WUWT reader “Purakanui” emailed me: “I have just read an extraordinary news item. Jim Salinger is the voice of global warming as far as New Zealand is concerned. Until recently he was always there when a new ‘record’ appeared, or a glacier retreated. He was a breathless and apparently wholly convinced warmer. Also he is a good scientist.”
I checked his bio page:
http://www.niwa.co.nz/ncc/contact/staff/jsalinger/bio
And it has been removed. Now if NASA could just get the stones to do this for Jim Hansen for promoting civil disobedience. – Anthony
From TV New Zealand
One of New Zealand’s top climate scientists has just been fired from his job at the National Institute of Water & Atmospheric research (NIWA).
Dr Jim Salinger has been the public face of the organisation for three decades, but says it was his unauthorised talking to the media that’s got him sacked.
Salinger, whose work as a science communicator has earned him accolades and even contributed to a Nobel Peace Prize, says he is now planning to sue his former employer for unjustified dismissal because according to him, he cannot understand why he was sacked.
“It’s not as though I’m doing bad science, it’s not as though I’m not performing and so I’m really astounded”.
What got Salinger fired is something that in the past brought him high praise – talking to the media.
Salinger says he always believed that his media work actually brought NIWA into repute.
Read the complete story here
“In House Energy and Commerce Sub-committed testimony, Mr. Gore just equated AGW deniers with Bernie Madoff, stating that the deniers are perpetrating a greater fraud on the world.”
That’s funny coming from Al “Flat Earth” Gore.
“See I figure that beer would be on the hit list considering how much co2 it produces in the process of making it.”
Which has to make one wonder why the wonder fuel ethanol isn’t on the hist list since its production creates a whole lot more CO2.
Highlighted and accessible on Drudge RIGHT NOW !!!!
Democrats Refuse to Allow Skeptic to Testify Alongside Gore At Congressional Hearing
http://www.drudgereport.com/
What many NZ’s have trouble with is understanding why the obvious corruption within the staff ranks of US tax payer funded organisations like NASA are allowed to continue unchallenged by their bosses.
John Galt (10:42:01) :
Who is that guy anyway?
😉
I recently heard that a well regarded potato breeding scientist informed a packed conference room that global warming meant that funding was needed to breed new plant cultivars that could be grown within our mountainous regions.
Maybe the sacking of Jim S. might effectively temper the comments of some other outspoken advocates of global warming both here in NZ and also overseas.
The missing “bio” page had a navigation breadcrumb header of ” > NIWA Science > National Climate Centre > Contacting the NCC > NCC Coordinators > Salinger bio > Staff Profile”
So it used to list Salinger as an NCC contact person.
The web site has been redesigned, and now if you traverse the menus to find contact people for climate you land on http://www.niwa.co.nz/our-science/climate/key-contacts
and listed are: Dr David Wratt (Position: Chief Scientist, Climate. “He is a member of the Bureau of the IPCC and a Vice-Chair of Working Group 1, which assesses the physical science of climate change.”) and Dr Andrew Tait (Position: Climate Scientist. “…acts as a NCC liaison with the media.”)
Adolfo Giurfa (10:28:30) :
Nasif Nahle (09:52:33) :
OT… Swine influenza hits Mexico
Beware all those fatty GWrs.!!
Hahaha… Out of Topic: And we have one of them here; a fatty, fatty man. Perhaps he brought swine influenza into Mexico?
On topic: Universities used to invite me to read conferences for their graduates; the last one was on global warming in September 2007, but from a scientific standpoint. Since then, I’ve not received more invitations from universities… That’s why I talked about a crusade against scientific correctness… Heh! 😉
Ray (10:19:53) : Excuse me, but that sounds like utter nonsense. Nature has no red flags. All flags are 100% anthropogenic which can be proven beyond doubt.
Goodo!… The new Conservative Government of NZ purging the dross from the Bureaucracy…. Should happen a bit more regularly.
I think the skill base should cycle a bit more…. Gets the buggers into private enterprise and engaged in the real world.
At least now NZ will get some new advice and perspective on the science of Climate.
Actually, the former Prime Minister Helen Clark is now head of UNDEP.
Did the WUWT moderator move to New Zealand? 🙂
NZ is very proud of its clean green image and had hoped to attract huge attention as THE world leader in carbon mitigation. Big fantasies of world fame. I think the mere thought of taxing agricultural animal emissions started to wake some of them up.
Isolated, as they are, and having lost enormous numbers of educated people over the ditch, (males in particular), their nanny state got out of control with Helengrad at the helm. Desiring leadership, and anti-American to the core, they invested a lot of naive hope in the UN as the standard.
Over-feminized in general, they have finally begun to come to their senses.
They also have extremely protective labor laws, it wouldn’t surprise me if Salinger wins a huge settlement over some detail.
