By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
The campaign by certain rent-seeking scientific societies to push a single, narrow view of the climate question continued in Scotland today with a meeting coyly entitled Climate Change: Science and Society at the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland’s once-famous, once-scientific society.
Your correspondent, following a tip-off from “rms”, a WUWT commenter, tootled round from Queen Street and sat through this gag-reflex-tweaking propaganda event.
This was the first meeting at any scientific society at which not only did I hear a member of the audience demand less science but the rest of the audience actually applauded.
We’ll come to that. But I’m not surprised. An eminent Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh suggested to its then president almost ten years ago that I should be asked to address the Society on the climate question so that the Fellows could hear both sides. He was told, in no uncertain terms, that any opinion but that one would be welcome.
Professor David Sugden, FRSE, who chaired today’s event, opened with the usual pietism about climate change being “one of the biggest problems facing humankind”. He was disappointed that climate change had not been mentioned in the recent UK election (actually it had, in UKIP’s manifesto, which promised near-complete desubsidization of the climate nonsense, and UKIP gained more votes than any other party).
Professor Sugden, a smooth, murmuring perpetrator of effortless pietisms akin to the waffling bureaucrat Wither in C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, also said the forthcoming world-government conference in Paris was the world’s “last-chance saloon”. Pass the sick-bucket, Alice! (as my Australian brother is prone to put it).
Professor Gabriele Hegerl, FRSE, an IPCC activist from the [University of Edinburgh], presented a summary of the two-year-old Fifth ASSessment Report. The report was “science based on publications,” she burbled, as her PowerPoint presentation showed a picture of an IPCC scientist very obviously asleep during one of the “working” sessions.
We were not told, of course, that of 11,944 climate-science “publications” in the 21 years 1991-2011 only 41, or 0.3%, had even gone so far as to say most of the global warming since 1950 was manmade. In the IPCC’s ASSessment Report, this 0.3% “science based on publications” became “95% confidence”. Bozhe moi.
Professor Hegerl hoped that this year’s el Nino would be a big one, “beating the world record by how much?” We were not told this would be just in time for Paris, before the countervailing la Nina kicks in.
Next, some cherry-picking. Springtime snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere was declining (we were not told that annual northern-hemisphere snow cover shows no change throughout the satellite era).
Professor Hegerl mentioned Antarctic as well as Arctic sea-ice extent, but said the former had increased only “slightly”. We were not told that the increase in Antarctic sea ice now largely compensates for the loss of Arctic sea ice, and for several months it has been showing its greatest seasonal extent in the satellite era.
We were told that upper ocean temperature had “increased linearly”. We were not told its warming rate is equivalent to 0.23 degrees per [century]. What with the sky not falling and the sea not really rising, whatever shall we do?
We were told that it was “66% likely” that 20th-century warming had made current temperatures the warmest in at least 1400 years. We were not told that that modelling estimate is at variance with just about every peer-reviewed proxy record. Our good friends at CO2science.org have a collection of around 500 papers based on measurements showing that the medieval warm period was real, was global and was at least as warm as the present almost everywhere, and in some places warmer by up to 3 degrees.
We were told the ocean was “acidifying”. We were not told by how much. Not surprising, really, because no global measurement has ever been taken. All we have are a few transects and one or two local records. We were not told that the ocean was actually acid 55 million years ago, and yet the calcite corals that evolved 550 million years ago and the aragonites that first achieved algal symbiosis 175 million years ago somehow survived, and here we all are.
Professor Hegerl said observed temperatures had exceeded predictions in the 1990s. She heard me growling at this and reiterated it. However, the warming from January 1990 to December 1999, even on the average of the three much-adjusted and exaggerated surface temperature datasets, was 0.22 degrees, compared with the IPCC’s prediction of 0.28 degrees per decade over the medium term in its 1990 First ASSessment Report.
However, Professor Hegerl admitted that the Pause had not been predicted.
We were told that more water in the atmosphere because of global warming would lead to more rainfall. We were not told that not all records show this; nor were we told that the linear trend on the Met Office rainfall record, the longest in the world, shows an increase in rainfall of just 2 inches a year compared with almost a quarter of a millennium ago.
Professor Hegerl expressed considerable interest in what she said was a new finding of the IPCC: that there was a linear relationship between cumulative CO2 emissions and global temperature change. We were not told that in the last 18 years 5 months that “linear relationship” had broken down, with CO2 emissions and concentration continuing to rise at rates not seen in more than 800,000 years, and yet global temperatures showing no change at all over the period.
Besides, the CO2 forcing function is not linear but logarithmic. A possible mistake somewhere, one felt.
I asked Professor Hegerl about the now embarrassingly large discrepancy between the IPCC’s medium-term interval of temperature predictions made in 1990 and the observed outturn in the subsequent quarter of a century, which was only half the IPCC’s central estimate. The IPCC had accordingly halved its predicted interval of medium-term warming from [0.2, 0.4] degrees per decade in 1990 to [0.1, 0.2] degrees per decade in 2013. Outturn since 1979, on all measures, had been closer to 0.1 than 0.2 degrees per decade.
