This video has been making the rounds, and the most encouraging thing about it is: it ran on the BBC. The fact that is did speaks to the growing skeptical view of climate change.
This video has been making the rounds, and the most encouraging thing about it is: it ran on the BBC. The fact that is did speaks to the growing skeptical view of climate change.
Absolutely hilarious – was just about to post a link from climate debate daily but no need now.
I saw this at the time (Armstrong & Miller show) and had a chuckle. I think what’s happening is less that people are more sceptical, it’s more that people in the public eye are much less afraid to display their natural scepticism. Two years ago, A&M would have been dismissed from the BBC for such a sketch.
This is all good.
Hilarious! I saw this on a couple of other sites and there was actually discussion about whether it was pro or con AGW! Apparently, some warmists took to it too. I suppose it could be pro – if you approve of big brother and government tyranny. I guess for the 10:10 crowd its pretty much as intended.
paging Mr. Manfredjinsinjin
It’s all over when the comedians start to get hold of it!
Bye bye AGW.
For me it is not funy. Too real…
Ex com. country migrant.
Mick.
A friend wrote from Hungary to say that when warmists claim that the cold weather is a sign of Global Warming it reminds him of communist agit-prop excuses when there were shortages of basic provisions in shops. They said that this is the way to build superabundance of all things.
Brilliant sketch and bang on target. I don’t know if they are warmists or sceptics, but the sketch certainly notices the absurdity of the situation when temperatures all over the Northern Hemisphere are breaking low records, we are expected to believe that this is the warmest year ever. Pull the other one.
Actually it’s actually quite daring given the: hushed/reverential* – angsty/urgent* – pained/superior* (*delete where applicable) tones most commonly used to discuss the subject.
I’m fairly sure they’re taking the piss of out the Jesuetical envirotypes that prowl the media unchallenged and their buddies the sycophantic government types who spout dogma on the MSM like the pale Curates they are…
It was supreme canny media operator Tony Blair who spotted the trend (0r should I say responded to the megaphone media assault) which took place in ’96 ’97.
Craving green credentials and the middle class vote, he used the hip youthful caring Climate Change issue to put some clear blue water between his Nulabor and and the flat earth, reactionary, big oil Conservatives.
It kinda worked, unfortunately the change of government in the uk failed to dislodge these apparatachiks from positions of power and influence, because Conservative Cameron had also nailed his green colours to the mast in order to tap this vast reservoir of green votes!
These people are now enacting quite serious pieces of legislation that the public REALLY know nothing about…hence the reference in the sketch to Draconian laws.
The Brits use comedy in a very sophisticated way and have done so for centuries. I think sketches like these, though tiny and insignificant in themselves, let the air out of the Climate Change bubble… it won’t pop overnight…just deflate.
As for the Legislation, well that’s another story.
Can someone get us some Local Warming in Portugal, please? Or is it sold out? We’re also freezing!
Ecotretas
The clip producers are reputedly warmers. If so it means they achieved the same phase of their development like the Communists with Perestroika closely before the gorges Berlin Wall collapse.
Wonderful! Snowed in at the moment on Ynys Mon, It really cheered us up.
Excellent parody!
BOM says the Australian alps may see a flurry of snow this weekend, which proves beyond doubt that global cooling is not regional.
I still wake up from “the green police” nightmares
Not climate but weather, an ice lighthouse
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-12006012
As an Armstrong and Miller fan I would have to say that this is a double edged sketch.
On the one hand it mocks authority, but it also make the pro AGW point that weather is not climate; except, of course, that climate is simply the sum of all weather.
It remains very difficult for anyone in the media to question the orthodox view, after years of successful entryism by the more radical greens their livelihoods depend upon toeing the line.
It’s a given that climate has always and will always change until the planet boils away into space; the gigantic leap from that to attributing the lion’s share of the observed changes to a trace gas at geologically low concentrations is the point where it becomes absurd.
Snowed in in Devon. 2nd time this winter so far. Only once the last two winters.
Iren says:
December 17, 2010 at 12:40 am
Hilarious! I saw this on a couple of other sites and there was actually discussion about whether it was pro or con AGW! Apparently, some warmists took to it too. I suppose it could be pro – if you approve of big brother and government tyranny. I guess for the 10:10 crowd its pretty much as intended.
One of the guys (Armstrong or Miller) is apparently quite a vocal Greenie (I rarely watch TV or read MSM so I’m a bit out of touch with this act) so I wouldn’t be so quick to interperate this sketch as a show of scepticism by any means. More like a softer version of the 10:10 vids. Still, whatever the intention, as with the 10:10 fiasco there will be unintended consequences.
I see the video as attempting to “educate” people into ignoring the coming cold weather, but with using a little self-deprecating humor to recover their image from the 10/10 debacle. The subtle things like using hockey sticks in the pamphlet combined with the overt declaration of “weather not climate” (something those outside of the debate aren’t as equated with) makes this an obvious propaganda piece in my mind.
Ecotretas,
I don’t read Portugese so please translate the text around that picture on your website of the polar bear dropping a turd.
Interesting to see that another hysterical use of the precautionary principle just bit the dust. Health authorities in the UK are now advising people to go out without sun screens for ten minutes at midday in summer.
Turns out that the ‘precautionary principle’, which said that even if there is the smallest risk that any exposure could cause skin cancer meant that there should be none, in fact raised the far greater risk of vitamin D deficiency.
A classic really. You cannot avoid working out the best way through the risks, and the so called precautionary principle, when it comes to religion, climate or sun exposure, is a positive hindrance to doing that.
Global warming was framed as an issue that only right-wing selfish oil interests would want to oppose. This framing appealed to two groups: those who see a world beyond corporations, and those who prefer the world prior to corporations.
Both are anti-corporation, but in very different ways. The “before-corp” group want to go back to essentially feudal times, with small villages and local quiet life. The “post-corp” group accepts industry and modern life as the necessary means, and just wants to make things more caring, by say, getting large corps to not fuel wars in unstable countries, and instead get them to fund charities.
Both groups, the pre and the post, can talk about wanting justice, so intitially there was a lot of apparent agreement between the two. But as it has become about implementing solutions, we’ve seen that the two groups that view it in two different ways. As time has gone on, the differences between these groups have been growing.
Here’s the major one: pre-corp feudal types don’t care about the essentially free individual with individual rights. Feudal authority was pre-Enlightenement, anyway, that is, before people were taught to think for themselves.
Post-corp types, on the other hand, are very much thinking for themselves, and consider this the basis of their core identity and their society. They happen to care more because they think for themselves, and try to see a better world.
Nowhere does this disparity between the two groups become more evident than with censorship. One group would happily make global-warming skepticism a crime and have people put in jail. When the post-corp types see this, they know they no longer want anything to do with the pre-corp types.
Armstrong and Miller may still be very much in favour of global justice, helping the third world, and many such issues. What I guess this sketch is targeting is the stupid draconian censorship atmosphere and those who promote it.
How about this question being asked in today’s Daily Mirror?
Is this record cold snap caused by global warming?
Mike Swain 17/12/2010
It could be the coldest winter since 1963, with temperatures forecast to plummet to minus 23C. There are warnings of severe weather across 10 regions this weekend and the cold spell could last until mid-February. It follows last winter’s severe weather, which brought the country grinding to a halt.
Is this the beginning of the kind of extreme weather we’ve been told to expect as the climate changes thanks to man-made greenhouse gases? Or is it just the notoriously unreliable British weather? Here, two of the country’s leading weather experts give their views.
YES – By Dr Liz Bentley, of the Royal Meteorological Society and founder of The Weather Club
What’s happening to the weather? Last winter was the coldest since 1978/79 and looking at the current spell, we could be in for another one. It may seem contradictory to link this with global warming, but there is growing evidence to show that we can expect a temporary period of colder winters as the climate warms.
