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Leadership spill thread. It’s on, it’s off… who will be the PM next week?

The thread for discussing “the spill motion”. Will we get a new PM next week?

The attempted spill of the Australian PM is on.

Some skeptical MPs and commentators have been aggressively and publicly attacking Australian PM Tony Abbott, yet he’s has been one of the most skeptical PMs in the Western World. The climate debate is heating up again with Paris on this year. Seriously — is any alternative better?

Potential candidates include Julie Bishop, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison. According to Dennis Shanahan both Turnbull and Morrison have said they will not challenge. The WA MP rebels (both skeptics) are apparently angling for Julie Bishop, a fellow West Australian.

Malcolm Turnbull is Australia’s version of David Cameron. Will Turnbull, ex Goldman Sachs, former opposition leader who died on the sword of an emissions trading scheme, be our PM next week? If Turnbull did run and win, the only bright point is it will be the best thing for those hoping to set up the equivalent of the UKIP in Australia. It could be the trigger for the conservatives to split from the Labor-lite Liberals. The passion against Turnbull runs deep.

The Nationals have vowed that Turnbull would have […]

February 6th, 2015 | Tags: | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

UK Met Office uses graphical tricks to hide the pause

The UK Met Office went to some effort to graph the last 160 years, from hottest calendar year to coldest.

Name the scientific reason:

1. Because the order of the calendar years is important.

The graph reveals mysterious patterns — Years ending in 3, 4, or 5 are more likely to be hotter. Years containing a six are statistically more likely to be green.

OR

2. Because climate models show a linear rise in temperatures, and no “pause”, and this graph does too. Glance at it sideways and be afraid!

The Met Office used to say one year doesn’t mean anything, only long term trends matter.

Now they graph the noise.

…

Thanks to Barry Woods for pointing me at this, and carefully putting the years back in their chronological order in the graph below.

See the pause? See the noise?

8.7 out of 10 based on 98 ratings

February 6th, 2015 | Tags: , , , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

It’s a parody of science: The Conversation thinks creativity in science is about dance choreography

Exhibit One: Government funded “art”. *

Creative genius in science is about the people who break the rules and see a pattern that the consensus thinks is wrong or refuses to discuss. But capture creative genius in a bureaucratic clamp, smother it with political correctness, and watch the flower die. That’s what The Conversation is for.

Say Hello to a parody of “creative science” in “Living data: how art helps us all understand climate change”. It’s not about scientists who challenge a paradigm, creative science is about cartoons and dances. It’s about glowing plastic sculptures.

A methodology that uses drawing and dance as tools of enquiry is a radical idea for those accustomed to the conventions of the scientific method. But when choreographic analysis is embedded within scientific research, pattern recognition can contribute to some startling discoveries.

Big-government bought science with monopolistic funding over the last 70 years, and it’s bought science-commentary too (e.g. academia, CSIRO, the ABC, The Conversation). We can’t have people highlighting the suffocating effect of bureaucracy, of grant applications, and deadlines! Nor would Big-Government-Science ever seek out, support, and laud scientific work that showed that big-government science (which favours Big-Government policies) is wrong. […]

February 5th, 2015 | Category: Academia, Big-Government, Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Write to a tree about climate change in the Melbourne City Council, and it will write back

Wait for it… “dozens” of Melbournians are writing emails to trees and the trees are writing back (thanks to paid staff who can speak Elmlish, Oatin, and Planely). Lots of trees are being told they are set to die off thanks to climate change. The Stress!

Broadsheet Melbourne

Right now, you can log onto the City of Melbourne’s Urban Forest Visual map and email any tree you’d like within the council’s boundaries.

Yep, all 60,000 of them.

The Gulf Today. AE

But almost a quarter of its trees, including oaks, elms and planes, are set to die off by the end of the decade, and that figure will rise to almost 40 per cent by 2030, speeded by a devastating 13-year drought that broke in 2012.

“As our climate becomes more and more extreme, we’re going to have to look at trees that are fit for purpose,” Councillor Arron Wood said.

