HACK CHECK: New York Times Seeking ‘Gender Editor’
...“We are seeking a journalist with a compelling vision of how to expand this coverage, from boardroom to bedroom, from the loftiest corridors of power to the back alleys of the world’s most impoverished villages,” the posting states. “We are looking for a creative, passionate leader to guide a cross-platform, global coverage vertical on the topic of gender and identity.”...
NYT Looking To Hire A ‘Climate Change Editor’ As Ad Revenues Slide
...The New York Times wants to hire a “climate change editor” to make what it calls “most important story in the world” more appealing to a global audience.
“The Times is ramping up its coverage to make the most important story in the world even more relevant, urgent and accessible to a huge audience around the globe,” reads a job ad from the international edition of The Times.
Its push for more global warming coverage comes as the paper embarks on a new strategy to shed its American identity and appeal more to international audiences. It’s all part of CEO Mark Thompson’s plan to spend $50 million over three years on “a new era of international growth,” Politico reported in May....
Climate Change: Get Over Objectivity, Newspapers
...I've also been thinking about the newspaper industry and global warming. And frankly, I don't think newspapers are doing enough. Indeed, newspapers' fabled commitment to "objectivity" has been a detriment to efforts to combat global warming.
The industry still has a lot of power to influence people. How about if newspapers abandon their old way of doing things when it comes to the issue of global warming, and turn their influence to good? It just might be that through this issue alone, newspapers revive themselves to some extent. Editors are shirking their responsibility to improve our world, in my view, so let's change that....
Showing posts with label warming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label warming. Show all posts
Sunday, August 14, 2016
Secret Deal Among AGs to Prosecute Climate Change ‘Deniers’ Challenged in Court
By signing a “secrecy pact” with fellow Democrat attorneys general preparing to prosecute climate change skeptics, Rhode Island’s top law enforcement officer jeopardized free speech rights and government transparency laws, according to two legal organizations that have taken him to court.
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Kilmartin’s tactics in supporting President Barack Obama’s climate change policy violate state law guaranteeing access to public records, the two groups, Energy and Environment Legal Institute and Free Market Environmental Law Clinic, claim in their lawsuit.
If Kilmartin and the other attorneys general prevail in the deal to keep select details secret, the ordinary citizen will be the loser, Chris Horner, a leading critic of climate change orthodoxy, said.
“It will mean that they can create privilege for what are otherwise public records, even when shared with ideological activists and donors, so long as everyone who wants to keep their scheming secret agrees in advance,” Horner told The Daily Signal....
By signing a “secrecy pact” with fellow Democrat attorneys general preparing to prosecute climate change skeptics, Rhode Island’s top law enforcement officer jeopardized free speech rights and government transparency laws, according to two legal organizations that have taken him to court.
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Kilmartin’s tactics in supporting President Barack Obama’s climate change policy violate state law guaranteeing access to public records, the two groups, Energy and Environment Legal Institute and Free Market Environmental Law Clinic, claim in their lawsuit.
If Kilmartin and the other attorneys general prevail in the deal to keep select details secret, the ordinary citizen will be the loser, Chris Horner, a leading critic of climate change orthodoxy, said.
“It will mean that they can create privilege for what are otherwise public records, even when shared with ideological activists and donors, so long as everyone who wants to keep their scheming secret agrees in advance,” Horner told The Daily Signal....
NASA: Antarctic Sea Ice Reaches New Record Maximum
Sea ice surrounding Antarctica reached a new record high extent this year, covering more of the southern oceans than it has since scientists began a long-term satellite record to map sea ice extent in the late 1970s. The upward trend in the Antarctic, however, is only about a third of the magnitude of the rapid loss of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean....
Massive Increase In Arctic Sea Ice Over Last Year
Experts say that the Arctic is melting down.
The area of 1.5 meter (5 foot) thick ice in the Arctic has more than doubled over last year, and total volume has massively increased. The animation below shows only ice 1.5+ meters thick....
Sea ice surrounding Antarctica reached a new record high extent this year, covering more of the southern oceans than it has since scientists began a long-term satellite record to map sea ice extent in the late 1970s. The upward trend in the Antarctic, however, is only about a third of the magnitude of the rapid loss of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean....
Massive Increase In Arctic Sea Ice Over Last Year
Experts say that the Arctic is melting down.
The area of 1.5 meter (5 foot) thick ice in the Arctic has more than doubled over last year, and total volume has massively increased. The animation below shows only ice 1.5+ meters thick....
Sunday, July 31, 2016
New Study, Scientists: ’20th Century Warming Not Very Obvious In Our Reconstruction’
A new 368-year tree ring temperature reconstruction has established that regional (China) summer temperatures were warmer than they are now (2012) during the mid-1600s and early 1700s, and that the temperature variations can be linked to variations in solar activity, volcanic forcing (cooling), and natural oceanic-atmospheric oscillations (AMO/PDO).
The authors are intent on pointing out that it is “noteworthy that 20th century warming was not very obvious in our reconstruction.” This “noteworthy” finding is mentioned four different times in the paper.
The lack of a conspicuous 20th century warming — and the warmer periods during the 1600s and 1700s — are clearly shown in the summer temperature graph below:...
Global Warming Expedition Stopped In Its Tracks By Arctic Sea Ice
A group of adventurers, sailors, pilots and climate scientists that recently started a journey around the North Pole in an effort to show the lack of ice, has been blocked from further travels by ice. The Polar Ocean Challenge is taking a two month journey that will see them go from Bristol, Alaska, to Norway, then to Russia through the North East passage, back to Alaska through the North West passage, to Greenland and then ultimately back to Bristol. Their objective, as laid out by their website, was to demonstrate “that the Arctic sea ice coverage shrinks back so far now in the summer months that sea that was permanently locked up now can allow passage through.”
There has been one small hiccup thus-far though: they are currently stuck in Murmansk, Russia because there is too much ice blocking the North East passage the team said didn’t exist in summer months, according to Real Climate Science.
Real Climate Science also provides a graph showing that current Arctic temperatures — despite alarmist claims of the Arctic being hotter than ever — is actually below normal....
A new 368-year tree ring temperature reconstruction has established that regional (China) summer temperatures were warmer than they are now (2012) during the mid-1600s and early 1700s, and that the temperature variations can be linked to variations in solar activity, volcanic forcing (cooling), and natural oceanic-atmospheric oscillations (AMO/PDO).
The authors are intent on pointing out that it is “noteworthy that 20th century warming was not very obvious in our reconstruction.” This “noteworthy” finding is mentioned four different times in the paper.
The lack of a conspicuous 20th century warming — and the warmer periods during the 1600s and 1700s — are clearly shown in the summer temperature graph below:...
Global Warming Expedition Stopped In Its Tracks By Arctic Sea Ice
A group of adventurers, sailors, pilots and climate scientists that recently started a journey around the North Pole in an effort to show the lack of ice, has been blocked from further travels by ice. The Polar Ocean Challenge is taking a two month journey that will see them go from Bristol, Alaska, to Norway, then to Russia through the North East passage, back to Alaska through the North West passage, to Greenland and then ultimately back to Bristol. Their objective, as laid out by their website, was to demonstrate “that the Arctic sea ice coverage shrinks back so far now in the summer months that sea that was permanently locked up now can allow passage through.”
There has been one small hiccup thus-far though: they are currently stuck in Murmansk, Russia because there is too much ice blocking the North East passage the team said didn’t exist in summer months, according to Real Climate Science.
Real Climate Science also provides a graph showing that current Arctic temperatures — despite alarmist claims of the Arctic being hotter than ever — is actually below normal....
Sunday, July 17, 2016
What planet are you on, Leo? DiCaprio flies his LA friends 6,000 miles around the world so they can listen to his speech on GLOBAL WARMING
Leonardo DiCaprio warned about global warming in his Oscars speech
Later this month he is holding a gala dinner for his foundation in St Tropez
Robert DeNiro and Arnold Schwarzenegger are among those he's invited
Each guest flying 12,000 miles from LA will release seven tons of CO2
Leonardo DiCaprio warned about global warming in his Oscars speech
Later this month he is holding a gala dinner for his foundation in St Tropez
Robert DeNiro and Arnold Schwarzenegger are among those he's invited
Each guest flying 12,000 miles from LA will release seven tons of CO2
Sunday, July 10, 2016
Exxon-Mobil is abusing the first amendment
...The obvious point, which remarkably bears repeating, is that there are circumstances when scientific theories must remain open and subject to challenge, and there are circumstances when the government must act to protect the integrity of the market, even if it requires determining the truth or falsity of those theories. ...
...The obvious point, which remarkably bears repeating, is that there are circumstances when scientific theories must remain open and subject to challenge, and there are circumstances when the government must act to protect the integrity of the market, even if it requires determining the truth or falsity of those theories. ...
Sunday, June 12, 2016
The federal government should buy coal plants, shut them down and pay to retrain their employees
...There is another alternative — which I’ll call Plan A — that would avoid the considerable litigation risks of the Clean Power Plan and achieve more quickly and with greater certainty a reduction in emissions at least equal to those of the Clean Power initiative. Under Plan A, the federal government would buy or, if necessary, seize under eminent domain all existing U.S. coal plants and close them over 10 years. Such a use of federal authority is well-established and would not be subject to serious legal challenge. (Plant owners could dispute the amount of compensation offered but not the public purpose of federal action intended to protect the environment.) ...
...There is another alternative — which I’ll call Plan A — that would avoid the considerable litigation risks of the Clean Power Plan and achieve more quickly and with greater certainty a reduction in emissions at least equal to those of the Clean Power initiative. Under Plan A, the federal government would buy or, if necessary, seize under eminent domain all existing U.S. coal plants and close them over 10 years. Such a use of federal authority is well-established and would not be subject to serious legal challenge. (Plant owners could dispute the amount of compensation offered but not the public purpose of federal action intended to protect the environment.) ...
Sunday, June 05, 2016
The federal government should buy coal plants, shut them down and pay to retrain their employees
...There is another alternative — which I’ll call Plan A — that would avoid the considerable litigation risks of the Clean Power Plan and achieve more quickly and with greater certainty a reduction in emissions at least equal to those of the Clean Power initiative. Under Plan A, the federal government would buy or, if necessary, seize under eminent domain all existing U.S. coal plants and close them over 10 years. Such a use of federal authority is well-established and would not be subject to serious legal challenge. (Plant owners could dispute the amount of compensation offered but not the public purpose of federal action intended to protect the environment.) ...