A report published last month by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts in Germany found a link between low levels of sea ice in the Barents-Kara Sea, north of Norway and Russia, and an increased probability of harsh winters across Europe. And according to measurements, Arctic sea ice has declined dramatically over the past 30 years. The lack of sea ice could alter weather patterns and lead northern continents to cool by an average of -1.5C.
The research also shows that this is a temporary cooling only, with weather getting hotter as the warming effect becomes more prominent. This winter started unusually early with sub-zero temperatures and wintry weather arriving in November. The last time we had a prolonged cold spell in November was in 1997, but that winter eventually turned out to be warmer than average. Last winter was the coldest for more than 20 years, with nasty weather starting mid-December and lasting until February in parts of the UK.
The temporary return to colder winters will mean that those records we break during this winter may remain for ever.
The Weather Club, with the help of hundreds of schools and members of the general public, has been recording the weather conditions right across the country to build up a record on how the climate is changing each year. The information gathered will show how the seasons are changing and whether the different seasons are coming earlier or later. Simple weather observations of temperature and snow depth have already been recorded to monitor the weather and capture these extremes.
NO – by Wayne Elliott, senior meteorologist at the Met Office
Linking the current cold winter to climate change is a nonsense. Exceptionally cold air has streamed down across the UK, with significant impacts for the next few days. But climate is a long-term trend issue – it’s not about short-term patterns. The two are linked, yes, but they’re not the same at all.
To compare one year against another year is nonsensical. Weather is the short-term changes in the atmosphere, which deliver clouds, sunshine, snow, wind. It changes all the time and our job is to predict how. Weather is about the movement of weather patterns.
But climate is the long-term – decades or more – patterns of the weather and variables like temperature or rainfall, which really define the world around us. It’s climate that defines the trees and the type of houses we live in. And climate change is how that long-term trend changes over time. Climate changes naturally all the time. The debate about global warming is whether humans are affecting it or not.
It is true to say that weather is the delivery mechanism for climate change. But you can’t take a single season or a single weather event as being indicative of climate change. It will take some time to research whether three cold winters suggest a problem, especially when research says that cold winters tend to come in clusters.
There is no way of knowing that a cold winter this year – and it certainly look like we’ll be having one – makes a cold winter next year. Next winter could be the mildest we have had for 40 years. We simply just don’t know. Movements of the atmosphere and ocean currents are very complex and the linkages between them are understood – but not well enough.
People’s experience of the weather is local. It is a challenge as a weather and climate science organisation to communicate broader trends. That’s where the hard work lies.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2010/12/17/is-this-record-cold-snap-caused-by-global-warming-115875-22789437/
—————————–
This is amazing – a national daily newspaper even asking this question!
No surprises about the freezing cold = global warming brainwash from the AGW shill.
You can join in and send your views to The Mirror –
To have your say about a story email mailbox@mirror.co.uk
For comments and questions about Mirror.co.uk email feedback@mirror.co.uk
Royal Meteorological Society
http://www.rmets.org/index.php
Royal Meteorological Society
104 Oxford Road, Reading RG1 7LL
Tel: +44 (0)118 956 8500
Fax: +44 (0)118 956 8571
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As I mentioned at the Bishop’s, the Armstrong and Miller show has a very long list of writers so the actual writer(s) of the sketch may or may not be more sceptical than the performers. It’s also worth noting that the sketch attacks the eco-fascist propaganda rather than the core idea of CAGW, but it’s a significant breech in the dam nevertheless.
I’ve always thought that CAGW would be dead in the UK when the comedians on the topical shows (i.e. closer to the Jon Stewart sense of humour) routinely treat it with contempt.
It’s a small step in that direction, but welcome and might encourage others.
Gareth Phillips says:
December 17, 2010 at 1:09 am
Wonderful! Snowed in at the moment on Ynys Mon, It really cheered us up.
Not exactly “snowed in” at the Holyhead end but there’s time yet! Snow on the Island before Christmas – whatever happened to Global Wa….
hang on, there’s someone at the door………….
@ Gareth Phillips, December 17, 2010 at 1:09 am:
Wonderful! Snowed in at the moment on Ynys Mon, It really cheered us up.
Greetings!
Snowed in here in Cardiff as well at the moment …
For our friends across the Big Pond – Ynys Mon (that’s Anglesey in English) is in the North of Wales, Cardiff is at the opposite end in the South.
For Gaia’s sake:
“Out the window” atmospheric conditions hve NOTHING to do with climate.
Nothing whatsoever.
You deniers harp on about rain, snow, sleet, and hail etc as if it were UNCONNECTED to Anthropogenic Global Warming And Climate Disruption.
The science is SETTLED, and your “out the window” approach simply fortifies the localised minimalist effects of random precipitation events.
You should all be aware that ALL this precipitation has been predicted by the very best climate models, and that rain, hail, sleet, snow, and teenage pregnancies (and other issues for the Postal Service) have been cast asunder upon us.
May Gaia have mercy upon our souls….
That warmed my cockles
@Charles nelson:
I think the pejorative use of ‘Jesuitical’ to describe Greens certainly does a disservice to Jesuits and probably even to warmist believers. Sixteenth-century Protestant words of abuse don’t even come close to describing the weird combination of Trots, Stalinists, earnest misanthropes, would-be totalitarians and young gullibles that comprise the Green movement. And I would bet very few of them are in the slightest religious — very little faith in their fellow humans among that lot.
Also, if I recall correctly, the first British PM who was sold on the ‘global warming’ issue was actually Margaret Thatcher, in the late ’80s.
It may be pro-AGW propaganda, but it certainly backfires – makes a mockery of it all.
Just to fill you in on the joke if you’re not British: When something major is afoot here in the UK, we get a government brochure sent to all households. We got one on nuclear war back in the 1980s, then AIDS, etc. I think the last one was on Swine Flu. The funniest one was the nuclear war one – totally useless. Of course, everyone threw them away, and I hear that they’ll be collectors favourites in the coming years.
@ charles nelson says:
“As for the Legislation, well that’s another story.”
Absolutely, a bit off topic but since it has been raised, watch out for a UK tax on ‘carbon’ so that renewables look (more) competitive. This would seem to be the next push & gives a nuclear/wind/PV nod to investors. The question has to be: if now we are allowed nuclear, why do we need wind/PV? Added to the mix, energy security now looks to be a consideration and may even be trumping warming as the stated main driver of policy. If that is so, is it a real concern or just moving the goalposts in the game of demonising CO2?
Just to inject a note of realism. Yesterday, in Iqualuit, Nunavut, Canada, the high temperature for the day was 21 C ABOVE average. The temperature was comparable to Daytona Beach, Florida.
The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley says:
December 17, 2010 at 3:27 am
The funniest one was the nuclear war one – totally useless.
Ah yes, ‘Protect and survive’.
Great advice on how to withstand nuclear attack by piling books on your dining room table and crawling under it with your box of candles and a transistor radio.
According to the SMHI (Swedens NOAA), the past 3 weeks have been very cool in the Stockholm area might be the coldest since 1875!
In other part of Sweden this is the coldest 3 weeks ever recorded. And looking ahead it looks like there will be some brutal cold just before X-mas, -20 to -22 degree C. December temperatures in Stockholm might be record cold. (The database is from 1756). But I guess GISS will fix that in the end.
charles nelson says: December 17, 2010 at 12:57 am
David, UK says: December 17, 2010 at 2:08 am
Well there may be some genuinely skeptical comedy shots in the pipeline. What about mine: today I was going to have (subsidised) solar heating panels installed… “to offset
Voldemortyou-know-what” but they couldn’t install them because there was three inches of snow and more falling.‘Protect and Survive’ — wasn’t everyone supposed to wear bin bags as well?
