You can’t make this stuff up. It’s worse than we thought. Related: Why the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets are Not Collapsing
Climate change: melting ice will trigger wave of natural disasters
Scientists at a London conference next week will warn of earthquakes, avalanches and volcanic eruptions as the atmosphere heats up and geology is altered. Even Britain could face being struck by tsunamis
Robin McKie The Observer, Sunday 6 September 2009
Scientists are to outline dramatic evidence that global warming threatens the planet in a new and unexpected way – by triggering earthquakes, tsunamis, avalanches and volcanic eruptions.
Reports by international groups of researchers – to be presented at a London conference next week – will show that climate change, caused by rising outputs of carbon dioxide from vehicles, factories and power stations, will not only affect the atmosphere and the sea but will alter the geology of the Earth.
Melting glaciers will set off avalanches, floods and mud flows in the Alps and other mountain ranges; torrential rainfall in the UK is likely to cause widespread erosion; while disappearing Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets threaten to let loose underwater landslides, triggering tsunamis that could even strike the seas around Britain.
At the same time the disappearance of ice caps will change the pressures acting on the Earth’s crust and set off volcanic eruptions across the globe. Life on Earth faces a warm future – and a fiery one.
“Not only are the oceans and atmosphere conspiring against us, bringing baking temperatures, more powerful storms and floods, but the crust beneath our feet seems likely to join in too,” said Professor Bill McGuire, director of the Benfield Hazard Research Centre, at University College London (UCL).
“Maybe the Earth is trying to tell us something,” added McGuire, who is one of the organisers of UCL’s Climate Forcing of Geological Hazards conference, which will open on 15 September. Some of the key evidence to be presented at the conference will come from studies of past volcanic activity. These indicate that when ice sheets disappear the number of eruptions increases, said Professor David Pyle, of Oxford University’s earth sciences department.
“The last ice age came to an end between 12,000 to 15,000 years ago and the ice sheets that once covered central Europe shrank dramatically,” added Pyle. “The impact on the continent’s geology can by measured by the jump in volcanic activity that occurred at this time.”
Read the rest here at the Guardian
Armageddon is near! The day of judgement is coming!
The only way to escape this is to regret your sins and to give all your money to us!
These knuckleheaded climate scientists are really desperate.
lol, just lol
Wow, from the ill-understood climatology to the even lesser-understood seismology. Surely they know it all don’t they. It is so easy to be a scientist these days; just throw out the most catastrophic prediction for 2100 and you’ll be famous and keep the funding rolling. No one will likely live long enough to see the validity of the claims anyways. Which Dr. Peikle Sr. just wrote an excellent discussion about this corruption of the scientific process.
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2009/09/07/another-paper-that-short-curcuits-the-scientific-method-gangulya-et-al-2009-in-the-proceedings-of-the-national-academy-of-sciences/
Is there nothing that they cant blame on global warming? Oh the humanity!!
Not long ago, scientists were cautious, modest and aware of how much they did not know.
Nowadays they run about screaming about speculative doom laden events based on half baked imagined scenarios.
When did they all turn into 5 year old schoolchildren ?
Should anyone keep listening to them ?
Should we vote for any politician who relies on their judgements ?
Come to that, where are the intelligent politicians ?
It seems that over 60 years of relative stability and prosperity in the world has led to universal brain rot in our ruling establishments.
Majority of the Ice at the Arctic is floating, so this will do what now to the earths crust if it melts? Did these “Scientists” purchase their degrees online for 12.99 plus 12 tokens from Kelloggs Corn Flakes?
Copenhagen here we come!
You could try commenting on this on the Guardian website, however if you don’t agree with the party line you will be out of luck.
How long before raised CO2 levels have an effect on the Earth’s orbit around the sun, or on the sun itself?
Meanwhile in the real world, expect total sea ice (NH and SH) to reach a record high (in satellite era) in late October. Annoying for the warmists, the ice doesn’t listen to propoganda.
Must become a Hollywood Film Script or was that what it was anyway?
“while disappearing Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets ”
Can someone who uses the words ‘disapperaring’ and ‘Antarctic ice sheet’ really call themselves a scientist?
Does evidence even matter any more?
Just thinking, all of the aerosols that the volcanoes produce when they go off should cool the planet again. Maybe this is the way forward after all!
I’m not sure that these pose problems as we will be well and truely fried by then if the UK Climate Projections published last month are true.
These are reported to “show that if we don’t take action by 2080 the temperature for the hottest day of the year in the West Midlands could increase by a scorching 100 C by 2080 … ”
http://nds.coi.gov.uk/clientmicrosite/Content/Detail.aspx?ClientId=416&NewsAreaId=2&ReleaseID=404755&SubjectId=36
I think that there should be a competition to see who can come up with the most looney and desperate alarmist ‘suggestion’ of what Climate Change will/or may (two categories) bring. Each of the suggestions entered in this competition should be published in a science paper or journal which is peer reviewed. Authors and reveiwers should be clearly named. Perhaps a week holiday at any tropical beach resort at the south pole could be offered as a prize.
This is possibly good news. Remember when the alarmists started claiming that global warming causes bigger hurricanes in 2005? We suddenly started seeing less and smaller hurricanes. Maybe this announcement will make us see less earthquakes and tsunamis!
Oh good God, we really have entered the age of stupid alright!
I’ve hardly ever read such complete and utter nonsense. As a geologist this garbage angers me. I don’t know where these guys learnt their geology but it wasn’t from the same rocks as the ones that I’ve studied over the years.
“You can’t make this stuff up. ”
Well, somebody did.
I can absolutely not believe the level of idiocy these days in the journalism profession. Have they not noticed that this year’s Arctic ice is greater than last year’s; or that last year’s is greater than the year before?
What total tools. I will tell you how this stuff gets reported like this. I will share a secret. I was married to a journalist for 10 years. What happens is that the reporter receives a “press package” with the story already written for them. It is done by a professional PR agency, often an agency that specializes on “progressive” causes like Fenton Communications in the US.
They might be given a list of individuals who would be available for interview or if there is an event or “protest”, they are given a press liaison contact. If they attend the event and make contact with the liaison, they will be given a “press packet” there that gives the “correct” background information. They will be briefed and explained to them what the importance of various things are and guided to the best locations for photographs and possibly be directed to key individuals for comments.
It is the difference between a photograph and a painting. Journalist means you write things down. It is different than being a reporter and digging for facts. The truth is many “journalists” are lazy and more interested in hanging out with the “cool people” so they can count themselves among them.
In laying out what “scientists will warn of” next week, he had to have been given access to the press packet. He is likely re-stating what was dropped on his desk.
“Maybe the Earth is trying to tell us something,”
A fine piece of “emotionalizing” there. Earth is a rock. A really big rock. If rocks are taking to you, maybe you need to up your dosage.
I am sick of this nonsense.
Thanks. This is one for the bookmarks. A talking point and citation high up on my list.
Meanwhile:
“…add this gem from New Zealand: According to a parliamentary committee, Kiwis should accept lower standards of living to protect the national image abroad.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB30001424052970203440104574397112556058826.html
Like Anthony said, you can’t make this stuff up!
It’s not April 1st is it?
“If rocks are taking to you”
Meant “if rocks are talking to you” … or maybe your dosage is too high already. Might want to get some professional help in either case. Earth doesn’t “talk” to anyone.
I am losing hope for western european society.
This will be taken seriousley.
When it gets cooler, or stays the same, it will be blamed on global warming “in the pipeline”.
This is not the only sign of a civilization in suicidal self decline.
I am lucky, I have family and property in Asia where they get on with life.
In the west, I hope America at least sees sense.
In reading the readers’ comments at the Guardian, the hysteria is worse than we thought too.
Don’t appear to be too many skeptic comments surviving the “moderator’s knife” either.
This really is desperation, isn’t it? Its like the Enron accountant, who vainly propped up his company by producing ever more fictitious profits. Like Enron, the Greens will eventually run out of scare stories that anyone believes, and their empire will crash, burn and disappear without trace.
.
Besides, the great story in the Sunday Times last week was that volcanos are exactly what we want, to reduce Global Warming.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6814912.ece
Ok, so let me get this straight. The solution to Global Warming is now the problem; so the original problem can never be solved because the solution is worse that the problem.
Is it just me??
This is why I inhabit this site, because it is an island of rationality and logic in an ever-increasing sea of hysteria and propaganda. Their shrill cries make me think the entire world has gone mad – but how have they done this? How have they bewitched an entire generation?
.
“said Professor Bill McGuire, director of the Benfield Hazard Research Centre, at University College London (UCL).”
The clue is in the name!
More warmist ridiculae from the UK:
It’s official! Warmism is now a religion recognised by British Law.
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2009/09/barking.html
Pass me a bucket someone, I need to vomit…
How can educated people be so gullible? We read “Will change…”, “Will not only affect…”, “Will show that…” These people have been looking too long and too hard at National Geographic and Discovery Channels, who have no qualms whatever about presenting a host of theories to our kids and grandchildren as established fact. These scientists are being brainwashed, exactly like the kids. We seem to be living in an age where remote theory, when the gang find it to be acceptably good-sounding, is swiftly melded into being established fact.
Geoff Alder
I dunno. That Guardian article has got me really worried. I’m at risk of laughing myself to death…
It’s hard to believe that the Dangerous man made global warming hypothesis could be extended into crustal dynamics but they have managed to do it. This really is laughable, if it wasn’t so serious.
All that with just one or two degrees of warming that will take the Arctic’s mean temperature to minus 27C and the Antarctic to minus 35C! OMG LOL
Henny Penny, the sky is falling! Run!
I don’t care to think what my geology professor would have said if I had put something like that on paper for him to read.
This conference seems like a parody of science.
*sound of me picking up my jaw from the floor*
And if it is warmer the earth will expand and make it a bigger target for asteroids. And there will be more solar flux hitting the larger earth so it will get even warmer, expand more and get even warmer……..leading to more drag from space dust which means the orbit around the sun will decay more quickly and it’ll get even warmer nay hotter and……
Some how I think there are more likely causes of earthquakes then AGW. The most interesting is from an Andies indian observation that quakes and eruptions followed solar eclips.
“This new learning amazes me! Explain again how sheep’s bladders may be employed to prevent earthquakes.” ~Monty Python and the Holg Grail.
None of this would have happened if we’d kept the earth flat and at the centre of the universe. I blame science and technology for all this… ahhh ignorance is such bliss.
Thermageddon and the Ecopolypse will cause earthquakes, tsunamis, and then the seas will boil!!! The very crust beneath our feet will crack and swallow us up!!! Scientists are all in consensus on that!!! Why won’t you listen, you deniers, you heretics and apostates???? Doom, I tells ya, doom is fast approaching!!!!
Oh the weeping and gnashing of teeth!!! You stupid greedy SUV drivers and energy hogs!!! You have condemned us all and Life Itself to the fiery pits!!!!
Two questions: what’s for lunch at the conference, and will there be a no-host bar?
I’m beginning to wonder why I keep subjecting myself to reading these sorts of stories. All they do is aggravate me and yet I keep going back for more, hoping that at some point they go over the deep end and people finally start looking at the numbers themselves.
Concerning the content of the article, I can’t help but wonder how Earth has even survived this long. They certainly seem to pile on the doomsday possibilities, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis oh my! Are they just hoping that if they propose enough disaster scenarios that if one were to happen they can instantly point to it and say look we told you so? If the methane hydrate deposits are so sensitive to sea surface temperatures isn’t it a good thing that they have been dropping since 2004? If less ice at the caps reduces the pressure on the Earth’s crust wouldn’t that reduce the likelihood of eruptions? Is it possible that correlation is not causation and that the volcanic activity at the end of the last ice age might be attributable to the milankovitch cycle, or another gravitational mechanism and have absolutely nothing to do with warming temperatures or retreating glaciers? Even if you assume they are right wouldn’t the increased volcanic activity lead to dimming? Pinatubo and El Chichon show up immediately in the temperature data and overwhelm many warming effects.
I think I have an idea for how we can accelerate the awakening to the realization the emperor has no clothes. We found the Watt’s Institute for Climatalogical Armageddon Nexus or WICAN. We then put out daily press releases showing that the increase in temperatures have led to increases across the globe in the number of cases of swine flu, aids, automotive accidents, pirates, terrorists, etc… We can scientifically show that all of those things have increased as a result of higher temperatures. “These are key issues that we will have to investigate over the next few years” All we need is the funding to do so.
It wouldn’t take long for the average joe who doesn’t pay very close attention to the drivel from the Hazard Research Centre to suddenly realize that the alarmist hand wringing du jour is just that.
JM
Maybe volcanoes offer an escape from ice ages through deposition of molecules on ice affecting the planet’s albedo.
The correlation could be backwards. Wouldn’t surprise me they try to find the most alarmist assessment possible though – it is the Guardian.
This is just the beginning.
Wait until they start getting creative.
The media will love them.
Fiction sells better than truth.
“Even Britain could face being struck by tsunamis…
The cynical selection of panic lines displayed by the quote above from this story is highlighted by reference to the following from a 2007 article. Like… why mention it has happened before a few hundred years back? That would only blunt the panic… and the guilt so necessary to keep this baby movin’.
I lost my keys this morning. Isn’t climate change insidious?
I´m sceptic of manmade climate change, but actually when ice sheets disappear, scientists in Iceland have said for years that less pressure on earth´s crust do trigger volcanic activity under the glaciers.
Greetings from Icelands 🙂
I bet they can’t proofe this. Al the snow and ice in the alps melt every summer and snow’s back every winter. I bet they didn’t measured the volume of the glaciers or any thing else. This is worse than the pope is saying that aids is caused by condoms.
and next time, the guardian’s science team will reveal the biggest threat to mankind
http://bioresonant.com/news.htm
Reply: I wear extra large, please ship to Anthony. http://bioresonant.com/dress.html ~ charles the moderator
After twenty plus years of this nonsense we are into a new generation of scientists who are qualified not in Climate science, or meteorology and the like. They are qualified and have PhD’s in Global Warming and Mitigation Strategies, Climate impacts on indigenous peoples, socio-economic impacts etc etc, having been taught and supervised by the initiators of the whole scam in the first place and fostered by the Behemoth that is the UN.