The satellite datasets had shown no warming for 18 years 4 months (UAH) or 18 years 5 months (RSS), and the ocean, perhaps the best indicator of the underlying warming rate, had been warming at a rate equivalent to less than a quarter of a degree per [century] across the entire 11-year run of bathythermograph data.
The Professor winced. There is no doubt about it: the pause is getting to them. She began her answer by saying that the IPCC had made no medium-term predictions in 1990: only predictions to 2100. I quickly interjected that it had predicted 1 degree of warming to 2025 and 1.8 degrees to 2030, against an outturn to date of not much more than a third of a degree in a quarter of a century.
Professor Sugden interrupted to tell me to let Professor Hegerl answer the question, but by then I’d made my point. Professor Hegerl, flustered at having been caught out on the content of the IPCC reports, speculated on some of the possible causes of what she called the “anomalously low warming” over the past decade or two. We were not told that anomalously high warming predictions might be a large part of the problem.
She mentioned relatively active volcanism. We were not told that since Pinatubo there has been no eruption of global significance. Less implausibly, she referred to the slowdown in solar activity: yet the IPCC has attributed so little forcing to solar changes that that pretext, too, fell short.
Next, she said that Professor Richard Lindzen’s negative feedback had not been observed and that, therefore, the very least we could expect from a doubling of CO2 concentration was 1.5 degrees’ warming. “The present slowdown in warming does not affect the prediction at all.” No, it doesn’t, and that, precisely is the problem: full steam ahead and damn the factedoes. We weren’t told, for instance, that Professor Lindzen’s negative feedback was actually derived from observation.
She concluded that the present el Nino would put warming back on track. We were not told that (alas, after the Paris pifflefest) the subsequent la Nina may well put the pause back on track.
A member of the audience, in that hectoring, bossy whine that is the hallmark of the climate campaigner everywhere, interjected that we shouldn’t be discussing “trivial quibbles about science” at all. All this talk of tenths of a degree was irrelevant.
The audience of “scientists” applauded rapturously. Actually, Miss, those tenths of a degree are relevant, because the warming to date is indeed only in tenths of a degree, and considerably fewer tenths than had been predicted.
While the next speaker was getting his act together, I had a look at the attendance register to find out why the audience had so ecstatically applauded the climate campaigner who had suggested that a scientific society should not concern itself with science.
As I had suspected, about three-quarters of the 70 people present were there either because they were on the taxpayer’s dime as academics, bureaucrats or students or because they were climate campaigners.
Even the members of what was once a distinguished scientific society no longer seemed to care about science. They seemed to care about money. As long as panicky governments were handing the stuff out by the barrow-load, they would pay not the slightest attention to the abyss now set between prediction and outturn.
Next, Professor Stuart Haszeldine, OBE, FRSE, said we were emitting “carbon” into the atmosphere “and there isn’t enough space”. Actually, we’re emitting carbon dioxide and there’s plenty of space, but people who live in towns seldom see the stars, so they don’t know how big space is.
However, he made an excellent and well balanced case for CO2 capture and storage: it was geologically safe, he said, but there was an energy penalty of 25%, though he hoped that might one day fall to 10% or even to 2-3% (dream on). He also hoped that the gas-fired plant at Peterhead on the north-east neuk of Buchan would shortly become the first gas-powered generation set in the world to be converted to CO2 capture and storage. We were not told that fracking is scarcely less safe than CO2 capture and storage.
He said that once the CO2 had been extracted chemically from the flue-gases and then sent through a compressor, it could be pumped out to sea using an existing pipeline and could be sequestered in the now-disused Goldeneye gas field under the North Sea. A similar retrofit at the Grangemouth refinery could send CO2 through another existing pipeline and out to the North Sea.
Next, Professor Mark Rounsevell, a specialist in modeling atmospheric chemistry at Edinburgh University, asked “So what? Should we adapt or mitigate?” He was willing to concede that the case for CO2 harming agricultural yields had not been made. Though crop yields were no longer increasing as much as they had done in previous decades, they had not dropped despite a very large reduction in the use of nitrogen fertilizers.
Dr Andy Kerr, an adviser to the Scottish executive, said that modeling of regional impacts for the UK had produced contradictory results. Earlier results had said it would be a bit wetter, later results had said the opposite. New scenarios were working on the basis of a warming of 4-5 degrees this century. We were not told that this would represent up to 20 times the underlying ocean warming rate of the past 11 years.
His sensible take-home message was that one should not start by worrying about climate change. Instead, one should be resilient to whatever might happen.
That was a cue for my question: the Cockenzie coal-fired plant (above) had been needlessly closed; the same was now to happen at Longannet; Scotland’s two nuclear plants were also due to be taken out of service; no replacement base-load power would be built; d*mnfool windmills were intermittent, costly and environmentally destructive, and were failing far sooner than their design lifetimes; and how was the Scottish executive going to keep the lights on?
That turned out to be the right question. Dr Kerr said the lights could well go out this winter because EU regulation was closing coal-fired plants all over England too, so that the entire UK grid would become acutely vulnerable. He was a fan of windmills but recognized that they were expensive and did not work when the wind was not blowing (we were not told that that is most of the time).
