This entry below is unashamedly pinched from Bishop Hill, who I don’t think will mind, since at the bottom I’m giving a link to him where a raging and somewhat related debate is going on right now.
He writes:
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More scratching of heads among the chattering classes as they try to work out why nobody believes their global warming propaganda – next week they are all jetting off to Norway for a chat about what to do:
We cordially invite you to the seminar Carbonundrums: From Science to Headlines as well as to the ensuing debate New Realities, New Narratives in Climate Reporting, on Tuesday 8th of February 2011 at Litteraturhuset. We will address important questions such as: How is the press reporting on climate change? What can we learn from Climategate? How should we communicate scientific uncertainty? What determines how people perceive climate change?
Panellists include Fiona Fox, Bob Ward, Roger Harrabin, Fred Pearce, Naomi Oreskes and Rasmus Benestad. That’s one very large carbon footprint!
The whole thing will be webcast here.
(H/T Billy)
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Funny how this comes on the heels of the Lisbon conference, which seems to be driving AGW proponents like Joe Romm absolutely batshit crazy. Bish has quite the discussion on it here.
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Let’s hope it keeps fine for them – then again maybe not.
Oh…who is paying:
KLIMALØFTET (climate uplift) is the “Norwegian government’s action on climate information to the public”
FRITT ORD (free word) Norway’s biggest fund for “free speech and debate by stimulating unafraid use of free speech”
SUND ENERGY, who, according to themselves:
“We represent several different educational and cultural backgrounds and thrive on diversity that enhances communication and sparks innovation. We are motivated by excelling in difficult tasks and have on several occasions assisted our clients to achieve the “impossible”. Our greatest compliment is when clients not only achieve good results, but also grow by working with us.
Much of what we do is “bridging” environments by assisting clients in designing optimal strategies and in understanding their counterparts and stakeholders. Mindsets are diverse and the right answer is often not the same for all parties. We also have a large contact network in many countries and different sectors of business life and politics. Clients find this useful not only in understanding market developments, but also in identifying potential partners and business opportunities.”
Which means essentially nothing.
Except that they want to do business.
The fourth sponsor is the Norwegian Climate And Pollution Agency, which of course is just another government outlet for government policy, promoting the idea of catastrophic AGW.
So no surprises, no skeptics, and of course no inconvenient questions.
Norway in February? Do they really believe that crap they’re spewing?
Re Oslo
Regarding Sund Energy
Which according to this page of their website-
http://www.sundenergy.com/projects/
mostly seems to be representing or advising the gas industry. Hopefully the conference attendees will look at the sponsor’s activities and decide the tired old meme of ‘big oil’ funding sceptics deserves permanent burial. Otherwise they just make our life too easy. One could also say the same about the Norwegian governments sponsorship, but then Norway invested it’s oil/gas windfalls rather better than we in the UK did.
Is Gavin going?
Atomic,
make no mistake.
All Norwegian “green energy” proponents in Norway are already fully financed by Statoil, BP, EXXON, etc…
Still they seem to stick to the same old message of lower consumption.
Only this time in suits.
Wasn’t Roger Harrabin the reporter who said the MET really did predict a cold winter, but then found out from his own FOI request that his story was completely wrong? He tried to make out that the MET isn’t biased and useless, and that their weather models aren’t biased by a belief in global warming. Instead of jetting off to a conference, his time would be better spent finding out who tricked him and why. Surely, if he’s acting as someone’s “useful idiot” he should find out what’s going on before he totally ruins his reputation.
Aside from all the facts, they aren’t going to be effective persuaders until they hire someone with a sense of humor and metaphor.
What’s the first association of the name?
Non illegitimi carbonundrum.
Appropriate, but not in the way they want.
“Ghost Whiners In Norway”
Dances in the past
Bring the spell right up to date.
A Tarentella.
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With all due sarcastic respect to our “betters” they must meet in Norway in February so that the instant winter weather will be a boon to the tourism trade. No middle latitude country or tropical country can afford the additional revenue loss (tourism) or expense (snow removal).
