Don't sell your coat!

Sounds like an interesting read – I’ll put it on my Christmas list. It will be the fourteenth book I have read on Climate since Climategate 1.0 with Donna’s book being the last one read and Mosher and Fuller’s being the first one. I was absolutely not involved until Climategate 1.0 but now am addicted and tell everyone I know about this stuff. Just saying so you all know that non-specialists are passionately interested in your work.
Keep it up.

Neat post, so a giant corporation that makes wind power buys the weather channel and the coverage goes to extreme global warming disaster alarmism. I should buy a network to promote my business lol

The huffington post?
They accept Intelligent, thoughtful writing?

Sounds like an interesting read. The comments about the Weather Channel are perhaps a bit obvious. Why do people watch the Weather Channel? To hear about dramatic stuff. It’s kind of hard to get people to tune in if you say “The weather’s mostly settled for the next few days, fine and dry conditions, pleasantly warm at 22*C/72*F”. If you’ve got a TV channel that survives on subscriptions or advertising revenue, you’d better give people a reason to tune in.
One question: Why is the headline from the “summing up” that “Wind turbines do not deliver reliable electric power”? We all know this, but the article isn’t about wind turbines, so why highlight that? Unless you are implying that General Electric sent a diktat to NBC who passed on the diktat to the Weather Channel that they have to exaggerate hurricanes so that people will blame global warming and go and buy wind turbines…
If that’s the point of this article, then sorry, nope, more likely, it’s just that more people will watch the Weather Channel when the weather’s bad. I do. Don’t you?
Lastly, we all know GE is a top polluter, the fourth-largest corporate producer of air pollution in the United States, not to mention their appalling track record on toxic waste. What do they care about the environment?

Nitpicker reporting for duty!
“I can collaborate what Delingpole says”
I think you mean “corroborate.”
No big deal. It is not like you said warming instead of flattening or cooling or anything like that.
,

@jon Jewett
I liked “Taken by Storm” when it came out a couple of years back. Still stands up.
http://www.amazon.com/Taken-Storm-Troubled-Science-Politics/dp/1552632121

“Don’t sell your coat”
Unless you don’t have a sword!

Dear Mr. Ambler:
Try telling that to NPR (National Public Radio).
As best I can tell, wholesale, unquestioning belief in the hypothesis of CAGW appears to be a condition of employment there.

TWC was once useful for getting a quick look at current weather. Now you have to sit through an hour or more of propaganda to get a national forecast. Like NASA, TWC has forgotten its mission.

If I may buck the current… Here in Kansas, Wyoming, and other places, Wind generators make economic sense. They run near full output about 40% of the time and limited output much of the rest of the time.
I have spoken to executives from local power companies and find their attitude not conducive to intelligent use of the things.
A fair amount of intelligent management could solve some of the problems inherent with wind generators.

Woops, I meant loathe.

16 Dec: Ria Novosti: Russia says Kyoto protocol no longer effective
Canada’s decision to quit the Kyoto protocol confirms that it had lost its effectiveness, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said on Friday…
Japan and Russia have also recently announced that they will not be signing the treaty renewal in 2012, but have yet to withdraw officially. According to Kent, other countries could soon follow Canada’s example, which perhaps indicates the need to find new approaches to battling climate change…
Lukashevich also said that Canada would remain a Kyoto protocol country for another year, until all its obligations under the Kyoto protocol expire. The country, which signed the treaty in 1997, failed to meet the target of decreasing carbon dioxide emissions by 6 percent in the 2008-2012 period, which has instead grown by 17-30 percent.
http://en.ria.ru/Environment/20111216/170302678.html

Jon Jewett says:
December 16, 2011 at 2:52 pm
I need a recommendation for Christmas:
Most all of my relatives (except my wife, my son, and my son’s wife) are liberals stuck on stupid. They believe that Al Gore has revealed The Truth and that we are all doomed!
What would be the best book to get people like that to think?
Thanks for the help!
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewett’s evil twin.)
————–
And what would you think if they gave you a copy of Inconevient Truth for Christmas? Maybe you need to rethink this, particularly the contempt you feel for others and your imagined superiority, especially around Christmas time.

Mofsdb says
This is why I loath wind turbines and the fanatics who promote them:
————-
Let’s see if this attitude survives the hypocrisy test.
Do you own a car?
If so get in the car and go for a drive in the countryside. Count the number of dead animals by the side of the road. These animals were all killed by cars. In my part of the world they include cats, dogs, possums, kangaroos, foxes, wombats and lots of birds. The birds like to eat the carrion you see.
Now do you loath cars and the fanatics who promote them?