After the mandatory break for bad coffee and good shortbread with the Scottish saltire carefully baked into the crust in a politically correct fashion, Professor Ottmar Edenhofer of the Potsdam Institute (them again) said that CO2 emissions growth was accelerating, and admitted that the 2-degree global-warming limit had nothing to support it either in physics or in economics: it was political.
Professor Edenhofer said energy intensity per unit of GDP was improving, but was more than offset by population and GDP growth. Coal was undergoing a renaissance, notwithstanding attempts in Europe and North America to shut it down, and the renaissance was not attributable solely to China and India. We were not told it’s nearly all attributable to China alone, nor that Mr Obama has unilaterally exempted China from any obligations to the world government he hopes to establish in Paris this December.
The “precautionary principle” required us to decarbonize quickly. We were not told that the “precautionary principle” is neither precautionary nor a principle: it is an expedient deployed to divert attention from the economic reality – which even the IPCC admits in its 2013 report – that mitigation today is costlier than adaptation even to absurdly over-predicted warming the day after tomorrow.
In Professor Edenhofer’s view, the fastest road to decarbonisation was the introduction of a CO2 tax or of emissions trading. We were not told that both are in force in Europe and have been a failure.
He said, “Climate policy has a current cost, but may benefit future generations: the question of intergenerational justice is important.” He estimated that, on business as usual, there would be a warming of 4 degrees this century. I asked him whether it was realistic for him to expect a 17-fold increase in the underlying ocean warming rate compared with what had been measured over the past 11 years.
I added that [in the city that gave the world the first member of his profession – Adam Smith (below), the first economist, a free-marketeer and, along with Benjamin Franklin, a founding member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh] it was depressing to be told that the answer to what increasingly appeared to be a non-problem was a gargantuan regime of totalitarian interference in the working of the free market in energy supply.
Taxing or pricing CO2, I said, was a poll tax on the poor.
Dr Edenhofer angrily replied that he accepted “the science” [but not the science that shows very nearly all the models to have exaggerated the warming trend].
He considered there was nothing totalitarian about government setting market prices (I kid you not). Prices, he said, must reflect society’s most important scarcities. But that is what the free market does, all by itself.
His objective, he said in an unctuous tone, was “caring for the atmosphere and rescuing the free-market economy”.
The audience of totalitarians, their wobbly bottoms planted on the Consolidated Fund just as firmly as steatopygy allowed, loved this confirmation of their opinion that global warming is what Lord Stern described in his now-discredited report on climate economics as “a market failure”. Dr Edenhofer’s comment got the biggest applause of the day.
Finally, Angus Gillespie of Shell said the oil corporation was investing billions in CO2 capture and storage. Shell, he said, accepted that climate change was underway and that fossil fuels were playing a role [can I have another grant now I’ve said that?].
Shell wanted a price on CO2, because it was changing from being an oil and gas corporation to being a gas and oil corporation. Gas had half of coal’s emissions per TWh of energy generated, so a CO2 price would make coal uncompetitive and increase Shell’s market share.
Shell was investing in CO2 capture and storage because it had concluded that 7 billion tons of CO2 would have to be sequestered every year to keep within the 2-degree global-warming limit. The cost of the technology was currently $125 per tonne captured, of which $100 was the cost of the capture itself. Costly though the technology was, Shell reckoned that any other method would be 40% costlier still. They estimated that the deadweight cost or energy penalty in driving the capture, compression, transport, injection and storage was 10-20% (the industry reckons more like 25-40% at present).
I asked Mr Gillespie whether, in view of the now embarrassingly large and ever-growing disconnect between the exaggerated predictions of the “settled-science” models and the inconvenient, real-world measurements, Shell had any strategy for disentangling itself from the CO2-as-demon matrix.
The question caught him by surprise. He said that although Shell maintained its portfolio of energy-producing reserves and other assets as flexibly as possible, the corporation had no strategy for handling the situation if real-world temperatures continued to demonstrate that the models were wrong.
A climate campaigner at the back of the room – another whining, bossy voice, male this time – asked for Mr Gillespie’s reaction to the campaign to persuade people to sell their investments in fossil-fuel corporations.
Mr Gillespie responded, bluntly, that divestment made no difference to the share price. Shareholders took a relatively short-term view of the value of Shell’s assets – typically ten or eleven years – so the divestment campaign would have no impact at all.
Then, in a final dig at the skeptics, he said, “Some of the debate has become a distraction.”
So let me make a prediction (that’s what They do). As global temperatures resume their rise, but do so at a rate very far below prediction, the debate will continue, whether the Royal Society of Edinburgh or Royal Dutch Shell like it or not.
As the hall emptied, Dr Edenhofer passed by. I said I hoped he’d find his way back to the free market in time. He said the Potsdam institute was committed to the free market. “Communists, the lot of you,” I said, with a warm smile to reassure him that I was not intending an insult.
Professor Haszledine came past at that moment and said, “And what’s wrong with Communism?” Sadly, he meant it. The only thing we learn from history …
On the way out, I asked Professor Sugden whether there had ever been a climate-skeptical speaker at a Royal Society event. He said there had been several interjections by skeptics over the years. I pressed him, asking whether the Society had ever invited a skeptic to speak from the podium. “No,” he said.