Ah, they really knew how to scare the bejaysus out of people in those days. The Greens babbling on about rising ocean levels and the world warming by two whole degrees are amateurs by comparison.
And that’s in the South West, the warmest part of the UK
@ Clare
“Also, if I recall correctly, the first British PM who was sold on the ‘global warming’ issue was actually Margaret Thatcher, in the late ’80s.”
Not correct. Thatcher (who had a science background) was persuaded to investigate any link between CO2 emissions and temperature. The UEA’s CRU was the result of that. She is also on record as being concerned that the issue could be hijacked for political purposes by those with a very different agenda to hers. She was expecting CRU to provide the truth of the situation. She and we are still waiting.
“The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley says:
December 17, 2010 at 3:27 am”
Indeed. And then we had “When the wind blows”…and that was jus too funny!
there’s nothing new in the bbc broadcasting a bit of scepticism. it’s just a bit of cognitive disonance as far as they’re concerned.
This amusing sketch gave me an idea. The AGW scaremongers rely on people generally not knowing what the weather is doing anywhere much beyond their own localities. They exploit this lack of knowledge by suggesting a cold snap (for example) is regional as well as being just local ‘weather’. It strikes me that a ‘climate’ could be defined to some degree by the size of area a weather pattern covers as well as the time period a weather pattern covers.
Anyway, I think it might be a good idea to have a ‘Watts Out The Window?’ section on the blog – in which visitors could place a marker for where they live on a map of the world and an indication of the current weather/temperature (perhaps using a colour scale or symbol?). That way, visitors to the blog might get to see instantly that (for example) the current ‘cold snap’ I am experiencing here in London has in fact gone on for a good couple of weeks and covers a large area of the northern hemisphere. Ditto the cold weather that is apparently happening in some places down south.
Excellent analysis, Stefan; I agree with every word.
Those of us geriatrics who grew up during WWII understand the principles of recycling, “waste not, want not”, “make do and mend” and all the other ideas associated with generally taking care of the environment we live in and not being profligate with nature’s gifts.
That does not mean that we want to go back to a sort of “golden age” when life was nasty, brutish and short and the exponents of your “pre-corp” principle would be the first casualties since they would get very short shrift from people more concerned with making sure they had enough wood for the fire in the coming winter or enough nuts and berries for tomorrow’s breakfast than listening to the ramblings of people trying to convince them that this way of life was in some way preferable to having a full set of teeth and the reasonable chance of living for 80 years instead of 35.
I have spent several years in my own locality in a battle with people who oppose every kind of development that does not involve either community gardens or craft shops or re-opening of long dead and abandoned mills or other pre-industrial revolution buildings and/or practices.
What their view on climate change is I don’t know (though I can guess!) but none of their arguments is based on reason and certainly not on either empirical evidnce or anything to do with the wishes of the local population!
Yet somehow, as with such as Ehrlich and the other doom-mongers, each time a project is holed below the water line they pop up again with a new one and a new (or often the same) set of acolytes all convinced that these people have the answer and “this time it’ll be different.”
You naughty people have just about said it all. Classic Armstrong & Miller. I love it when my choir singing chums from the Wet Office tell me this pain in the rear thing of being snowed in here in darkest Devon, (btw the forecast seems to change hourly as usual, rain or shine, hot or cold) is just weather, but global warming when it’s hotter than usual.
I remember reading somewhere about a place in North America, sorry not sure where, but from 1875 to 1890, from historic written accounts (yeah I know they weren’t as clever as we are today for obvious reasons………..?) the winter snows started in the first week in September, & by the end were arriving at the last week in September! Don’t think it was a post here but might have been! Oh well time to take pooch out for his regular lunchtime perambulation. Right now, boots – check, warm clothes – check, mobile phone (fully charged) – check, thumb stick – check, inner gloves – check, sheep-skin mittens – check, compass -check, packet of peanuts – check, bar of chocolate – check, Leatherman – check, Swiss Army knife – check! Off we go!
Clare says: December 17, 2010 at 3:21 am
Yes, but with two crazy and important twists.
(1) Maggie Thatcher eventually came to realize there was no AGW. She had a science degree and understood the real science, and was not AGW-brainwashed at that point because the brainwashing started later.
(2) But she had activated the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. She was rightly, at that time, concerned about our effects on climate. Also she wanted kudos for being a scientist (so rare amongst politicians) and she wanted kudos for beating the miners, and wanted a stick to beat them with. So she set up the Hadley Institute and CRU (IIRC) – to gather together global climate science data and see what was up. Hubert Lamb, the first head of CRU, was doing proper science. But the real mischief was this: she cut back on research grants across all disciplines, except any research into… Manmade Global Warming.
Unintended consequences. Also divide-and-rule. “My research shows that AGW is not a problem… but all these other disciplines show that it is a problem… and since my funding depends on showing AGW, I will have to include this item somehow…”
h/t Richard Courtney and Chris Monckton, for this understanding.
If you think this is Warmist you’re wrong for all kinds of reasons.
The main one is that Miller and Armstrong are famous for ripping the piss out of sacred and pompous institutions…see for instance Nude Vets or Stryker…they’re comedians and their top priority is laughs. This is quite gentle but definitely in a long British Tradition of anti-establishment humour. David Frost and Co’s political satire may seem incredibly mild today but it brought down the Macmillan Government.
Gentle ridicule judiciously applied.
And though the sense of humour might be a little ‘obtuse’…being buggered in prison for making a politically incorrect statement about the weather/climate change can only be read one way right?
The Brits don’t like ‘thought police’, they went through it once during the English Revolution when the Puritans took over and they didn’t like it much. (The London Theatres were closed for over twenty years). Also they can smell a rat.
I think that as all my friends and family freeze their butts off in the British Isles, and we here in Australia are having lush cool grey Christmas, that the wheels are coming off the Warmist machine in their heartlands, where it matters most.
At the moment there are fears that supplies of heating oil may have to be rationed in the UK if the cold spell continues.
I can imagine a high level oil execs meeting ten years ago.
“Will we build that new heating oil refinery JB?”
“Nah mate…heating oil, thing of the past.”
The Brits were amongst the first to fall for the scam and they will in due course be unutterably vicious towards those who perpetrated it.
Kaboom says: December 17, 2010 at 3:08 am
Hahahaha. I had to stop and check if you were pushing the warmist agenda.
Like the video, British subtle humour. Hedging your bets.
Clare, Dec 17th, 3:21am –
“Also, if I recall correctly, the first British PM who was sold on the ‘global warming’ issue was actually Margaret Thatcher, in the late ’80s.”
The pro CAGW lobby loves to mention that, but what is not so generally known is that Margaret Thatcher, a true scientist, later became more sceptical –
From – http://www.perc.org/articles/article506.php
“In her latest book, Statecraft (2002, 449-58), Thatcher devotes ten pages to the subject of “Hot Air and Global Warming.” Thatcher is quite clear that she feels things have gone in the wrong direction since former British ambassador to the United Nations-turned-global-warming- campaigner Sir Crispin Tickell convinced her to tell the Royal Society, “it is possible . . . we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.” She notes that the doomsters’ favorite subject today is climate change, which “provides a marvelous excuse for worldwide, supra-national socialism” (449).
Thatcher’s critics might claim that she has–to use a fashionable term–flip-flopped on the issue, but that is not necessarily the case.