Makes you wonder how they will handle it when another c. 535 volcanic eruption occurs what wipes out the US and Canadian grain crops. Last time it happened we lost 1/2 of the world’s population. We would probably loose a greater portion if that happened today. And it WILL happen again.
XBox-360 – “Anything is possible”
(I should have gone into advertising)
So AGW leads to ACD (Anthropogenic Continental Drift). Looks like the climatologists are finally catching up to the Peoples Cube.
http://thepeoplescube.com/red/viewtopic.php?t=1668
Bill McGuire : rent-a-disaster expert.
Put him in a plane, send him to a disaster destination, get some footage of him walking around the area with his little travel bag, cue audio.
I recall a nutty PhD in Australia who mooted this a few years ago. It was howled down by both AGW proponents and sceptics alike, but obviously he must have the ear of some folk. I just cant remember his name at the present.
Reply: Dr Thomas J. Chalko MSc, PhD ~ ctm
Obviously people are not scared enough over Global Warming.
……………………but there is a day of reckoning coming for scientists who indulge in crying wolf.
Got it. Tom Chalko is the fellow, who did his fid in vibration analysis. His website;
http://sci-e-research.com/quake-energy.html
Nothing to worry!!
Professor Bill McGuire, director of the Benfield Hazard Research Centre, at University College London (UCL) only makes publicity for his activities:
Earthquakes
Floods
Landslides
Tsunami
Volcanic Activity
Windstorms
Climate Change
Disaster Studies
Geographic Interest
Publications
Alert
Issues in Risk Science
Hazard & Risk Science Review
Technical Papers
Catastrophe Reports
Working Papers in Disaster Studies & Management
(From the BHRC website)
pkatt (23:25:20) :
‘Is there nothing that they cant blame on global warming? Oh the humanity!!’
Not much! have a look at http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm.
Its also very funny.
“… NS (00:08:22) :
When it gets cooler, or stays the same, it will be blamed on global warming “in the pipeline”
…Yes, exactly. They keep referring to the “underlying warming” trend when trying to explain why the weather keeps getting colder. As the roof of Broadcasting House collapses under the unimaginable weight of an advancing glacier, they will still be insisting that this is the behavior of a climate with an underlying warming trend.
These vibrations and bioresonances (which are caused by SUVs and the unwillingness of some people to recycle and change their lightbulbs) are even now creating ripples in space/time. These ripples will undoubtedly shake loose meteoroids and rogue comets, which have heretofore remained in stable orbits.
Oh yes, brothers and sisters, make no mistake… a reckoning is coming…
J/K
Mike
These projections are approved by the IPCC…
I hear a lot of understandable exasperation here, but nobody’s commented (that I’ve seen) that it’s COOLER past climate times that have seen more seismological events – earthquakes eruptions and tsunamis.
Also there’s the insurance factor. Damages suffered (or paid out for by insurance) due to tornadoes and hurricanes have risen. But that reflects lots more building in vulnerable places, not lots more wind. Someone did a paper on how this is used to misrepresent the state of hurricanes and tornadoes – who was it?
Also, Roger Knights @ WUWT on Pielke (6 Sept, 20:09:44) : Why Smart People Fall for Fads is pertinent.
“Maybe the Earth is trying to tell us something,” – absolutely spot on except that something is being lost in the translation.
I hear it saying – please take care of me but stop all that silly nonsense about co2! I hear it saying LOOK at the ice, look at the patterns of negative feedback, look at the patterns that have always been there.
I hear it saying – aren’t you listening you silly silly people?
Clearly by babel fish is not a climatescientist approved version.
So that’s fire and brimstone then.
Bring on the Weathermen of the Apocalypse !
Right, but the thing here is that they are making predictions based on unrealistic predictions. Where is the empirical data that should be the foundation of science if both your input and your output data are computer generated instead of observed data?.
Al Gore (internet tubes inventor) said in 2007 that the Arctic could (or will, i am not sure) be ice-free in 2013. By looking at this year’s ice extent that doesn’t seem possible, so UN secretary Ban Ki-Moon postponed the melted north pole disaster to 2030. It is the disappearing south pole and Greenland ice sheets by 2080 prediction what seems unlikely. More so when all the research groups failed in predicting this year’s Arctic ice melting. (see previous blog entry)
So, if they weren’t able to predict this year’s ice melt, don’t expect me to believe they can predict 2080 ice melt.
Poor Professor McGuire must have felt left out in the cold (so to speak) with all the attention being lavished on the Drought guys and the Flood guys and the Firestorm guys and the Hurricane guys and the Polar bear guys. It must be difficult being a poor relation, a mere irrelevant (to AGW) Tsunami guy.
He’s got HIS rice bowel to protect after all, just like his more important colleagues.
The Guardian is England’s version of the National Enquirer? Reading some of the comments from that link are…disturbing. I thought Europeans were better educated.
Let’s see, how many tsunamis have we had this year?
When was the last time we had a tsunami?
When did science start manufacturing high-tech crystal balls?
I missed that technological breatkthru.
For many decades, geologists have searched in vain for clues to predict Earthquakes.
And now, through the magic of Global Climate Models, we can now tell Los Angeles and San Fransico when the Big One wil hit. We can tell when the next Volcano will pop long before the harmonic tremors hit.
There are plenty of countries willing to pay a handsome sum for the next mudslide, avalanche, tsunami, hurricane, killer drought, flood, earthquake etc advance warning.
Just tell us where & when the next event your GCM predicts is , and let the good times roll.
But, this is like a bag of Lay’s Potoato chips, isn’t it? Betcha can’t nail just one.
No, you can’t do that.
That’s too bad, really. The world surely needs something like that.
. If it sound too good to be true….
Gunnar,
“I´m sceptic of manmade climate change, but actually when ice sheets disappear, scientists in Iceland have said for years that less pressure on earth´s crust do trigger volcanic activity under the glaciers.
Greetings from Icelands”
Don’t you mean IF the ice sheets disappear.
IF the earth is struck by a comet, it will trigger volcanic activity.
IF the earth is approached by a black hole, it will trigger volcanic activity.
Etcetera, etcetera.
Yes, all this takes place if we continue to have above 350 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere. Then coral reef will die, and also almost half of the species until year 2050. Of course wildfires which destroys every forest and tree, large parts of the world will be flooded — except where forest burns the eternal fire — and so also tsunamis will attack us and the sky will virtually fall down on us. (Otherwise not 10 millions a year will die from AGW, which may be the number of people dying from starvation.) AGW will also makes us poor and have lack of energy I predict.
So now let us let politicians take control with carbon credits and without the inefficient democracy and free market model we have that our predictions show us has failed. Otherwise we will not get below magically dangerous 350 ppm.
So with abolition of cheap fossil energy and plan economy we will of course avoid a downturn in economy as well as the energy crisis. Believe me!
Al Gore agrees.
http://i666.photobucket.com/albums/vv22/David-C-King/al-gore-prophet-of-doom.jpg
That is supposed to be The Sun, not The Guardian.
Ever notice how when one of these really insane AGW stories comes up, the warmists seem slow to defend their own? (I guess I mean more insane than usual.) Where’s Flanagan?
REPLY: In Brussels, he’s sprouting alarmism there. 😉
From the article:
“Melting glaciers will set off avalanches, floods and mud flows in the Alps and other mountain ranges; torrential rainfall in the UK is likely to cause widespread erosion; while disappearing Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets threaten to let loose underwater landslides, triggering tsunamis that could even strike the seas around Britain.”
All very true. I’ll have to remember to set my alarm clock for 11,000 years after the melting starts so I can set my shoes up off the floor, secure the teacups in the cupboard, and put the cat outside.
IIRC, that’s approximately how long it will take for the Greenland ice sheet to melt according to the experts.
(Help me out here. Should I set the alarm for 11,000 years a.m. or 11,000 years p.m.? And do you think that in 11,000 years they can finally get the clock to stop blinking 12:00 after power is restored?)
Global Warming responsible for male-pattern baldness, erectile disfunction, middle age spread, menopausal hot flashes, vericose veins, cellulite, arthritis, near-sighteness, dyslexia, ADHD, restless leg syndrom, the seven year itch and halitosis!
Come on, everyone, join in with your favorite malady caused by global warming!
Our media are full of stuff about sport, the arts, religion and politics. Rarely is there any science and if there is it’s about global warming. It’s been like that for decades and I wonder if anyone would understand if they did start reporting science.
And, what annouys me know is how foolish I was to take seriously any of what they did report. Arrrrgh!
Actually, earthquakes are caused by hyro-electric power projects.
No, wait, earthquakes are caused by underground nuclear testing.
We’re just a gang of fleas arguing about which way the dog should go.
You all know that it is nonsence, but how other could know?
I have feeling that you are playing in your own playground (with some exceptions, of course). Sometimes you try to influence other scientists, policymakers with some result (unfortunatelu not great). Have you tried to teach somebody else?
Next week I am going to local primary school to make presentation about ‘Natural disasters’. Teachers were delighted when I offered my help, but, I think, they expect something different, not what I am going to show to children.
I think working with ordinary people is very important, maybe more than trying to influence top ones.
Crosspatch
09 08 2009 0135
I agree with you. It so smells of PR you can almost feel the grease.
I have recently read “Flat Earth News” by Nick Davis. It is written from a UK perspective, but also applies to the States, I think. But be warned. If you read the book, you will never trust anything you read in newspapers again.
Gunnar Th. Gunnarsson.
I have no problem to believe you may be right. But I’m not sure, and the ice isn’t retreating more than it does within normal variations. The whole Arctic sea has before periodically been ice free. Probably even this interglacier, in the holocene optimum:
http://www.ngu.no/en-gb/Aktuelt/2008/Less-ice-in-the-Arctic-Ocean-6000-7000-years-ago
Maybe less ice also can make conditions stable? Does every scientists say what you claim, or is it a hypothesis — or simply newspaper alarm?
I would like the best referenses, because I’m skeptical towards everything. Also I remember that large volcanoes erupted in the 60s and 70s on Iceland (I was a child then), and that was in the end of a cooling period. Islands popped up from the ocean. I think you know about these events. Surtsey, Vestmannaeyjar etc; isn’t it calmer recent decades?
http://www.volcanodiscovery.com/en/iceland.html
MAgnus (Sweden)
After seeing him on quite a few documentaries I had a lot of respect for Professor Bill McGuire as he seeemed to know what he was talking about. Then I came across a youtube video in which he described sceptics as ‘climate change deniers’. It’s obviously designed to sound like ‘holocaust deniers’. As well as insulting, it’s also mindlessly stupid, as a major sceptical argument is that the climate is always changing. If there are climate change deniers then it’s the IPCC and its followers. If you think about it, the whole essence of the Hockey Stick is climate change denialism.
Now I feel nothing but contempt for the man.
Chris
NS (00:08:22) :
I am losing hope for western european society.
In the west, I hope America at least sees sense
Jim Hansen – American Resident
Al Gore – American Vice President (ex)
But anyway, it’s not a ‘nations’ thing. It’s a supranational coalition of money jugglers and their minions we are up against.
Ack (02:14:51) :
The Guardian is England’s version of the National Enquirer? Reading some of the comments from that link are…disturbing. I thought Europeans were better educated.
Don’t forget the comments you see are selected, the comments you don’t are rejected.
Don’t forget also that there are plenty of mouth frothing rants expressed by Americans on sites like Joe Romm’s.
Let’s not start slagging each other’s countries or continents down, there are ill informed people everywhere.
UK Skeptic
09 8 09 1300
Perhaps having a judicial ruling that Climate Change constitutes a religion is not such a bad thing.
Religion, by definition, is dependent on only faith and belief, not on fact. Science, on the other hand is (or should be) dependent on facts that can be demonstrated by repeatable experiments.
At least it draws a line in the sand.
It also means that the subscribers to this site can now refer to the *Religion* of Climate Change with authority, because there is an established legal precedent.
First Q – yes, if the NI was aimed at those with social science degrees.
2nd – I like to imagine that there are still little islands of sanity left. Like mould on bread. Though I can see why you might doubt us after reading that lot.
The rest of comments section will have to wait until the evening – I can only take so much in a single sitting. Alternates between disturbing and hilarious. Though I’m not sure that the hilarity isn’t simply a horror reflex as you begin to realise what kind of people AGW attracts.
A bit OT but again from The Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/sep/07/global-warming-religion
“Lord May, a former chief scientist to the government, said religious groups could use their influence to motivate believers into reducing the environmental impact of their lives.
The international reach of faith-based organisations and their authoritarian structures give religious groups an almost unrivalled ability to encourage a large proportion of the world’s population to go green, he said.”
There seems to be a movement that scientists consider themselves not merely scientists, but also moral human beings, and as such, they become more concerned with morality than with science. Funny how so often atheist scientists see religion as the opposite of science, and yet here we have a former chief scientist appealing to religious authority to help teach a new morality.
Personally I don’t have a problem with religion, and the point the chief scientist makes here is pretty valid–if you want to change the world, you’ll need the help of the world’s religions, simply because they have so much influence at present, but my problem with this person’s attitude is simply, wouldn’t he best serve the world by sticking to his speciality, namely science? Give us the scientific evidence. Let others deal with the ethical dilemmas.
There are many currents in religion that could just as easily undermine environmentalism as help it. For example, some schools of thought tend to downplay the importance of the material world (including the planet), and these are old traditions. So perhaps a naive scientists thinks he can persuade these old institutions to start teaching something different? It is a minefield, it is very complicated, and I don’t think your average scientist who has little or no experience of these issues should be implying we need religious authority to help green the world.