So you can write to a tree in Melbourne and it will write back:

The quirky emails, to which staff respond on behalf of the trees, are building awareness of climate change in Melbourne, regarded as Australia’s most European […]

February 4th, 2015 | Tags: , | Category: Big-Government, Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

How to unscientifically hype insignificant noise in ocean “warming”

Time to panic:

Peter Hannam says: “The world’s oceans are heating at the rate of two trillion 100-watt light bulbs burning continuously…”

Maybe not?

Jo says: “… that’s two trillion light bulbs, plus or minus 200 trillion…”

Conclusion: Random noise is coming to get you.

Scientists used to care about measurement error. Not so much any more. The ARGO buoys are marvelous high-tech robots, but each thermometer measures 200,000 cubic kilometers of ocean. The thermometer in a buoy is accurate in a laboratory to 0.005C, but can they really detect global oceanic changes of five thousands of a degree?

Oh yessity say the scientists, because there are 3,000 thermometers. But, no no no thinks Jo. If they were all measuring the same swimming pool, having a lot of them would reduce the error, but each thermometer is measuring a different piece of ocean full of thermal noise. Some will argue that the the exact absolute temperature is not what matters, it’s the changing trend we need to measure. But these thermometers are not staying in one place measuring one tiny slice of the ocean, they roam randomly through water that […]

February 3rd, 2015 | Tags: , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

The hate campaign — it’s “science by insults” revealing the deepest fear of believers

Should David Rose’s children murder him for the sake of the planet?

Welcome to western civilization’s advanced scientific debate. There there are no shades of gray, we can’t discuss whether climate sensitivity is 1, 2,or 3 degrees, and it’s not even about numbers. It’s about whether you are good or evil.

For a religious believer, the worst thing that could happen is a polite conversation. They know (at least on a subconscious level) that they don’t have the answers, and that if skeptics were heard the voters would flee… the only possible answer is to “win” through bully-boy tactics. Unleash the righteous indignation!

David Rose does Daily Mail articles asking dangerous questions about error bars and wanting to know pedantic, unreasonable things like where the scientific data is. One commenter urged his children to kill him. Rose has been a journalist for 34 years. He has seen nothing like this vitriol. As he writes below, The Guardian and other newspapers support brutal threats in comments but filter out skeptics.

Climate of Hate: His children are urged to kill him, he’s compared to Adolf Hitler and labelled a ‘denier’ – even though he’s Jewish. Disturbing article reveals what happens if you […]

February 2nd, 2015 | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Weekend Unthreaded

Summer 2015, Margaret River, South West WA.

Queenslanders can tell us what happened. I’d like to ask MV…

8.1 out of 10 based on 49 ratings

February 1st, 2015 | Tags: | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Public are not buying science “experts” opinions: AAAS survey shows 30-50% gap

There is a large gap between what the certified appointed experts say and what the public thinks on GM, Climate Change, pesticides, ethics, and sigh, on evolution. The researchers were “surprised” that a collective pool of university educated, largely government employed scientists have a different spread of opinions to the population at large. On climate change half of the public are skeptics that man-made effects are dominant. In the AAAS, 87% of scientists think it is. But despite twenty years of propaganda the public are not buying their message.

UPDATE: Given that 48% of Meteorologists are skeptics and survey after survey shows that two-thirds of geoscientists and engineers are skeptics, the 87% figure “across the sciences” seems hard to believe. 3748 members of AAAS took the survey — and as A.Scott points out on WUWT in comments, only 7% of the respondents were from the Earth Sciences, and nearly half were “biomedical”. Link to the survey Questions. See TdeF in comment. H/t to Michael for the tip about Scott.

The answer is not more propaganda, it’s open public debate

To resolve the gap, scientists naturally think the public needs more education. But perhaps it’s the scientists who need […]

January 31st, 2015 | Tags: , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

More Australians switched off ABC politically correct propaganda in 2014

People are bored of the sermons, the half-truths, and carefully filtered messages. Who wants to be told what to think?

The ABC lost nearly 4% of its audience last year. Australians are tuning out the $1.1 billion ABC public broadcaster, and it has nothing to do with the small 5% efficiency cuts. The fall in popularity occured before the cuts. The three commercial TV channels in Australia all did much better at maintaining their popularity — despite suffering larger cuts to their budgets.