First, she stresses that she was initially skeptical of the arguments about global warming, although she thought they deserved to be treated seriously. She points out that there was “rather little scientific advice available to political leaders from those experts who were doubtful of the global warming thesis” (451). However, by 1990, she had begun to recognize that the issue was being used as a Trojan horse by anti-capitalist forces. That is why she took pains in her Royal Society speech in 1990 to state: “Whatever international action we agree upon to deal with environmental problems, we must enable our economies to grow and develop, because without growth you cannot generate the wealth required to pay for the protection of the environment” (452). In fact, Thatcher makes it clear that she regards global warming less as an “environmental” threat and more as a challenge to human ingenuity that should be grouped with challenges such as AIDS, animal health, and genetically modified foods. In her estimation,
All require first-rate research, mature evaluation and then the appropriate response. But no more than these does climate change mean the end of the world; and it must not either mean the end of free-enterprise capitalism. (457)
As Tracy Mehan implies, Thatcher’s environmentalism is founded on Edmund Burke’s conservative view of our inheritance as being worth defending. Yet that view is tempered by her classical liberal belief that human wealth and progress are crucial. That is why Lady Thatcher can be described as a true free market environmentalist.”
Stefan says: Global warming was framed as an issue that only right-wing selfish oil interests would want to oppose.
CRU East Anglia was set up and still funded by Oil and Nuclear interests. Coal being the loser, it was already cleaning up its act, one big rival now demonised. The manipulation of data par for the course for such interests.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100020304/climategate-peak-oil-the-cru-and-the-oman-connection/
There are also more of these connections in the replies to ‘big oil against global warming’ disinformation on http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=5074
Maggie’s interests coincided, becoming the first voice of AGW she set about to destroy the coal industry and increasing oil and nuclear interests by increasing funding to the Hadley Institute which joined up with CRU. An amazingly clever sleight of hand to get the Greenies who were against Nuclear energy for heating to support the destruction of its biggest rival..
The Delingpole is taken, I think, from the longer piece on http://seeker401.wordpress.com/2010/03/02/university-of-east-anglia-cru-unit-major-reasearcher-for-the-last-four-ipcc-reports etc. Sorry, can’t get it all into the link, a search should get the page up.
clare, defender of the jesuits hmmn
Could it be from the same producers as the exploding kids?
Trying to acclimatize the public and this is also backfiring?
I can’t agree with this reading. Of course the government propaganda pamphlet would show hockey sticks. That just makes the point that its brainwashing. When you can’t make an offhand comment on the weather then its freedom itself under attack. And the big green tick when he mouths the “correct” mumbo-jumbo (that no normal person would ever come up with). Priceless.
You do recall correctly. She did think it was worth investigating (perhaps partly because of her battle with the mining unions) and might have been instrumental in getting the current apparatus going. However, she has long since recanted. In fact, if I recall correctly, this was stated clearly in her book.
An inch of snow on my terrace in downtown Paris this morning. The boys are planning to build a snowman after school.
I also believe this is a diversionary tactic, make a big “hoorah” about AGW, distract “the unwashed masses” and BINGO, pass policy. Oh, hang on, this is the UK right? Or is this Australia? Or New Zealand? Or CA? Oh bugger! The frog is boiled already!
Kaboom says:
December 17, 2010 at 3:08 am
You forgot dry turkey and tasteless, watery Brussels sprouts. Not that this is anything other than par for the course in our home…
P.S. Al Gored on Tips and Notes 3 December 16 2010 10.59 has post on how this has come full circle for the Greenies in the pre-programmed use of them, first villifying coal and now actively supporting nuclear power!
Re Kaboom says:
December 17, 2010 at 3:08 am
Ya, you tell em.
Just one question for you, what have climate models NOT predicted?
Funny but disturbing for it’s Orwellian overtones of prison for not agreeing with political propaganda that you’ll got to jail and end up being ass raped; and the fact that the video has got it wrong (sure there is currently a slight warming trend but they forget to point out that it’s entirely natural and that there is no good evidence that humans are having any significant impact upon climate at all).
Is this clip “for or against” ???
Well I’m a non manmade warmest/climate change or whatever the latest buzz word is. But as an ex-pat I tend see it as a p**s take. But for some warmists I think this may well lead to confusion and doubt, especially for the older ones.
Are they making fun of us, it, whatever?
It’s a confused message or we wouldn’t be asking the question “for or against”. The term cognitive dissonance comes to mind.
Hi Kaboom – I guess you have trouble with reading. I don’t think you will find many people here “harping on” about weather being climate. Don’t forget it was warmist who predicted that “snow would be a thing of the past”.
Perhaps you could explain how and where climate models predicted “all this precipitation” (weather as you point out, not climate).
Global Warming Is The Least of Your Worries
It took me a second to catch the satire (I’m Canadian not British)
Thankfully I learned from my last burned out computer monitor to
turn away before I cough up my tea.
Climate VS. weather? what have we been saying for the last 15 years?
dwright
@Myrrh
Thanks, very interesting!
Oil companies using reverse psychology… does this make them double-evil ? 😉
Hysterical!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Maggie Thatcher’s enthusiasts cannot get away from the fact that (irrespective of what she later came to realise) she was the one who really launched this whole scam and who appointed weapons-grade eco-loons like Crispin Tickell and John Houghton as Government Advisors. Since then, successive governments in the UK have made a point of only appointing eco-loons as “scientific” advisors.
So guess what kind of “scientific” advice policy decisions have been based on, ever since? It is also worth pointing out that advice in areas of science not obviously connected to the climate has been overwhelmingly based on computer models rather than proper experiment and observation. Think of the avian flu “pandemic”, Foot & Mouth, nvCJD, Listeria, Salmonella in eggs and so on and on.
All based on computerised shroudwaving (and sucking up huge amounts of Grant money in the mean time).
Brilliant! Love the video (and the Genesis reference to The Ghost of Big Jim Cooley)!
Ohio is currently having its coldest December in recent memory. Already, city governments are nearly out of road salt, and winter doesn’t officially begin for three more days.
I’m planning a mid-winter vacation to the Bahamas, but I’m afraid temperatures will be too cold to allow for a swim in the ocean! Where is global warming when you need it??
“Ah yes, ‘Protect and survive’.
Great advice on how to withstand nuclear attack by piling books on your dining room table and crawling under it with your box of candles and a transistor radio.”
And parodied mercilessly in an episode of ‘The young one’s.” Awakening to find an unexploded nuclear warhead had lodged itself in the kitchen of their house, Neil reaches for his ‘incredibly helpful and informative protect and survive guide.’ He is later seen building a barricade under the kitchen table and painting himself white in order to ‘deflect the blast.’
Priceless.
check out what goes on in Australia
http://weather.news.com.au/news/heavy-rain-in-very-dry-parts-of-western-australia-/15637
“…The rain started at Carnarvon Airport in the Gascoyne during Thursday night and brought 205mm in only 24 hours. Carnarvon has not recorded any rainfall above 1mm this month and has just seen its wettest day since December 1949…”
Funny, very appropriate here in freezing Blighty.
Here’s a funny letter I found . . . . enjoy.
Dear Sir,
I live in Hitchin, which is 45 miles away from your impressive meetings venue. As featured on your website under ‘Carbon Free Meetings’, please calculate my CO2 emissions to and from the meeting so that I can then pay you some money towards the planting of a few saplings – in order to offset my ‘footprint’. The following information may help you arrive at a more accurate calculation.
Firstly, as far as I am aware, from the moment I set off on my journey to when I arrived home later that evening, I was involuntarily responsible for inhaling quite a bit of oxygen and breathing out CO2 that day. Despite several conscientious attempts, I found it difficult to prevent my lungs from performing this respiratory function.