That says it all. Can’t have scientific quibbles about tenths of a degree, can we? Not when our fat subsidies might be cut off once governments work out they’ve been had.
Though some of the speakers made sensible points, neither speakers nor audience seemed aware of most of the central scientific facts in the climate debate. They knew the Party Line, but that was all. One or two had heard of the pause, but none had realized how wide the discrepancy between models’ predictions and real-world outturn had become.
And where they knew the facts, they presented only one side of the picture. This was a propaganda event, pure and simple. It had nothing to do with science except the name of the once-illustrious society in whose premises the meeting was held.
After the meeting Professor Hegerl told me it was simply not true that the rate of warming since 1990 was half of what the IPCC had then predicted. The current temperature outturn, she said, was consistent with the models’ predictions.
She knew, of course, that there was no penalty in making such an entirely incorrect and insupportable assertion: for the mainstream media can now be relied upon not to ask any of the right questions. The good news, though, is that they did not bother to attend. It is slowly dawning on them that this particular horse is dead.
I came away saddened. It is not just the terrible destruction of the Scottish landscape wrought by the 600-ft windmills that can be seen from two-thirds of it. It is not just the extinction of the ospreys and golden eagles and pipistrelles and countless other species of birds and bats smashed out of the sky by the grim, new triffids of totalitarianism.
As one of Scotland’s most successful civil engineers and I agreed over ersatz coffee and politically-correct biscuits, it is the loss of the use of reason herself by the only known species that possesses it that is the heaviest loss.
How will science recover, if the very bastions of science, however elegant their premises, are infested with intellectual pygmies who no longer care to hunt for the objective truth that is – or, rather, was – the end and object as much of science as it is of religion?
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Lord M. How do you ever walk with cohonas that big? BRAVO!
That Edinburgh puts up with this is telling … It was the foundation of the Scottish Enlightenment that saved and then expanded England’s civilization and knowledge and research between 1500 and the 1910’s
Indeed. I thought, looking at the photo of the dining hall, “If only those portraits could talk… .”
Most historians would restrict the Scottish Enlightenment to the 18th and 19th centuries, but some have argued that the educational system in the Lowlands established in the 16th and 17th centuries contributed to this later intellectual flowering.
Even a scientist as late as James Clerk Maxwell (1831-79) could be considered a Scottish Enlightenment figure, although most historians would end the period early in the 19th century. “Father of Modern Geology” James Hutton died in 1797, but Darwin’s mentor Robert Edmond Grant survived a mostly penurious and outcast existence of 81 years until 1874.
It is indeed a sign of how mightily Scotland has fallen that such totalitarian trash could be peddled where Adam Smith once preached freedom. The crash in price of Brent crude ironically makes Scotland even more dependent upon England, just as the communist SNP swept into the UK Parliament.
And then Americans took over, with NOAA leading the charge currently. They even predicted the pause, but were and are not yet aware of it, and the most likely they wouldn’t want to know.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/MTC.htm
Vuk,
I’d say that the best science in the first half of the 20th century was practiced in England and Germany, despite Polish-French Curie. The US IMO didn’t take over until after WWII.
It was. These days Scotland is a banana republic of non-science.
vuk’ says: http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/MTC.htm
Interesting stuff. It appears to me, from the central bump, that your dipole data is over-scaled by about a factor of two and that, to be objective, the CO2 data probably has about the same degree of correlation.
Post 1998 drop in dipole is stronger than what is seen surface temps.
Since most skeptics, including out host, declare that they accept that there is probalby *some* AGW effect, I would suggest that a 50/50 mix of your lagged dipole and CO2 would produce a much better fit to HadCRUT4.
Of course there are many sets of data, from almost any source, that could roughly fit in that way, if we ignore the detail.
Interesting though.
Hi Mike
Thanks for the comment.
Two points:
– The idea was not to accurately reproduce the CruTem4 temperature curve from any particular driver but to articulate existence of a natural process with a similar variability.
– The geomagnetic force could be either a proxy for another natural force or a partial driver.
a) Stronger secular changes in the geomagnetic field usually are associated with changes at the mantle-liquid core boundary. These processes could be also drivers of tectonic movements, which in turn may have an effect on the ocean currents circulation and global heat distribution (equatorial to pole-ward direction).
See graph “C”
b) Long term data shows that the in the North Hemisphere all the warming is due to milder winters rather than hotter summers. There are some indications that the catalyst for the polar vortex splitting (associated with the SSW in the winter months) is the bifurcation of the Earth’s magnetic field in the N. Hemisphere. For further clarification of this see: http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/NH.htm
In my graph, you commented on the magnetic field is shown with inverse scale, weakening of the field is associated with rise in temperatures and vice versa.
And finally:
Even with curves as they are the CO2 correlation is somewhat higher at R2 = 0.82 than the one with the dipole as quoted at R2 = 0.806 (is it reality or due to the data re-adjustments I have no idea)
“Cojones”
Lord Monckton prefers Catalan to Castilian, so how about “collons”?
Another great expose by the Great [Monckton]. These alarmists provide purposeful deception, which translates to Lies.
They did concede, albeit naively, a great deal of ground. The stress is showing no matter how furiously they clap on certain slogans.