And yet, the green agenda keeps coming across as religious, particularly with all the doom and gloom stuff. Now tsunamis are going to get you, for your sins. Biblical floods indeed.
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm
A complete list of things caused by global warming
And yes its a long, long (as in longcat) list…
These indicate that when ice sheets disappear the number of eruptions increases, said Professor David Pyle, of Oxford University’s earth sciences department.
Note the implied causation by the use of the word ‘when’,
Disappearing icesheets -> volcanic eruptions
In fact its well established it’s the other way around. More volcanic eruptions = cooler climate and advancing ice.
‘When’ can mean both co-incident with and consequent upon or after, and this so called scientist is exploiting the ambiguity of natural language. Something real scientists strive to overcome.
Otherwise, climate change can cause tsunamis.
Bernhard Weninger et al (2008)
The catastrophic final flooding of Doggerland by the
Storegga Slide tsunami
http://sci.tech-archive.net/pdf/Archive/sci.archaeology/2009-05/msg00047.pdf
“He’s got HIS rice bowel …”
Coffee snort.
Worth it.
JimB
Oh decisions, decisions! Whether to laugh of cry I cannot say. It’s all so very embarrassing being a Brit at times, we gave so much to the world in the past, not least our sense of fair play, cricket, rugby, tennis, oh & that other rather silly game with a round ball, (what’s that all about?). Now all we export is gloom ‘n doom, based on lies & deceit, & just plane old rubbish science. I know I am no climate scientist, but I do feel rather angry that these guys talk to the general public as if everyone is stupid! Surely they must realise that we know it’s nonsense, they know we know it’s nonsense, we know they know we know it’s nonsense, they know………………..I’ll stop there I think.
Disgusting.
But I have to give The Guardian thumbs up for the title of their top news story in the Environment section (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment) today:
“In Pictures: Polar bear numbers increasing in Norway”.
OT, but still sort of “media madness”, the Isle of Man TT will hold it’s first “emissions free” race. WUWT? And here in Australia, Senator Fielding, the only senator to be bucking the political trend with regards to an ETS, apparently, suffered in his youth and still suffers “learning difficlties”!!!!!
Ack (02:14:51) :
The Guardian is England’s version of the National Enquirer? Reading some of the comments from that link are…disturbing. I thought Europeans were better educated.
Guardian Reader = One who thinks he/she is better educated than the rest
They are merely understating the effects of global warming. It will be much more catastrophic thean they say. The entire earth will implode and we’ll all be done for. The oceans will boil, the core will emit its load over us, and we’ll be thrown out of orbit. We’ll be toast.
despite there were more volcanoes in the past and that we’re in stable times, even cooling somewhat, we’re doomed as the sky rains fire, and the oceans boil us to death as we know it.
i’ll be the only survivor, as I pay my bills and taxes on time
Actually last week. A Mag 7 event off Java sent a 20 mm tsunami ashore.
“Ack (02:14:51) :
The Guardian is England’s version of the National Enquirer? Reading some of the comments from that link are…disturbing. I thought Europeans were better educated.”
Readers of the Enquirer know it is BS; readers of the Gruaniad think it is a paper for intellectuals.
PISA shows that Europeans are not better educated; maybe the above shows something about intelligence ?
Ack. here in Europe, this is and has been an entire propaganda campaign. Unfortunately, proficience in sciences doesn’t extend beyond engineering or biology, so climate centres, which should be a complex study ranging from spectroscopy (chemistry & physics) to geology and general basic physics, in fact turns out to be rather passive.
“Ram it in, ram it in!
Children’s heads are hollow
Ram it in, ram it in!
Still there’s more to follow”
Dr Whitehead (from the antediluvian past) said that if dogmas of religion are precisely like those of science, then we must believe that what is true of religious dogmas is true of scientific dogmas., and that reason, uncontrolled by observation, is no guarantee of such dogmas.
I don’t think this scientific temper exists across Europe however, as science is wielded for its use value than its veracity
With the publication of this article, the AGW crowd is arguably “jumping the shark”.
More on the Storegga Slide. Note another major landslide and tsunami can only occur after another ice age.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storegga_Slide
http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/homes/s0456225/Storegga.html
typos: *proficieny* in sciences
The best form of defence is attack and I would suggest contributors here make their comments made on the Guardian Web Site and Observer sites. But beware they have in house baiters who will insult you and then if you respond you will be moderated.
My suggestion would be to ignore the baiters, who act in concert, make the points and of course do not turn this into a left right argument.
As to earthquakes and tsunami’s I guess that if overnight the land ice melts then yes I could sea how earthquakes and tsunami’s could be generated due to the sudden release of pressure, however if (see below) hypothetically all of the land ice was to melt over a couple of hundred years then the stress would be dissipated. After all an earthquake is caused due to a sudden release of stress.
The word IF.
If my Aunty had testicles she would be my uncle 😉
@ACK
“The e Guardian is England’s version of the National Enquirer? Reading some of the comments from that link are…disturbing. I thought Europeans were better educated.”
End
Ack don’t use the ACK ACK gun when commenting also it’s either the United Kingdom or Great Britain otherwise you will upset us Barbarian celts.
Below is a link to a group of scientists? Spot one of our cousins?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solvay_conference_1927.jpg
Take care and remember where most of the alarmist papers are coming from?
I am sorry we sent Our Gav over to you but please keep him?
Can someone please stop these idiots!
God help us……
Isn’t this the same Bill McGuire that says La Palma is going to slide into the sea and wipe out the US East Coast??
Why is it that pointing out a graph showing temperatures going down slightly since 1997 will almost get one sent to the gallows but some other pro-AGW zealot could say it’ll be 100°C in summer or melting antarctic ice caps will trigger underwater landslides causing worldwide tsunamis at a breakneck pace OR, better still, the methane-belching-out-of-the-ocean-causing-a-planetary-firestorm-incinerating-everyone-and-everything thing and NOT be called out on it by the ‘scientific community’.
It seems the prerequisite for being a credible scientist now-a-days is being a ‘Prophet of Doom’. The more ridiculous the prediction the more media coverage received and the more backing of the scientific community to follow.
I can’t wait to see RealClimate’s rebuttal to this trash…
Only if the earthquakes, tsunamis, avalanches and volcanic eruptions were to be caused by ice build-up on the ice sheets would one see a rebuttal…unless, of course, if this ice build-up was from more precipitation falling as snow in the arctic regions due to global warming. Then it would be completely plausible.
I also heard that clipping a bird’s wings makes them fly better too…
No, no, no, it is going to be much worse. The melting ice caps will cause the earth to spin off its axis and send us plunging into the Sun exterminating all life for ever. This is God’s punishment for us being so wicked as to burn a lump of coal to keep us warm in winter.
Sorry, the Guardian is a joke – worse perhaps than the BBC and that is saying something.
I tried to post on the comments for their article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/06/global-warming-natural-disasters-conference?commentpage=8&commentposted=1
And they were all deleted. These were reasoned arguments, with no ranting or abuse. I was also asked by one poster for further proof, which I supplied, but they deleted both the questions and my replies.
It is obvious that the liberal/left media DO NOT WANT A DEBATE on Global Warming, because they increasingly realise that they will lose the debate. (This, despite the cries of many posters saying “why will the deniers not debate with us.”)
This is no longer science, it is pure propaganda. All you need to do now is realise the true goals of these people (One Worldism).
Tatelyle
.
Scientists at a London conference next week will demonstrate that thinking about AGW has driven them “mad as hatters”. Clothing at the affair will be optional. However, attendees are encouraged to wear their official, tin-foil caps to all scheduled sessions. No one will be admitted who has not uttered the secret conference password: “We’re all going to burn up and die!”
A question for Douglas Adams: Do purple sharks jump the googly tsunamis in Gangaftlyaglay Galactia?
======================================
Chaos and crisis is the opportunity for change.
Hope and change. One world governemnt, one world currency. One world leader, the antichrist
Look East, it’s coming before he arrives in power.
Copied from the tips & Notes discussion now that this has a home:
McGuire seems to get around!
Ric Werme (17:38:34) :
Aron (13:46:31) :
“Even Britain could face being struck by tsunamis”
LOL, created by which fault line??
I would’ve guessed a undersea landslide at the Canary Islands, those may be behind some American tsunamis. I wouldn’t have thought the Lisbon quake would affect Britain, but a quick Google yields
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/05/070507-tsunami-britain_2.html
“An active fault zone lies off the coast of Ireland, and second-hand reports mention a tremor felt on the morning of January 30, 1607,” Haslett said.
[Being the current NatGeo, it mentions the Canaries, but goes the extra step:]
“Our research has shown that the world’s biggest active landslide is occurring on the flanks of Cumbre Vieja, a volcano on the Canary Island of La Palma,” said Bill McGuire, director of the Benfield Hazard Research Centre at University College London. (See a map of the Canary Islands and Morocco.)
When this volcano erupts, McGuire and his colleagues predict, half of the island will slide into the ocean, precipitating an Atlantic Ocean tsunami.
The East Coast of the United States and large swaths of Western Europe will be swamped with wave heights of up to 33 feet (10 meters), the experts said.
“One day this eruption will occur. It is a case of when, not if,” McGuire said.
About 2 percent of tsunamis occur in the Atlantic Ocean, but this figure could become higher in the future, he added.
“If global warming causes catastrophic melting of the Greenland ice sheet, then we can expect large landslides to occur from the glacial sediment sitting offshore,” McGuire said.
http://news.scotsman.com/opinion/Could-tsunami-really-hit-Britain.4558454.jp
We already know that Britain can be affected by tsunamis: one hit our shores as recently as 1755, when a massive earthquake reduced Lisbon in Portugal to smoke and rubble. The quake sent a wave charging across the Atlantic and into the English Channel, travelling as fast as a modern aeroplane and hurling giant slabs of rock from the sea bed far up the beach at Lamorna Cove in Cornwall. But the professors say that wasn’t a unique event; in fact, they claim we have experienced an array of tsunamis, and, for the past 300 years, they have struck once every century.
However, Haslett and Bryant have three other tsunamis in their armoury: in 1580, an earthquake with a magnitude of 5.8 hit Kent. Contemporary accounts talk of ships grounding on the sea floor and widespread panic on both sides of the Channel. While most academics put this down to a normal process called “seiching”, Haslett and Bryant argue the waves and flooding were due to a tsunami, triggered by the earthquake causing an undersea landslide.
In 1884, they claim the “Great British Earthquake”, with its epicentre in Essex, triggered a giant wave that swamped Mersea Island and surrounding areas, leaving a signature layer of sand in the soil profile. Again, the sand layer dates from this time, but Professor Bill McGuire, from University College London, claims that this is far more likely to be the result of the water sloshing on shore as the Earth’s crust deformed with the shock of the quake.
In France in 1833, a Lithograph of a volcanic eruption was used to promote “FREEDOM”.
http://volcanism.wordpress.com/2009/09/05/saturday-volcano-art-auguste-desperret-troisieme-eruption-du-volcan-de-1789-1833/
Today volcanic eruptions are used to suppress freedom and promote the Global Warming myth.
During the LIA volcanic eruptions and a long SOLAR MINIMUM triggered the Maunder and Dalton Minimum.
The Midieval Warmth Period, when temperatures were much higher than today, saw a lul in tectonic activity, earthquakes and volcanic eruption.
Also our last century is regarded as a relative quiet period in regard to volcanic eruptions.
Anthony is right, you can’t make this stuff up!
This is pure alarmism based on….nothing and call it science.
I am flabbergasted about the lack of journalism that allow the publication of this kind of BS.
Come to think of it, ever since global warming really took off according to “scientists”, I have had to go to the bathroom more. You see, it is hotter outside. This causes me to drink more. Since I drink more to keep myself cooler, I have to urinate more. (Hey, I’m pining for funding! I need to use official terminology to make people think I know something they don’t.) As another side-effect, more trips to the toilet mean more flushes. Therefore, global warming will also cause a huge reduction in potable water as well.
Sarcasm aside, do you see how easy it is to tie something to global warming. Correlation does not imply causation. That is Logic 101. Furthermore, who is to say they have the order right? They say: global warming causes more volcanic eruptions. But could it be: more volcanic eruptions causes global warming. More basic logic: if A implies B, that does not mean B implies A. In their zeal to blame everything on our lifestyle, they start with the premise that we are causing global warming and then go from there. They start with what they want to be true, never considering that what they blame global warming for causing could possibly be causing global warming.
On a related note, the definition of stupidity is to do the same failed action again but expect a different result. I saw a commercial yesterday urging me to call my congressman and tell them to support cap-and-trade because it will create jobs. They used the same tactic: blame Big Oil, vilify their record profits. It gave a website, which I forgot. But if I see it again, I will send them a note and ask how they can be so stupid.
Volcanoes, cap-and-trade, earthquakes … we will look back and go “these people truly were stupid.”
“… Ack (02:14:51) :
The Guardian is England’s version of the National Enquirer? Reading some of the comments from that link are…disturbing. I thought Europeans were better educated.”
…The Guardian is more Britain’s version of The New York Post, which was once a great newspaper that used to be taken seriously, but is now the home of daily hysterical ravings and fantasy.
Re Stephen Wilde: “where are the intelligent politicians ?”
Thanks for the chuckle over my morning cereal. My nominee for oxymoron of the week.
So apparently it’s OK for climatologists to speculate on geological / geophysical phenomena but it’s not OK for Geoscientist to hypothesize on issues of climatology. And it’s really not OK for anyone else to speculate on climatology. Nice double standard guys!
They are going far beyond discrediting climatology & are going into the realm of discrediting all science.
This is a disservice to all humanity & it is an outrage!
H.R. (02:42:47) “And do you think that in 11,000 years they can finally get the clock to stop blinking 12:00 after power is restored?)”