Yep, for years I would spend my spare time reading a book with the Weather Channel playing in the background.
The weather has always interested me, and even impacted my work as a land surveyor.
(I’ll leave out the part it might have played in getting my private pilot license, as I never really used said license).
It might have been the Weather Channel that drove me to google “arctic ice”, and click on their return of a post at WUWT.
Unintended consequences.

Jon Jewett says:
“They believe that Al Gore has revealed The Truth and that we are all doomed!”
IMO there’s really no one answer to this, there’s as many paths to skepticism of CAGW as there are people it seems.
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/04/21/reader-background/
If they’re into history then something that goes through the historical evidence of the LIA and MWP might be a good place to start.
If they’re “people” people then a book that organizes and explains climategate might be better. Does “I would not give them *anything*. I would not respond or even acknowledge receipt of their emails. There is no reason to give them any data, in my opinion, and I think we do so at our own peril!” (Michael E. Mann to Phil Jones) really inspire confidence?
http://assassinationscience.com/climategate/1/FOIA/mail/1076359809.txt
If they’re scientifically literate then Jo Nova’s “Skeptic’s Guide” might be enough.
http://joannenova.com.au/global-warming/

At any time, 98% of the planet is having normal ordinary weather. 1% is having abnormally cold weather and 1% is having abnormally warm weather. Its just the stats of a 100 year record of weather.
Climate science is constantly trying to tie the 1% abnormaly warm weather to global warming but, as the above statement notes, it is completely normal for 1% of the planet to be abnormally warm.
The same place in Russia that had the heat wave in 2010 (just south of Moscow) is now having the 1% abnormally cold weather over the past 6 weeks at 8C below normal. No one is running climate models over this particular cold spell.

Lazy Teenager;
Maybe you need to rethink this, particularly the contempt you feel for others and your imagined superiority, especially around Christmas time.>>>>
Well, yes, if it wasn’t Christmas time, a higher degree of contempt would obviously be more appropriate.

LazyTeenager says:
“And what would you think if they gave you a copy of Inconevient Truth for Christmas?”
I’d think, they haven’t been listening to me pointing out all the flaws in it at all (or read my editorial in the local paper), if they’d been paying attention they’d know that I had already seen it /read it / debunked it. Then I’d think, this thing can’t even be re-gifted! After awhile I’d probably realize that it would make a decent target and be proportionately grateful.
“Maybe you need to rethink this, particularly the contempt you feel for others and your imagined superiority”
It has nothing to do with contempt for others or any imagined superiority. When you see someone you care about being scammed by a con artist, you tell them.
“especially around Christmas time.”
What better time of year to spread cheer? Hey, good news, we’re not doomed after all, you’re free to be happy.

davidmhoffer says:
December 16, 2011 at 4:55 pm
LazyTeenager;
Now do you loathe cars and the fanatics who promote them?>>>
Nope. I don’t recall any of the promoters of cars telling me they are economical to do things they are not economical for, nor do I recall promoters of cars insisting that the road kill has nothing to do with the cars.
————–
That’s odd, maybe you look at different car advertising than I look at. In my world car promoters of cars tell me that cars are fun and inflate my social status. Economical transport is rarely mentioned. I am not sure that cars are an economical way to have fun or inflate my social status.
But hold on, you are executing the good old “move the goal posts tactic” tsk tsk! You seem to be trying to move from – wind mills are bad since they kill birds – to – wind mills are bad because the wind mill company lied to me – . Does this mean you are conceding my point that as far as bird kill and animal kill rates are concerned cars may very well be much worse?
And an even handed approach would require measures against both cars and wind mills that was in proportion to the kill rates?

To mfosbd 3:36 pm…
One of my ecology students did a term paper on animal casualties caused by wind generators Vs. animal casualties done by automobiles. Would you be surprised to know that no deer have ever been proved to have been killed by wind generators? Would you be surprised to know that in most states, more deer are killed by autos than are taken by hunters? Would you be surprised to know that about 100,000 birds/bats are killed by autos for every one killed by wind generators. Look it up, she found all this on the internet.
For myself, every turn these wind generators make, that is one more turn of a screw in our rich middle eastern trading partners’… well you know the word.