Radar images reveal Mars is coming out of an ice age
An analysis of radar images that peered inside the polar ice caps of Mars shows that Earth's neighbor is coming out of an ice age that is part of an ongoing cycle of climate change, scientists said on Thursday....
Global Warming Scaled Back, Say Two New Studies
...Two new studies look at the long-run projections of climate computer models and suggest that they are running too hot. One critical parameter is equilibrium climate sensitivity, which is conventionally defined as the amounf of warming that can be expected from doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide. In the current issue of the journal, Earth and Space Science, mathematician J. Ray Bates, from the Meteorology and Climate Centre at the University College Dublin, calculates climate sensitivity focusing specifically the meteorological dynamics in the tropics that are mostly ignored in climate models. Basically, the tropics are more effective at expelling extra heat into space than the models project.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change widened its range of climate sensitivity estimates to 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius in its latest report, dropping the lower bound from 2 degrees. The new study suggests that climate sensitivity could be much the lower, about 1 degree C for doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide. If this were true, then the climates models are proejcting future temperarture increases that are 2 to 4 times hotter than the actual likely trend. It is worth noting that the satellite data find that the global rate of temperature increase since 1979 has been +0.12 degree Celsius per decade which suggests that the lower estimates of climate sensitivity may be correct.
Another study published in Nature by the researchers at European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN finds that the world was much cloudier in the pre-industrial age than previously thought. The researchers suggest that a cloudier world was a cooler world. Computer climate models assume that man-made atmospheric pollutants like sulfur dioxide have increased modern cloudiness which has further shielded the planet from higher temperatures. If it turns out that early eras were somewhat cloudier than represented in the models that means that future warming has again been overestimated....
25 Years Of Predicting The Global Warming ‘Tipping Point’
...Would you believe it was eight years ago today that the United Nations predicted we only had “as little as eight years left to avoid a dangerous global average rise of 2C or more.” This failed prediction, however, has not stopped the U.N. from issuing more apocalyptic predictions since.
To celebrate more than two decades of dire predictions, The Daily Caller News Foundation presents this list of some of the “greatest” predictions made by scientists, activists and politicians — most of which we’ve now passed....
...The San Jose Mercury News reported on June 30, 1989 that a “senior environmental official at the United Nations, Noel Brown, says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.”...
...There is another alternative — which I’ll call Plan A — that would avoid the considerable litigation risks of the Clean Power Plan and achieve more quickly and with greater certainty a reduction in emissions at least equal to those of the Clean Power initiative. Under Plan A, the federal government would buy or, if necessary, seize under eminent domain all existing U.S. coal plants and close them over 10 years. Such a use of federal authority is well-established and would not be subject to serious legal challenge. (Plant owners could dispute the amount of compensation offered but not the public purpose of federal action intended to protect the environment.) ...
Radar images reveal Mars is coming out of an ice age
An analysis of radar images that peered inside the polar ice caps of Mars shows that Earth's neighbor is coming out of an ice age that is part of an ongoing cycle of climate change, scientists said on Thursday....
Global Warming Scaled Back, Say Two New Studies
...Two new studies look at the long-run projections of climate computer models and suggest that they are running too hot. One critical parameter is equilibrium climate sensitivity, which is conventionally defined as the amounf of warming that can be expected from doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide. In the current issue of the journal, Earth and Space Science, mathematician J. Ray Bates, from the Meteorology and Climate Centre at the University College Dublin, calculates climate sensitivity focusing specifically the meteorological dynamics in the tropics that are mostly ignored in climate models. Basically, the tropics are more effective at expelling extra heat into space than the models project.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change widened its range of climate sensitivity estimates to 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius in its latest report, dropping the lower bound from 2 degrees. The new study suggests that climate sensitivity could be much the lower, about 1 degree C for doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide. If this were true, then the climates models are proejcting future temperarture increases that are 2 to 4 times hotter than the actual likely trend. It is worth noting that the satellite data find that the global rate of temperature increase since 1979 has been +0.12 degree Celsius per decade which suggests that the lower estimates of climate sensitivity may be correct.
Another study published in Nature by the researchers at European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN finds that the world was much cloudier in the pre-industrial age than previously thought. The researchers suggest that a cloudier world was a cooler world. Computer climate models assume that man-made atmospheric pollutants like sulfur dioxide have increased modern cloudiness which has further shielded the planet from higher temperatures. If it turns out that early eras were somewhat cloudier than represented in the models that means that future warming has again been overestimated....
25 Years Of Predicting The Global Warming ‘Tipping Point’
...Would you believe it was eight years ago today that the United Nations predicted we only had “as little as eight years left to avoid a dangerous global average rise of 2C or more.” This failed prediction, however, has not stopped the U.N. from issuing more apocalyptic predictions since.
To celebrate more than two decades of dire predictions, The Daily Caller News Foundation presents this list of some of the “greatest” predictions made by scientists, activists and politicians — most of which we’ve now passed....
...The San Jose Mercury News reported on June 30, 1989 that a “senior environmental official at the United Nations, Noel Brown, says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.”...
Sunday, May 15, 2016
The Great Green Con no. 1: The hard proof that finally shows global warming forecasts that are costing you billions were WRONG all along
...But when the latest official global temperature figures from the Met Office are placed over the predictions, they show how wrong the estimates have been, to the point of falling out of the ‘95 per cent’ band completely.
The graph shows in incontrovertible detail how the speed of global warming has been massively overestimated. Yet those forecasts have had a ruinous impact on the bills we pay, from heating to car fuel to huge sums paid by councils to reduce carbon emissions.
The eco-debate was, in effect, hijacked by false data. The forecasts have also forced jobs abroad as manufacturers relocate to places with no emissions targets.
A version of the graph appears in a leaked draft of the IPCC’s landmark Fifth Assessment Report due out later this year. It comes as leading climate scientists begin to admit that their worst fears about global warming will not be realised.
Academics are revising their views after acknowledging the miscalculation. Last night Myles Allen, Oxford University’s Professor of Geosystem Science, said that until recently he believed the world might be on course for a catastrophic temperature rise of more than five degrees this century.
But he now says: ‘The odds have come down,’ – adding that warming is likely to be significantly lower. Prof Allen says higher estimates are now ‘looking iffy’.
The graph confirms there has been no statistically significant increase in the world’s average temperature since January 1997 – as this newspaper first disclosed last year. ...
Happy Earth Day: A Reprise of Failed Doom
1: “Civilization Will End Within 15 Or 30 Years”
Harvard biologist Dr. George Wald warned shortly before the first Earth Day in 1970 that civilization would soon end “unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” Three years before his projection, Wald was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
Wald was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War and the nuclear arms race. He even flew to Moscow at one point to advise the leader of the Soviet Union on environmental policy.
Despite his assistance to a communist government, civilization still exists. The percentage of Americans who are concerned about environmental threats has fallen as civilization failed to end by environmental catastrophe.
2: “100-200 Million People Per Year Will Be Starving To Death During The Next Ten Years”
Stanford professor Dr. Paul Ehrlich declared in April 1970 that mass starvation was imminent. His dire predictions failed to materialize as the number of people living in poverty has significantly declined and the amount of food per person has steadily increased, despite population growth. The world’s Gross Domestic Product per person has immeasurably grown despite increases in population.
Ehrlich is largely responsible for this view, having co-published “The Population Bomb” with The Sierra Club in 1968. The book made a number of claims including that millions of humans would starve to death in the 1970s and 1980s, mass famines would sweep England leading to the country’s demise, and that ecological destruction would devastate the planet causing the collapse of civilization.
3: “Population Will Inevitably And Completely Outstrip Whatever Small Increases In Food Supplies We Make”
Paul Ehrlich also made the above claim in 1970, shortly before an agricultural revolution that caused the world’s food supply to rapidly increase.
Ehrlich has consistently failed to revise his predictions when confronted with the fact that they did not occur, stating in 2009 that “perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future.”
4: “Demographers Agree Almost Unanimously … Thirty Years From Now, The Entire World … Will Be In Famine”
Environmentalists in 1970 truly believed in a scientific consensus predicting global famine due to population growth in the developing world, especially in India.
“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions,” Peter Gunter, a professor at North Texas State University, said in a 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness. ”By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
India, where the famines were supposed to begin, recently became one of the world’s largest exporters of agricultural products and food supply per person in the country has drastically increased in recent years. In fact, the number of people in every country listed by Gunter has risen dramatically since 1970.
5: “In A Decade, Urban Dwellers Will Have To Wear Gas Masks To Survive Air Pollution”
Life magazine stated in January 1970 that scientist had “solid experimental and theoretical evidence” to believe that “in a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching Earth by one half.”
Despite the prediction, air quality has been improving worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. Air pollution has also sharply declined in industrialized countries. Carbon dioxide (CO2), the gas environmentalists are worried about today, is odorless, invisible and harmless to humans in normal amounts.
6: “Childbearing [Will Be] A Punishable Crime Against Society, Unless The Parents Hold A Government License”
David Brower, the first executive director of The Sierra Club made the above claim and went on to say that “[a]ll potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.” Brower was also essential in founding Friends of the Earth and the League Of Conservation Voters and much of the modern environmental movement.
Brower believed that most environmental problems were ultimately attributable to new technology that allowed humans to pass natural limits on population size. He famously stated before his death in 2000 that “all technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent” and repeatedly advocated for mandatory birth control.
Today, the only major government to ever get close to his vision has been China, which ended its one-child policy last October.
7: “By The Year 2000 … There Won’t Be Any More Crude Oil”
On Earth Day in 1970 ecologist Kenneth Watt famously predicted that the world would run out of oil saying, “You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”
Numerous academics like Watt predicted that American oil production peaked in 1970 and would gradually decline, likely causing a global economic meltdown. However, the successful application of massive hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, caused American oil production to come roaring back and there is currently too much oil on the market.
American oil and natural gas reserves are at their highest levels since 1972 and American oil production in 2014 was 80 percent higher than in 2008 thanks to fracking.