That’s the big question, H.R.. I admire someone who can get right down to relevance…
IanP (23:46:07) :
These are reported to “show that if we don’t take action by 2080 the temperature for the hottest day of the year in the West Midlands could increase by a scorching 100 C by 2080 … ”
My vote for quote of the week. Doesn’t water BOIL at 100c? I know I’m American and don’t get metrics…silly me.
There is nothing that cannot be blamed on global warming — even global cooling is caused by global warming — so this should not surprise anybody.
Is there any doubt that our education systems have failed?
We also need to make “jumping up and down” illegal if we are to save the planet from earthquakes, tsunamis, avalanches and volcanic eruptions.
So I expect to see UK legislation soon that will ban skipping ropes, hop-scotch, high jumping, long jumping, shot putting and vigorous sex…. with appropriate politically correct exceptions for the Olympic Games, MPs, Gays and bungee jumping…
Rumour has it that there is an EU funded scientific research station based on Ipanema beach that is monitoring the established relationship between butterflies beating their butterfly wings in Brazil with the number of earthquakes in Japan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect_in_popular_culture
PS And don’t even think about getting hopping mad… just be good sheeple…
The UK was an empire. Look how far down has fallen. It seems that when some generations die or emigrate, they are not replaced by similarly gifted people. If we were to search for the english people genetically, perhaps we could not find them in contemporary England, not even in their “new age” monarchy. It is a lost species.
OT: There is a new storm forming and it has been called “Fred”, as far as these are not named with female names these do not pose any real danger 🙂
Maybe the melting of the glaciers will cause enough seismic activity to raise Atlantis from beneath the waves. I mean, that could be cool.
Altantis, baby!!!
“Not only are the oceans and atmosphere conspiring against us, bringing baking temperatures, more powerful storms and floods, but the crust beneath our feet seems likely to join in too,” said Professor Bill McGuire, director of the Benfield Hazard Research Centre, at University College London (UCL).”
Great, now scientists are animating the forces of nature, and as conspirators. What we need is a Saturday morning cartoon series so as to really understand this effect.
I already know the solution though. Build a temple.
The New Scientist reported on September 4, 2009 and I quote here partly only,
“Forecasts of climate change are about to go seriously out of kilter. One of the world’s top climate modellers said Thursday we could be about to enter one or even two decades during which temperatures cool.
Latif predicted that in the next few years a natural cooling trend would dominate over warming caused by humans. The cooling would be down to cyclical changes to ocean currents and temperatures in the North Atlantic, a feature known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO).
Breaking with climate-change orthodoxy, he said NAO cycles were probably responsible for some of the strong global warming seen in the past three decades. “But how much? The jury is still out,” he told the conference. The NAO is now moving into a colder phase.
Latif said NAO cycles also explained the recent recovery of the Sahel region of Africa from the droughts of the 1970s and 1980s. James Murphy, head of climate prediction at the Met Office, agreed and linked the NAO to Indian monsoons, Atlantic hurricanes and sea ice in the Arctic. “The oceans are key to decadal natural variability,” he said.
Another favourite climate nostrum was upturned when Pope warned that the dramatic Arctic ice loss in recent summers was partly a product of natural cycles rather than global warming. Preliminary reports suggest there has been much less melting this year than in 2007 or 2008″
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17742-worlds-climate-could-cool-first-warm-later.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news
So it would appear that even AGW scientists admit that some of their past doom and gloom forcasts may have been wrong . This article will prove to be the same .
PPS Don’t you know we are at the tipping point… one more fluid ounce of water added to our globally connected oceanic infrastructure could cause all the tectonic plates to move catastrophically… please remember this the next time you go to the bathroom…. just flushing the toilet once may kill hundreds of thousand of people and destroy the lives of millions…. so best read the small print on your personal indemnity insurance before flushing… you have be warned…
Ah More volcanic ativity _lowers_ the atmospheric temps.Tambora,anyone?…
The icecap of biggest glacier in Europe, Vatnajokull, Iceland, has decreased for the last decates, and there are signs of more volcanic activity under the icecap.
When the vikings settled in Iceland 1.100 years ago, the climate was much warmer and therefore the glaciers smaller, and at that time, volcanic activity was more than today.
It´s a sign! It´s a sign!…. isn’t it?
It’s a veritable tsunami of doom-mongering pseudo-scientific “climate change” nonsense, all in preparation for Copenhagen, which will likely be the AGWers’ Last Hurrah.
“Maybe the Earth is trying to tell us something,” added McGuire. Wow. As idiotic (and non sequitur) Warmist statements go, they just don’t get any more idiotic than that.
Though this one is equally dumb: ““Not only are the oceans and atmosphere conspiring against us, bringing baking temperatures, more powerful storms and floods, but the crust beneath our feet seems likely to join in too,” said Professor Bill McGuire.
So, now the Earth is CONSPIRING against us, AND it’s “trying to tell us something”? Do tell us more, Mr. McGuire.
It’s not April 1st is it?
nope………..
Then it can only be the result of a free educational system. A population doesn’t get this dumb on it’s own.
I doesn’t take long to find that this isn’t the first time Bill McGuire has made big claims before.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_McGuire (not that I like Wiki for a reference)
if true, he also said this….
McGuire, in the 2006 History Channel program “Last Days on Earth” discussing Global Warming said, “I find it extraordinary that anybody can regard global warming (climate change) as a debate. Clearly it isn’t a debate.”
He also wrote the book “A Guide to the end of the world”
http://books.google.ca/books?id=RY-LWN6OdGMC&dq=A+guide+to+the+end+of+the+world&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=YGCmSta6HZmc8Qbhr7DjDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4#v=onepage&q=&f=false
“Every time you address the Holocaust, you don’t bring somebody who says it didn’t happen. And we’re at that stage now, we have, we have Holocaust deniers and we have climate change deniers…and to be honest, I don’t see a great deal of difference.”
My cynical mind suspects Hazard Research was in danger of losing their funding to Climate change studies. Time to invent an angle and secure that funding.
“You can’t make this stuff up. It’s worse than we thought. “
Yes, they can make this stuff up. And it is is worse than we thought – the state of science that is.
Benfield Hazard Research Centre… hmmm.
Benfield is an insurance company with a large energy practice, insuring oil rigs and offshore facilities amongst other things. I work for an oil company, we pay premiums to these people. So this lunatic is errr… funded by big oil.
Funny old world innit??
Shame Prof McGuire didn’t make the effort to do a sense check with any geologists or geophysicists working in the real world before spouting this idiocy, or maybe they were just ROFLing too hard.
For what its worth, another company in the same space, happy to take $$ from the oil industry is Caitlin, a favourite of many posters on WUWT .
Must be good publicity and PR for “responsible” insurers to be sponsoring populist AGW enviro causes, however wacky the output.
Staying with insurers, I stumbled across AonBenfield’s racily titled “Annual Global Climate and Catastrophe Report 2008”. Scrolling excitedly to the exec summary, in anticipation of wild horrors, unstoppable feedback loops and tipping points, I was kind of let down when it started off with the following:
“The year 2008 was unremarkable from an insured natural catastrophe loss perspective. May’s earthquake in China and September’s Hurricane Ike brought the most coverage from the news media, but these events
proved to be mere sideshows when compared to the capital stresses put upon insurers and reinsurers from the credit and liquidity crisis.”
Oh well. Surprisingly, its not too bad a read, available on their website, with a reasonably balanced hurricane / cyclone / typhoon section despite the alarming title. Seems that the San Andreas fault is keeping them awake much more than than GW when it gets down to the $$$.
All,
Somewhat OT but still in the “You can’t make this stuff up” department…
You may recall that Seattle, Washington, city council passed a law banning all plastic drinking bottles in public buildings. This occured about the same time as banning campfires in parks for the CO2 they would throw in the air.
OK, typical greenish activity for that part of the world. A friend visited us this weekend from Seattle, and told us not only the small plastic bottles were banned, but also the large filtered water containers for “water coolers”. The stands were plumbed into the nearest faucet.
Luckily lakes are plentiful there so when the council took the “plunge” they didn’t have far to drive, uh walk…
Mike
Is this from the “Daily Onion”?
No, they have better standards.
What is Bill McGuire’s educational background? Does anyone know?
His Benfield CV lists his interests, TV programs and that he runs a graduate program for insurance adjusters…
The UCL Dept. of Earth Sciences shows that he only teaches a freshman Geology class…
The Aon Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre isn’t even an actual geoscience program…
Aon Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre (ABUHRC) is Europe’s leading multidisciplinary academic hazard research centre. The ABUHRC comprises three groups: Geological Hazards, Meteorological Hazards & Seasonal Forecasting, and Disaster Studies & Management. The Centre is based at University College London, one of the UK’s top three multi-faculty teaching and research institutions.
The ABUHRC is sponsored by Aon Benfield, the premier reinsurance intermediary and capital advisor.
Just like John Holdren’s Berkeley Energy and Resource Group and Jerry Sachs’ Earth Institute at Columbia University… ABUHRC is just another “touchy-feely” interdisciplinary program for non-scientists.
Here are the ABUHRC’s entrance requirements for their Geophysical Hazards
masters degree program…
“Degree topics are likely to have been in”… WTF is that? And… “Where the qualifications are of a lower standard, a student may be admitted if evidence of an adequate academic background and experience in an appropriate field can be shown.”
This guy is a joke!
The future, directed by Michael Bay
I’m a lifelong left-winger –
And I have been repeatedly removed from the comment section at the Guardian.
I have attempted to point out to them that such nonsense will do progressive issues no good – and that they are really working overtime to make sure that Labour comes in third place in the next general election.
I guess that I am a rather rare beast – a critic of the “climate change” movement from the left. I go not advocate wasting resources or polluting the planet, but doubling the utility bills of the working poor and demanding that people in India continue to drive donkey carts is hardly progressive.
Stacey,
“… however if (see below) hypothetically all of the land ice was to melt over a couple of hundred years then the stress would be dissipated. After all an earthquake is caused due to a sudden release of stress…”
Not being a geologist probably makes this next comment suspect, but I’ll go with it anyway.
According to what I’ve been told not quite true. There is at least one example of a good quake waiting to happen – in Utah, Salt Lake City to be exact. Lake Bonneville once covered a great part of the American Southwest. Over time, it has evaporated, leaving the Great Salt Lake. The removal of all the water weight is putting tremendous pressure on the Wasatch Fault – which is ripe for a major quake. (Just search for Wasatch Fault – Wiki has a good summary on it)
When (in geologic time) it does, it ain’t gonna be pretty…
(I just finished putting a target on me, so “fire when ready Gridley!”
Mike
“torrential rainfall in the UK is likely to cause widespread erosion”
A few months ago, it was supposed to become a Mediterranean climate with vinyards in Scotland and deserts in southern England and France according to forecasts by the Hadley Centre (sorry, don’t have a link)
LOL“Maybe the Earth is trying to tell us something,” added McGuire
Sure it is!, it says SHUT UP!
This made up stuff sounds very much like the stuff made up by the alarmists in the late Michael Crichton’s novel “State of Fear”.
Life again imitates art.
The 100 degree increase by 2080 (cited above) seems like the most extreme prediction I’ve ever heard. I think I would be amused by a ‘Top 10’ for these sorts of things.
It seems most of these theories, being predictions, are not currently falsifiable. And the theories that made predictions that have now been observed/tested have been falsified. Nor are they reproducible, i.e. a copy of all source code and data files on a public website.
I am not a practicing scientist, but aren’t these attributes necessary for a theory to be scientific? Or does it just have to be provide a better explanation? What about all those proprietary methods .. is a theory/program less scientific just because less people are allowed to examine the method and data?
Is it hard to attack this as being unscientific because we often trust secret computer models?
Nogw (06:08:56) :
If we were to search for the English people….we could not find them in contemporary England… It is a lost species.
Being English is about a cultural mindset…. not about genetics nor a geographic location… I discovered that concept by reading Jeremy Paxman’s book The English: A Portrait of a People while living in Spain… so now I understand how I got here… and I have to thank Douglas Adams Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy for telling me the answer to life, the universe and everything… which happens to be 42..
My guess is that Captain Kirk was in the Guardian newsroom when he said these immortal words:
“”Beam Me Up, Scotty, There’s No Intelligent Life Down Here””
John Egan, 7:16:15
Well, bully for you. I have a great deal of respect for liberals who are climate skeptics; you have a hard row to hoe. Another such fellow is Thomas Fuller, available in the right sidebar. His commentary is always thoughtful.
==========================================
John Egan,
“I’m a lifelong left-winger –
And I have been repeatedly removed from the comment section at the Guardian.”
Well, here’s the rub. You see modern eco liberals don’t like traditional socialists (if there are any left) because they are all for increasing the prosperity of the poor, which is obviously antithetical to their ideology of universal impoverishment.
BTW I’ve also had a comment removed from the Guardian, just because I said they should close down to stop their own CO2 emissions. What did I say wrong?
IanP (23:46:07) :
I had to follow that link you provided, as I was sure that what you posted was a typo. Surely no one could actually be predicting a 100C rise in temperature. That’s just absurd.
Sure enough, that’s exactly what the article said. I did a ping and rdns search to be sure it wasn’t some sort of spoof site. Sure enough, it really is a .gov.uk website.
In all fairness, if these people really and truly believe in their predictions then they have a moral obligation to sound the alarm. Think about it, a 100C rise in temperature could well mean a lifeless planet. Barely habitable anyway.
I just find it difficult to believe that anyone with a sound scientific background, in almost any field of science, could believe such things.
How can you take someone seriously when he says the earth speaks to him?
Mariss
So the “Anthropogenic Continental Drift” satire has indeed become “science”?
Incredible.
Read the comments, it’s a hoot!
My current favourite is
englishhermit
06 Sep 09, 6:30am
I recall being blasted by the planetfuckers in these very columns over a year ago for having the temerity to suggest that a redistribution of water across the face of globe would change the pressure on the earth’s crust leading to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis. Now the predictions of this hermit have been validated by qualified scientists, although anyone with ‘O’ level physics could have worked it out for themselves. So I am going to say ‘Told you so. Nur Nur Nur’.