The ABC share is down to 10.08 per cent of 16 – 54 year olds. Nearly 90% of working age Australians are paying for the ABC but not watching much. The losses in the over-55 age group, traditionally the ABC stronghold, were almost as large as the younger groups.

Is the ABC biased towards Green politics?

Christine Milne leader of The Greens, at a rally outside Parliament House. Photo: Daily Telegraph.

“Only” 40% of ABC journalists vote Green.

The Australian, last week: Older viewers abandon the ABC

THE ABC was the worst performing television broadcaster last year, losing 3.95 per cent of group audience across all the channels before the government announced budget […]

January 30th, 2015 | Tags: , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Climate Grief — Believers mourning — It’s denial and anger (but it sure isn’t science)

Those who believe the Glorious Climate Models (GCMs) are in trouble. Many of them have spent their entire careers soaking in dire predictions, but things are falling apart — (or rather, not falling apart) — the models don’t work, the public doesn’t care, the media are not that interested, and skeptics keep winning Bloggies awards. Spare a thought for them. It’s tough out there for unskeptical people. Children still know what snow is.

Things are unravelling in believer-land and there is pain. They are witnessing “the wholesale destruction of the planet”, or perhaps the death of a hypothesis, which is nearly as bad.

Truthout, where no conspiracy is too grand, and skeptical scientists are bastards

The headline reads:

“Mourning Our Planet: Climate Scientists Share Their Grieving Process”

The 3,000 word extravaganza of psychological pain is published by an NGO aptly called Truthout (think, “LightsOut”?)

“Climate science researchers, scientists, journalists and activists have all been struggling with grief around what we are witnessing.”

There’s an angry professor calling other scientists who disagree “greedy, lying bastards” and talking of backing “you plutocrats, denialists, fossil-fuel hacks “ against the wall. Another professor blames ACD for the driving cause of her […]

January 29th, 2015 | Tags: , , , , | Category: Global Warming, Junk Science, Pseudoscience, Psychology | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Climate change will hit “Everywhere” harder than “rest of world”

The Prophets of Doom are still at The Guardian (and the CSIRO)

Climate change will hit Australia harder than rest of world, study shows

The first paragraph contains the word “could”. It’s all a guess based on models they already know are broken:

Australia could be on track for a temperature rise of more than 5C by the end of the century, outstripping the rate of warming experienced by the rest of the world, unless drastic action is taken to slash greenhouse gas emissions, according to the most comprehensive analysis ever produced of the country’s future climate.

But wait, will Australia — a rich, low population country with a temperate climate and surrounded by ocean — really be hit harder than the polar regions, the poor, those closest to rising seas and those living in cyclone zones?

A new website called ClimateChangePredictions is keeping track of the “hardest hit” predictions and can’t find a consensus on this one:

“Rural Australians will be the hardest hitby climate change according to Professor Steve Vanderheiden from the Charles Sturt University (CSU)”

“Sydney’s urban areas to be hit hardest by global warming” — ARC Centre of Excellence for […]

January 27th, 2015 | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Nominate your favourite blogs for the 2015 Bloggies — How many categories can skeptics win?

Click to nominate your favourite blogs

Bloggies nominations are open but only til Sunday this week. There is still no Science and Technology category, after 2013 when 4 out 5 finalists were skeptics. Protest by nominating science blogs for all the other categories that apply. As I’ve asked before:

Do these dumb awards matter? They bring in new traffic, and help bloggers tick credibility boxes with the media and with donors. So yes. If you bother (I know it’s a chore) it is a way to say thanks and to put your favourite sites further up the rankings lists. Think of it as a way to alert more people to the sites you feel deserve more attention. It’s free advertising for them. You might have a bit more sway if you also tick the box “I’d like to be on the panel of voters who choose the finalists”.