From the article:
Late Thursday, Dr Salinger arrived home from NIWA for the last time. He may head the World Commission for Agricultural Meteorology, but now has no job to go to in his own country.
Thanks Kiwis, your gift to the world will not go unrequited.
All the World’s a Playstation
Tom Quirk
http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2009/4/all-the-world-s-a-playstation
Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, a powerful tool had been created. In the early 1970s Robert C. Merton, Myron S. Scholes and Fischer Black developed a pioneering approach for the valuation of stock options. In 1973, the Black–Scholes Option Pricing formula appeared. Thousands of traders and investors now use this formula every day to value stock options in markets throughout the world. Robert Merton devised another method to derive the formula that turned out to have very wide applicability.
Merton and Black were awarded the 1997 Nobel Prize for Economics. In a press release announcing the award the Nobel Foundation stated, “Their methodology has paved the way for economic valuations in many areas. It has also generated new types of financial instruments and facilitated more efficient risk management in society.”
Now are there lessons to be learned in other parts of the forest? An interesting starting point is the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Lehman were setting themselves to be leaders in carbon emissions trading when their world suddenly entered an ice age. They were close to a Nobel Prize winner, Al Gore.
So the enabling technology for this disaster has been the computer, the spreadsheet and risk modelling—all possibly mixed in with Quants with little experience of the actual assets involved and a belief in computer-generated models of risk.
For climate change many would argue that the only “evidence” for the dangers we may face comes from computer models.
Here we assess risk helped by the IPCC with statements such as “it is very likely” that the surface temperature will warm by three degrees Celsius in the next one hundred years.
The belief in climate modelling parallels the belief in financial risk modelling. The practitioners have been brought up to use computers as a primary tool for investigation. It has become so extreme that one lead IPCC author described the difference between model calculations and an actual measurement where the chance of the two overlapping was less than 5 per cent as “[measurements] consistent with model simulations, just larger than model average”! So now calculations verify measurements, where in classic science it used to be the other way round.
Dr Kevin Trenberth, another lead IPCC author stated: “None of the models used by the IPCC are initialised to the observed state, and none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate.”
“… think about Al Gore, his Nobel Prize and what may follow.”
KimW (12:13:31) :
Actually, the former Prime Minister Helen Clark is now head of UNDEP
Thanks Kiwis, you digging the hole even deeper.
Re Barley crops(Mentioned above) In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s Barley was considered as a fast maturing drop as the Growing season was nibbling at two months in Northeastern Oregon.-the last time the PDO shifted cold without the added Solar Minimum being as severe…
Seriously the State Wheat commission was worried about northern Canada-like conditions…
This is going to have scientists walking around like beaten
dogs; tail between the legs, eyes looking upwards in fear,
to see where the next wack on the head is coming from.
Live by consensus, die by consensus!
It is always fascinating to read about a happening in NZ on the web before I see it in the local media. It is 7-30am in New Zealand as I write. A quick check of one of NZ’s largest daily newspapers online reveals nothing immediately – a search on Jim Salinger’s name does however reveal a brief factual story together with a raft of fairly innocuous weather related articles – see http://www.nzherald.co.nz
To be sure, Jim’s views fall within the AGW camp – and I happen to disagree with him on that score. But I firmly disagree with anyone of whatever persuasion having their views stifled simply because some of us disagree, or that the opinion doesn’t fit with a “mainstream” view. Isn’t that what we all want – a proper debate, where all viewpoints are fairly aired ??
Whatever Jim’s views on climate he has always been a good humoured friendly presence on television and in print. No I don’t agree with him, but just as I want my view to be heard – it shouldn’t be at the expense of others’ views being shut down, whatever the excuse – such as talking to the media without prior permission. What a sad indictment on NIWA.
Do we applaud the fact that Monckton is not permitted the opportunity to debate with Al Gore ?? Should we rejoice in the apparent demise of one weatherman whatever his views on the simple excuse his talking to the media was not “permitted” – one who by my perception is a genial gentleman who gives out a fresh and insightful view on just the weather for goodness sake.
A New Policy Direction for Climate Change
Bob Carter
http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2009/4/a-new-policy-direction-for-climate-change
“…Australia currently possesses leaders of both its government and opposition who are lost in an imaginary world of virtual reality about one of the most important public issues of the day. They need a new and different sign on their desk, namely: It’s natural climate change, stupid!”
For, whether it reflects simple ignorance or the sophisticated seeking of political advantage, and it must be one or the other, both Mr Rudd and Mr Turnbull have declared themselves in favour of the introduction of carbon dioxide taxation in order to help “stop” a wholly imaginary human-caused global warming. Their beliefs are supported only by speculative computer climate models already known to be wrong, and they will implement an emissions trading system (ETS) at their own political peril and to the great detriment of the Australian people.