These folks are having their last hurrah before the big funding cuts come. Regardless of who makes the demands on spending the House of Representatives must approve it and the “climate” in that body has taken a decidedly more skeptic view on the science of climate. Perhaps the umbilical to the government teat is about to be cut.
Bill Derryberry
Seems to be the wrong place for a climate conference, Norway in January. Don’t they normally go somewhere warm.
They would not join us in Lisbon.
Now they will not let us join them in Norway.
Although they are debating How To Communicate.
Last week, BBC Science was Under Attack.
Then the BBC Met The Skeptic.
Next week BBC are pushing Skeptics Under the
BusCouch.So….. they want to Forcibly Reprogramme us,
having hung the millstone of AGW round children’s necks
having raised a generation of “Debate Is Over” Believers
Just like the Inquisition
Just like Stalinist Russia
Just like 1984.
Or will they?
Ed Waage says:
February 5, 2011 at 10:54 am
According to the Norwegian met office
http://www.yr.no/place/Norway/Oslo/Oslo/Oslo/long.html
The temperature will be -1 C on Monday when the participants arrive and rise up to a balmy 1 C on Tuesday during the conference.
Not quite a full bore Gore effect, but it will do.
Naomi Oreskes’ talk is called “Merchants of Doubt”. The title suggests that doubters are making large amounts of money from their efforts. Au contraire, the warmists are far better funded than people like our host blogger Anthony and others like him.
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R williams of ABC aus agw Bias fame, recently allowed this to take taxpayer airtime here in aus..I sincerely hope they all get frostbitten! m Oreskes especially. her clever twisiting and implications with no proof of what she claims, classic psyops type spindoctoring indeed.
Oslo in February is actually quite OK. It is about +4C here where I live, a one hour drive west of Oslo, the sun is shining, there is no wind, so alas, there will be no snowstorm when the delegates arrive. Oslo at 0 degrees is not like Chicago at 0 degrees, I am sorry to say.
Norwegians consist of people who actually followed when the ice age ended and the ice retreated. They love snow and ice (I am a genetic misfit). You can see that every Easter, when the snow disappears in the lower land and the sun rises higher for every day. Most people travel to the mountains to enjoy the snow and ice while it lasts, hurl themselves together in small wooden cottages or mountain resorts, and go skiing all day and party all night. Today, I am sure hundreds of thousands of Norwegians are out skiing.
Benestad whined about the lack of communication along the warmists a year ago, in a letter to the opinion pages of Teknisk Ukeblad. Teknisk Ukeblad is the technological weekly in Norway, being mailed to all members of the union of the university educated engineers – which is as good as all engineers educated from the Norwegian Institute of Technology, University of Trondheim, renamed some years ago into the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. I mention this because you should be aware that Norway is a small country, a bit larger than Minnesota with a little less people, and very centralized, almost like Minnesota. The Teknisk Ukeblad is situated in Oslo and probably doesn’t have a single journalist skilled in science. Mockingly we now call it The Environmentaltechnology Weekly because they are in the hands of the environmentalists and print all the badly written press releases about AGW from the Norwegian equivalent of Reuters.
Norway as a country is obsessed with one notion: that the only thing that matters is to be BEST. That is why we pour money into sports, especially winter sports. There is something religious about this, and note that this obsession is not shared by the Danes or Swedes – or Icelanders or Finns.
We print news every month to bring to knowledge of people that we are the happiest, the richest, the most caring, that Norway is the best country in the world to live in, that we live longest, are most prosperous, that our technology is the best, that we are world-leading in this or that, that we set an example for other countries, etc. etc. While we are one of the most over-taxed countries with a rigorous control in so many areas that people who come from dictatorships for instance in South Africa have said to me that they were much freer in their dictatorships.
Our politicians have extended this obsession to the climate crisis. We SHALL be the BEST of the world in developing CO2 capture and storage, wind turbines, etc. We shall be best in giving away money to other countries so they can combat climate change. Our prime minister was recently appointed by Ban Ki Moon as head of the UN’s climate combat panel – or whatever they call it. Our environmental minister who is going to appear at this conference fly all over the world and throw money into other countries climate combat schemes. Billions of them.