Unless that is clever satire, of course.
I suggest a competition for the most hilarious comment on this thread…..
Anthony … its true .. you couldn’t make this stuff up. A few years ago (about 20) one of the British tabloids (maybe News of the World or the Sunday Sport) had a story about how a WW2 bomber had been found on the moon – complete with photograph.
This is in the same vein .. except its in the Gaurdian.
(^^^^ BTW, as someone with ‘A’ level physics myself, and a computing degree)
Great breakthroughs in science have been always accomplished by unfunded individuals, never by funded bureaucrats.
I have tried to post comments here before, but the last one merely pointed out the acidity of the insults against sceptics, and that was deleted. I ask you…
Maybe I should try ‘An Open Mind’ ….
Ralph: Like Enron, the Greens will eventually run out of scare stories that anyone believes, and their empire will crash, burn and disappear without trace.”
But – that’s the problem. ENRON may have disappeared, but it destroyed thousands of people.
Lets hope (!) that when the empire of Greenies disappears, the shockwave from that disappearance does not destroy all that classic conservation has achieved since the 1800’s.
I have said it many times, it will be this type of reporting and research that will completely marginalize the AGWers, alienate the moderate environmentalists and annoy the populace at large, they cannot help themselves.
As they feel the message slipping away they will do the only thing they know how, make even more dire and ridiculous predictions of peril.
This is a good sign that the end is nigh…. for AGW as the disaster de jour.
Mariss Freimanis (07:54:30) :
How can you take someone seriously when he says the earth speaks to him?
This seems to becoming an English characteristic…. which explains a lot…
I just come and talk to the plants, really-very important to talk to them, they respond I find.
Prince Charles
http://www.allgreatquotes.com/prince_charles_quotes.shtml
Prince of Wales talked to plants: scientists test if it works
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/5080991/Prince-of-Wales-talked-to-plants-scientists-test-if-it-works.html
There is a difference between last glaciation and now; the size of ice sheets or that doesn’t matter? LOL
If melting glaciers causes quakes and volcanoes, then surely the converse is true. Advancing glaciers and expanding ice sheets will push down on the plates and cause pressure to pop out elsewhere. Since there’s no such thing as a static climate or a static geological Earth, there’s doom either way you look at it.
And where were the tremendous catastrophes when each winter in the NH several feet of snow and ice suddenly develop over vast portions of the land masses? Why didn’t we have massive quakes? We had a LOT of snow this year in North America. Surely those trillions(?) of tons should have caused a geologic disaster. I must have missed it.
Idiots.
Also, Roger Knights @ WUWT on Pielke (6 Sept, 20:09:44) : Why Smart People Fall for Fads is pertinent.
Anyone who’d like to repost it anyway should feel free to do so. Here’s the link to the thread (you’ll have to search for “fads”).
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/05/pielke-senior-arctic-temperature-reporting-in-the-news-needs-a-reality-check/
I find it pretty funny that one of the chief criticisms of Michael Crichton’s book State of Fear was that the ecoterrorist’s plot to cause a tsunami was not a climate issue. I guess he knew it was only a matter of time before these non climate events would be linked to global warming.
Were there tsunamis in Britain during the Holocene Climate Optimum or Medieval Warm Period? :p
““Lord May, a former chief scientist to the government, said religious groups could use their influence to motivate believers into reducing the environmental impact of their lives.
The international reach of faith-based organisations and their authoritarian structures give religious groups an almost unrivalled ability to encourage a large proportion of the world’s population to go green, he said.””
And Marxism’s authoritarian structure too. We’re all going back to the Garden of Eden, from whence sinful man fell from grace. And this time we’ll be vegans and sing Bob Dylan songs and have group sex and smoke lots of weed under the benevolent eyes of a Dear Leader and Bono because apparently God Is Dead, but only if you’re white. Everyone else gets to keep God.
[snip]
Point one: the readership of the Guardian isn’t very large. You’ve got just as many loonies in the US who believe that God’s wrath will descend on earth through just the same mechanisms. None of us think that the rest of you are idiotic enough to believe such drivel. Hopefully you’ll believe the same about us Brits?
Second: the academics see Copenhagen as marvellous fuel to drive new grant funding opportunities, so they take part in the generalised media bullshit for partisan purposes. So, I guess, do US academics?
Thirdly: The Guardian is the home for sandal-wearing lefties. There’s nothing wrong with 98% of what sandal-wearing lefties believe in. Getting rid of nukes – yeah, we all agree with that, as long as everyone else gets rid of them too. Generally trying not to kill people – yeah, we agree with that too as long as some bearded bastards don’t bomb the crap out of us. Feeding Africans – yeah, we agree with that too, so long as the food isn’t sold by tinpot dictators and the money deposited in some Swiss bank account whilst the poor folks starve to death. Clean energy – yeah we agree with that so long as it doesn’t mean switching the lights out.
The problem with papers is that their bloggers get like a bunch of Kluckers after a few too many beers – they wind each other up with their fantasies and they stop realising that the rest of us folks think they’re off their rocker.
That’s why I spend plenty of time challenging journos and bloggers whose views I disagree with. At least then they have to listen to challenge and really argue their case properly.
Maybe a bunch of you folks should go onto the Guardian site and do the same to that bunch? Some to the Independent too….last bastion of the heat generation on earth transferred from the Sun to the human gaseous emissions………
Utterly shameless.
Though one wonders whether these alarmists have actually started to believe what they write; if that’s the case, I feel a shadow of pity for them. I can imagine them pulling their hair out in their cubicles, in the dark, because they unscrewed their compact florescents in an attempt to avert the apocalypse.
Does Bill McGuire have any academic credentials… besides teaching freshman Geology and running a geo-hazards school for insurance adjusters?
Just amazing. And we let this folks get science degrees…
“Maybe the Earth is trying to tell us something,”
This is called “religion”. The belief in a “higher power” or earth as a living being with emotional state and sentience.
Maybe the earth is just sitting here as a big ball of rock doing what big balls of rock do as a consequence of the laws of physics. And as we all know:
“I can nay change the laws of physics, Jim!”
(Think of a very famous Scot)…
UCL’s Climate Forcing of Geological Hazards conference, which will open on 15 September. Some of the key evidence to be presented at the conference will come from studies of past volcanic activity.
Another “Given these conclusions, what assumptions can I draw?” conference.
These indicate that when ice sheets disappear the number of eruptions increases, said Professor David Pyle, of Oxford University’s earth sciences department.
And he doesn’t think that maybe lighting off a few dozens of volcanos under an ice sheet might cause some melting?
“The last ice age came to an end between 12,000 to 15,000 years ago and the ice sheets that once covered central Europe shrank dramatically,” added Pyle. “The impact on the continent’s geology can by measured by the jump in volcanic activity that occurred at this time.”
And completely ignores the evidence that the Clovis People came to an end in N. America when a giant meteor hit the ice sheet. Gee, a giant fiery ball of high energy whacks the continent, causes widespread destruction, ice sheet melting and most likely some crustal deformation. Ya think that might just cause a we bit ‘o volcanic triggering? Nothing like a few gigatons of TNT equivalent to shake up your day.
But nooooo, these folks want the arrow of causality to run backwards. Ignore that giant impact behind the curtains…
They all ought to be required to right on the blackboard 1,000,000 times:
Coincidence, Correlation, Causality – I will not Confound them.
Okay, so we create a large number of tsunami’s and volcanic eruptions… Would not the volcanoes then cool the atmosphere? Oh wait… Never mind that would mean the planet was regulating itself while mankind continues to exist…
I am tired of people making ridiculous claims… what if the pressure does the opposite… Now we have fewer of these events? This shows more and more that this is a religious movement rather then sound science. I am so angry right now that words fail me.
How many more plagues will Al “Moses” Gore inflict on us until we relent and abandon ourselves to their control?
What bad thing could happen that would not be attributable to AGW? War? no, they got that one. Death of the Loch Ness Monster? Nope. I have it! A nearby supernova that floods the planet with X-Rays. Alarmists, start working on it! A good place to start would be with “teleconnections”.
We have a bar here in Calgary called Yuk Yuk’s, comedy bar, I believe these people would get standing ovaitions every time!
rxc (04:40:35) :
With the publication of this article, the AGW crowd is arguably “jumping the shark”.
Perfect observation.
JER0ME (08:10:27) :
I can see your comments fine. Maybe you need to wait for the moderation queue to catch up…
The sky is falling! The sky is falling ! errrrr
The sea is rising the sea is rising ! Uhhhh
The ice is melting ! The ice is melting! Ummmm
The Polar bears are drowning! The polar bears are drowning! Ahhh
The earth is quaking ! The Earth is quaking ! Yeah that’s the ticket!
(moment must check my notes to see what is next)
I must say what are these guys smoking ?
Or are they just unemployed screen writers from Hollywood trying to do a career change to cope with the down turn in video sales?
If it wasn’t so pathetic, it would be funny. Can’t these folks see that it is exactly this sort of “cry wolf” stories that is turning them into laughing stocks to the general public?
Larry
Well, we’ve always had the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Apocalypse
Conquest, War, Famine, and Death. Now we have a fifth !!!
How about a competition for the best name?
This story it is a good one for making a science fiction movie!…and professor Bill Mc Guire a serious candidate for a Nobel Prize!, as laurate and as informed as BB(*) Al.
(*)Big belly.
“but doubling the utility bills of the working poor and demanding that people in India continue to drive donkey carts is hardly progressive.”
You may not realize it, but you pass as a right winger at a tea party by saying that simple sentence and nobody would question your credentials. Conservatives have been saying that for years.
One of the most nasty effects of pressure…is its release through farting. Beware when the earths farts!
Why don’t Bill McGuire’s academic credentials ever appear in any of his CV’s or bio’s?
He’s a volcanologist “by inclination and training”?
If he couldn’t handle the “maths” to be an astronomer, he surly couldn’t handle the “maths” to be a volcanologist or geophysicist.
I don’t find a “Senior Scientist” position listed for the Montserrat Volcano Observatory.
Does McGuire have any degrees in geology or geophysics? He’s never referred to as Dr. McGuire, or Bill McGuire, PhD. There’s no mention anywhere of his geoscience education apart from being a “Senior Scientist” at MVO.
Ray Boorman (00:03:47) : “It’s not April 1st is it?”
In Warmist Willie “science,” it’s always April 1st.
John Edmondson (23:35:13) : How long before raised CO2 levels have an effect on the Earth’s orbit around the sun, or on the sun itself?
Perhaps like those little glass globes with black / white vanes in them that spin in the sun? Our excess “heating” will cause more photon emissions on the dark side of the planet and this will cause the earth to spin faster and drive it out of the solar system … (or cause it to stop spinning and drive us into the sun – take your pick, I can run the argument either direction.)
IanP (23:46:07) : I think that there should be a competition to see who can come up with the most looney and desperate alarmist ’suggestion’ of what Climate Change will/or may (two categories) bring.
My contribution is this:
DNA zip / unzip replication is driven by warm / cold cycling (as demonstrated and used in PCR reactors, for example). As the climate becomes more extreme, there will be more temperature variation and cycling, leading to random DNA cycling, leading evolution to run amuck! We will all devolve into lower creatures and monsters while new and terrible beasts will develop to devour us! It is the natural and just revenge of the planet as it cleans itself of our pestilence. There will be carnivorous trees, new diseases, household pets will turn on us and devour us, as we devolve into incompetent masses of immobile cells paying for our sins with unimaginable suffering and hideous deformities, quivering, covered in painful boils and sores from new diseases.
So how did I do? I have the requisite touch of science at the beginning, the reference to a demonstrated scientific touchstone in reality, the “plausible yet wrong” leap to a bad effect that might come from it, then the launch into fantastic consequences from projecting this, completely uncontrolled, to extremes. That seems to be the “AGW Science” pattern…
I would submit it in both categories. “Will” up to the word “amuck”, and “may” from that point onward…
I suppose I could submit the “spin change’ scenario too…
When I was a child, a small child, I was read Fairy Tales from The Brothers Grimm. Other children were protected from the original versions by sanitized re-writes, but my mother read from an older book (the one where the wolf ‘wins’ and eats Little Red Riding Hood…) I learned very early that this was just fantasy and not to get too worried about it. I think I now know why I was taught that “these are just stories to scare the children”… Some other folks seem to have never learned that lesson. Only now are they experiencing the Fairy Tale with the bad ending, and they have not yet learned to control their imaginations and their fears…
“There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”
Mark Twain
The illustration chosen is quite misleading. Not all quakes are tsunamogenic.
Richard111 (08:59:48) :
Well, we’ve always had the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Apocalypse
Conquest, War, Famine, and Death. Now we have a fifth !!!
How about a competition for the best name?
Accoording to Terry Pratchet there are still four horsemen, “the horseman of Pestilence is changed out for Pollution, suggesting Pollution took over in 1928 when Pestillence left “muttering something about Penicillin”.
They are so blind, I think they got it backwards, Earth changes are affecting climate. If the Earth’s geothermal/seismic/volcanic activity has increased such as demonstrated in the poles, one can be sure that subterranean release of GHG are naturally increasing. This could explain the GHG curve increase regardless of stable mean global temps… Oceans can also be increasing in temp not only through solar forcing but also through unsuspected geothermal activity increases deep within the crust.
Here another list of the horrible 100 effects of global warming. It’s serious!
And then there is this excellent video that lays it all out. Enjoy!
I don’t think Scotty ever called him “Jim”. It was always “Captain”, “Sir”, or later “Admiral”. 😉
Gullibility?
“If I hadn’t’ve believed it, I wouldn’t’ve seen it.” – Yogi Berra
I reposted my comments and arguments on the Guardian site and they lasted for one hour this time, but they have been deleted yet again.