They may have axed the Science and Technology Category because too many skeptics kept winning it, but that only meant skeptical blogs won in other categories. The blogs you visit every day may not be just science blogs, but politics, education, entertainment, and topical blogs. They may also be […]

January 27th, 2015 | Tags: | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Man-made adjustments transform cooling to warming in Paraguay, South America

It’s not fossil fuels causing global warming, it’s man-made adjustments. Stop the adjustments!

In South America, there are hardly any rural land thermometers. GISS tells us the area is warming (see the map below). Paul Homewood looked at the raw data. There are only three rural stations currently operating in the area, Puerto Casado, Mariscal, and San Juan, and they all show a raw trend that falls. As in so many other situations, after adjustments, all three show a rising trend. The changes are breathtaking. In Mariscal raw temperatures of 25.5C turned out to be “really” 22.5C. (Those 1950 thermometers were hopeless 😉 ). In San Juan Bautista, and Puerto Casasdo the old thermometers get adjusted down by around two degrees. Perhaps there are reasons for the adjustments, but if old thermometers so so bad, and station changes have made such a difference, why does any scientist pretend we can calculate global temperatures accurately?

The GISS map of South America. Left: The warming. Right: The NOAA map showing “grey” areas with no coverage. See Notalotofpeopleknowthat for source links.

Paul Homewood describes what he found when he compared the raw data with the official set: Massive Tampering With Temperatures In […]

January 25th, 2015 | Tags: | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Weekend Unthreaded

Limestone beach cave, 3hrs north of Perth, WA | Click to enlarge.

9.4 out of 10 based on 32 ratings

January 25th, 2015 | Tags: , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

The polarisation of the climate debate has gone too far, says Matt Ridley

Are we all intelligent adults in the room — can we discuss the weather without calling people names?

The state of the national conversation is pathetic.

Matt Ridley, best selling science writer, PhD, elected to the UK Parliament did the unthinkable and switched to become skeptical of carbon crisis a few years ago. This week he wrote about that transformation and the different behaviour of skeptics and those who disagree with them…

UPDATE: Attacking the man takes on an especially blunt meaning today. Bishop Hill reports that in comments Gary Evans, a Guardian author (aka Bluecloud) laid out his best scientific argument. Should that not be [Matt] Ridley’s severed head in the photo? Where else but that paragon of progressive ethics: The Guardian? Such is the intellectual parry of gullible believers: We would actually solve a great deal of the world’s problems by chopping off everyone’s heads. Why are you deniers so touchy? see More Greenpeace Death Threats? Nice of him to prove Ridley’s point.

From My Life As a LukeWarmer: Matt Ridley

In the climate debate, paying obeisance to climate scaremongering is about as mandatory for a public appointment, or public funding, as being a […]

January 24th, 2015 | Tags: | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Marble Bar’s hottest day? Today might reach 49.1C again like it did 110 years ago

UPDATE: 6pm — Despite the hype, the BOM shows no towns making 50C in WA. Marble Bar was the hottest at 49.0C. At least, the BOM, WA Today, The Australian and the ABC have printed the old record correctly as 49.2C.

Will it be a hottest record at one of the hottest towns in the world today? The forecast for Marble Bar, Western Australia, is 49C. The record for Marble Bar stands at 49.2C or 120.5F recorded in 1905 and 1922. I guess if we give up our cars and airconditioners the temperatures in Marble Bar will go back to these ideal conditions?

Thermometer-spotting: the temperature has varied up and down.| The BOM page for Marble Bar: 48.3C at 2.54pm but the highest was 48.9C at 2:46 (8 minutes earlier?). | At 3:30pm the current temp is 48.4C but the highest as listed as 49C at 3:12pm. | Now at 3:50pm the temperature has fallen to 47.9C and it looks like the peak was reached just short of the old record.

Overexcited journalists get 50C into headlines already

Sat Jan 14, 1905

At least one journalist is so excited he predicted it’s “highly likely” […]

January 23rd, 2015 | Tags: | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

A rare sighting of endangered scientific graph in newsprint

We skeptics get excited about unusual things. The Australian published Michael Asten today in the Op-Ed pages, and took the extremely rare step of publishing a scientific graph (!) with a few error bars and everything. Newspapers publish economic graphs all the time, so it’s nice to see the scientific debate getting a bit more sophisticated than just the usual “deniers are evil, government climate scientists speak the word of God” type of stuff. (In the Enlightenment, data was a greater source of authority than any human; how we pine for those days.) The only thing the story should have added was a note that reminds us that the not only was the “hottest” record not beyond the error bars but that it did not occur in satellite measurements. I’m sure a lot of people mistakenly think that NASA might use satellites, but they prefer highly adjusted ground thermometers next to airport tarmac instead.