Furthermore, the U.S. now controls the world’s largest untapped oil reserve, the Green River Formation in Colorado. This formation alone contains up to 3 trillion barrels of untapped oil shale, half of which may be recoverable. That’s five and a half times the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia. This single geologic formation could contain more oil than the rest of the world’s proven reserves combined.
95% of Climate Models Agree: The Observations Must be Wrong
...Whether humans are the cause of 100% of the observed warming or not, the conclusion is that global warming isn’t as bad as was predicted. That should have major policy implications…assuming policy is still informed by facts more than emotions and political aspirations.
And if humans are the cause of only, say, 50% of the warming (e.g. our published paper), then there is even less reason to force expensive and prosperity-destroying energy policies down our throats.
I am growing weary of the variety of emotional, misleading, and policy-useless statements like “most warming since the 1950s is human caused” or “97% of climate scientists agree humans are contributing to warming”, neither of which leads to the conclusion we need to substantially increase energy prices and freeze and starve more poor people to death for the greater good....
Apparently Everyone Now Agrees Science Is Badly Broken
My "Broken Science" cover article in Reason now has a lot of company. In that article I noted that "there is no one single cause for the increase in nonreproducible findings in so many fields. One key problem is that the types of research most likely to make it from lab benches into leading scientific journals are those containing flashy never-before-reported results. Such findings are often too good to check. 'All of the incentives are for researchers to write a good story—to provide journal editors with positive results, clean results, and novel results,' notes the University of Virginia psychologist Brian Nosek. 'This creates publication bias, and that is likely to be the central cause of the proliferation of false discoveries.'"...
...Science is often thought of as a dispassionate search for the truth. But, of course, we are all only human. And most people want to climb the professional ladder. The main way to do that if you’re a scientist is to get grants and publish lots of papers. The problem is that journals have a clear preference for research showing strong, positive relationships – between a particular medical treatment and improved health, for example. This means researchers often try to find those sorts of results. A few go as far as making things up. But a huge number tinker with their research in ways they think are harmless, but which can bias the outcome....
RICO Climate Alarmists FOIA Emails Released
...Attorney General Loretta Lynch has referred to the FBI the question as to whether people who question the scientific consensus about climate change should be prosecuted.
Lynch might have been acting on a request from George Mason University professor Jagadish Shukla, who—with 19 others—wrote a letter urging the administration to follow the advice of Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D) and go after "corporations and other organizations" by using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. As The Wall Street Journal has noted, RICO is an anti-mafia statute written to help "prosecute individuals tied to loansharking and murder-for-hire."
Speaking of rackets: Shukla is the founder and head of the Institute of Global Environment and Society. His wife is the business manager, and his daughter is the assistant to the president. The organization gets 98 percent of its funding from the government, and the Shuklas have reaped more than $5 million from it over the years....
The Climate Wars Get Ugly
...The climate skeptics have a point. An incident from a decade ago shows how tricky the analysis of the science can get. Professor Naomi Oreskes, then at the University of California, analyzed some thousand papers on global warming and concluded that over 75 percent of them backed the view that global warming was largely attributable to human intervention. But when Dr. Benny Peiser of Liverpool University looked at the same data, he concluded that only one-third could be read to support the consensus view, and that, of those, only one percent did so explicitly. Oreskes’s paper has been cited from President Obama on down while Peiser’s paper has been rejected not because it was wrong, but because its conclusions were, so it was said, already widely known. More recent studies in line with Peiser’s have been met with a similar skeptical response.
In principle, it should be possible to separate the scientific issues from the political ones. But in today’s overheated political environment, that is difficult to do. The latest example of the politicization of climate change comes via twenty state Attorney Generals, led by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who are bringing civil and criminal legal actions against ExxonMobil. A similar course of action has been proposed by Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehead, who advocates investigations of fossil fuel companies for possible violations of the civil and criminal law....
...Indeed, one troublesome part of this debate is the weak correlation between temperature increases and the rise in carbon dioxide concentrations. Data presented by climate scientist John Christy shows that the standard models have not done well against actual data for the past 37 years. These climate models have predicted temperature increases three-fold that of those that have been observed, and the greatest errors in the models were where the increases in carbon dioxide concentrations were the largest. Models, as Christy warned, “are properly defined as scientific hypotheses or claims—model output cannot be considered as providing proof of the links between climate variations and greenhouse gases.” That is especially true for models whose predictions have been falsified over a forty-year period. It seems even clearer that these models should never be used as the basis of criminal prosecutions or civil investigations....
The Left Is Coming for You Next
...New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, is taking a similar approach. He isn’t sure what law Exxon has broken, but he promises to find one, making different accusations and arguments as the venue demands. Barack Obama’s so-called Justice Department is considering filing a case of its own.
Despite the insistence of Democrats in positions of power, this is not a “fraud” investigation. There has been no credible case made — none whatsoever — that any fraud has been committed.
We should, while it is permitted, be as plain as possible about what is happening here: This is an act of obvious, gross, and indefensible political suppression, with two ends: One is riling up young, white, middle-income progressives before the 2016 election (in which California’s Democratic attorney general, Kamala Harris, is a Senate candidate), voters who care a great deal about global warming and not very much about freedom of speech; the second is financial, in that Exxon, the second most valuable firm on Earth by market capitalization, has a great deal of money, and may be bullied into a settlement that will fund a great deal of Democratic activism for years to come.
Scientific Regress
...Paradoxically, the situation is actually made worse by the fact that a promising connection is often studied by several independent teams. To see why, suppose that three groups of researchers are studying a phenomenon, and when all the data are analyzed, one group announces that it has discovered a connection, but the other two find nothing of note. Assuming that all the tests involved have a high statistical power, the lone positive finding is almost certainly the spurious one. However, when it comes time to report these findings, what happens? The teams that found a negative result may not even bother to write up their non-discovery. After all, a report that a fanciful connection probably isn’t true is not the stuff of which scientific prizes, grant money, and tenure decisions are made.
And even if they did write it up, it probably wouldn’t be accepted for publication. Journals are in competition with one another for attention and “impact factor,” and are always more eager to report a new, exciting finding than a killjoy failure to find an association. In fact, both of these effects can be quantified. Since the majority of all investigated hypotheses are false, if positive and negative evidence were written up and accepted for publication in equal proportions, then the majority of articles in scientific journals should report no findings. When tallies are actually made, though, the precise opposite turns out to be true: Nearly every published scientific article reports the presence of an association. There must be massive bias at work.
Ioannidis’s argument would be potent even if all scientists were angels motivated by the best of intentions, but when the human element is considered, the picture becomes truly dismal. Scientists have long been aware of something euphemistically called the “experimenter effect”: the curious fact that when a phenomenon is investigated by a researcher who happens to believe in the phenomenon, it is far more likely to be detected. Much of the effect can likely be explained by researchers unconsciously giving hints or suggestions to their human or animal subjects, perhaps in something as subtle as body language or tone of voice. Even those with the best of intentions have been caught fudging measurements, or making small errors in rounding or in statistical analysis that happen to give a more favorable result. Very often, this is just the result of an honest statistical error that leads to a desirable outcome, and therefore it isn’t checked as deliberately as it might have been had it pointed in the opposite direction....
...What they do not mention is that once an entire field has been created—with careers, funding, appointments, and prestige all premised upon an experimental result which was utterly false due either to fraud or to plain bad luck—pointing this fact out is not likely to be very popular. Peer review switches from merely useless to actively harmful. It may be ineffective at keeping papers with analytic or methodological flaws from being published, but it can be deadly effective at suppressing criticism of a dominant research paradigm. Even if a critic is able to get his work published, pointing out that the house you’ve built together is situated over a chasm will not endear him to his colleagues or, more importantly, to his mentors and patrons....
Electric, hybrid and other eco-friendly cars fill the air with as many toxins as dirty diesels say scientists
Eco-friendly electric and hybrid cars fill air with as many toxins as diesels
That was finding of a study looking at particles from tyre and brake wear
Greener alternative produces more tiny particles because they are heavier
Made heavier by batteries and parts meaning tyres and brakes wear faster
SlashDerp: Does More Carbon Dioxide Mean Increased Crop Water Productivity?
For the most part, we think of rising levels of carbon dioxide as an environmental problem. But atmospheric CO2 can also boost agricultural productivity by helping plants grow. How do these potential issues balance out? In an investigation recently published in Nature Climate Change, scientists have looked into the global implications of carbon dioxide's ability to enhance agricultural productivity. Increased levels of CO2 can enhance photosynthesis and reduce leaf-level transpiration, the process by which some of the water that plants draw from the ground gets released back into the atmosphere. These changes can reduce growing seasons and water loss. The result could be an increase in what's called "crop water productivity," i.e. the amount of food produced for each unit of water expended. If elevated CO2 levels increase crop yield and reduce water consumption at large scales, this could help ensure water and food security despite the climate disruptions. By combining data from a massive network of field experiments and global crop models, the scientists claimed that depending on the crop type, global crop water productivity will increase by 10 to 27 percent by the 2080s. Arid regions exhibited large increases that were based on crop type....
SlashDerp: Rise In CO2 Has 'Greened Planet Earth'
Carbon dioxide emissions from industrial society have driven a huge growth in trees and other plants. A new study says that if the extra green leaves prompted by rising CO2 levels were laid in a carpet, it would cover twice the continental USA. Climate skeptics argue the findings show that the extra CO2 is actually benefiting the planet. But the researchers say the fertilization effect diminishes over time. They warn the positives of CO2 are likely to be outweighed by the negatives. The lead author, Professor Ranga Myneni from Boston University, told BBC News the extra tree growth would not compensate for global warming, rising sea levels, melting glaciers, ocean acidification, the loss of Arctic sea ice, and the prediction of more severe tropical storms. The new study is published in the journal Nature Climate Change by a team of 32 authors from 24 institutions in eight countries....