So here we have liberal poster after poster on the Guardian site saying that “the deniers will never debate with us, because their arguments are false”, while the newspaper itself deletes anything that in contrary to AGW. And my post there was pure reasoned argument, with no vitriol.
Perhaps those Guardian lobotomists – who have been convinced by the AGW priesthood that CO2 will cause volcanos – would like to transfer over to WUWT, so we really can have that discussion and debate.
.
Terry (01:34:45) : I recall a nutty PhD in Australia who mooted this a few years ago. It was howled down by both AGW proponents and sceptics alike, but obviously he must have the ear of some folk. I just cant remember his name at the present.
Reply: Dr Thomas J. Chalko MSc, PhD ~ ctm
Would that be the same as the one who has put his moniker on the copyright notice on the bioresonant site with the T-shirt that makes me queezy?
from: http://bioresonant.com/ © Dr. Tom Chalko. 2003
For educational purposes and under fair use doctrine I provide this brief excerpt:
In brief, stress and other negative factors seem to disrupt the uniformity, coherence and the magnitude of the human electro-photonic glow measured with bio-electrography. Bioresonant color stimulation seems to do exactly the opposite…
Uh huh… And here I didn’t even know that I had an electro-photonic glow. Maybe that’s why people look at me so oddly…
UK Sceptic (00:13:00) :
More warmist ridiculae from the UK:
It’s official! Warmism is now a religion recognised by British Law.
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2009/09/barking.html
Pass me a bucket someone, I need to vomit…
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In the US, of course, Scientology is legally a religion. I guess it won’t be long before the Church of AGW obtains similar tax-exempt status. Al Gore will be the new L. Ron Hubbard. Oh wait… He already is!
>>>I suggest a competition for the most hilarious comment on
>>>the Guardian thread…..
Well how about this one – it had to rear its ugly head, did it not.
Quote (08:32 pm) – “People who can see the threat from global warming today are in the same position as people who could see the threat from Hitler in 1933.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyone who will not join the AGW religion is a “heretic, N@zi, racist, scum” – but we will never undermine the integrity of science by making personal attacks.
.
“Kate (05:41:50) :
…The Guardian is more Britain’s version of The New York Post, which was once a great newspaper that used to be taken seriously, but is now the home of daily hysterical ravings and fantasy.”
Since the NY Post never was a great newspaper, now is a tabloid but with competent people like Peters (the only one constantly right about Iraq) and Taheri, you must mean the NY Times. A pity that the WSJ is too much economy oriented.
And witches float, too.
“Scientists at a London conference next week will warn of earthquakes, avalanches and volcanic eruptions as the atmosphere heats up and geology is altered. Even Britain could face being struck by tsunami”
“Anniversary of 1607 killer wave”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/6311527.stm
Not caused by global warming
“At the same time the disappearance of ice caps will change the pressures acting on the Earth’s crust and set off volcanic eruptions across the globe.”
Question…Technically speaking even if all the ice on the planet were to melt, wouldn’t the pressure on the plates still be the same as their is no change in actually mass?
Wouldn’t only the distribution on the plates change?
Al Qaida deeply thanks the contribuition of the infidels’ philosophy called Green by their unceasingly efforts for destroying occidental civilization, so we have to recognize the unbeatable strength put forward by its principal false and malign prophet, the unnamable fat one, to conspicuosly erradicate the infidels by blaming them for polluting the blessed universe and consequently impeding their sinful lives altogether by depriving them of the means to subsist.
And Dr. Leif Svalgaard says the state of Science is “clearly healthy!”
The desperate pronouncement pointed to in this post is nothing but “rot”.
And those that defend it and other dubious propositions with blithe statements can’t be taken seriously.
“Stacey (05:02:36) :
Below is a link to a group of scientists? Spot one of our cousins?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solvay_conference_1927.jpg”
That were the good old times, when you could be somebody without emigrating to the US.
Had you selected 1933, I would have been able to spot more women and my high school math-teacher:
http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datei:Solvay1933Large.jpg&filetimestamp=20060214190553
Lucy Skywalker (02:06:10) :
I hear a lot of understandable exasperation here, but nobody’s commented (that I’ve seen) that it’s COOLER past climate times that have seen more seismological events – earthquakes eruptions and tsunamis.
Yup. There seems to be a couple of whopper volcanoes that let loose just about the bottom of a cold cycle, causing lots of hand wringing over “the volcano did it” vs “the sun did it” vs “rock from space did it” vs “whatever else did it”; when the data seem to show that they all come together.
This, for me, has been one of the major attraction of the “solar system momentum shiny thing”. It offers a plausible way that the volcanic cycle would tend to peak at the same time the solar output is minimized. (Unfortunately, it does not match our present temperature data so can not have any causality for the “warming” pattern in the temperature record. That has seasonal and decade variations that do not match solar variations at all – but do match thermometer position changes. Neither the sun nor CO2 can explain why “warming” takes summers off in the temperature records. Longer cycle events may still have some grand shiny thing driver, but I lack the data to prove it.)
Also there’s the insurance factor. Damages suffered (or paid out for by insurance) due to tornadoes and hurricanes have risen. But that reflects lots more building in vulnerable places, not lots more wind.
Don’t forget that it also reflects the decrease in the value of the dollar.
In 1960 my Dad bought a home for $7000. In the ’90s I sold it for over $80,000 (and it is now “worth” significantly more than that…).
You have a well over 10 x factor in “increasing damages” just from the “rubber ruler” that is used to measure them. (Insurance company results are published in unadjusted dollars as are most all financial statements). So unless the researcher was very diligent, and got the currency deflator exactly right (a very contentious process, btw, who’s “proper” answer is not ‘settled’… partly because the number constantly changes over time) they will be reflecting the rubber ruler more than the weather.
Call me a cynic (haha!), but doing a little digging into Benfield………….there’s always a reason………………. .
http://www.benfieldgroup.com/Media%20Centre/Press%20Releases/Pages/..%5CPages/AonBenfieldUCLHazardResearchCentreLaunchesNewWebsitewwwabuhrcorg.aspx
About Aon Benfield:
Aon Benfield is the world’s premier reinsurance intermediary and capital advisor, providing clients with integrated capital solutions and services. The company offers clients access to every traditional and alternative market in the world, through an international network of offices spanning over 50 countries and more than 4,000 professionals. Its worldwide client base is able to access the broadest portfolio of integrated capital solutions and services, world-class talent, unparalleled global reach and local expertise to best meet their business objectives. Aon Benfield is the industry leader in treaty, facultative and capital markets transactions.
Research students at UCL (Benfield Hazard Centre) are funded by all sorts of motley organisations ie – The NERC and the ESRC!!!! found here;
http://www.esrc.ac.uk/ESRCInfoCentre/index_government.aspx
http://www.nerc.ac.uk/about/work/policy/safety/documents/procedure_highrisk.pdf
Bill Mcguire and Chris Kilburn and something called ‘Volcalert’ has had the European Commission digging into its coffers to the tune of 875,500 euros.
Benfield Hazard Research Centre is part of the Aon Benfield Group. An article about a BBC programme on Natural disasters mentions Benfield.
– and says (the Telegraph in 2005 – it would not be so sceptical now!);-
‘Some critics also point to the fact that the Benfield Hazard Research Centre is sponsored by the Benfield Group, a leading re-insurance organisation that sells insurance to insurance companies. “We’re talking about a business that is happy to give cover against tsunamis, but won’t give you flood insurance as it might have to pay out on that,” says one authority on natural disasters. “I don’t think the people at the Benfield Centre realise the potential conflict of interest that raises, but it’s enormous.”
While the Benfield Group insists the UCL centre is completely independent, some believe the emergence of so many apocalyptic claims shows just how desperate academics have become for funding.’
And goes on to quote;
“Almost all scientific communities are playing the disaster game,” says Dr Benny Peiser, a social anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University who has made a long-term study of the phenomenon. “Behind it all lurk the vested interests of researchers, campaign groups, politicians, charities, businesses and the news media.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1485544/Apocalypse-now-again.html
Its all about vested interests and the science once again goes flying out of the window, in fact it gets in the way of a damn goood scarrrrrry story! And in Europe the hand of big government’s encouraging and funding projects within places such as the Benfield Hazard Centre – is somewhat sinister, particularly and annoyingly, when it is not their money (governments have no money).
As Goebbels is reported to have said…”If you tell a big enough lie….”
I have tried to struggle through the threads in the Grauniad but it was all too much. I love Science fiction novels but….. this is crazy. I wonder what Asimov, Heinlein, Niven, Pournelle and Clarke think??…. Could they make it up??
Just to endorse a comment made earlier, I posted my howl of protest at this absurd article on the Guardian comments section (‘Comment is Free’, no less).
It was deleted.
John Egan (07:16:15) :
John Egan (07:16:15) :
“I’m a lifelong left-winger –
And I have been repeatedly removed from the comment section at the Guardian.
I do not advocate wasting resources or polluting the planet, but doubling the utility bills of the working poor and demanding that people in India continue to drive donkey carts is hardly progressive.”
I am a screaming right winger and I agree with your statement.
We both need more fact, disciplined scientific debate, and testing of hypotheses; along with less hurling of abuse and demanding that those who disagree are imprisoned or burn in hell. (and the implied censorship of “heresy”).
The scientists have no one to blame for this crap but themselves. Taking grant money to reinforce a hoax has consequences. Money corrupts, it’s intoxicating, but when you throw your own reputation overboard, it’s your problem alone.
What has happened to science.
Alexej Buergin (10:48:47) :
“Those were the days, my friend,
we thought they’d never end…”
But those were the days when physics became methaphysics, a time that saw the last experiments in science…to become what it is today: statistics instead of logic, random searching instead of real research.
Patrick Davis (03:43:15) : And here in Australia, Senator Fielding, the only senator to be bucking the political trend with regards to an ETS, apparently, suffered in his youth and still suffers “learning difficlties”!!!!!
As did one A. Einstein… kicked out of school and didn’t learn to talk until late in life. Early years home schooled by a Mom who refused to take the bull with which the school was labeling her kid.
My spouse is a highly certified special education teacher (with a long string of letters for all the varieties of Special Ed she can handle. Even taught an SED class one year – Severely Emotionally Disabled. These are the kids where 3 or 4 faculty must be on hand at all times to tackle one of them when they start throwing chairs or other people around… she now serves as a district advisor on some things.) As a consequence of listening to her stories “about work” I’ve soaked up some of it.
The interesting bit to me was that if you are TOO SMART you end up in Special Education too. (The acronym used is GATE – Gifted And Talented Education).
Why? Because you have a ‘special’ form of learning ‘problem’ and will be disruptive to the rest of the class. There is a long history of folks who were too resistant to the regimentation and dull plodding pace of school going on to achieve what other could not. (Charles Schwab, for example, has a “problem” – Dyslexia IIRC).
Heck, I caused no end of trouble asking questions that the teachers found annoying and pointing out errors and omissions. I can easily see a young skeptic of today being ostracized for “not learning” about AGW when they point out the errors and inconsistencies. School is designed to stamp out independent thought, not develop it. That, IMHO, is why we have so many lemming “scientists”. It is much easier to get a Ph.D. if you are a lemming.
Heck, just TRY to ask about the Pullman Riots or the Bonus Riots in a grammar school history class, or try to ask why if so many words were spelt differently in the past we can’t do that today? I did. I wasn’t pretty…
(There are even school book police now that make sure no ‘gender specific’ language is used and no ‘stereotypes’ are shown. Now exactly HOW do you teach WWII history without at least showing MEN in battle and WOMEN not? How do you teach economic history when the word “workman” can not be used? Or how do you teach about the 1950’s if you are forbidden to show women with “big hair”? BTW, those are actual “issues”… And if the kid asks a question about those things, then the kid “has a problem”…)
And don’t even think about asking why, if there are no real gender differences, girl children preferentially play with dolls and boy children will make “finger guns” even if their parents prevent all contact with dolls and gun-like play and even if it gets them sent home from school for “having a gun”. (Yes, this happened here. The “zero tolerance” seems to extend even to imaginary objects… the kid was subjected to the letter of the policy for ‘guns on campus’… Draw a gun (with pencil), go to prison (detention), it’s the law. Don’t even think of asking “why?”)
So I now look at folks with a history of “school problems” but who have achieved some success as a likely marker of someone who actually does think and does not just parrot dreck.
Basically, if you can survive formal government run education and still function, you probably have a decent mind and can start getting a decent education on your own.
(FWIW, I’d guess that about 90%+ of what I know did not come from school. Of all the things I learned in school pre college, I’d count about 3 years of it as worth while. Learning to read in 1st grade (though Mom had already got me started). The “timeline” concept from 8th grade history (the rest of the class was a waste of a year). High school geometry, chemistry, physics, biology, algebra. A couple of plays we went to. One concert. That’s about it.
Why no English or Literature? Because what they “taught” in school caused me to hate it for decades. Only after being “out” a few years did I recover and learn the parts of it I love today. Ditto history. They darned near killed it for me. My love of history only survived due to the historical movies I watched. The list goes on. Yes, I resent what was stolen from me in that lost decade spent stuck in a wooden torture chair trying to keep my brain from atrophy. They didn’t have GATE then… )
So when someone gets that ‘special’ label stuck on them, or gets the ‘troublemaker’ label stuck on them; that just might indicate a person worth knowing…
(Oh, for a good time look at the ‘dropouts’ who founded companies. The list is huge. It’s not just Apple and the 2 Steves …)
TJA (08:53:12)
“What bad thing could happen that would not be attributable to AGW?”
Do visit ‘numberwatch.co.uk’. Check out the ‘Complete list of cancer and global warming’ from the table of contents. I laughed when I first read it. I’m not laughing now………………
tarpon (11:40:56) :
“The scientists have no one to blame for this crap but themselves. Taking grant money to reinforce a hoax has consequences. Money corrupts, it’s intoxicating, but when you throw your own reputation overboard, it’s your problem alone.