Thank you, Monckton, for participating in the event and reporting. I enjoyed the narrative.
It never ceases to fascinate me when I read these “green zealot, CAGW” people say “I hope this year’s el nino is the biggest ever,” as they wish to show rising temperatures, and not even have it sink in that they are saying “natural variability is driving the climate.” If it wasn’t, then the el nino wouldn’t matter.
Tom O: You’re so right. I was dying for Chris Monckton to ask Professor Hegerl if she was really praying is aid natural variability – if she wanted an El Nino to support her CAGW wet dreams.
(Note: My spell-checker initially suggested El Nono – which is ironic if one considers that a) it’s a natural event, and b) it could turn out to be a complete no-no. El Nono: I like it!)
El Nono? The ninth of what? A new symphony?
Obviously CO2 must drive El Ninos too.
@Brian H
CO2 must drive which El Niños? The ones that have failed to deliver as the models predicted or the ones that are claimed should/could/might occur in some hypothetical future?
I thought CO2 caused people to drive Teslas?
This wishing for warming thing just shows how perverse their mentality has become. They claim to be concerned about dangerous effects of global warming and its impact on future generations, yet they are hoping and praying for it to happen.
Their worst nightmare is that there is minimal warming that is not a danger to future generations.
It is amazing how adverse people are to discussing all the measured data surrounding Earth’s climate. Otherwise intelligent and well educated people have been brainwashed or bullied into a place where they dare not engage in a full and robust discussion on climate. Perhaps these people are terribly afraid of rejection by the climate catastrophe community and suffer from low self esteem. Their fear of rejection by the community is stronger than their love of science and the pursuit of knowledge.
“Averse”, not “adverse”
+1
Great write up. It started making sense to me a while ago when I attended the annual dinner of the Nuclear Institute in the North West of England – invited with my wife who is in the industry. I had a pleasant conversation with the chap sat next to me whom I had never met before. He clearly understood the great scam going on as well or better than I did and for once I was feeling encouraged to find someone in real life of a similar opinion. I normally find that most people are actively disinterested with only a small minority openly hostile to opening a “settled debate”. Then the president then got up to give his address and made a statement something along the lines of “We look forward to working with the new government to play our part in managing climate change”. Of course, it doesn’t matter whether you believe it or not, what matters is whether saying you believe it will further your own cause. Logic and reason do not play a part any longer and it is depressing to think how long all these idiotic situation will take to unwind, though unwind it inevitably will.
Managing the climate? They might as well practice rain-dancing for all the influence they’ll have.
Wolsten, as a professional commercial translator, I am faced on an almost daily basis with texts that twitter endlessly about sustainability and corporate social responsibility. It has become such a mind-numbingly tedious and depressing exercise to me that I have resigned and intend to do something completely different. I have always where possible spun, in a subtle way, the baseless prognostications I’ve encountered to ameliorate the hogwash, but you can only get away with so much, err, ‘content adjustment’ as a translator.
One of the key economic pathogens that led to the 2008 financial crisis was the interconnectedness of the financial system, what with repackaged subprime debt finding its way through re-re-re-securitisation into every little nook and cranny of the financial system.
What we face now is a subprime crisis of another kind, and on an even greater scale – subprime science and policy. Worryingly, this time the cancer that is now metastasising rapidly throughout the entire global commercial system is even less quantifiable than the subprime debt was. Every single company I translate for is investing a vast amount of energy and resources into toeing the envirocommunist party line. Even companies that on the face of it have absolutely no relation whatsoever to the subject at hand are kowtowing, and are now bleating the self-same drivel on their websites, in their marketing material and of course in their annual reports. Apparently most shareholders and investors are also blindly trusting in the universal church of save-gaia, curtail-growth – the sectarian earth-good, capital-bad religious cult.
That’s what we’re up against – an almost universal case of the Emporer’s new clothes. If it were just a load of hot air and words, the damage would be limited and the inevitable losses easily written off. The system would clear quickly – unwind, as you put it. But it’s not just words. Through engagement – a word straight out of Orwell’s lexicon – activist shareholders/investors with hundreds of millions of dollars of assets under management are essentially blackmailing companies across the globe into playing this ridiculous and costly game. That’s hundreds of millions of dollars in pension-fund capital, by the way. Your pension. My pension. My parent’s pension. Your children’s future, to use an oft-repeated heart-tug so beloved of the scaremongers…
This insane narrative has embedded itself so deeply into global commercial consciousness, that the wealth of millions of pension-holders and investors worldwide is now at risk as it plays out. And this is in addition to the economic and financial risk of contagion inherent in investing in the bonds of bankrupt governments and banks, considered by so much (pension-fund) capital as a safe haven.
There’s a lot of talk about global government in the run-up to Paris, but my message is this: we already have a de facto global government. It’s there in praxis, infesting every little area of our lives in ways and iterations the man in the street is barely able to percieve. Junkets like Paris are really all about rubber-stamping a structure that already exists. It has been created by stealth and ‘regulatory ratcheting’ but does not yet exist fully in juris. All we need is a black swan event to give the control freaks the crisis du jour they’re looking for, and hey presto, all of a sudden before our very eyes appears, as if from nowhere, the wet dream of busybody bedwetters everywhere – global government! And if one were to look for a black swan, one might like to start looking in the tributaries of the great river of capital that flows through pension funds across this planet.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you…
Jan, good luck with the new career and thanks for the warning.