My car is a large 3.5 litre V6 Estate – some may say a ‘gas guzzler’ and less CO2 efficient than say a small Mini. However, I chose to drive the 90 mile round trip in a cautiously sedate fashion – as behind the driver’s seat, the back was still full of heavy sacks containing decaying rubbish from my garden. Unfortunately, I failed to get to the local recycling centre on time the previous day. With regard to my ‘footprint’ calculation, please take in to account the extra CO2 produced by the natural anaerobic digestion of grass cuttings, decaying leaves, windfall apples, twigs and roots – both during my journey and whilst my car remained parked at your premises for the day. In addition, being such a warm morning, and due to the load I was carrying, the liquid CO2 refrigerant in my car’s air conditioning unit circulated fresh cool air in a pleasing manner – which overcame both the heat and the unpleasant pong. Furthermore, I quenched my thirst sipping from the small screw top bottle of fizzy lemonade (injected with man-made CO2 purely for its novelty effect).
Much to the annoyance of fellow road users, my sedate driving behaviour that day was also largely responsible for their impatient driving manner. Each one flashed, tooted and increased their fuel consumption by accelerating past me at every available opportunity. Therefore, I must also be held indirectly responsible for the all the unnecessary extra CO2 emissions caused by other road users.
During the picturesque journey to your impressive facilities, the lemonade got the better of me. Having stopped briefly for some welcomed bathroom facilities, I realised that on flushing the toilet, CO2 is used to control the alkaline pH level when processing our waste water in sewage treatment.
You should also note that whilst driving to your venue, regretfully, I failed to stop in time when a deer ran across the road. Sadly, I killed the deer instantly – the consequences of which meant that more CO2 would begin to leach in to the atmosphere because of the imminent decaying process of animal tissue. Although I was not driving at speed, the collision also caused highly compressed liquid CO2 (@ 870psi) to rapidly inflate both my driver’s and passenger air bags. My engine also caught fire, but luckily, I used my emergency CO2 extinguisher to put out the flames successfully. The whole unfortunate event left me in shock. To help remedy this, and for medicinal purposes, I took a sip from my handy hip flask containing the finest malt whisky – which is distilled from beer that is naturally fermented using sugar and yeast – which produces CO2.
On my return journey home, feeling peckish, I stopped off and bought a coffee, a small bag of ‘Twiglets’ and a pre-packed ham sandwich. When calculating my footprint, please take in to consideration that CO2 is combined with other gases to replace the oxygen when packing food. Known as Modified Atmosphere Packaging or MAP, the process slows down the growth of mould and bacteria, and helps to increase “shelf-life” so that food stays fresher for longer. The process also reduces the need to put artificial additives and preservatives into our food. CO2 emissions were also increased as a bi-product of yeast fermentation when the bread for the sandwich was made in the factory – and when the large scale production line bread making equipment was cleaned down at the end of the baking shift, it was ‘sandblasted’ with liquid CO2 (dry ice) pellets – as is the norm for the industry. As for my bag of ‘Twiglets’: they where manufactured by adding Baking Powder and/or Bicarbonate of Soda to a slightly acidic wheat flour liquid. Sadly, this produced CO2, which ‘aerated’ the mix to give it its light texture. Twiglets are also flavoured with wonderfully knobbly bits of Marmite. Marmite is fermented yeast extract, a bi-product of the brewing industry. Loads of CO2 there. Please also allow for the fact that my coffee was decaffeinated – meaning that the raw coffee beans travelled down a 70ft column of CO2 fluid to neutralise and remove the caffeine. Unfortunately, the additional intestinal gas I produced as a reaction to the coffee and sandwiches’ resistance to my normal digestive enzymes meant that I farted. Please note that in addition to obnoxious smells, a typical fart is made up of 25% CO2 (plus 55% Nitrogen and 20% of flammable oxygen/methane/hydrogen mixture).
Finally, when my car was originally manufactured, CO2 was used in the rubber moulding for the tyres and gaskets, the casting of moulds for the metal panels and as a ‘shielding’ gas in the welding fabrication. Pressurised CO2 was used in the precision sealed beam laser cutting of all my car’s printed circuit boards, ceramics and acrylics.
I already pay hefty stealth taxes for driving my car – especially annual road tax based on CO2 emissions – and now you are offering me the opportunity to shell out even more money so people like you can profiteer from their tree-planting sideline business – and all because I should feel guilty about saving the planet. It is mind boggling that millions of people around the world should get so concerned about a temperature increase of one degree over the past one hundred years that they are prepared to financially penalise us for it.
For the record, despite my car’s engine size, I understand that what was coming out of my car’s exhaust is quite insignificant when compared to all the world’s manufactured CO2 gas that I used to ‘make things happen’ during the course of that day. CO2 is manufactured on a global scale by encompassing alkali metal hydroxides, calcium hydroxide, sodium or potassium carbonate, and organic absorbers. Molecular-sieve materials (using temperature or pressure cycling) complete the process. Most of this CO2 is then compressed into liquid, placed inside cylinders and sold to the manufacturing industry.
If CO2 is really a problem, then why are we not banning volcanic eruptions, sulpher springs, decaffeinated coffee, printed circuit boards, prawn crackers and people farting after eating brussel sprouts? Ethically speaking, you would be far better earning lots of money planting your trees to offset the collective ‘Carbon Footprint’ of compost heaps, wood burners, beer production, limescale removers, bread, wine, cakes, brick manufacture, cement production, Alka-Seltzer, inflatable life jackets, anti-tainting compounds, phenol (synthetic carbonic acid used in dyestuffs, colourants and plastics) and food miles for global distribution of staple foods such as citrus fruit, nuts, tea, coco, tinned tuna, pineapples & rice.
How much do I owe you?
Anon
I can’t imagine that any native Brit will have interpreted this as anything but a dig at AGW. If they’d wanted to support AGW, they’d have had a dig at the sceptics. It’s very encouraging to see questioning occurring via humour, especially when it’s the Beeb.
In reference to the above “hang on there’s someone at my door…” comment, I too think all this knicker twisting over climatic disruption is being delivered compliments of an invasion of greenstupid disestablishmentarianism, too-smart-for-their-breeches, marginal scientists who would rather feel than search for doubt like real scie…hold on, the phone is ringing…
Interesting weather in Australia yesterday; Hailstones the size of walnuts.
Meant to say “…disestablishmentarianistic…” Bad grammar Pam, bad grammar.
I’ve been visiting this website for about a month now. I have to admit that it presents some conflicting and perhaps irreconcilable viewpoints, or at least they are unclear to me, a person with a reasonable level of scientific fluency.
Is it the contention of this site that
1) There is no such thing as global warming?
2) There is global warming, but the data has been massaged and twisted by corrupt scientists and policymakers?
3) There is global warming, but it is not manmade?
4) There is global warming, but we don’t have the data to determine that it’s manmade, or if so, what proportion of it is “natural climate variance” and which is caused by 250 years of industry raising the CO2 levels.
5) it is amusing to take the piss out of holier-than-thou climate change scaremongers who have a vested interest in jobs-for-life as carbon-tax bureaucrats?
I suppose it could be a combination of all these points, and a few more I haven’t seen yet as ongoing themes. I live in a country (Canada) where we are quite profligate in our use of fossil energy and also in which some of the more notable climate change events occur (such as permafrost thawing and the opening of the Northwest Passage).
I am also a sailor planning a world cruise starting in a couple of years. On the personal level, I do in fact see more “extremes” in the weather, more deviation, I suppose, from the historical norm. I also accept that “change” in this sense could include this sense of a widening of such historical norms and a lessening of the predictability of seasonal weather trends. My pilot books are established on these principles: that over some 200 years of data recording (mostly by the U.S. and U.K navies), it has been possible to discern patterns that exceed raw chance in terms of what sort of sailing weather one might expect in given areas in given months.
So while I encourage a healthy and indeed scientific skepticism over the causes (and by inference, the range of possible solutions) of climate change, I don’t reject the premise that burning fossil fuels created over millions of years in a handful of decades, or widespread deforestation in favour of farting cattle has had a measurable effect on the planetary climate.