First, there has been no recent global warming in the common meaning of the term, for world average temperature has cooled for the last ten years.
Second, this lack of overall warming over the last sixty-eight years happened despite an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide of more than 20 per cent; which is actually no surprise, because, notwithstanding that it is a greenhouse gas, the increase in the warming effect of carbon dioxide beyond 1940 levels is diminishingly small.
Third, by planetary accident, in comparison with most of the Earth’s geological history we live today in a world that is in a state of carbon dioxide starvation, especially for optimal plant growth; just ask the commercial tomato growers who use enhanced levels of carbon dioxide in their greenhouses to expedite crop growth.
Fourth, experience in Europe shows emissions trading markets are unstable, and that a carbon dioxide tax is ineffectual as a tool for reducing emissions at any reasonable price level. Overall, therefore, Mr Rudd’s planned emissions trading scheme suffers from the double indignity of being a non-solution to a non-problem.
“…most journalists and editors are innocent of knowledge of the workings of science and cling to a naive belief that scientific matters can be determined by authority or consensus, thereby confusing science with politics.”
Science is about testing hypotheses, and the hypothesis of the day—that dangerous global warming is being caused by human carbon dioxide emissions—has been tested repeatedly and found to be invalid,…
“… the greatest damage that has been inflicted by those whipping up the imaginary threat of human-caused global warming is that the hysteria has overwhelmed mature consideration of the much greater and proven threat of natural climate change.”
All competent scientists accept that global climate has always changed, and always will; that human activities (not just carbon dioxide emissions) definitely affect local climate, and have the potential, summed, to measurably affect global climate; and that carbon dioxide is a mild greenhouse gas. The true scientific debate, then, is about none of these issues, but rather about the sign and magnitude of any human global effect, and its likely significance when considered in the context of natural climate change.
To summarise, the indirect evidence advanced for human-caused climate change is all equally consistent with a natural origin. Since the establishment of the IPCC in 1988 several thousand scientists have spent more than US$50 billion looking for evidence of human-caused warming without avail. No direct evidence exists for a worrisome magnitude or rate for human-caused global climate change over the last fifty years.
Natural climate changes of all types are going to continue to affect our planet, and from time to time these changes will wreak human and environmental damage. Future changes will include cooling trends, warming trends and sudden step-events. Extreme weather events and their consequences, and prolonged inconveniences such as droughts, are natural disasters of similar character to earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions, in that in our present state of knowledge they can neither be predicted far ahead nor prevented once they are under way.
The IPCC’s Plan A, therefore, is a dead parrot. For “greenhouse gas reduction”, by any means, becomes an irrelevancy when it can only deal with as-yet-unmeasured, human-caused global warming, at a time when the globe has been cooling for ten years.
World Commission for Agricultural Meteorology
How is that distinct from ordinary meteorology?
Tim Clark (12:28:08) :
From the article:
Late Thursday, Dr Salinger arrived home from NIWA for the last time. He may head the World Commission for Agricultural Meteorology, but now has no job to go to in his own country.
Thanks Kiwis, your gift to the world will not go unrequited.
—————
The Farmer’s Almanach predictions never followed that if the IPCC. It seems that they have known all the time that this was natural and of course know very well that CO2 is good for the plants. I hope his new job won’t affect that if he stays on the dark side of the climate truth.
The schadenfreude detectable hereabouts isn’t necessarily noble.
But as prisoners of a perpetual underclass, used to being stifled by our ‘betters’ who have successfully gamed the system, it’s rather refreshing to see one of them get sent to the penalty box — for once.
Hooray for our side!
We’ll take ’em where we can get ’em. This isn’t pattycake.
Norm Beazer, if you’ll step off the soapbox for a moment… this isn’t about “stifling” someone, it’s about them using their role in a Government organization to advance an agenda. Just as many of these personalities have done and are doing.
Personally I don’t care what he or Hanson have to say, they can shout it from the rooftops for all I care… just NOT ON GOVERNMENT LETTERHEAD.
I hate it when AGWers uses the word “consensus”.
In the past, consensus by public and professionals deemed:
a) The Earth is flat.
b) The Sun orbited around the Earth.
c) Galileo is a heretic.
d) Bloodletting can be used to cure many ailments and diseases.
e) Washing hands by doctors before operations and births is not necessary.
and so on.
Today all the above looks silly and quaint. Yet these statements were once believed by decision makers and rulers. Consensus without the backing of real and verifiable science and data (models do not count) is meaningless.
Norm Beazer (12.56)
Jim S. must have been making public comments so far removed from the science taking place within NIWA that they had to sack him.. Perhaps a giant step for NASA and US science credibility if they adopted the same attitude.