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.
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.