It would be surprising if it hadn’t, given that we are pretty clear on what a single large volcano can do as a matter of historical record: Bugger up the summers for a few years.
But I remain unclear as to the base premises of this site. While I do not accept nor encourage the sort of evangelical self-hatred of all man’s works that some “greens” espouse, neither do I believe that the viewpoint of those who posit that “all climate change science is bunk; let’s all hop in the SUV and drive slowly!” is particularly helpful, either.
Will someone illuminate me? Preferably with a warm, white LED, of course.
Jim Cripwell
December 17, 2010 at 3:36 am
In Regards to your “realism” I just checked the weather history for the city that you mention and my parent’s town, Daytona Beach. On the 15th of December, the high in Iqualuit shows as 0 C and that in Daytona is +14C. Not quite “the same.” If you are going to argue that yesterday was the 16th, the differences are even greater. By the way, this is with Daytona having colder temperatures than average at the time.
I will give you that I have not adjusted the data. This is raw data before any “value” has been added.
Tallbloke:
It’s just weather, really, believe our computer model, it’s real.
Really no?
You dare to question your Lord and God academia?
(I’m kidding, satire being satire, never sure)
dright
I really liked the documentary video’s authenticity and accurate portray of how Mann Hansen et al probably go about their climate research to come up with their findings.
Nice hailstones, tallbloke. I hope nobody got bruised. I notice today in southern Englad, some of our snowflakes were bouncing and rattling in a very un-snow-like way, but they did not get to walnut proportions, thankfully.
“tallbloke says:
December 17, 2010 at 3:37 am
The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley says:
December 17, 2010 at 3:27 am
The funniest one was the nuclear war one – totally useless.
Ah yes, ‘Protect and survive’.
Great advice on how to withstand nuclear attack by piling books on your dining room table and crawling under it with your box of candles and a transistor radio.”
About as effective as this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKqXu-5jw60
Let’s teach people how to do totally worthless actions in the attempt to make them feel as if they are in control over their fate. Hmmm….sounds a lot like the carbon neutral/footprint scheme.
el gordo says:
December 17, 2010 at 1:40 am
There are alps in Australia? I didn’t know that. And snowing during the Southern Hemisphere summer. That’s remarkable.
To make a long story short…you have many years of discussion to catch-up on to see the breadth of views. You will find a wide diversity of opinions and diiscussions here. Although there is a lot of back and forth going on, there is also a considerable amount of scientific inquiry and some original scientific investigation going on as well. Some of the contributors include the authors of the scientific publications and the IPCC proceedings under discussion here and elsewhere.
Before you assume by default that the IPCC premise for AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) is credible, you need to examine the alleged scientific basis and see for yourself whether or not the claims really do or do not have a credible scientific basis. While doing so, keep in mind that the skeptics include a very substantial number of credible climatologists, meteorologists, geophysicists, geologists, engineers, space scientists, statisticians, and others contrary to the proponents who misrepresent to the contrary.
Puts things in geologic perspective. LOL
Ah, but when climate “gets into the weather”, then we’re all in trouble.
Sheesh!
Lol, great ad. But Guinness is HORRIBLE!
Alchemy said “Is it the contention of this site that …”
The top of the page says it all. “Commentary on puzzling things in life, nature, science, weather, climate change, technology and recent news …”
Perhaps the most general description would be scientific inquiry and associated skepticism. The “contention” of the site is that the scientific method will yield the proper answers when properly applied. That does not imply anything with respect to conclusions. The reader is responsible for those.
Alchemy,
I don’t think you and most of us are that far apart regarding your questions. For the most accurate answers, you couldn’t do much better than a search for Prof Richard Lindzen’s views. As MIT’s head of its atmospheric sciences department, he has more credibility than all the self-serving, grant-sucking UN/IPCC jamokes put together. And the self-promoting charlatans like Michael Mann and his ilk? Pff-f-f-t. They are just running a scam on the public.
Your questions remain unanswered for a very serious reason: the ‘mainstream’ self-designated climatologists and their fawning media absolutely refuses to follow the scientific method. Instead, they employ the anti-science of “consensus” on which to base their appeals to authority.
The reason they avoid being bound by the scientific method is because if they were, their AGW scare would be promptly falsified – and there would be no rationale for providing them with more grant money.
Almost thirteen years after Mann, Bradley and Hughes published their debunked Hockey Stick chart [MBH98], they still refuse to ‘open the books’ on their raw data, metadata and methodologies. How can other scientists reproduce their results when their methods are kept secret? The scientific method requires that others must be able to reproduce the original work.
In fact, Michael Mann was informed that the Tiljander proxy he planned to use was completely unusable, because road grading had turned the sediments upside down. Yet Mann used Ms Tiljander’s proxy anyway, because the upside-down sediments gave him the result he wanted.
That is certainly scientific misconduct by Michael Mann. And the kicker is that Mann’s paper passed peer review! When Mann’s paper was going through the peer review process, the worthless Tiljander proxy was widely reported, and the proxy was shown to be worse than worthless; it gave a chart that was upside down. And Mann knew it was worthless prior to publication. But his paper sailed through the climate peer review process anyway.
The whole climate science industry is rife with fraud. The climate clique, with Jones and Mann at its center, is on display throughout the Climategate emails. And the “Harry_Read_Me” programmer admits outright that raw temperature data was fabricated [“I’ll make it up as I go along.”]. Thus, the $Billions being shoveled out every year to these corrupt scientists cheats every taxpayer.
So your questions, while interesting, miss the central point: why are these scam artists exempt from the scientific method? Claiming a [bogus] “consensus” is no substitute for the scientific method.
The first question everyone should ask is: why are climate scientists allowed to avoid the scientific method? No other branch of the hard sciences is given that free pass. The answer is obvious: because if they had followed the scientific method, their catastrophic AGW hypothesis would be immediately falsified, and it would be shown that their data and methods are based on fraud, incompetence – or are simply fabricated. The public that is being cheated by this clique of climate scam artists needs to hold their feet to the fire at every opportunity, and demand an answer to why only climate scientists are exempt from the rigor of the scientific method.
“David says:
December 17, 2010 at 5:00 am
Just one question for you, what have climate models NOT predicted?”
They have NOT predicted 30 years of cooling.
Mind you, they did not predict 10 years of cooling either, however now that this has happened according to Hadcrut3, they say something to the effect that in millions of simulations, there is a one in eight chance of a ten year cooling period in an overall warming trend.
I am not sure how to interpret this though. We used to hear that it is 90% certain that humans affected climate in a significant way. Has this now been reduced to 12.5%? And if so, does this call for drastic and expensive action?
Just like when you put a pot on the stove and it briefly ices over when you first turn the heat on to boil the water.
Yeah that’s the ticket!
Happens all the time! Lots of things cool down just before they start heating up.
/sarc
Even if they had a remotely logical rational for that assertion, on the local level, the average person on the street will see the absurdity of the concept on a global scale.
It is head shakers like that that are leading to man/woman on the street comments about having to shovel the global warming or needing to scrape the global warming off the windows before driving in to work.
What astonishes me is the folks making these comments do it with a straight face, and don’t see that from the perspective of the person on the street it makes no sense.
Larry
D. Patterson says:
“Before you assume by default that the IPCC premise for AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) is credible, you need to examine the alleged scientific basis and see for yourself whether or not the claims really do or do not have a credible scientific basis.”