SlashDerp: Global Warming Has Made the Weather Better For Most In US -- For Now
Since Americans first heard the term global warming in the 1970s, the weather has actually improved for most people living in the U.S.. But it won't always be that way, according to a new study. Research shows Americans typically -- and perhaps unsurprisingly -- like warmer winters and dislike hot, humid summers. And they reveal their weather preferences by moving to areas with conditions they like best. A new study in the journal Nature has found that 80% of the U.S. population lives in counties experiencing more pleasant weather than they did 40 years ago. "Virtually all Americans are now experiencing the much milder winters that they typically prefer, and these mild winters have not been offset by markedly more uncomfortable summers or other negative changes," writes Patrick Egan, a political scientist at New York University, and Megan Mullin, professor of environmental politics at Duke University. However, if greenhouse gas emissions continue unchecked, 88% of the current population will live in areas where the weather is less pleasant than it was before. The paper does not predict how changing weather patterns will influence migration patterns over the coming century....
...But when the latest official global temperature figures from the Met Office are placed over the predictions, they show how wrong the estimates have been, to the point of falling out of the ‘95 per cent’ band completely.
The graph shows in incontrovertible detail how the speed of global warming has been massively overestimated. Yet those forecasts have had a ruinous impact on the bills we pay, from heating to car fuel to huge sums paid by councils to reduce carbon emissions.
The eco-debate was, in effect, hijacked by false data. The forecasts have also forced jobs abroad as manufacturers relocate to places with no emissions targets.
A version of the graph appears in a leaked draft of the IPCC’s landmark Fifth Assessment Report due out later this year. It comes as leading climate scientists begin to admit that their worst fears about global warming will not be realised.
Academics are revising their views after acknowledging the miscalculation. Last night Myles Allen, Oxford University’s Professor of Geosystem Science, said that until recently he believed the world might be on course for a catastrophic temperature rise of more than five degrees this century.
But he now says: ‘The odds have come down,’ – adding that warming is likely to be significantly lower. Prof Allen says higher estimates are now ‘looking iffy’.
The graph confirms there has been no statistically significant increase in the world’s average temperature since January 1997 – as this newspaper first disclosed last year. ...
Happy Earth Day: A Reprise of Failed Doom
1: “Civilization Will End Within 15 Or 30 Years”
Harvard biologist Dr. George Wald warned shortly before the first Earth Day in 1970 that civilization would soon end “unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” Three years before his projection, Wald was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
Wald was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War and the nuclear arms race. He even flew to Moscow at one point to advise the leader of the Soviet Union on environmental policy.
Despite his assistance to a communist government, civilization still exists. The percentage of Americans who are concerned about environmental threats has fallen as civilization failed to end by environmental catastrophe.
2: “100-200 Million People Per Year Will Be Starving To Death During The Next Ten Years”
Stanford professor Dr. Paul Ehrlich declared in April 1970 that mass starvation was imminent. His dire predictions failed to materialize as the number of people living in poverty has significantly declined and the amount of food per person has steadily increased, despite population growth. The world’s Gross Domestic Product per person has immeasurably grown despite increases in population.
Ehrlich is largely responsible for this view, having co-published “The Population Bomb” with The Sierra Club in 1968. The book made a number of claims including that millions of humans would starve to death in the 1970s and 1980s, mass famines would sweep England leading to the country’s demise, and that ecological destruction would devastate the planet causing the collapse of civilization.
3: “Population Will Inevitably And Completely Outstrip Whatever Small Increases In Food Supplies We Make”
Paul Ehrlich also made the above claim in 1970, shortly before an agricultural revolution that caused the world’s food supply to rapidly increase.
Ehrlich has consistently failed to revise his predictions when confronted with the fact that they did not occur, stating in 2009 that “perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future.”
4: “Demographers Agree Almost Unanimously … Thirty Years From Now, The Entire World … Will Be In Famine”
Environmentalists in 1970 truly believed in a scientific consensus predicting global famine due to population growth in the developing world, especially in India.
“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions,” Peter Gunter, a professor at North Texas State University, said in a 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness. ”By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
India, where the famines were supposed to begin, recently became one of the world’s largest exporters of agricultural products and food supply per person in the country has drastically increased in recent years. In fact, the number of people in every country listed by Gunter has risen dramatically since 1970.
5: “In A Decade, Urban Dwellers Will Have To Wear Gas Masks To Survive Air Pollution”
Life magazine stated in January 1970 that scientist had “solid experimental and theoretical evidence” to believe that “in a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching Earth by one half.”
Despite the prediction, air quality has been improving worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. Air pollution has also sharply declined in industrialized countries. Carbon dioxide (CO2), the gas environmentalists are worried about today, is odorless, invisible and harmless to humans in normal amounts.
6: “Childbearing [Will Be] A Punishable Crime Against Society, Unless The Parents Hold A Government License”
David Brower, the first executive director of The Sierra Club made the above claim and went on to say that “[a]ll potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.” Brower was also essential in founding Friends of the Earth and the League Of Conservation Voters and much of the modern environmental movement.
Brower believed that most environmental problems were ultimately attributable to new technology that allowed humans to pass natural limits on population size. He famously stated before his death in 2000 that “all technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent” and repeatedly advocated for mandatory birth control.
Today, the only major government to ever get close to his vision has been China, which ended its one-child policy last October.
7: “By The Year 2000 … There Won’t Be Any More Crude Oil”
On Earth Day in 1970 ecologist Kenneth Watt famously predicted that the world would run out of oil saying, “You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”
Numerous academics like Watt predicted that American oil production peaked in 1970 and would gradually decline, likely causing a global economic meltdown. However, the successful application of massive hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, caused American oil production to come roaring back and there is currently too much oil on the market.
American oil and natural gas reserves are at their highest levels since 1972 and American oil production in 2014 was 80 percent higher than in 2008 thanks to fracking.
Furthermore, the U.S. now controls the world’s largest untapped oil reserve, the Green River Formation in Colorado. This formation alone contains up to 3 trillion barrels of untapped oil shale, half of which may be recoverable. That’s five and a half times the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia. This single geologic formation could contain more oil than the rest of the world’s proven reserves combined.
95% of Climate Models Agree: The Observations Must be Wrong
...Whether humans are the cause of 100% of the observed warming or not, the conclusion is that global warming isn’t as bad as was predicted. That should have major policy implications…assuming policy is still informed by facts more than emotions and political aspirations.
And if humans are the cause of only, say, 50% of the warming (e.g. our published paper), then there is even less reason to force expensive and prosperity-destroying energy policies down our throats.
I am growing weary of the variety of emotional, misleading, and policy-useless statements like “most warming since the 1950s is human caused” or “97% of climate scientists agree humans are contributing to warming”, neither of which leads to the conclusion we need to substantially increase energy prices and freeze and starve more poor people to death for the greater good....
Apparently Everyone Now Agrees Science Is Badly Broken
My "Broken Science" cover article in Reason now has a lot of company. In that article I noted that "there is no one single cause for the increase in nonreproducible findings in so many fields. One key problem is that the types of research most likely to make it from lab benches into leading scientific journals are those containing flashy never-before-reported results. Such findings are often too good to check. 'All of the incentives are for researchers to write a good story—to provide journal editors with positive results, clean results, and novel results,' notes the University of Virginia psychologist Brian Nosek. 'This creates publication bias, and that is likely to be the central cause of the proliferation of false discoveries.'"...
...Science is often thought of as a dispassionate search for the truth. But, of course, we are all only human. And most people want to climb the professional ladder. The main way to do that if you’re a scientist is to get grants and publish lots of papers. The problem is that journals have a clear preference for research showing strong, positive relationships – between a particular medical treatment and improved health, for example. This means researchers often try to find those sorts of results. A few go as far as making things up. But a huge number tinker with their research in ways they think are harmless, but which can bias the outcome....
RICO Climate Alarmists FOIA Emails Released
...Attorney General Loretta Lynch has referred to the FBI the question as to whether people who question the scientific consensus about climate change should be prosecuted.
Lynch might have been acting on a request from George Mason University professor Jagadish Shukla, who—with 19 others—wrote a letter urging the administration to follow the advice of Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D) and go after "corporations and other organizations" by using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. As The Wall Street Journal has noted, RICO is an anti-mafia statute written to help "prosecute individuals tied to loansharking and murder-for-hire."
Speaking of rackets: Shukla is the founder and head of the Institute of Global Environment and Society. His wife is the business manager, and his daughter is the assistant to the president. The organization gets 98 percent of its funding from the government, and the Shuklas have reaped more than $5 million from it over the years....
The Climate Wars Get Ugly
...The climate skeptics have a point. An incident from a decade ago shows how tricky the analysis of the science can get. Professor Naomi Oreskes, then at the University of California, analyzed some thousand papers on global warming and concluded that over 75 percent of them backed the view that global warming was largely attributable to human intervention. But when Dr. Benny Peiser of Liverpool University looked at the same data, he concluded that only one-third could be read to support the consensus view, and that, of those, only one percent did so explicitly. Oreskes’s paper has been cited from President Obama on down while Peiser’s paper has been rejected not because it was wrong, but because its conclusions were, so it was said, already widely known. More recent studies in line with Peiser’s have been met with a similar skeptical response.
In principle, it should be possible to separate the scientific issues from the political ones. But in today’s overheated political environment, that is difficult to do. The latest example of the politicization of climate change comes via twenty state Attorney Generals, led by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who are bringing civil and criminal legal actions against ExxonMobil. A similar course of action has been proposed by Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehead, who advocates investigations of fossil fuel companies for possible violations of the civil and criminal law....
...Indeed, one troublesome part of this debate is the weak correlation between temperature increases and the rise in carbon dioxide concentrations. Data presented by climate scientist John Christy shows that the standard models have not done well against actual data for the past 37 years. These climate models have predicted temperature increases three-fold that of those that have been observed, and the greatest errors in the models were where the increases in carbon dioxide concentrations were the largest. Models, as Christy warned, “are properly defined as scientific hypotheses or claims—model output cannot be considered as providing proof of the links between climate variations and greenhouse gases.” That is especially true for models whose predictions have been falsified over a forty-year period. It seems even clearer that these models should never be used as the basis of criminal prosecutions or civil investigations....
The Left Is Coming for You Next
...New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, is taking a similar approach. He isn’t sure what law Exxon has broken, but he promises to find one, making different accusations and arguments as the venue demands. Barack Obama’s so-called Justice Department is considering filing a case of its own.