Ambler left out part of the story that actually helps to make his point. Earlier this year NBC was bought by Comcast, which doesn’t need to sell Chinese bat-mashers to increase its share price. Since that purchase, the Weather Channel has downplayed the Gaia crap. Heidi Cullen is no longer on staff as High Priestess, and the features about Our Noble Planet Suffering From Our Grievous Sins no longer appear on their website.
So it’s a classic A/B experiment. With only one direction of change, you don’t know for sure if the effect is coincidental. With an on/off change, you can spot causality.

I have a peculiar view of the economics of the wind generator argument. I can see wind generators from my town. That means money is flowing into the county coffers, that does not come out of my pocket. Money is given to my customers, that replaces some of the taxes they pay, and when they do business with me, it trickles into my pocket.

For those who have never served in the military, There is a comment always made when you say you are from Kansas: ” There is no such place as Kansas, It is Oklahoma blowing north in the summer and Nebraska blowing south in the winter.”

LazyTeenager;
Nope. I don’t recall any of the promoters of cars telling me they are economical to do things they are not economical for, nor do I recall promoters of cars insisting that the road kill has nothing to do with the cars.
————–
That’s odd, maybe you look at different car advertising than I look at. In my world car promoters of cars tell me that cars are fun and inflate my social status. >>>
You’ve clearly never driven into a high school parking lot in a Ferrari.

DocWat says:
December 16, 2011 at 7:06 pm
I have a peculiar view of the economics of the wind generator argument. I can see wind generators from my town. That means money is flowing into the county coffers, that does not come out of my pocket. Money is given to my customers, that replaces some of the taxes they pay, and when they do business with me, it trickles into my pocket.
———————————————————————
This is a common fallacy – thinking that local subsidies benefit you because they bring money into your community. The reality is there is a net outflow (a negative trickle) from your pocket, through the government and into the hands of “entrepreneurs” who oddly weren’t around trying to build businesses in your community prior to the government money becoming available to them.
In Toronto I watched a couple of young British “entrepreneurs” talking sweetly about how progressive our Provincial government was in taking “bold” steps toward a greener future (lots of wind turbines) and how happy they were to be a part of it. Why did these guys come all the way from the UK to help Canada spend its government subsidies? If you don’t know the answer, I would like to start a business with you. You invest the money and I will supply the entrepreneurial sweetness.
If you like mathematical examples:
Start with $700 million.
Subtract 15% which is eaten by the government as a handling fee.
Subtract 10% to the entrepreneurs.
Buy some wind turbines from Germany or solar panels from China.
Install them.
Run them at a cost which is 2-3 times your revenue.
————————————–
Calculate what the return was on the $700 million.
Now ask yourself how much of the $700 million you would be willing to put up if you were asked.

Steve from Rockwood, Damage6,
You boys are chasing the wrong rabbit. Just because this concept is not properly managed (we agree on that) does not mean it cannot be properly managed.

Too many fingers in the pie.

LazyTeenager;
Before you respond to me, please read what Damage6 wrote above.
Then add to that the extra capacity that must be built into other energy sources to pick up the load when the wind don’t blow, and the reduced efficiency of other energy sources because they are most efficient when run “steady state” and are least efficient when fluctuating up and down to accomodate the vagaries of the wind, and then add to that the increased capital costs you will have to bear because the lifetime of conventional power plants will be dramatically shortened due to accomodating highly fluctuating loads.
NOW let’s go back you your car analogy. Find me a lie from the car industry as ridiculous as the notion that wind power makes any sense at all. Keep in mind BTW, that money = energy. All that money that must be spent to run wind mills, comes from other sources which by definition are not “green”. So not only is wind uneconomical, it more than likely has a net positive increase in CO2 associated with it. (backfilling with hydro generation may be the only exception that comes to mind, and why would one backfill with hydro if it was available since it is low carbon and cheaper than wind in the first place, so just use it instead of building wind mills!)

LazyTeenager,
Because A causes misery and it’s tolerated, B, which also causes misery must be tolerated too according to your logic.
Sounds to me like you need to get clued up and study a bit here: http://summalogica.com/logic101/
Life is better if you don’t end up fooling yourself with fallacies…
8():

@LazyTeenager.
Your argument seems to be that if I loathe something that causes harm I should loathe all things that cause harm. But the harm that something causes should be weighed against its benefits.
If you’ve been reading WUWT you’ll know the answer and perhaps if you think about it for a while you’ll understand that in the context of cars and wind turbines the charge of hypocrisy is an oversimplified, ad hominem irrelevance.
By the way loath is an adjective meaning unwilling. You shouldn’t blindly follow my spelling just as you shouldn’t blindly follow AGW.