Fair enough. I don’t necessarily accept that premise (which I understand in caveman terms is “man bad because burns stuff, turns sky into fire!”) because I do accept that there are a raft of moderating factors (astronomical cycles, sun spot activity, amount and type of particulate matter in the air, and so on) that could make the world either warmer or colder than is currently (and provisionally) forecast. I do find some of the research in paleoclimatology interesting, however, in that ice core analyses indicate that some fairly dramatic (and pre-“anthro”) climate change has occurred very rapidly (decades or less) in the past. The breakup of the Laurentian ice shield circa 7,500 BCE and the various multi-century cold and/or dry periods since human records have been kept argue that climate is a cussedly complex beast, and those who say we’ve all the answers needed to apply fixes are far too simplistic for my taste.
The difference “this time” is that, human-fuelled (or even human-deterred, as some have suggested) rapid climate change has a far more destructive potential given that there are so damn many of us, and there is unprecedented mobility at this point in history that our ancestors, who tended to oblige the world by starving or dying of thirst more or less where they lived, are unlikely to do so in our current time-frame.
So we can argue about the causes as much as is informative or is amusing, but I consider that the odds of human migrations not seen since the Goths got pushed west by the Huns to be a real possibility in my lifetime. Call it a neo-Malthusian point of view, or a problem of “distribution”, but there’s not much slack in the world’s excess food supply, nor is there the infrastructure or even the desire to distribute it to the number of hungry people that already exist.
A few poor harvests in China attributed to climate change aren’t going to alter China’s response to millions of starving peasants. History is quite explicit on this point: what cannot be bartered for will often be looted.
Smokey said:
“The first question everyone should ask is: why are climate scientists allowed to avoid the scientific method? No other branch of the hard sciences is given that free pass. The answer is obvious: because if they had followed the scientific method, their catastrophic AGW hypothesis would be immediately falsified, and it would be shown that their data and methods are based on fraud, incompetence – or are simply fabricated.”
So can it be then said that while the jury is out on whether climate change is actually occurring, at to what degree (pun intended), the premise of this site is that there are huge credibility problems with the methods of some climatologists?
Does a small cadre of specialized scientists really need their jobs to take on that much false importance? Or is it a case of herd mentality meeting a buffalo jump?
I certainly think there are problems with drawing conclusions about climate trends in the absence of a holistic appreciation of what climate is (a vast amalgam of influences physical and chemical), and consequently an inadequacy in the necessary completeness of modelling it using, for instance, room-sized computers.
This does not, however, preclude cause and effect and the possibility of improving the process. Two examples off the top of my head include the partial restoration of the Antarctic ozone hole since the banning of most CFCs (it could still be a coincidence, of course, but the two states appear observationally related), and the slow improvement in the understanding of hurricane tracking. As a sailor who will return to those Caribbean waters at some stage, I take an avid interest in hurricane formation and movement, and it seems to me that while forecasters can still get things very wrong, the track record has improved in terms of predicting intensities and direction. Yes, I know this is “weather” and less “climate”, but it’s an example of how long observation can in fact aid prediction.
The BBC has been told to be impartial, so some employees may actually try.
However, the bulk of those who aired this short film *really* wanted to tell the viewers that they should stop saying heretical things about the climate – otherwise they will be arrested! 😉
It’s just like with the No Pressure movie that was also meant to be a serious celebration of the looming final solution of the skeptics question. 🙂
Tis a clever video indeed that supports the Eco fascists agenda while also giving the rest of us a good laugh.
Kaboom – very funny.
Alchemy says:
December 17, 2010 at 6:39 am
I think all your points. There is a huge readership at WUWT so the blog attracts an enormous diversity of opinions across many climate science disciplines. Along with bucket loads of excellent humor thrown into the mix.
I think they meant the “lesson” of distinguishing climate from weather seriously. After all, they are quite precise about the preferred language they are calling for. They even show Phil Jones HadCRUT3 temperature graph, with its alarming looking increase global average temperature, as if this is the the reality.
“Alchemy says:
December 17, 2010 at 6:39 am
But I remain unclear as to the base premises of this site.”
I would say the following is a good place to start:
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2010/03/six-myths-about-deniers
Thank you, Werner. That clears things up. I don’t see myself as a “denier” by a long shot, but I remain to be persuaded that the right paths are being pursued in this debate.
And I hope that I never get so seriously wound up in the topic that I can’t have a laugh about the folly of humanity.
Alchemy says:
December 17, 2010 at 6:39 am
I’ve been visiting this website for about a month now. I have to admit that it presents some conflicting and perhaps irreconcilable viewpoints, or at least they are unclear to me, a person with a reasonable level of scientific fluency.
Is it the contention of this site that….
I agree with Smokey above. The real problem is that CAGW “science” is actually only a massive, classic Propaganda Operation, which therefore must actually avoid doing real, scientific method, science – an avoidance which Climate Science demonstrates over and over again. I know my claim sounds strange at first, but once you get acquainted with the way ipcc style Climate Science operates, then viewing it as solely a massive Propaganda Operation – with the usual suspect motives and goals other than the truely scientific – makes nearly all of its otherwise very bizarre machinations understandable.
So my position on the valid questions you raise is that Climate Science really does not intend to answer them by using real science, and that the “Climate Science” Propaganda Op. itself is clearly the most virulent threat revealed by “Climate Science” so far, not fossil fuel CO2 or “global warming”.
Pause at the 34 second mark. The top graph looks very much like HadCRUT3 global, the middle looks like HadCRUT3 northern hemisphere, and the bottom looks like HadCRUT3 southern hemisphere, ALL TRUNCATED SHORTLY in the year 2000 or shortly after (maybe 2003). Side by side here:
http://i191.photobucket.com/albums/z36/AlecRawls/Environment%20and%20climate/BBCwarmingspoofcompositeJPG.jpg
This proves that they intended this to be actual climate-vs-weather propaganda.
Jeff Alberts says: “Lol, great ad. But Guinness is HORRIBLE!”
Nay, lad, ye joost ha’ nae had enough prrrractise!
Antonia,
You can check out a not so good translation into English by Google Translate.
The post is about an article in a Portuguese daily people, Publico (the most alarmist Portuguese newspaper), about the Fox News message that was handled here by Anthony yesterday. It is was a very bad approach by the Portuguese journalist that wrote the article.
If you want more information, drop me an email (top left of my blog).
Ecotretas
I think that a few people who may not be British or as steeped in British humour as a native are having a few problems understanding the stance of the Armstrong and Miller sketch.
Although it says nothing about the core “facts” of CAGW, to my mind, there is no question at all that its target is the smug quasi-official propaganda which wants to turn people into unthinking parrots. British people tend to react such heavy-handed Orwellian bossiness regardless of how worthy they think the message might be.
I suspect that they would be likely to do a sketch about such propaganda regardless of their views on the actual subject of the propaganda. I don’t think for a second that this comes from the same groupthink as 10:10 although it may well have been inspired by splattergate.
charles nelson says:
December 17, 2010 at 4:15 am
‘If you think this is Warmist you’re wrong for all kinds of reasons.
The main one is that Miller and Armstrong are famous for ripping the piss out of sacred and pompous institutions…see for instance Nude Vets or Stryker…they’re comedians and their top priority is laughs. This is quite gentle but definitely in a long British Tradition of anti-establishment humour. …. The Brits were amongst the first to fall for the scam and they will in due course be unutterably vicious towards those who perpetrated it.’
Like charles and several Brit posters, I agree very much that this is a dig (even if no more) at warmist absolutism. The body language and the arch facial expressions say so; the setting (reassuringly, impeturbably middle class) says so; the ‘government advice’ says so – these propaganda leaflets are either universally derided, treated with mild contempt or simply binned; the clear disapproval of the police state approach says so – very few Brits like being threatened by their corrupt governers and, even if we’re not an armed population, we are perfectly capable of unutterable viciousness towards them if necessary. The only thing that could have been better was to put it in monochrome, like the public information films of the 40s and 50s. Underneath it all, we don’t, as a people, have much time for sanctimonious puritans and self-righteous bullies.