Despite the insistence of Democrats in positions of power, this is not a “fraud” investigation. There has been no credible case made — none whatsoever — that any fraud has been committed.
We should, while it is permitted, be as plain as possible about what is happening here: This is an act of obvious, gross, and indefensible political suppression, with two ends: One is riling up young, white, middle-income progressives before the 2016 election (in which California’s Democratic attorney general, Kamala Harris, is a Senate candidate), voters who care a great deal about global warming and not very much about freedom of speech; the second is financial, in that Exxon, the second most valuable firm on Earth by market capitalization, has a great deal of money, and may be bullied into a settlement that will fund a great deal of Democratic activism for years to come.
Scientific Regress
...Paradoxically, the situation is actually made worse by the fact that a promising connection is often studied by several independent teams. To see why, suppose that three groups of researchers are studying a phenomenon, and when all the data are analyzed, one group announces that it has discovered a connection, but the other two find nothing of note. Assuming that all the tests involved have a high statistical power, the lone positive finding is almost certainly the spurious one. However, when it comes time to report these findings, what happens? The teams that found a negative result may not even bother to write up their non-discovery. After all, a report that a fanciful connection probably isn’t true is not the stuff of which scientific prizes, grant money, and tenure decisions are made.
And even if they did write it up, it probably wouldn’t be accepted for publication. Journals are in competition with one another for attention and “impact factor,” and are always more eager to report a new, exciting finding than a killjoy failure to find an association. In fact, both of these effects can be quantified. Since the majority of all investigated hypotheses are false, if positive and negative evidence were written up and accepted for publication in equal proportions, then the majority of articles in scientific journals should report no findings. When tallies are actually made, though, the precise opposite turns out to be true: Nearly every published scientific article reports the presence of an association. There must be massive bias at work.
Ioannidis’s argument would be potent even if all scientists were angels motivated by the best of intentions, but when the human element is considered, the picture becomes truly dismal. Scientists have long been aware of something euphemistically called the “experimenter effect”: the curious fact that when a phenomenon is investigated by a researcher who happens to believe in the phenomenon, it is far more likely to be detected. Much of the effect can likely be explained by researchers unconsciously giving hints or suggestions to their human or animal subjects, perhaps in something as subtle as body language or tone of voice. Even those with the best of intentions have been caught fudging measurements, or making small errors in rounding or in statistical analysis that happen to give a more favorable result. Very often, this is just the result of an honest statistical error that leads to a desirable outcome, and therefore it isn’t checked as deliberately as it might have been had it pointed in the opposite direction....
...What they do not mention is that once an entire field has been created—with careers, funding, appointments, and prestige all premised upon an experimental result which was utterly false due either to fraud or to plain bad luck—pointing this fact out is not likely to be very popular. Peer review switches from merely useless to actively harmful. It may be ineffective at keeping papers with analytic or methodological flaws from being published, but it can be deadly effective at suppressing criticism of a dominant research paradigm. Even if a critic is able to get his work published, pointing out that the house you’ve built together is situated over a chasm will not endear him to his colleagues or, more importantly, to his mentors and patrons....
Electric, hybrid and other eco-friendly cars fill the air with as many toxins as dirty diesels say scientists
Eco-friendly electric and hybrid cars fill air with as many toxins as diesels
That was finding of a study looking at particles from tyre and brake wear
Greener alternative produces more tiny particles because they are heavier
Made heavier by batteries and parts meaning tyres and brakes wear faster
SlashDerp: Does More Carbon Dioxide Mean Increased Crop Water Productivity?
For the most part, we think of rising levels of carbon dioxide as an environmental problem. But atmospheric CO2 can also boost agricultural productivity by helping plants grow. How do these potential issues balance out? In an investigation recently published in Nature Climate Change, scientists have looked into the global implications of carbon dioxide's ability to enhance agricultural productivity. Increased levels of CO2 can enhance photosynthesis and reduce leaf-level transpiration, the process by which some of the water that plants draw from the ground gets released back into the atmosphere. These changes can reduce growing seasons and water loss. The result could be an increase in what's called "crop water productivity," i.e. the amount of food produced for each unit of water expended. If elevated CO2 levels increase crop yield and reduce water consumption at large scales, this could help ensure water and food security despite the climate disruptions. By combining data from a massive network of field experiments and global crop models, the scientists claimed that depending on the crop type, global crop water productivity will increase by 10 to 27 percent by the 2080s. Arid regions exhibited large increases that were based on crop type....
SlashDerp: Rise In CO2 Has 'Greened Planet Earth'
Carbon dioxide emissions from industrial society have driven a huge growth in trees and other plants. A new study says that if the extra green leaves prompted by rising CO2 levels were laid in a carpet, it would cover twice the continental USA. Climate skeptics argue the findings show that the extra CO2 is actually benefiting the planet. But the researchers say the fertilization effect diminishes over time. They warn the positives of CO2 are likely to be outweighed by the negatives. The lead author, Professor Ranga Myneni from Boston University, told BBC News the extra tree growth would not compensate for global warming, rising sea levels, melting glaciers, ocean acidification, the loss of Arctic sea ice, and the prediction of more severe tropical storms. The new study is published in the journal Nature Climate Change by a team of 32 authors from 24 institutions in eight countries....
SlashDerp: Global Warming Has Made the Weather Better For Most In US -- For Now
Since Americans first heard the term global warming in the 1970s, the weather has actually improved for most people living in the U.S.. But it won't always be that way, according to a new study. Research shows Americans typically -- and perhaps unsurprisingly -- like warmer winters and dislike hot, humid summers. And they reveal their weather preferences by moving to areas with conditions they like best. A new study in the journal Nature has found that 80% of the U.S. population lives in counties experiencing more pleasant weather than they did 40 years ago. "Virtually all Americans are now experiencing the much milder winters that they typically prefer, and these mild winters have not been offset by markedly more uncomfortable summers or other negative changes," writes Patrick Egan, a political scientist at New York University, and Megan Mullin, professor of environmental politics at Duke University. However, if greenhouse gas emissions continue unchecked, 88% of the current population will live in areas where the weather is less pleasant than it was before. The paper does not predict how changing weather patterns will influence migration patterns over the coming century....
Sunday, April 17, 2016
U.S. state prosecutors met with climate groups as Exxon probes expanded
A coalition of U.S. state attorneys general received guidance from well-known climate scientists and environmental lawyers in March as some of them opened investigations into Exxon Mobil for allegedly misleading the public about climate change risks, documents seen by Reuters showed.
Peter Frumhoff of the Union of Concerned Scientists, which has urged action on climate change, and Matt Pawa, who litigated against Exxon in a global warming case, were listed as presenters at a March 29 meeting of more than a dozen state prosecutors, according to emails between the offices of attorneys general in New York and Vermont.
The previously unknown level of coordination with outside advisers offered a glimpse behind the scenes in an increasingly pitched battle between Exxon and environmental groups....
IPCC Official: “Climate Policy Is Redistributing The World’s Wealth”
...Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection, says the German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer. The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated. – Ottmar Edenhofer [co-chair of the IPCC Working Group III.]
Does Transit Save Energy?
...The key issue turns out to be occupancy -- how full is the train or bus. And it turns out that occupancy is probably lower than most people think. That is because everyone rides on buses or trains as they commute -- they are going in the direction of most people's travel at the time of day they travel, so the transit is totally full. But no one thinks about those trains having to go back the other direction, usually mostly empty....
A coalition of U.S. state attorneys general received guidance from well-known climate scientists and environmental lawyers in March as some of them opened investigations into Exxon Mobil for allegedly misleading the public about climate change risks, documents seen by Reuters showed.
Peter Frumhoff of the Union of Concerned Scientists, which has urged action on climate change, and Matt Pawa, who litigated against Exxon in a global warming case, were listed as presenters at a March 29 meeting of more than a dozen state prosecutors, according to emails between the offices of attorneys general in New York and Vermont.
The previously unknown level of coordination with outside advisers offered a glimpse behind the scenes in an increasingly pitched battle between Exxon and environmental groups....
IPCC Official: “Climate Policy Is Redistributing The World’s Wealth”
...Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection, says the German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer. The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated. – Ottmar Edenhofer [co-chair of the IPCC Working Group III.]
Does Transit Save Energy?
...The key issue turns out to be occupancy -- how full is the train or bus. And it turns out that occupancy is probably lower than most people think. That is because everyone rides on buses or trains as they commute -- they are going in the direction of most people's travel at the time of day they travel, so the transit is totally full. But no one thinks about those trains having to go back the other direction, usually mostly empty....
Friday, April 01, 2016
Another Climate Alarmist Admits Real Motive Behind Warming Scare
One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole,” said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.
So what is the goal of environmental policy?
“We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy,” said Edenhofer.
For those who want to believe that maybe Edenhofer just misspoke and doesn’t really mean that, consider that a little more than five years ago he also said that “the next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.”...
One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole,” said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.
So what is the goal of environmental policy?
“We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy,” said Edenhofer.
For those who want to believe that maybe Edenhofer just misspoke and doesn’t really mean that, consider that a little more than five years ago he also said that “the next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.”...
Saturday, March 26, 2016
‘Propaganda’: Top MIT Climate Scientist Trashes ‘97% Consensus’ Claim
...Cook’s paper found of the scientific study “abstracts expressing a position on [manmade global warming], 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.” But Cook’s assertion has been heavily criticized by researchers carefully examining his methodology.
A paper by five leading climatologists published in the journal Science and Education found only 41 out of the 11,944 published climate studies examined in Cook’s study explicitly stated mankind has caused most of the warming since 1950 — meaning the actual consensus is 0.3 percent...
...A 2013 study by Andrew Montford of the Global Warming Policy Foundation found that Cook had to cast a wide net to cram scientists into his so-called consensus. To be part of Cook’s consensus, a scientific study only needed to agree carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that human activities have warmed the planet “to some unspecified extent” — both of which are uncontroversial points....
...He said it’s part of a political machine that’s used by scientists and politicians to direct more taxpayer dollars to pet projects. “If you can make an ambiguous remark and you have people who will amplify it ‘they said it not me’ and he response of the political system is to increase your funding, what’s not to like?” Lindzen said...