A conclave of Piltsown men.
Welcome to the new Socialist Republic of Scotland. They all know, deep down, that all this pseudoscience they tout is pure horsesh*t and, when you look them straight in the eye, they know you know and that really hurts them. They know that in the end, you won’t be the one behind bars. Well, perhaps the ones that sell fine single malt scotch whiskey, but not reinforced steel ones they will reside behind.
Pedant’s point:
There’s no ‘e’ in whisky in Scotland, unless it’s on the label of something imported.
On Topic:
There are still places where a well lubricated and honest discussion can take place, the Bow Bar on Victoria Street, a mere half mile or so from from the RSE, is one. There’s a huge variety of the water of life on sale there, plus some terrific beer to wash it down. I fear that the PC piety of the current members of the RSE would deter them from enjoying such pleasures, at least not if someone with no fear and an argument to make were present.
Well done and well said.
Look for fingers in the pie. Money changing hands.
That is where the real story is to be told.
Worst of all is that it’s OPM that’s changing hands.
She concluded that the present el Nino would put warming back on track. ….
In order to be back on track….temperatures would have to jump up 1 degree over night
….does she listen to what she’s saying?
Amazing, isn’t it? They don’t even TRY to hide their hustling. Such remarks are proof either of:
1. Insanity
or
2. A conscious attempt to deceive (Planned Hustle: “Whew! It’s WARMER, folks! And CO2 must have done it.”)
yep…every little bump up is “back on track”
…and every stop is just a “pause”
lol, Latitude, that created a funny little picture (not a parallel to what you said, just tangentially related, heh) in my mind of an old jalopy full of Enviroprofiteers, bumping and lurching along in the wilderness:
{BUMP!} “Whoa, boys and girls! Goody! We’re back on track!”… a little later…. {KERBLAM — STOPPED!!}… “Uh…. hm. … just a minute while I get out and take a look at that rear axle… .”
What a bunch of CLOWNS!
3. Ideological blinders: They can’t abide the idea that their cause celebre might be ill-founded. That’s why they are jumping on the totally factitious claim that “2014 was the warmest year ever!” As long as they can say, by hook or by crook, that “climate change is real” (i.e. it’s getting warmer), the Cause is safe, and their lives have meaning. The Cause is not about causation; it has nothing to do with science; it’s about Doing Good.
/Mr Lynn
I was recently told by a “scientist” who works at a US govt lab that since CO2science is run by a blogger and that since none of the papers listed had been published in one of the “major” journals, that CO2science was not a site worth visiting.
This same guy also proclaimed that since skepticalscience was run by a “real” scientist, that it was the go to spot for info on global warming.
SkS, appropriately enough, is run by a cartoonist who enjoys dressing up as a N*zi. You just can’t make this stuff up.
CO2science is run by a scientist and son of a scientist, Craig Idso, who is also one of the key authors of the Non-Intergovernmental Panel on CLimate Change. He knows what he is talking about. And the journals he cites in his list include Science, Nature, Climatic Change, Journal of Climate, International Journal of Climatology, Geophysical Research Letters, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, etc., etc.
I dived into the list and made a random selection of journal titles. Most of them are very well known and leading scientific journals with high impact factors. Inevitably a few are highly specialist journals dealing with regional climates – for that is what is being discussed when we look for proxy evidence of temperatures in the medieval warm period. The list of just some of the journals is below.
Physics Today, Climatic Change, Ecologival Modelling, Geophysical Research Letters, Climate Research, Quaternary Science Reviews, Science, Jounral of Geophysical Research, Quaternary Research, Science in China, Geografiska Annaler, Climate of the Past, Nature, Energy & Environment, Journal of Climate, The Holocene, Marine Micropaleontology, Polar Researc, Progress in Oceanography, Arctic, Polar Geography, Annals of Glaciology, EOS (Transactions of the American Geophysical Union), International Journal of Climatology, Polaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology and Palaeoecology, Quaternary International, Journal of Hydrology, Journal of Quaternary Science, Weather, Danish Journal of Geography, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, Journal of Paleolimnology, Marine Geology, Boreas, Ecology, Journal of Arid Environments, Human and Ecological Risk Assessment, Geology, Water Resources Research, Atmospheric Environment, Canadian Journal of Forest Research, Arctic and Alpine Research, etc., etc.
interesting articles at CO2science. One deals with the effects of sea life on CO2.
Some Sea Life Does Not Adapt to OA; It Makes OA Adapt to Them
Generally, aquatic animals excrete mostly ammonia. Ammonia neutralizes CO2 in water.
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V18/may/a25.php
apparently science is only now catching up to nature. nature perfected carbon capture a long time ago.
Carbon Dioxide Capture using Aqueous Ammonia
http://www.che.cemr.wvu.edu/publications/projects/large_proj/carbon%20dioxide%20capture.pdf
I am a great fan of yours, my lord, but why do you so try the patience of your supporters with statements like “UKIP gained more votes than any other party”?
