate Teachers: if your pupils watch TV in the USA, this is what you are up against

Networks Do 92 Climate Change Stories; Fail to Mention ‘Lull’ in Warming All 92 Times

  Extracts from article by Julia A. Seymour

  • Recent years’ slowdown in global warming completely ignored by networks 92 climate change stories in 2013.
  • Stories citing experts or the latest studies promoting alarmism get covered more than 8 times as often as critical experts and studies.
  • Although many scientists say no, ABC, CBS and NBC continue to link weather events like tornadoes, hurricanes, heat waves and more to climate change nearly one-fourth of the time. "

 ...

"Just since Jan. 1, 2013, ABC, CBS and NBC morning and evening news programs have aired 92 stories about “climate change” or “global warming.” Not a single one of those stories mentioned the “warming plateau” reported even by The New York Times on June 10. The Times wrote, “The rise in the surface temperature of earth has been markedly slower over the last 15 years than in the 20 years before that. And that lull in warming has occurred even as greenhouse gases have accumulated in the atmosphere at a record pace.” Even though the Times piece wasn't published until June 10, a warming slowdown had been reported by foreign media outlets in November 2012, and by The Economist online in March, Reuters in April and BBC online in May of 2013."

  ...

8 Times the Alarmism

"New reports, studies or scientists that warned of the threat of climate change from concern over penguin populations, to predictions of sea level rise continued to be promoted by the networks in 2013. There were stories or news briefs warning that flying would become more turbulent because of climate change, connecting allergies to global warming, and others worrying about glacial melt and sea level rise.
There were 25 networks reports that mentioned a new report or analysis or that cited a scientist who promoted the climate alarmist viewpoint. That was 8 times as many as the other side; there were only three stories that cited a report or included such a scientist challenging alarmism.
The networks consulted scientists from NASA and NOAA as well as activists like Michael Oppenheimer from Princeton, who has gotten climate predictions wrong in the past. “Nightly News” interviewed Kenneth Kunkel from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center on May 25 who continued the hype, saying “If we continue to increase atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we will warm the globe and that will bring certain risks into play or increase the risks of certain types of extremes.”

...
 In spite of science, networks continue to link weather to climate

"Weather events that did a lot of damage and claimed lives, like the recent Oklahoma tornado and last year’s “Superstorm Sandy” were cited as incontrovertible proof of climate change. Scientists who argued otherwise were left out of the broadcasts. Even snowfall, wildfires and droughts were mentioned in some reports as examples of what one reporter called “globalweirding.”
On Jan. 8, NBC “Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams mentioned a new report on the cost of extreme weather saying “natural disasters caused a total of $160 billion damage around the world in 2012 ... These new numbers coincide with a new official look at just how hot our past year was.” Anne Thompson followed up his introduction by linking the “year of extreme weather” to “nature and man made climate change.”
Meteorologist Joe Bastardi has vehemently opposed such connections and told Forbes.com columnist Larry Bell, “The fact is that those alarmist claims [about weather getting more extreme because of man made climate change] simply aren’t true.”

  Source

Note added 29 June 2013Here are some more links to recently published articles on this topic:

 PBS NewsHour global warming coverage: IPCC/NOAA Scientists – 18; Skeptic Scientists – 0