NOAA Radiosonde Data Shows No Warming For 58 Years
In their “hottest year ever” press briefing, NOAA included this graph, which stated that they have a 58 year long radiosonde temperature record. But they only showed the last 37 years in the graph.
Here is why they are hiding the rest of the data. The earlier data showed as much pre-1979 cooling as the post-1979 warming....
...Cook’s paper found of the scientific study “abstracts expressing a position on [manmade global warming], 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.” But Cook’s assertion has been heavily criticized by researchers carefully examining his methodology.
A paper by five leading climatologists published in the journal Science and Education found only 41 out of the 11,944 published climate studies examined in Cook’s study explicitly stated mankind has caused most of the warming since 1950 — meaning the actual consensus is 0.3 percent...
...A 2013 study by Andrew Montford of the Global Warming Policy Foundation found that Cook had to cast a wide net to cram scientists into his so-called consensus. To be part of Cook’s consensus, a scientific study only needed to agree carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that human activities have warmed the planet “to some unspecified extent” — both of which are uncontroversial points....
...He said it’s part of a political machine that’s used by scientists and politicians to direct more taxpayer dollars to pet projects. “If you can make an ambiguous remark and you have people who will amplify it ‘they said it not me’ and he response of the political system is to increase your funding, what’s not to like?” Lindzen said...
NOAA Radiosonde Data Shows No Warming For 58 Years
In their “hottest year ever” press briefing, NOAA included this graph, which stated that they have a 58 year long radiosonde temperature record. But they only showed the last 37 years in the graph.
Here is why they are hiding the rest of the data. The earlier data showed as much pre-1979 cooling as the post-1979 warming....
HALF of women have a fall-back partner on standby who has always fancied them, in case their current relationship turns sour
...The survey of 1,000 women also found Plan B is also likely to be someone whom she has known for around seven years, who will be 'ready and waiting' because of 'unfinished business'....
...Furthermore, around one in ten women said their Plan B had already confessed his undying love, while one in five said they were confident he would 'drop everything' for her, if she asked him to.
Slightly more than four in ten said they had got to know the man whilst they were with their partner, while a similar percentage said he was 'on the scene' long before.
Around one in four women who have a back-up plan have feelings as strong for him as they do for their other half.
Incredibly, 12 per cent went as far as to admit their feelings were 'stronger' for Plan B, and close to seven in ten admitted they are currently in contact with him.
But despite the secrecy involved in having a close friend or ex to turn to, around half of the women who took part in the poll said their other half was aware of the 'third party'.
Of those, one in five said they were able to joke about it, but one in three said their man was 'uncomfortable' discussing him.
One in four admitted their current partner had met their Plan B, while one in five admitted he was a friend of the man in her life....
Why do women age so fast in their fifties? FEMAIL investigates why gender age gap problems increase the older you get
...He was 49 and I was 54 at the time.
I've always looked young for my age and when we met I didn't look five years older than my partner. However, as the years slipped by, well, I did.
And then, as time seemed to slow down for him, it somehow sped up for me. The truth is I suddenly feel as if I'm ageing faster than my partner and now that age gap shows.
We met through online dating. He was one of the few men in my age group who deigned to go out with me. Most of the fiftysomethings, even those with comb-overs and anoraks, were looking for bendy 35-year-olds willing to squander the last of their good years on an over-the-hill couch potato...
‘Our teenage daughter dumped her boyfriend - and we’re heartbroken’
The last time I sat across a kitchen table from a heartbroken teenage boy, I was just a girl myself, and I was the one doing the heart-breaking. Thirty years on, I find myself in the same situation – only this time the distraught boy in question is in love with my 18-year-old daughter Katie*, who has decided she doesn’t want to be with him any more.
Over the last year, I’ve grown to love this boy – who sits before me now with his head in his hands, looking for advice as to how to win her back – as a son. My husband feels the same way. Alex*, also 18, is kind, hard-working, respectful and good-looking. He adores our daughter and wants to keep her happy and safe.
What more could you want for your girl? But for Katie, what he offers isn’t enough. Safe is for later. For now she wants excitement and freedom. However much we adore him, for her he isn’t ‘The One’....
This University of Oregon Study on Feminizing Glaciers Might Make You Root for Trump
...Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions. ...
...The survey of 1,000 women also found Plan B is also likely to be someone whom she has known for around seven years, who will be 'ready and waiting' because of 'unfinished business'....
...Furthermore, around one in ten women said their Plan B had already confessed his undying love, while one in five said they were confident he would 'drop everything' for her, if she asked him to.
Slightly more than four in ten said they had got to know the man whilst they were with their partner, while a similar percentage said he was 'on the scene' long before.
Around one in four women who have a back-up plan have feelings as strong for him as they do for their other half.
Incredibly, 12 per cent went as far as to admit their feelings were 'stronger' for Plan B, and close to seven in ten admitted they are currently in contact with him.
But despite the secrecy involved in having a close friend or ex to turn to, around half of the women who took part in the poll said their other half was aware of the 'third party'.
Of those, one in five said they were able to joke about it, but one in three said their man was 'uncomfortable' discussing him.
One in four admitted their current partner had met their Plan B, while one in five admitted he was a friend of the man in her life....
Why do women age so fast in their fifties? FEMAIL investigates why gender age gap problems increase the older you get
...He was 49 and I was 54 at the time.
I've always looked young for my age and when we met I didn't look five years older than my partner. However, as the years slipped by, well, I did.
And then, as time seemed to slow down for him, it somehow sped up for me. The truth is I suddenly feel as if I'm ageing faster than my partner and now that age gap shows.
We met through online dating. He was one of the few men in my age group who deigned to go out with me. Most of the fiftysomethings, even those with comb-overs and anoraks, were looking for bendy 35-year-olds willing to squander the last of their good years on an over-the-hill couch potato...
‘Our teenage daughter dumped her boyfriend - and we’re heartbroken’
The last time I sat across a kitchen table from a heartbroken teenage boy, I was just a girl myself, and I was the one doing the heart-breaking. Thirty years on, I find myself in the same situation – only this time the distraught boy in question is in love with my 18-year-old daughter Katie*, who has decided she doesn’t want to be with him any more.
Over the last year, I’ve grown to love this boy – who sits before me now with his head in his hands, looking for advice as to how to win her back – as a son. My husband feels the same way. Alex*, also 18, is kind, hard-working, respectful and good-looking. He adores our daughter and wants to keep her happy and safe.
What more could you want for your girl? But for Katie, what he offers isn’t enough. Safe is for later. For now she wants excitement and freedom. However much we adore him, for her he isn’t ‘The One’....
This University of Oregon Study on Feminizing Glaciers Might Make You Root for Trump
...Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions. ...
Sunday, February 07, 2016
Feds Cover Up Numbers On Fake Science
...The National Science Foundation (NSF) awards about $7 billion for research annually, but an agency report on the foundation’s merit review process doesn’t mention “plagiarism” or “misconduct” – problems that have increased tenfold since 2004, according to NSF’s inspector general.
“NSF declines approximately 37,000 – 40,000 proposals per year,” according the report.
“You will need to submit a FOIA request for more specific information than what’s contained there,” NSF spokeswoman Jessica Arriens told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Such information is critical since NSF’s watchdog estimates that 1,200 proposals contain plagiarism and another 800 proposals or results include “falsified or fabricated data,” according to the IG’s semiannual report.
NSF grants account “for about one-fourth of federal support to academic institutions for basic research,” Arriens previously told TheDCNF. The foundation awards 11,000 grants to 2,000 research institutions, according to the IG....
Scientist Ruthlessly Debunks One Of NOAA’s Central Climate Claims
...Christy recently co-authored a study with veteran meteorologist Anthony Watts that found the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was basing its temperature adjustments on “compromised” temperature data.
The study found most of NOAA’s 1,218 thermometers were sited near artificial surfaces and heat sources like concrete, asphalt, and air conditioner exhausts that were causing more warming to show in the U.S. temperature record than was present at weather stations that were well-sited.
Christy and Watts surmised NOAA was basing its temperature adjustments (efforts made to get “biases” out of the temperature record) on bad data....
EMT 2/5/16 The First World edition.
...Forty-five years. It has been forty since the last time a human being (Harrison Schmitt) has set foot on any rock other than Earth.
Forty years in the past, the first world was the place where miracles of science coupled with indomitable spirit to do the impossible lifted the hopes and dreams of the human race.
Forty years ago, the apolitical scientific method for empirical studies of chemistry, physics & math based on actual data still trumped the politicized sciency-tific madness of psychology & climatology & math based on fabricated data.
Now we spend our resources chasing rainbows and unicorns, and man's sole mission to escape this rock Earth that will otherwise ultimately be our tombstone has been sacrificed to the gods of progressivism.
Because the First World is no longer interested in science, or the survival of the survival of its long-distant progeny....
...The National Science Foundation (NSF) awards about $7 billion for research annually, but an agency report on the foundation’s merit review process doesn’t mention “plagiarism” or “misconduct” – problems that have increased tenfold since 2004, according to NSF’s inspector general.
“NSF declines approximately 37,000 – 40,000 proposals per year,” according the report.
“You will need to submit a FOIA request for more specific information than what’s contained there,” NSF spokeswoman Jessica Arriens told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Such information is critical since NSF’s watchdog estimates that 1,200 proposals contain plagiarism and another 800 proposals or results include “falsified or fabricated data,” according to the IG’s semiannual report.
NSF grants account “for about one-fourth of federal support to academic institutions for basic research,” Arriens previously told TheDCNF. The foundation awards 11,000 grants to 2,000 research institutions, according to the IG....
Scientist Ruthlessly Debunks One Of NOAA’s Central Climate Claims
...Christy recently co-authored a study with veteran meteorologist Anthony Watts that found the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was basing its temperature adjustments on “compromised” temperature data.
The study found most of NOAA’s 1,218 thermometers were sited near artificial surfaces and heat sources like concrete, asphalt, and air conditioner exhausts that were causing more warming to show in the U.S. temperature record than was present at weather stations that were well-sited.
Christy and Watts surmised NOAA was basing its temperature adjustments (efforts made to get “biases” out of the temperature record) on bad data....
EMT 2/5/16 The First World edition.