Benestad complained in his letter that climate change combat didn’t receive enough attention, they communcated too poorly. I wrote a long letter in reply to the T. U. where I pointed out that no other branch of science (if you choose to call it that) ever had the same amounts of money, prizes and international attention at their feet or in their hands. With a Nobel prize, an Oscar, and a lot of feature films scaring the shit out of people or TV serials and debates presenting the scare again and again, they were so grossly overcommunicated I wondered what was his problem?
The sarcasm and the heap of sound arguments were of no use. The T. U. didn’t print my reply, so I mailed it to Benestad and received a feeble reply that they (the warmists) didn’t communicate well enough because people still didn’t believe. At this time half of the Norwegian population didn’t believe in AGW at all.
So be sure of this – there is no discussion of climate in itself in this conference – there will only be a discussion of how to work with presentation and spreading the word.
Cicero is one of the two institutes founded by the government to work explicitly with climate. If you as an employee become a skeptic, you are likely to be fired. They are a few hundreds, many working with meteorology and mathematical modelling, others with social sciences – like plans for what to do when the drought is over us and the sea washes in over us. Or economists working out taxation to carry out the climate combat plans or lawyers working out the legislation for the taxation.
Yep. The only consolation is that the conference will not succeed, from the simple basis that they don’ t speak the truth. Whatever they do to perpetrate a lie, just let them. It will disappear in the end.
John Marshall says:
February 6, 2011 at 3:08 am
“Seems to be the wrong place for a climate conference, Norway in January. Don’t they normally go somewhere warm.”
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They’re making sure that cold is normal where they meet, so when the Gore- or COP-effect hits, it won’t be noticed.
Panellists include Fiona Fox, Bob Ward, Roger Harrabin, Fred Pearce, Naomi Oreskes and Rasmus Benestad.
In an equitable world most of these would be stripped of their doctorates for scientific fraud. I do not know about Rasmus Benestad so can not talk about his scholarship.
These people sure live a lavish, high-carbon lifestyle on the public dime, decrying carbon use. An unbiased observer might call this hypocrisy.
Thanks a lot for making the effort to describe the terminlogy for the newbies!
Carbonundrums? They better watch it on the spelling, for a moment I thought the meeting was sponsored by Big Abrasives.
Although, Big Abrasives are masters at carbon sequestration. Once they’ve made a chunk of silicon carbide, safe bet that carbon ain’t going back into the carbon cycle anytime soon. And that’s not even mentioning the synthetic industrial diamond abrasives.
Still, we don’t really need a lot more abrasive dense lumps. Especially at this conference. ☺
Someone needs to tell all these AGW Folks about TELECONFERENCE facilities…
They need to all link from their laptops “for the children” and “for the planet”….
How is the press reporting on climate change?
It´s not true what said by Theo Goodwin, at least in Spain: see below.
What can we learn from Climategate?
Regarding what that way called, it´s been demonstrated, by more than three independent investigation commissions, that only some lack of information happened, but everything was scientifically correct.
And when the issue came up, most media spent hours and days talking about it. But when the news was what done by the scientists of U. of E. A. did not affect the “very high” risk of global warming, very very little could be seen/heard.
How should we communicate scientific uncertainty?
It´s unavoidable: Nature is very very complex…But I usually say that even if those figures of likelyhood such as 90% … 85% were so exagerated that they should be much lower, even around 50%, can we toss a coin to risk our planet future so gravely?
An example. Simon Lewis says (see linked paper):
“It’s difficult to detect patterns from just two observed droughts, but to have them close together is concerning”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12356835
Even if the likelyhood of what said can be moderate -for now-, can we be called rational animals and just wait until seeing the risk is almost 100% sure?
What determines how people perceive climate change?
I think sceptic´s arguments should be countered restlessly. Most people wish climate change were not true, not to have to reduce their energy consumption. And what each person can do is so little! (they think). If they hear there are people saying the issue is just unnecessary alarmism … they do nothing!