You may well have been engaging in semantics and that your meaning was that UKIP had increased the number of votes cast for it more than any other party did but, even if that was your meaning, that is not the way that reasonable people will interpret that statement.
Sticking your neck out is to be applauded but at the same time handing your opponents a sharp instrument with which to attack you is not really clever!
It didn’t occur to me to interpret Lord Monckton’s statement any other way than that UKIP showed the biggest percentage gain, despite winning only one seat and its leader losing his.
newminster – not new minister, I note,
Sturgis old friend,
UKIP received about 4 million votes, but, as noted, only 1 (one) MP.
So the Ukippers had far and away the most votes – per elected MP.
Tories some 11 million, Labour about 9 million.
The Scot-Nats [who, despite the comment above are more Marxist than Communist, through a London Lens, anyway] gained over 50 seats, with about1.6 million votes. One MP per thirty-some thousand votes [albeit concentrated exclusively in Scotland].
The UK rejected (a form of) proportional representation in a referendum during the last parliament, required by the Dem-Libs, as part of the Coalition negotiation.
Having gained – but lost – the referendum, the Lib-Democrats reneged on the deal to push through boundary change (for UK constituencies), so democracy has no representation amongst the Dim Lebs.
‘It’s my ball, and I’m not playing.
Their vote did collapse.
Auto – no admirer of Cameron, described as a ‘Tory’.
But several streets less bad that all or any of the alternatives.
No ringing endorsement, please note . . . .
Apparently, if you run a blog that disagrees with the “consensus”, then you are a blogger, regardless of how many degrees you have earned.
On the other hand, even a cartoonist who runs a blog that supports the consensus is immediately promoted to “scientist”.
Auto Amigo,
Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto and foretold the coming of Communism, due to the internal contradictions of Capitalism, so IMO Marxist v. Communist is a distinction without a difference. Happily, Communism was undone by its internal contradictions, but now idiotically many deluded fools in the West want to bring it back.
Dr Andy Kerr,
That is sensible. I’ve not heard of him before but he sounds like a Warmist who loves the feel of wind on metal tower-blades. But that is sensible.
He shows that not everyone we disagree with is daft. Scotland may not be doomed after all.
I loved the “We were not told…” theme. It is to be repeated at every opportunity.
For that illustrates how the Warmists operate. Tell not lies (ok, a few), not even half-truths, but vapid qualitative statements that are not false, while carefully avoiding the quantitative statements that would falsify their views or make irrelevant.
I suppose it is a good sign that only 70 were there.
Yesterday within our lair,
We spied a trend which wasn’t there.
It wasn’t there again today,
We wish, we wish that trend would stay.
With apologies to William Hughes Mearns
You could’ve left the opening alone:
Yesterday upon the stair
I met a trend that wasn’t there.
It wasn’t there again today,
I wish, I wish that trend would stay.
It’s perversely hypocritical of the warmists to decry all the disasters that warming would cause and yet hope for warming to vindicate them rather than be relieved it’s not happening and doing the predicted damage. It’s deliciously ironic that warming will do more good than harm if it does occur.
The corruption of science by Government money and the corruption of “scientists” without any morals, has gone far and wide. It’s a bit like FIFA, or the UN or the EU or…..
PB
A l-o-o-o-n-g list you’re building.
Comintern, British Bankers’ Union [And I guess an American (or European) equivalent]; cricket’s recent sell-out to England, Australia and India; Cycling’s ICU perhaps, even Rafael Nadal asking for particular umpires to be scheduled away from his matches . . . . . . .
Never mind local ‘democracy’, in many countries, where pals of the Planning Committee [or Council] Leader get – ahh, I suggest ahhhhh – rather good outcomes. Shall we say . . . !
It’s al around you.
Auto,
Rather hoping that local planning here isn’t too bad.
I want to build a seven mile high tower in my back garden, which will incorporate the new – twelve runway – London super-airport, a major spaceport for London, several abattoirs, about five toxic waste incinerators; eighteen thousand [ish] luxury apartments, from studios (bedsits) to seven-bedroom units; a sky-high sewage farm; and parking for several hundred thousand cars. I suspect that my local socialist council will impose a planning gain penalty of – about – seventeen thousand windmills.
Mods – /SARC. Seriously SARC. So badly SARC . . . .
Guess what? I don’t even love windmills. That’s Not Sarc.
Ideologues view inconsistency as a virtue. When your premises are inconsistent, you can argue for any point you want and your argument will be valid. It will not be sound, of course, because the premises are false.
It is truly sad to see scientific discourse fall to the level of political discourse. It is a symptom of the fact that the ideologues have no truths which support their position. For lack of truths, all they can do is attempt to push skeptics out of the discourse.
Thanks, Christopher, for a very entertaining and enlightening report from Edinburgh. Give my regards to the statue of David Hume. It must be very lonely.