...Forty-five years. It has been forty since the last time a human being (Harrison Schmitt) has set foot on any rock other than Earth.
Forty years in the past, the first world was the place where miracles of science coupled with indomitable spirit to do the impossible lifted the hopes and dreams of the human race.
Forty years ago, the apolitical scientific method for empirical studies of chemistry, physics & math based on actual data still trumped the politicized sciency-tific madness of psychology & climatology & math based on fabricated data.
Now we spend our resources chasing rainbows and unicorns, and man's sole mission to escape this rock Earth that will otherwise ultimately be our tombstone has been sacrificed to the gods of progressivism.
Because the First World is no longer interested in science, or the survival of the survival of its long-distant progeny....
Friday, January 29, 2016
Do 'experts' believe their own predictions?
...So to probe the seriousness of these economic experts' stated beliefs about the impending consequences of climate change, it's fair to ask if they personally put their own money where their mouths are. How many of these economists are, for example:
• Buying land in the upper Midwest and inland Canada (the price of which will rise significantly if global temperatures make much of the South, as well as coastal areas, quite unpleasant places to live)?
• Investing in pharmaceutical companies that own patents that extend beyond 2025 on medicines to treat illnesses that are especially prevalent in the tropics and subtropics?
• Shorting shares of companies that specialize in attracting tourists to subtropical and tropical destinations, especially those on or near seacoasts?...
If ocean’s rising, why is Al Gore in Montecito?
...If the ocean’s rising, why is Al Gore in Montecito?
In response to the recent fanatical post by a global warming drone who fears that the rising tides will drown mankind, let him take solace in the fact that his climate guru, Al Gore, recently bought a $9 million beach front home in Montecito. Guess Al is not really afraid of sinking into the sea....
2006: Al Gore Does Sundance, January 26, 2006
...And politicians and corporations have been ignoring the issue for decades, to the point that unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return, Gore said....
Fraud Detected In Science Research That Suggested GMO Crops Were Harmful
...Three science papers that had suggested that genetically modified crops were harmful to animals and have been used by activist groups to argue for their ban have been found to contain manipulated and possibly falsified data. Nature reports: "Papers that describe harmful effects to animals fed genetically modified (GM) crops are under scrutiny for alleged data manipulation. The leaked findings of an ongoing investigation at the University of Naples in Italy suggest that images in the papers may have been intentionally altered. The leader of the lab that carried out the work there says that there is no substance to this claim. The papers' findings run counter to those of numerous safety tests carried out by food and drug agencies around the world, which indicate that there are no dangers associated with eating GM food. But the work has been widely cited on anti-GM websites — and results of the experiments that the papers describe were referenced in an Italian Senate hearing last July on whether the country should allow cultivation of safety-approved GM crops. 'The case is very important also because these papers have been used politically in the debate on GM crops,' says Italian senator Elena Cattaneo, a neuroscientist at the University of Milan whose concerns about the work triggered the investigation....
Stunning Rejection of Scientific Values of Transparency and Skepticism at New England Journal of Medicine
The headline is taken from a dismayed tweet from prominent open science advocate Brian Nosek. University of Virginia psychologist Nosek is the co-founder of the Center for Open Science. He was also the team leader for the massive project that sought to replicate 100 psychological studies taken from leading journals. The researchers reported in Science that only about one-third of the results from the selected studies could be reproduced....
...Evidently, Drazen hasn't changed his mind even as evidence has continued to pile up over the past 10 years that researchers are massively producing and publishing false positives.
If NEJM's editors are afraid that other researchers won't understand the choices, procedures, and parameters made by the original researchers, Nosek's Center for Open Science has a solution—use its Open Science Framework.
The Open Science Framework is organized around a free, open-source Web platform that supports research project management, collaboration, and the permanent archiving of scientific workflow and output. The OSF makes it easier to replicate studies because outside researchers can see and retrace the steps taken by the original scientific team.
It should go without saying that "research parasitism" is wrong. Researchers who use the results produced by other investigators should fully acknowledge that fact and give them credit when they publish their additional findings. But the lack of replication and the proliferation of false results in the scientific literature is a far bigger problem than "research parasitism."...
Are the Global Warmistas Simply Juicing Up the Latest Years' Temperatures With "Adjustments" While Reducing the Temperatures of Previous Years, To Always Make the Current Year "The Hottest"?
...But now they may have gone too far -- in order to declare 2015 the "hottest on record," they apparently had to revise and "adjust" the previously declared all-time "hottest on record," 1997.
Because 1997 was more than three and half degrees warmer than 2015 -- going by NOAA's published data.
If they've now adjusted 1997's temperature down by three and a half degrees or more -- thus making the former All Time Hottest Year On Record not particularly hot -- this should be the lead, no?...
Feds Give Billions To Research Based On ‘Falsified Or Fabricated Data’
National Science Foundation officials award $7 billion in grants annually based on funding proposals the agency’s watchdog estimates have hundreds of examples of plagiarism and “falsified or fabricated data.”
The federal science research agency awards 11,000 grants to 2,000 research institutions annually, but Allison Lerner, the agency’s inspector general, only oversees about 1 percent of those recipients.
Researcher misconduct has drastically increased over the past decade, meaning millions of tax dollars go to fraudsters, according to Lerner.
The watchdog estimated that around 1,200 proposals for funding could contain plagiarism and another 800 proposals or results include “falsified or fabricated data,” according the IG’s semiannual report....
...So to probe the seriousness of these economic experts' stated beliefs about the impending consequences of climate change, it's fair to ask if they personally put their own money where their mouths are. How many of these economists are, for example:
• Buying land in the upper Midwest and inland Canada (the price of which will rise significantly if global temperatures make much of the South, as well as coastal areas, quite unpleasant places to live)?
• Investing in pharmaceutical companies that own patents that extend beyond 2025 on medicines to treat illnesses that are especially prevalent in the tropics and subtropics?
• Shorting shares of companies that specialize in attracting tourists to subtropical and tropical destinations, especially those on or near seacoasts?...
If ocean’s rising, why is Al Gore in Montecito?
...If the ocean’s rising, why is Al Gore in Montecito?
In response to the recent fanatical post by a global warming drone who fears that the rising tides will drown mankind, let him take solace in the fact that his climate guru, Al Gore, recently bought a $9 million beach front home in Montecito. Guess Al is not really afraid of sinking into the sea....
2006: Al Gore Does Sundance, January 26, 2006
...And politicians and corporations have been ignoring the issue for decades, to the point that unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return, Gore said....
Fraud Detected In Science Research That Suggested GMO Crops Were Harmful
...Three science papers that had suggested that genetically modified crops were harmful to animals and have been used by activist groups to argue for their ban have been found to contain manipulated and possibly falsified data. Nature reports: "Papers that describe harmful effects to animals fed genetically modified (GM) crops are under scrutiny for alleged data manipulation. The leaked findings of an ongoing investigation at the University of Naples in Italy suggest that images in the papers may have been intentionally altered. The leader of the lab that carried out the work there says that there is no substance to this claim. The papers' findings run counter to those of numerous safety tests carried out by food and drug agencies around the world, which indicate that there are no dangers associated with eating GM food. But the work has been widely cited on anti-GM websites — and results of the experiments that the papers describe were referenced in an Italian Senate hearing last July on whether the country should allow cultivation of safety-approved GM crops. 'The case is very important also because these papers have been used politically in the debate on GM crops,' says Italian senator Elena Cattaneo, a neuroscientist at the University of Milan whose concerns about the work triggered the investigation....
Stunning Rejection of Scientific Values of Transparency and Skepticism at New England Journal of Medicine
The headline is taken from a dismayed tweet from prominent open science advocate Brian Nosek. University of Virginia psychologist Nosek is the co-founder of the Center for Open Science. He was also the team leader for the massive project that sought to replicate 100 psychological studies taken from leading journals. The researchers reported in Science that only about one-third of the results from the selected studies could be reproduced....
...Evidently, Drazen hasn't changed his mind even as evidence has continued to pile up over the past 10 years that researchers are massively producing and publishing false positives.
If NEJM's editors are afraid that other researchers won't understand the choices, procedures, and parameters made by the original researchers, Nosek's Center for Open Science has a solution—use its Open Science Framework.
The Open Science Framework is organized around a free, open-source Web platform that supports research project management, collaboration, and the permanent archiving of scientific workflow and output. The OSF makes it easier to replicate studies because outside researchers can see and retrace the steps taken by the original scientific team.
It should go without saying that "research parasitism" is wrong. Researchers who use the results produced by other investigators should fully acknowledge that fact and give them credit when they publish their additional findings. But the lack of replication and the proliferation of false results in the scientific literature is a far bigger problem than "research parasitism."...
Are the Global Warmistas Simply Juicing Up the Latest Years' Temperatures With "Adjustments" While Reducing the Temperatures of Previous Years, To Always Make the Current Year "The Hottest"?
...But now they may have gone too far -- in order to declare 2015 the "hottest on record," they apparently had to revise and "adjust" the previously declared all-time "hottest on record," 1997.
Because 1997 was more than three and half degrees warmer than 2015 -- going by NOAA's published data.
If they've now adjusted 1997's temperature down by three and a half degrees or more -- thus making the former All Time Hottest Year On Record not particularly hot -- this should be the lead, no?...
Feds Give Billions To Research Based On ‘Falsified Or Fabricated Data’
National Science Foundation officials award $7 billion in grants annually based on funding proposals the agency’s watchdog estimates have hundreds of examples of plagiarism and “falsified or fabricated data.”
The federal science research agency awards 11,000 grants to 2,000 research institutions annually, but Allison Lerner, the agency’s inspector general, only oversees about 1 percent of those recipients.
Researcher misconduct has drastically increased over the past decade, meaning millions of tax dollars go to fraudsters, according to Lerner.
The watchdog estimated that around 1,200 proposals for funding could contain plagiarism and another 800 proposals or results include “falsified or fabricated data,” according the IG’s semiannual report....
Sunday, December 27, 2015
NOAA Fiddles With Climate Data To Erase The 15-Year Global Warming ‘Hiatus’
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists have found a solution to the 15-year “pause” in global warming: They “adjusted” the hiatus in warming out of the temperature record.