Iren says:
December 17, 2010 at 12:40 am
Hilarious! I saw this on a couple of other sites and there was actually discussion about whether it was pro or con AGW!
I think the BBC was in the pro AGW group, (foot the in self ones shoot) comes to mind.
As a Brit I can assure you that this is warmist propaganda, Our humour can be difficult to interpret if you are German or American.
Stefan – it’s an interesting study in mass manipulation, from example going back to Communism’s beginnings in Russia. Lenin first used it by creating an alternative to the Orthodox Church which he intended to pass off as the real one, his Bolshevik Church came from his ‘if they want a Church I’ll give them a Church, but it will be my Church’; Stalin perfected this by clever manipulation and by murdering and incarcerating any bishops, priests and laity against it. To this day it’s recognised as the ‘real’ Orthodox Church on the world stage and the line from the original Church still villified (now subsumed abroad).
Stalin went on to perfect the ‘art’ of disinformation, he was much impressed by the fledgling advertising industry in the US, and worked together with Beria who came up with the strategy of belittling any opposition by calling them insane, whence the rising numbers in Soviet lunatic assylums, reasoning that ‘majority people’ don’t like think themselves associated with ideas from ‘lunatics’. Of course, all done together with the very real fear of the camps and death for any daring to object. Together with the standard brain-washing techniques in childrens’ education, much as now with AGW in schools, where no teacher, if they knew different, would risk bucking the trend publically. Privately became as dangerous, we haven’t quite reached that tipping point in our schools, but we’re coming close.. There have been a spate of ad campaigns on other subjects encouraging ‘members of the public’ to report offenders.
But the way the Greenies have been used en masse in this campaign is extraordinary.
Maggie Thatcher the Rationality Snatcher. She got quite a lot from it, the Greenie voices against nuclear power diverted, the destruction of the coal industry (which brought down the previous goverment she was in) and the battering of union power to protect workers, the selling off of Britain’s wealth and nationalised industries into private ownership, and, ‘authority’ on the European stage, which grew to world wide.
I think this article he wrote last year in the Times Science mag Eureka might give some insight into where Ben Miller the comedian in the sketch is coming from.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/eureka/article6934863.ece
Erm, no. This is standard BBC climate porn – it’s just being ironic, which seems to have been a bit lost in translation.
I appreciate English irony does not travel well and that we are two nations divided by a common langauage, but you are viewing this video in entirely the wrong light and making inferences based of that interpretation with regards a change in attitudes at the BBC with cannot be justified bases on the their output. The BBC world service has basically become 24 hour “Songs of Praise” for the Green religion, and this is not mocking climate science, but skeptics.
The skit is of the Brechtian (read communist) school – “show that you are showing” – the man presents himself to the camera and on one level he is showing the village idiot and on another he is intimating to the audience, “look, this man is an idiot”. The canned laughter indicates the audience should be laughing AT this “idiot” who says “whatever happen to global warming, eh?”.
Note the sarcasm in the voice over – look at the “idiot” who can’t tell the difference between weather and climate – the distain of intonation that infers that anyone who cannot look beyond their own garden is parachical, xenophobic, ma.
Cut to them reading a government issue book – not a pamphlet – this is serious, well researched data – data you can depend on – the village idiot is cured! He drops out of charachter, steps out of the field of suspension of disbelief and gives an imperceptible nod to camera, implying that now the viewer should consider the “moral”.
The moral they should smugly congratulate themselves for being neither parochial nor xenophobic, and of course for believing in climate change – becuase after all, anyone that doesn’t is a parocial xenophobe aren’t they?
“I’m so gald I’m not an alpha – alpahs have to work so hard – I shouldn’t like to be an alpha – I’m so happy as a beta…”. Note that Orwell worked for the BBC.
Boy, how’d they get Barbara Feldon for that clip? She sure ages well!
Simon Barnett says:
December 17, 2010 at 3:29 pm
I see it differently. I think the comedians are taking the piss out of all parties here, which is after all, what they are paid to do. The hallmark of good comedy is its ability to hold the mirror up to both sides of an argument, and make the stereotypical appear absurd.
The stereotypical ‘ignorant wisecrack’
The stereotypical ‘Government Pamphlet’
The stereotypical ‘Public information film’
The stereotypical ‘prison shower scene’
The stereotypical media brainwash earning the green tick for correct recitation of the ‘party line’.
Brits are dimly aware there is something amiss with the data. They are acutely aware of the coldest cold snaps in many a long year. Everyone is aware that nothing is proven either way by the weather or the propaganda.
The joke in this sketch is mainly on the government for stolidly sticking to the same old drivel when everyone can plainly see things are not as they were before climategate and the cold winters.
The green tick at the end is what gives it away. The pat on the head for Pavlov’s dog after the ‘threat of prison’ aversion therapy gets the biggest laugh.
Simon Barnett – I’d agree with you but somehow you’ve not included the threat of imprisonment in your analysis. This, to me, is what makes it pro skeptics and a warning to those pro warming, and so I think a brilliant skit on the totalitarianism of AGW support. (Different from the warmists’ direct bludgeoning as in the 10/10 video and the ad frightening the little girl with bedtime stories of a dangerous CO2, which created a huge backlash against them.)
tallbloke says:
December 17, 2010 at 4:37 pm
I agree with your characterization. They are clearly taking shots at both sides.
@Myrrh
dude – that is a threat that cuts bots ways – each side has suggested trials of the other at some point, – although only onse side ahas suggested moral relativisim with holocaust denial as far as I am aware – and I would aver that the suggestion of criminality is primarily to prevent the audience from identifying with the protagonist (ie the “idiot”), which makes the payload I outimed in my last the more poigniant.
(Disclaimer: I am, at this juncture, very, very drunk – tis the season etc, please excuse typos – had one for the cold, had another to see where 1st got to, all went downhill from, there drinking rusty mails). Bleh. Yes, bleh, damn you!
note that original comment was sober, and that I don;t drink, except at crhistams.
rustsy mail =
rusty nail =
single malt + drambuie. warm with hands. snifff lovionlgy. Ahhh, xmas.
Use a brandy glass – it facilitates the smell.
@tallbloke
Dude you couldn;t ne more wromg = these are serrioulsly intelliget folk – the3y know what tey are about = but fk it – meryy fkn xmaxs,.
Plane Stupids, Climate Stupids, now we have [sadly for the UK] the extremely low brain Cameron Stupids. 80% renewables by when? Eton may be an exclusive school but it seems to produce far too many idiots.
Following the Cancun debacle, this sketch is another sign that the CAGW scam is well and truly over!
I suspect that few of us Englishmen would take this sketch as pro-CAGW, rather it is an illustration of how our corrupt and useless government has got things wrong again.
You see things. For next funny Friday, some Wordsworth:
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of Man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the ages can.
— William Wordsworth, The Tables Turned
Somehow I think the joke is on you. I find this funny – it is satire about government control but it is no way anti-AGW.
Ben Miller (the guy in the sketch), is a bit of an eco activist. He said recently:
“What we really mean by “saving the planet”, of course, is “saving the humans”. I’m not sure we deserve it. For a start, we did the damage in the first place. And what’s so great about us anyway?”
“…after we are extinct, some future species may industrialise, overpopulate and make exactly the same mistakes all over again. The ultimate irony is that we will just be lumps of fossil fuel for those numpties to burn.”
But it good to know that numpties find it funny too.
It’s amazing how the Thought Police from Orwell’s “1984” came in through the back door of environmentalism…
Lazarus says:
December 18, 2010 at 6:14 am
Somehow I think the joke is on you. I find this funny – it is satire about government control but it is no way anti-AGW.
It takes a special type of numptiness to not see that the CAGW crowd are all about government control, so congratulations on that.