Offered without comment:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_patches_in_Scotland
My wife and I were on a Lindblad/National Geographic Antarctic expedition last year, in the company of James Balog of “Chasing Ice” fame and a retired NASA scientist with two decades of working on Antarctic glaciers. It was remarkable that neither was open to information about earlier Holocene warming periods, earlier periods of glacier retreat, the pause, and my pet project, the slowdown and even drop in sea level (sea level on the west coast of North America has fallen since 1997). Blog was dismissive that the Jakobshavn glacier of Greenland he videoed for “Chasing Ice” had retreated more before 1900 than after, and only recently had begun retreat again. The NASA scientist dismissed the 60-mile retreat of glaciers in Glacier Bay, Alaska, from 1790 to 1900, compared to the 6-mile retreat since 1900. “It’s different now,” he said, without explaining what was different. I suspect that some of the money that we and fellow passengers paid was used by Lindblad/National Geographic to sponsor Mr. Balog and his assistants as they planted time-lapse cameras at the termini of several West Antarctic peninsula and South Georgia Island glaciers. They were not interested when I pointed out that a British expedition reported that the Pine Island glacier had retreated as much or more 6,000 years ago as now. Selective science is not science.
sea level on the west coast of North America has fallen since 1997
===
Mike file this paper away ….
Majority of tide gauges show no sea level rise at all.
http://pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il/~msdfels/wpapers/Tide%20gauge%20location.pdf
Patience, the coming years will be crucial. What will happen when it really become colder, I look forward to the explanation of the greenies
Not to worry, any “cooling” will be adjusted to show warming. Ice and snow? Nah, just your imagination.
Any cooling will be because of warming, just as was predicted, but of course also unprecedented.
Ice and snow will, of course, be evidence of ‘white heat’…
It’ll just be adjusted out:
“Global Warming is real and is definitely caused by human-produced carbon . . . pencil lead, that is.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/02/15/theory-on-the-pause-climate-science-has-exhausted-adjustment-rationales/
Clearly, the response will be to seek more research grants to deal with the man made global warming caused global cooling.
The Enviro-fanaticism is a world-wide plague which needs to be removed with a huge dose of governmental common sense and placing the well being of people in all countries first. GW is a flat-out lie.
damn, i wished i had known that was taking place . it would have been fun to attend ,though i doubt i would have lasted the course. well done for ruffling some feathers,it is good to now they were only preaching to the converted ,no one else listens to their nonsense anymore.
The CAGW god works in mysterious (but well funded) ways…
The next challenge is to refute the nonsense being promulgated by the IMF and gleefully reported by the Guardian regarding “subsidy” of fossil fuels.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/18/fossil-fuel-companies-getting-10m-a-minute-in-subsidies-says-imf
That is the view of Lord Stern not the IMF.
The Guardian headline is in error. Strangely, they haven’t got around to correcting it yet despite the comments pointing this out.
.
Following the link from the Guardian to the paper gets:
The increase in the galactic radiation (weak solar cycle), results in increased air ionization and increased precipitation. This, in turn, causes a decrease of water vapor and the temperature in the upper troposphere. The strongest ionization zone of the ozone occurs at about 20 km and causes changes in ozone (in the region of the magnetic poles) and the inhibition of winter polar vortex.
This reduces the wind speed over the oceans (and thus the amount of water vapor).
http://oi57.tinypic.com/so38go.jpg
Oh noes…There is an Ozone Hole forming over the Himalayas
Royal {Big Wind} Society of Edinburgh
“I had a look at the attendance register to find out why the audience had so ecstatically applauded the climate campaigner … .”
{Answer, in short: Big Wind (and its Subsidiaries, such as Tiny Solar)}
Your opening paragraphs reminded me of another bunch worried about protecting their investment in worthless products sold based on precautionary fallacy-type l1es about what their junk could do to avert disaster in the buyers’ lives….
{With helpful edits}
“A
silversmithwindmill maker named Demetrius, who madesilver shrines of Artemiswindmills, brought in no little business for the craftspeople. He called them together, along with the workers in related trades, and said: “People, you know we receive a good income from this business. And you see and hear how this fellow Paul has convinced and led astray large numbers of people here in Ephesus … He says that human-madegods are no godsCO2 is no problem at all. There is danger not only that our trade will lose its good name, but also that the temple of the great goddessArtemisAGW will be discredited …When they heard this, they were furious and began shouting: ‘
Great is Artemis of the EphesiansCO2 is a huge problem!’ … for about two hours … .The city clerk quieted the crowd and said: ‘People of Ephesus … we are in danger of being charged with rioting because of today’s events. In that case we would not be able to account for this commotion, since there is no reason for it.'”
Acts 19:24-41.
Vis-a-vis the comment above, the IMF has calculated the negative value of all the claimed problems (such as warming, alleged increased in extremes, and so on) and characterised the cost as a subsidy for fossil fuel. It seems the IMF has as little idea as the Guardian as to what constitutes a subsidy. A couple of things that come to mind straight away: what would the cost have been for the vast amount of deforestation that would have occurred if people had turned to burning wood, if fossil fuels had not powered the industrial revolution and the 20th and 21st centuries? What would be the cost of increased disease, death, and suffering if modern medicine had not been facilitated by cheap power via coal, oil and gas?
Vis a vis your comment above, here, I think: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/05/27/the-royal-anti-science-society-of-edinburgh/#comment-1946610
Good point, Keith!