New climate data by NOAA scientists doubles the warming trend since the late 1990s by adjusting pre-hiatus temperatures downward and inflating temperatures in more recent years.
“Newly corrected and updated global surface temperature data from NOAA’s [National Centers for Environmental Information] do not support the notion of a global warming ‘hiatus,'” wrote NOAA scientists in their study presenting newly adjusted climate data....
...To increase the rate in warming, NOAA scientists put more weight on certain ocean buoy arrays, adjusted ship-based temperature readings upward, and slightly raised land-based temperatures as well....
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists have found a solution to the 15-year “pause” in global warming: They “adjusted” the hiatus in warming out of the temperature record.
New climate data by NOAA scientists doubles the warming trend since the late 1990s by adjusting pre-hiatus temperatures downward and inflating temperatures in more recent years.
“Newly corrected and updated global surface temperature data from NOAA’s [National Centers for Environmental Information] do not support the notion of a global warming ‘hiatus,'” wrote NOAA scientists in their study presenting newly adjusted climate data....
...To increase the rate in warming, NOAA scientists put more weight on certain ocean buoy arrays, adjusted ship-based temperature readings upward, and slightly raised land-based temperatures as well....
Sunday, December 13, 2015
The Certainty of Uncertainty
"A Disgrace to the Profession": The World's Scientists on Michael E Mann, his Hockey Stick and their Damage to Science
Nine years ago self-proclaimed "climate hawk" David Roberts was contemplating Nuremberg trials for deniers:
When we've finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we're in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards — some sort of climate Nuremberg.
But in his latest piece, at Vox.com, he's singing a rather different tune:
Basically, it's difficult to predict anything, especially regarding sprawling systems like the global economy and atmosphere, because everything depends on everything else. There's no fixed point of reference....
"A Disgrace to the Profession": The World's Scientists on Michael E Mann, his Hockey Stick and their Damage to Science
Nine years ago self-proclaimed "climate hawk" David Roberts was contemplating Nuremberg trials for deniers:
When we've finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we're in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards — some sort of climate Nuremberg.
But in his latest piece, at Vox.com, he's singing a rather different tune:
Basically, it's difficult to predict anything, especially regarding sprawling systems like the global economy and atmosphere, because everything depends on everything else. There's no fixed point of reference....
Scientists cheering for NOAA chief to not be “bullied” into showing their work on climate data
...But on a far more basic level, we’re talking about the scientific process here. Since when is the process for critically examining data and arriving at substantive conclusions some sort of clandestine, secret process? We’re not talking about an agency that’s guarding sensitive national security secrets. This is allegedly science. The entire concept of solid research involves extensive peer reviews where other experts can put your theories and conclusions to the test and see if they can either replicate or repudiate your results. What do these scientists have to hide from the public even if they weren’t being funded on the taxpayer’s dime?...
...But on a far more basic level, we’re talking about the scientific process here. Since when is the process for critically examining data and arriving at substantive conclusions some sort of clandestine, secret process? We’re not talking about an agency that’s guarding sensitive national security secrets. This is allegedly science. The entire concept of solid research involves extensive peer reviews where other experts can put your theories and conclusions to the test and see if they can either replicate or repudiate your results. What do these scientists have to hide from the public even if they weren’t being funded on the taxpayer’s dime?...
Sunday, November 08, 2015
NOAA withholds climate documents from Congress
...“Because the confidentiality of these communications among scientists is essential to frank discourse among scientists, those documents were not provided to the Committee,” the agency told Nature. “It is a long-standing practice in the scientific community to protect the confidentiality of deliberative scientific discussions.”...
Global Warming Activists Don’t Like When Someone Follows The Money
...In the case of Al Gore, prominently featured in the video, the former vice president has levied his global warming activism from a net worth of $700,000 in 2000 into an estimated net worth of $172.5 million by 2015. He’s not alone in his financial endeavor....
...Studies that receive financial support from the public sector don’t have to disclose it as a conflict of interest, even when that support is in the millions of dollars. Recent studies that the Environmental Protection Agency is using to support the scientific case for its Clean Power Plan saw the EPA itself give $31.2 million, $9.5 million, and $3.65 million in public funds to lead authors according to EPA public disclosures.
The author who received $3.65 million, Charles Driscoll, even admitted to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that the result of his study was predetermined, saying “in doing this study we wanted to bring attention to the additional benefits from carbon controls.”
Universities typically received about 50 percent of the money that their researchers get in public funds if their research finds positive results, making them deeply dependent upon federal funding and likely to encourage studies which will come to conclusions that the government wants.
Even counting only private money, environmental groups massively outspend their opposition. Opposition to global warming activism only raises $46 million annually across 91 conservative think tanks according to analysis by Forbes. That’s almost 6 times less than Greenpeace’s 2011 budget of $260 million, and Greenpeace is only one of many environmental groups. The undeniable truth is that global warming activists raise and spend far more money than their opponents....
...“Because the confidentiality of these communications among scientists is essential to frank discourse among scientists, those documents were not provided to the Committee,” the agency told Nature. “It is a long-standing practice in the scientific community to protect the confidentiality of deliberative scientific discussions.”...
Global Warming Activists Don’t Like When Someone Follows The Money
...In the case of Al Gore, prominently featured in the video, the former vice president has levied his global warming activism from a net worth of $700,000 in 2000 into an estimated net worth of $172.5 million by 2015. He’s not alone in his financial endeavor....
...Studies that receive financial support from the public sector don’t have to disclose it as a conflict of interest, even when that support is in the millions of dollars. Recent studies that the Environmental Protection Agency is using to support the scientific case for its Clean Power Plan saw the EPA itself give $31.2 million, $9.5 million, and $3.65 million in public funds to lead authors according to EPA public disclosures.
The author who received $3.65 million, Charles Driscoll, even admitted to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that the result of his study was predetermined, saying “in doing this study we wanted to bring attention to the additional benefits from carbon controls.”
Universities typically received about 50 percent of the money that their researchers get in public funds if their research finds positive results, making them deeply dependent upon federal funding and likely to encourage studies which will come to conclusions that the government wants.
Even counting only private money, environmental groups massively outspend their opposition. Opposition to global warming activism only raises $46 million annually across 91 conservative think tanks according to analysis by Forbes. That’s almost 6 times less than Greenpeace’s 2011 budget of $260 million, and Greenpeace is only one of many environmental groups. The undeniable truth is that global warming activists raise and spend far more money than their opponents....
Sunday, October 18, 2015
Meanwhile in the Future: To Stop Climate Change, We Must Genetically Engineer Humans
...Another modification that Liao proposed was an induced allergy to meat, to help people reduce their consumption of animals. ...
Scientists Ask Obama To Prosecute Global Warming Skeptics
The science on global warming is settled, so settled that 20 climate scientists are asking President Barack Obama to prosecute people who disagree with them on the science behind man-made global warming.
Scientists from several universities and research centers even asked Obama to use the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) to prosecute groups that “have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change, as a means to forestall America’s response to climate change.”
RICO was a law designed to take down organized crime syndicates, but scientists now want it to be used against scientists, activists and organizations that voice their disagreement with the so-called “consensus” on global warming. The scientists repeated claims made by environmentalists that groups, especially those with ties to fossil fuels, have engaged in a misinformation campaign to confuse the public on global warming.
“The actions of these organizations have been extensively documented in peer-reviewed academic research and in recent books,” the scientists wrote.
But these riled up academics aren’t the first to suggest using RICO to go after global warming skeptics. The idea was first put forward by Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, who argued using RICO was effective at taking down the tobacco industry....
This is why media coverage of climate debate has been corrupted
...News journalists are being bribed by the United Nations and the Oxfam charity to write scare stories about climate change ahead of the global climate treaty negotiations in Paris later this year.
Details of the bribes – which take the form of ego-boosting “awards”, global travel in CO2 generating airliners and financial payments – are contained in a news release just published by the UNDP today, an organisation headed by former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark.
Journalists’ codes of ethics prohibit being induced to give favourable coverage, but those rules have increasingly been ignored in recent years by the use of backdoor mechanisms like funding journalism “awards” as a means of generating content and rewarding propaganda-writers.
New Zealand’s major media, like the TV3 network, have frequently covered climate stories in the Pacific with the financial “assistance” of lobby groups like Oxfam and Greenpeace....
Report: Climate scientist who wants to bring skeptics up on RICO charges makes $750K/yr thanks to taxpayers
...Another modification that Liao proposed was an induced allergy to meat, to help people reduce their consumption of animals. ...
Scientists Ask Obama To Prosecute Global Warming Skeptics
The science on global warming is settled, so settled that 20 climate scientists are asking President Barack Obama to prosecute people who disagree with them on the science behind man-made global warming.
Scientists from several universities and research centers even asked Obama to use the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) to prosecute groups that “have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change, as a means to forestall America’s response to climate change.”
RICO was a law designed to take down organized crime syndicates, but scientists now want it to be used against scientists, activists and organizations that voice their disagreement with the so-called “consensus” on global warming. The scientists repeated claims made by environmentalists that groups, especially those with ties to fossil fuels, have engaged in a misinformation campaign to confuse the public on global warming.
“The actions of these organizations have been extensively documented in peer-reviewed academic research and in recent books,” the scientists wrote.
But these riled up academics aren’t the first to suggest using RICO to go after global warming skeptics. The idea was first put forward by Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, who argued using RICO was effective at taking down the tobacco industry....
This is why media coverage of climate debate has been corrupted
...News journalists are being bribed by the United Nations and the Oxfam charity to write scare stories about climate change ahead of the global climate treaty negotiations in Paris later this year.
Details of the bribes – which take the form of ego-boosting “awards”, global travel in CO2 generating airliners and financial payments – are contained in a news release just published by the UNDP today, an organisation headed by former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark.
Journalists’ codes of ethics prohibit being induced to give favourable coverage, but those rules have increasingly been ignored in recent years by the use of backdoor mechanisms like funding journalism “awards” as a means of generating content and rewarding propaganda-writers.
New Zealand’s major media, like the TV3 network, have frequently covered climate stories in the Pacific with the financial “assistance” of lobby groups like Oxfam and Greenpeace....
Report: Climate scientist who wants to bring skeptics up on RICO charges makes $750K/yr thanks to taxpayers
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