What has happened to science.”
tarpon, the problem is that the scientists lie to themselves, to everybody else, and smear anybody else that disagrees with them.
Even when they are forced to admit they don’t “understand” some process or another they still claim that those who disagree with them are pseudo-scientific.
It’s sick — and scientists in the highest perches of the ivory tower engage in this kind of stuff.
Like I said, “It’s sick.”
Michael J. Bentley (07:18:45),
Hey, I live in the Salt Lake Valley. Growing up, I was made well aware of the Wasatch Fault’s presence. In High School Summer Science we were driven to the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon to view the 50′ (or was it 75′, I can’t remember) quake scar. I have never encountered any mention of stresses left from Lake Bonneville, but I wouldn’t discount the possibility. While in Guayaquil, Ecuador many years ago, I felt a moderate earthquake and was told that they regularly have shallow seasonal quakes at the beginning and end of the Wet season. They sit above the subduction zone of the Nazca Plate, so they may be more susceptible to variances in weight, or there may be no real relationship whatsoever — but isn’t it fun to theorize?
To keep things in perspective, I was always a little worried about a major earthquake, but it was always overshadowed by the real immediate threat of annihilation by nuclear war. Iirc the Salt Lake City area was considered to be fairly high on the list of targets. I think the anticipated number was about 30 multi-megaton warheads. Kind of gives meaning to the word “overkill”. At least with a massive earthquake there is a very good chance of living to tell the tale.
I think that today’s youth feel that they have somehow missed out on the specter of nuclear armageddon, so they have replaced it with AGW armageddon.
@ Michael J Bentley
I would not dare take aim or fire.
My understanding, for what its worth is earthquakes are caused when the tectonic plates lock so if you are unlucky to live on a fault line then the thing you want to happen is the plates to keep moving otherwise your all Doomed.
The example you gave probably demonstrates my lack of knowledge on Geological processes and we need someone to help.
@John Egan
Keep on posting at Cif and if you cant then you now what to do?
I wish Anthony would use GMT on his clock:-)
Tomorrow is a very sad day and in a way it brings home the dangers of extremism wherever it comes from.
And from my countryman Dylan Thomas I leave you with these words. Nos Da
And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.
E.M. Smith, I see a lot of my own experience in what you just posted… the whole attitude of wanting, needing to get OUT of school, then later in life discovering genuine interest in things that school seemed designed to make me hate.
And Crosspatch, the Earth talks to me. It says “drive a bigger car, FASTER”. And I obey.
Hubris used to be a crime.
” Nogw (11:59:27) :
Alexej Buergin (10:48:47) :
“Those were the days, my friend,
we thought they’d never end…”
But those were the days when physics became methaphysics, a time that saw the last experiments in science…to become what it is today: statistics instead of logic, random searching instead of real research. ”
When they finally solve the engineering problems, they will do some serious work in Geneva.
Increased volcanism due to rapid deglaciation is not wild speculation but a phenomenon studied for over a decade – see for example:
Jull, M., and D. McKenzie (1996), The effect of deglaciation on mantle melting beneath Iceland, J. Geophys. Res., 101(B10), 21,815–21,828.
“The spreading ridge on Iceland shows large variations in eruption rate over the last 10,000 years. An increase of about 30 times the steady state value, between 10,000 and 8000 years ago, coincides with the disappearance of ice at the end of the last ice age.”
I suspect Professor David Pyle, as one of the world’s leading volcanologists (he literally wrote the book on the subject), might know what he is talking about here.
Are you serious???
“Maybe the Earth is trying to tell us something,” added McGuire
Sounds more like a greenpeace heckler after money!
They are comparing the end of the last ice age (when there was huge overburden pressure on parts of the earths crust) to the current ice mass which is tiny in comparison! The ice has been there for millions of years and will take at least thousands of years to recede, what are they talking about? Climate change over 100,000 year time scales? I think we can deal with that!
Increased erosion due to rainfall? Yes, but also less erosion due to frost thaw action! Erosion from rainfall is also factor of land use, soil saturation, river channel dimension etc…also wind. Sounds like complete alarmist spin!
JER0ME (08:10:27) : I have tried to post comments here before, but […] and that was deleted. I ask you…
When you post something and it just evaporates (no ‘awaiting moderation’) that is the spam filter. You have some ‘forbidden’ or ‘trigger’ word in your text (maybe even just in a quote; as yours had an F variant… ) or you have ‘too many’ links.
spam is handled in a different screen from regular moderation, so only gets looked at cyclically. Eventually your post will be freed, just give it some time…
I see four posts from JEROME that have made it through on 9/8.
E.M.Smith (12:08:55) :
It is much easier to get a Ph.D. if you are a lemming. ……
Basically, if you can survive formal government run education and still function, you probably have a decent mind and can start getting a decent education on your own.
How true… remembering back to my days in prep school (seriously it was called Wallop), military boarding school (learning to kill from the age of 11) and a myopic welsh comprehensive school (that wanted to teach everything to English speakers in the medium of Welsh)
They always felt like insane asylums run by power crazed raving lunatics… but the real shock came when I studied Political Economy for my degree because I believed universities were a bastion of intelligence and ethics… luckily the first lecture in economics cured me of that false belief…
Unfortunately, the same economic bull is still being promulgated to this day… so I have little hope that science will ever recover it’s integrity… I just hope I am wrong…
“Since the NY Post never was a great newspaper, …”
It was founded by Alexander Hamilton, so it probably was OK back in the day.
Oh gads… now you will all see why I was told to stop asking questions in school…
Rhys Jaggar (08:39:06) : There’s nothing wrong with 98% of what sandal-wearing lefties believe in. Getting rid of nukes – yeah, we all agree with that, as long as everyone else gets rid of them too.
Rhys, I’m going to point out a couple of “issues” with these points; but it isn’t in the form of ‘baiting’ or being cantankerous… it’s an Aspe thing, the need for completeness and precision…
While *I* think getting rid of nukes might be a good idea, it has “issues”.
For one, it grants hegemony to the country with the largest conventional force. Is that what you want? Even if in 20 years that country is China? A “nuke” is an asymmetrical threat. It lets even the little guy say “Don’t even think of crossing that line”. In some very important ways, the threat of nuclear war reduces the risks of conventional wars breaking out. Very few nuclear powers have risked conventional war with nuclear neighbors…
Feeding Africans – yeah, we agree with that too, so long as the food isn’t sold by tinpot dictators and the money deposited in some Swiss bank account whilst the poor folks starve to death.
This ignores the “teach a man to fish” issue.
Flood a poor African country with food, put the farmers out of business. Next year will be a worse famine. Now subsidize those farmers for a year or two, help them build pumped wells and irrigation, teach them modern farming techniques and industrial fertilizer use: THEN you can make them dependent on the western industrialized base, foreign money lenders, foreign exchange, and spare parts… Ooops…
Economics is called “The Dismal Science” for a reason. Food price supports is one of the big issues with lots of hand wringing, but few good answers.
So I must protest that “no, we can not all agree” on that. Nor ought we.
E.M.Smith (13:09:02) :
So I must protest that “no, we can not all agree” on that. Nor ought we.
What can i say… wonderful response.
I for one welcome our armageddon preaching cosmic overlords.
As I see it the more ludicrous these fantasy stories become the more the general public is going to see them for what they are; the increasingly desperate outpourings of a dying cargo-cult movement.
Bring them on I say.
Cheers
Mark
Rhys Jaggar (08:39:06) : Point one: the readership of the Guardian isn’t very large. You’ve got just as many loonies in the US who believe that God’s wrath will descend on earth through just the same mechanisms. None of us think that the rest of you are idiotic enough to believe such drivel. Hopefully you’ll believe the same about us Brits?
You talk funny, drink warm beer, and have no idea what football really is. Of course we doubt your sanity. We don’t doubt our own; we never had any!!!!
ctm, JEROME may have been referring to posts at the guardian.
This Prof. McGuire cannot do maths but he does have three cats called Jetsam, Driftwood, and Dave listed under “Expertise” on his WEB site.
I am sure this makes him highly qualified in:
– geodetic monitoring of active volcanoes
– volcano instability and collapse
– volcanoes and environmental change
– volcanic hazards and their mitigation
– volcanic emergency protocols and procedures
– low frequency-high magnitude geophysical hazards
– climate forcing of geological hazards
– identification and characterisation of megatsunami deposits
– feeding cats
To me this appears to be a clever ploy to relate every natural disaster or natural weather event even if only slightly more than normal to climate change and then blame it on mankind and their generated carbon dioxide and thus justify a new world wide false carbon tax. Since many of the AGW predictions have proven to be wanting, they urgently needed to find predictable events and tie them to global warming to give them more legitimacy.These natural disasters and weather events have their own causes and cycles but the public may not always be sufficiently informed about their true causes and if you tell half truths a thousand times they will remember them and accept them as fact .[ remember the weapons of mass destruction and the false link to Iraq] . That is why it is is important to challenge questionable science in public as it happens. It is more difficult to correct the public’s beliefs after .
“earthquakes, tsunamis, avalanches and volcanic eruptions”
They left out dogs and cats sleeping together.
I guess that will be for another “conference”.
Jeff Alberts (09:59:49) :
“I can nay change the laws of physics, Jim!”
I don’t think Scotty ever called him “Jim”. It was always “Captain”, “Sir”, or later “Admiral”. 😉
OK, you caught me 😉
In the original I think it was
“Cap’n, I can’nay change the laws o’physics!”
The version I posted is a slightly modified form from the song that was bouncing around in my head: “Star Trekkin Across the Universe”:
Lyrics at:
http://www.trekkieguy.com/startrekkin.shtml
A very infectious parody so do not listen to it nor watch in on U-Tube unless you are prepared to be warped and have your trek melded! 😎
Sung to a catchy ditty:
Engine Room, Mr. Scott:
Ye canna change the laws of physics, laws of physics, laws of physics;
ye canna change the laws of physics, laws of physics, Jim.
Ah! We come in peace, shoot to kill, shoot to kill, shoot to kill;
we come in peace, shoot to kill; Scotty beam me up!
So, click at your own peril and be prepared to have your brain folded, spindled, and… trekked upon …
Oh, and the “straight” video without lyrics added:
FWIW, I think the quality of information in much or our modern ‘news’ is lower than that in this video… Satire can carry real truths very effectively.
Once the catastrophic hyperbole is removed, I believe their speculation of a tectonic response to degalciation is valid. Isostatic rebound is well known and is likely responsible for some part of geologic activity. So in a few thousand years, if the sheets substantially melt, we’ll have to worry about increased vulcanism, earthquakes and subaqueous slides in and around Antarctica and maybe Greenland. Warning noted.
Doom and Gloom, Gloom and Doom
Oh … The Pain, the PAIN
One February 1, 2009 Gavin said on RC:
“The impact of climate change on seismic events/volcanoes/tsunamis etc. is not something one needs to worry about – the forces controlling those phenomena are vastly in excess of anything we will be able to do to the Earth’s crust.”
Phew! We are safe…
Jeff Alberts:
“I don’t think Scotty ever called him “Jim”.”
Bones called him “Jim”. Or, Dr. McCoy.
Scottie’s best line, IMHO, “The di-lithium crystals cannae stand th’ strain.”
Another comedian mentioned in the article is Jasper Knight of Exeter University.
http://www.exeter.ac.uk/cornwall/academic_departments/geography/research/staff-and-research-profiles/jasper_knight.shtml
He seems qualified.
So what is he doing putting his name along side the insurance charlatans?
http://www.exeter.ac.uk/cornwall/academic_departments/geography/postgraduate-programmes/CHICKS_studentship.shtml
ESRC CASE funded PhD Studentship University of Exeter Business School.
Thomas J. Arnold. (11:24:06) :
The ESCR isn’t exactly “motley.
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. (BIS) is a UK government department. BIS was formed on 5 June 2009 by merging DIUS and BERR.
http://www.dius.gov.uk/about_us/budget2009
Their total budget is not all that clear but the 203 million the ESCR gets is a fair chunk of 260 million.
So we have a largely government funded organization funding a reinsurance group who’s brief it is to peddle the worse possible junk science to a tabloid news paper.
Jasper Knight of Exeter University has by his statements gone along with the imminent disaster theme of McGuire.
Jasper Knight is a referee for several international journals. So much for peer review.
Thanks for a full box load of ribbing ammo to fire at those dubious ex UC and Oxon geos next time I meet them!
I hope you are not suggesting that there is something “wrong” with ONN. (given the article under debate, from a supposedly “serious” MSM outlet)
Now then, John, “stress and other negative factors seem to disrupt the uniformity, coherence and the magnitude of the human electro-photonic glow measured with bio-electrography”.
I didn’t want to be the one to point it out, but the preceeding is now the political centre ground. You are right-wing. Accept your new position (together with your new found human electro-photonic glow) and wear it with pride.
And finally … every time you go to the Guardian and add a comment (or even a hit) next weeks graph at the “we are [self snip]ed, where do we go from here” meeting proves conclusively that publishing garbage is better than news. AGW D&G Garbage = 10,000,000 hits, earthquake kills 000’s in somewhere we don’t know or go = 20,000 hits. What do the advertisers want? It is a cynical last gasp for much of the MSM.
The only silver lining I can see in this is that much of the MSM will die a long and painful death as we all go elsewhere for “news n views”. Help them out – don’t go there. It is morally wrong to keep them on life support.
and.. as an aside (and really finally) …
I remember a time when Guardian readers cluttered MP’s mail/Guardian news desk phones because of a full page published plan to get milder winters and cooler summers for the UK. The plan went along the lines of detonating truly massive Hydrogen bombs in the Arctic and thereby reducing Earth “wobble”. IIRC there was a large diagram illustrating how the plan would work. Nothing much changes eh?
(BTW it was April 1 1986 IIRC)
For those of you mocking the UK, it may be coming to a cinema near you sooner than you think.