The headline on that graph could have been “Climate scientists don’t know what caused most of the big moves on this graph”. Some mystery effect caused the warming from 1910-1940. In ClimateScienceTM it is OK to call that “natural variability” and pretend to be 95% sure […]

January 22nd, 2015 | Tags: , , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

BOM admits they got it wrong on “worst Queensland drought”

How much does the BOM care about misleading Australians? Not much apparently, unless they are caught doing it. Everyone makes mistakes, but what matters is what they do to correct it.

The BOM claimed (and the ABC broadcast) that this Queensland drought is the worst in 80 years, but Ken Stewart showed with their own graphs that it was only the worst for 9 years. Stewart politely informed both groups two weeks ago. The ABC excused themselves immediately because they always believe the BOM no matter what it says and never ask any hard questions (it’s not like they are paid to make sure Australians get the right information is it? what do you expect for $1bn?). The BOM took five days to fob the error off even though the “mistake” was obvious against the BOM’s own graphs.

But yesterday Maurice Newman mentioned the mythical 80 year drought in The Australian, lo, suddenly the BOM feel the urge to send another email to Ken and the ABC.

Dear Ken, Further to our correspondence we can confirm that media statements made to the ABC by a Bureau employee on 6 January 2014 did not accurately reflect the relative severity […]

January 21st, 2015 | Tags: , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

New small study: Wind farms show health effects – why wasn’t this done before?

This is the tiniest of most preliminary studies on the health effects of wind turbines, but it made it to the front page of a major newspaper. It is really just laying the groundwork for setting up a proper study. But at the end of 2012, according to the Global Wind Energy Council, there were 225,000 wind turbines operating around the world. So the real question is why has it taken so long to do an eight week study on six people in three houses looking at the effects of very low frequency ultrasound?

The Greens and Labor Party are supposed to be concerned about the effect of industry on people and cuddly animals, so where was their angst? If wind turbines ran on uranium, or the turbines were erected in inner-city areas, would the Greens have been so quiet?

Pacific Hydro deserves credit for funding and cooperating with the study which took place at Cape Bridgewater in Victoria.

Turbines may well blow ill wind

Graham Lloyd, The Australian

PEOPLE living near wind farms face a greater risk of suffering health complaints caused by the low-frequency noise generated by turbines, a groundbreaking study has found.

January 21st, 2015 | Tags: , | Category: Global Warming, Health | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Maurice Newman: conservatives outsmarted — they apologise where they should demand apologies

A wake up call from Maurice Newman. The gravy train of bigger and bigger government is grinding to its inevitable halt, and Greece is the destination the Western Express is headed for. Those who promised that big-government could solve everything have bought votes, while using schools and universities to train a generation to hate free market competition. Young people were raised to blame the system and demand the handout, rather than take responsibility. The soft-west has gone too far left. The weak right has rolled over and tries to be a mini-left, settling for being the team B of “progressivism”. Newman’s best line is that the conservatives apologize where they should demand apologies. So true.

To illustrate dismal standards in science and the media, Newman cites joannenova.com.au (thanks Maurice), and thousands more Australians find out a small part of the scandalous failure of academia (specifically, Lewandowsky at UWA) and the ABC. The stories he refers too are: “Lewandowsky peer reviewed study includes someone 32,757 years old” and the “ABC got it wrong, BOM not concerned with Australian public being misinformed“. Ken Stewart at Kenskingdom deserves credit for catching out the ABC and BOM. Readers, when you want to throw your […]

January 20th, 2015 | Tags: , , | Category: Academia, Big-Government, Free markets, Global Warming, Media-matters, Politics | Print This Post Print This Post | |
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