This page is yet another validation of the recent study showing how people trust scientists, but not their conclusions.
John F. Hultquist:
>Cold leads to snow and storage of H2O in glacial ice. Glaciers grind rock into “rock flour” >which is spread about during melt season and blown about during the freeze-up season.
And the rock flour blows into the oceans and provides minerals that aid the growth of algea. This pulls CO2 from the atmosphere and makes things cooler.
Imagine if you lived in Holland at the hight of the Tulip Craze (February 1637) REF: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
And you had invested your life savings in a shed full of Tulips… You would be making all sorts of crazy statements to (1) Justify the purchase, and to (2) sell the tulips onto the next fool.
These climate scientists have invested their professional careers and livelihoods into the notion that man made emissions of CO2 are destroying the planet/civilization/life etc… – and yet the hard data evidence is not playing along.
It’s no wonder that they are making more desperate, and outrageous statements as the “consensus” breaks down around them.
>anomaly
I think a better term would be “residual” as that term is used in statistics.
The approach used makes the implicit claim that the multi-year seasonal average explains all of the variation in the various time series. The amount by whch a value differs from the predicted is called the “residual error” or usually just “residual”.
WestHoustonGeo (02:43:19) :
Global Warming responsible for male-pattern baldness, erectile disfunction, middle age spread, menopausal hot flashes, vericose veins, cellulite, arthritis, near-sighteness, dyslexia, ADHD, restless leg syndrom, the seven year itch and halitosis!
Come on, everyone, join in with your favorite malady caused by global warming
You forgot Boils, Sprains,Broken Legs and Bunions
“Man made emissions of CO2 invite Annihilation by Alien Attack!”
It’s fully described in the recent movie “The day the Earth Stood Still” REF:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0970416/
No Kidding – it’s from Hollywood – it must be TRUE.
“Man Made Emissions of CO2 Accelerate the Force of Gravity – Impending Black Hole Doom!”
“It has been recently reported in “Science” that man made emissions of CO2 are causing the Force of Gravity to become stronger. This new global affect will continue to accelerate in line with CO2 emissions until a tipping point is reached and the Earth implodes into a black hole.”
The studies author, Professor Andy Nuttur, of the Climate Institute of Brussels had this to say when contacted by this reporter.
“The heaviest animals will be more cruelly affected by the growth in gravity as gravity affects heavy objects more than light ones. This means that Polar Bears which often weigh more than 500 kg will not survive. Young polar bears orphaned by the crushing deaths of their parents will slowly starve to death.”
Climate models have been quickly tuned to the new gravity affect and as Climate Modeller Peta Bitte from the prestigious London College of Climate Modelling had this to say.
“This is worse than we thought. This new gravity affect linked to man made emissions of CO2 is accelerating the impacts of Climate Change in new and devastating ways. Our models show that a gravity tipping point will soon be reached, and that our opportunities to do something to stop this catastrophy will not last beyond 2009.”
After contacting our Minister for Climate, Mr Myron Interest, a statement has been issued by the Ministry, as follows.
“It is imperative that an agreement for binding and comprehensive reductions in CO2 emissions is agreed by all parties at the upcoming Copenhagen Conference. The time to act is now. Further delay would be negligent and would border on criminal. I urge all constituents to actively lobby their members of parliament to ensure that the right decisions are made to ensure the future safety of the world and future generations of all life on this fragile and sacred planet.”
/parody
Pete (16:16:15) :
WestHoustonGeo (02:43:19) :
…
Come on, everyone, join in with your favorite malady caused by global warming
You forgot Boils, Sprains,Broken Legs and Bunions
A plague of frogs and fish raining from the sky.
So, eastern Canada and northern USA should be a hotbed of earthquakes because of the isostatic rebound from the last glacial age. Look out! Chicago and NYC, there just may be a volcano brewing just below the surface 😀
This was the highlight of my day. I’m glad someone finally made the Ghostbusters allusion…real Biblical stuff here!
Over at National Review Online, on Planet Gore, one of the guys noted an article that said that lion attacks on humans will go up as a result of global warming. So now we can cue Dorothy chanting, “Lions, tigers and bears, oh my!”
I’m thinking all of this rubbish is nothing more than “mine is bigger than yours” gone hideously out of control… seems that the more outlandish or ridiculous the claim, the bigger the “oo-er”.
Or maybe it’s a cleverly calculated experiment in seeing how far they can go before the MSM actually explodes from the internally generated pressure?
Sigh.
JLKrueger (02:38:46) :
Ever notice how when one of these really insane AGW stories comes up, the warmists seem slow to defend their own? (I guess I mean more insane than usual.) Where’s Flanagan?
REPLY: In Brussels, he’s sprouting alarmism there. 😉
Hmmm. Sprouts or Spouts? (At least you know that I’m paying attention to what you write.)
If he is Brussels it would be sprouts…
Graeme Rodaughan (17:04:35) :
“Man Made Emissions of CO2 Accelerate the Force of Gravity – Impending Black Hole Doom!”
After contacting our Minister for Climate, Mr Myron Interest, a statement has been issued by the Ministry, as follows.
/parody
Not all Myron’s are goofy.
I just found out (Open Passages Expedition) that the Arctic has 2m diameter jellyfish with 35m stinging tentacles. When Global Warming makes it warm enough to swim there, these will “very likely” be a menace!
Best,
Frank
pls (16:08:22) :
>anomaly
I think a better term would be “residual” as that term is used in statistics.
The approach used makes the implicit claim that the multi-year seasonal average explains all of the variation in the various time series. The amount by whch a value differs from the predicted is called the “residual error” or usually just “residual”.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Residuals are differences from a least-squares fit. These anomalies are usually just differences from a baseline value or from a linear trend.
This new gravity effect linked to man made emissions of CO2 is accelerating the impacts of Climate Change in new and devastating ways.
IT’S MUTATING!!! oo
Myron Mesecke (19:41:20) :
Graeme Rodaughan (17:04:35) :
“Man Made Emissions of CO2 Accelerate the Force of Gravity – Impending Black Hole Doom!”
After contacting our Minister for Climate, Mr Myron Interest, a statement has been issued by the Ministry, as follows.
/parody
Not all Myron’s are goofy.
If any offense was given – I apologise. The name “Myron Interest” is meant to imply “My Interest” I.e. a Self Interested Politician…
I suppose that I better watch out for all the Andys and Petas out there…
I thought I’ve heard everything but this takes the cake for the most lunatic scenario extant. They have gone quite mad – and what’s worse, they have political control as well.
This is all in preparation for the Climate Forcing of Geological Hazards Conference.
This is a very prestigious University College London conference with highly competitive scientific papers from all over the world.
This video shows upper class British scientific finalists competing at last years conference
“E.M.Smith (12:08:55) :
Patrick Davis (03:43:15) : And here in Australia, Senator Fielding, the only senator to be bucking the political trend with regards to an ETS, apparently, suffered in his youth and still suffers “learning difficlties”!!!!!”
Good post. I only mentioned this in passing as it appears politicians and the media (No surprise there) appear, at least to me, picking on him for his admission (And possibly on his position on AGW and an ETS) and the fact his son suffers the same or similar condition. I too suffered from dyslexia, still do, and for being told off many times for asking “Why?” too many times at skewl.
When did Chicken Little join the IPCC?
And, yes Virginia, AGW can do anything and everything. No matter what we all know is it’s much worse than we think!
Can AGW cause the Earth to spin out of control and fly into the Sun? As soon as one of the AGW’ers think of it, it will!
Whoa! Skepticism is a good starting position for improbable proposals. I also was initially incredulous. But I want to hear their arguments.
Its the science that should lead. The scientists should be followers. Given volcanic activity at the end of the last ice age…someone should be looking for connections. Myself…I’ll wait before passing judgement..until the future articles are published that discuss earlier ice ages.
EXCLUSIONS: Items that we already regularly include in our discussions of above ground climate change.
Mountain glacier meltwaters have always increased any downstream flooding that occurred during the melt season.
Current warming releasing permafrost methane and underwater methane hydrates.
UK floods leading to erosion. Since wet areas will be getting wetter, and dry areas drier.
INCLUSIONS: What’s new.
Avalanches: “Rock walls resting against glaciers will become unstable as the ice disappears and so set off avalanches.”
Mud flows, from increasing meltwaters.
Methane hydrates: “As the ice around Greenland and Antarctica melted, sediments would pour off land masses and cliffs would crumble, triggering undersea landslides that would break open more hydrate reserves on the sea beds.”
Tsunamis: “…disappearing Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets threaten to let loose underwater landslides triggering tsunamis…” So these aren’t fault plane tsunamis.
Volcanos: “…the disappearance of ice caps will change the pressures acting on the Earth’s crust and set off volcanic eruptions across the globe.”
Earthquakes…would be “triggered” (???) Where are the geologists when we need them?
Sinkholes: Increasing AGW CO2 will increase the acidity (carbonic acid) of rainwater. So there will be more dissolution of limestone, leading to more cave-making…….Actually, this last is my own invention. AGW alarmism isn’t a gift. Its something acquired through regular practice.
Lake Bonneville lost much of it’s water in a prehistoric catastrophic flood when it rose enough to start draining through Red Rock Pass which was dirt not rock. It rapidly cut down to bedrock and drained, I think, into the Snake River in a megaflood. I wonder if the fault scarp in Cottonwood Canyon dates from the lake draining.
Where’s doctor Svalgaard when we need him…
so – when the inevitable ice age returns when this interglacial ends, where does the Guardian get published? What happens to their local readers?
It’s sad, since that will be a true problem to cope with requiring nations to go elseware. I find the location of the Guardian on this planet and this fact somehow comforting in an ironic karmic sort of way.
E.M.Smith (12:08:55) “As did one A. Einstein… kicked out of school…
Nice reality spread, E.M.; thank you.
I believe also that the scientists should be the leaders but who is going to believe these scientists when they make statements like “tsunamis in britain”…. how ridiculous. These “scholarly” women and men must think that they are addressing uneducated halfwits if they believe we believe all these years they have been predicting will be life changing..give us some believable data!!!!…..how much longer will they blame the weather events and slight changes in the climate to catastrophes in the near future when in reality it will occur in hundreds of years???
Gerry:
>Residuals are differences from a least-squares fit. These anomalies are usually just
>differences from a baseline value or from a linear trend.
Not just least squares fit. “Residuals” apply to any model that predicts data values. They are the difference between the predicted value and the actual value.
OK – I’ve calmed down, thanks for the sanity check people. I left the UK 10 years ago and sorry to say there’s no chance of me going back there. But that’s irrelevant.
I do remember my state education learning about evil imperialists, evil white men, evil americans, basic marxist theory, the wonders of the cuban medical system…….you see where i’m going i guess…..then i grew up and read some stuff myself, met some real people…….
I believe Trotsky proposed the capture & use of the education system to further political goals….and check the CVs of the Labour government.
“Roger Knights (13:04:49) :
“Since the NY Post never was a great newspaper, …”
It was founded by Alexander Hamilton, so it probably was OK back in the day.”
Yes, but did Aaron Burr contribute to the Op-Ed page?
Of the 3 NY-papers that can be bought elsewhere in the US it is the most entertaining (especially all the news from the Hamptons). I do not touch the Times, and one does not get the NY Press.
“While analysing seismic activity of the Earth it is not difficult to notice the connection with solar activity. The considered line has essential negative correlation with the line of solar activity. The maximal earthquakes are observed during the minimum of solar activity or during the periods close to a minimum, and, on the contrary, in maxima of solar activity seismicity of the Earth accepts the least values.”
http://www.planetary.brown.edu/m42/m42_67.pdf
Ice melting will change the pressure on the earth. OMG a pound of ice is a pound of water!
Perhaps they needs to spend more time doing something constructive.
mr.artday (21:38:18),
I had considered that, but my feeble memory was telling me that the large quake scar predated the megaflood. We need to consult a teenager who attended summer science this year.
Now, I am wondering if the most recent volcanic activity along the southern boundary of Lake Bonneville could be linked to the megaflood? Since the Great Basin is considered a divergent boundary, rapid changes in surface weight might more readily create earthquakes and vulcanism.
Graeme Rodaughan (19:59:04) :
“If any offense was given – I apologise. The name “Myron Interest” is meant to imply “My Interest” I.e. a Self Interested Politician…”
I didn’t take it that way. There just aren’t that many Myron’s around so I decided to chime in. Besides, growing up when one episode of The Brady Bunch had a white mouse named Myron and then Happy Days where the Fonz baby sat a brat kid named Myron I developed a thick skin over the years. Maybe that thick skin will keep me warm in the coming years.
“from studies of past volcanic activity. These indicate that when ice sheets disappear the number of eruptions increases, said Professor David Pyle, of Oxford University’s earth sciences department.”
Hmm, and all that happened without the help of fossil fuel burning humans. Explain that!
Myron Mesecke (19:00:24) :
No drama.
Cheers G
Oh alright. They’ve got a taker.
One question, though. Just exactly how many ppm CO2 does Congress (on IPCC recommendations) want circulating in the atmosphere in order to save us from “earthquakes, tsunamis, avalanches and volcanic eruptions?” What is the magic number? Name it.
Is it 222?
“carbon dioxide from vehicles, factories and power stations”
Is that all they need? Will that do it for them? Because I also have a refrigerator, house, and kids.
At times like this I prefer to read my horoscope…
First, sit still. Then, breathe deeply. Next, try to think about something other than what you’re currently thinking about. Better still, stop thinking entirely. Switch off your brain. Leave other people to race around like headless chickens, creating a noise and nonsense whilst achieving next to nothing. When they have all run out of steam, you will see a clear way forward.
Phew! Sanity at last…
Okay, you smart asses. It’s almost a month since these scientists talked about it and in the last three days there’ve been major floods (Philippines), earthquakes (Indonesia and Fiji), and tsunamis (America Samoa). Suddenly, this theory isn’t looking so stupid now, is it?