“How did the good politics of social justice become chained to the bad science of global warming?” – Freeman Dyson
Liberals have been latching on to all sorts of sorry issues over these last decades. A bit depressing as there are many good causes which will be discredited as a group when now, yet another liberal cause, AGW, becomes publicly known as a major fail.
And how did Conservatives become associated with God, guns, anti-science etc? Can’t one be a social liberal, fiscal conservative, atheist, science geek all at the same time without the MSM stereotyping us? Sigh.

Harold, modern liberalism has become fertile ground for totalitarian tendencies. Return to the classical liberalism of personal freedom, property rights, and true respect for the rights of others (rather than the psuedo-tolerance being promoted). You’ll be much happier. Still hated by those in your former country, but much happier because it’s the right place to be.

I can relate to the Weather Channel references. Ironically it played a big part in my becoming aware of the CAGW mass psychosis. During the 2000’s I had been encountering more and more global warming-as-fact mentions in various media and it was probably Heidi Cullen’s spots that finally nudged me to look further into it. Even before getting to the science, the “debate is over”-“science is settled” -“we’ve got to act now” remarks I read smelled fishy. And then that’s when I came across an account of Ms. Cullen’s diatribe calling for decertifying AMS meteorologists who dared to not accept the dogma that had been built up around the new religion. Thanks to Icecap, WUWT, Climate Audit, and many other fine bloggers I found plenty more to raise my ire at this travesty of politicized science. (I even wrote & recorded a song called “Political Science Fiction” I was so disgusted). The intrigue that has unfolded the last few years has been stunning and now it seems that the powers-that-be may be getting twitchy to play their hand. Keep your head down FOIA, whomever you are, and thanks for trying to keep the conversation open.

“He simply doesn’t buy into the global warming issue anymore as many of us used to, including me. – Anthony”
I used to be a rabid warmist. But for me, and I expect many warmists who have moved to the skeptic side, truth is more important than ideology. I’ve often wondered what percentage of skeptics were at one time alarmists.

How did the good politics of social justice become chained to the bad science of global warming?

Leaving aside the question of whether “social justice” is “good politics”, the more basic question is how did the ostensibly “progressive” politics of the left end up entangled with the reactionary Luddites and Malthusians of the environmental movement?

John Garrett says:
December 16, 2011 at 3:12 pm
“Dear Mr. Ambler:
Try telling that to NPR (National Public Radio).
As best I can tell, wholesale, unquestioning belief in the hypothesis of CAGW appears to be a condition of employment there.”
I would call it Pavlovian but its spookier than that. It is something like an overwhelming, deeply embedded psychological need to live in a world of romance with heroes, villains, innocent victims, and the certainty that you know the only narrative that ends in happiness.

Jon Jewett says: December 16, 2011 at 2:52 pm
I need a recommendation for Christmas: Most all of my relatives… believe that Al Gore has revealed The Truth and that we are all doomed! What would be the best book to get people like that to think?
Jon, I have problems like that. Brother BSc Cantab etc. It’s an ongoing challenge. I’m going to give you the same advice I gave Jeff Id which probably helped him set up his blog. Stay in your integrity. Let that direct you. Follow your heart and your intuition. Give your relatives something they can relate to so they don’t lose faith in you. Meanwhile, do something useful for the whole beleaguered Science that is in your power to do well for future generations…
LazyTeenager says: December 16, 2011 at 3:48 pm
And what would you think if they gave you a copy of Inconevient Truth for Christmas? Maybe you need to rethink this, particularly the contempt you feel for others and your imagined superiority, especially around Christmas time.
Ye gods you really are lazy. Click my name to discover the details of the many and thorough debunks of AIT. Monckton did it best. And won a court case.

Kozlowski says:
December 17, 2011 at 4:38 am
And how did Conservatives become associated with God, guns, anti-science etc? Can’t one be a social liberal, fiscal conservative, atheist, science geek all at the same time without the MSM stereotyping us? Sigh.
______________________________________________
AGREED!
I absolutely HATE being stereotyped. If I am a female and get a science degree and stick up for my rights that does NOT mean I am a “Feminist” for example.

Lucy Skywalker says: December 17, 2011 at 12:59 pm
Thanks for the suggestions. Should you ever get to the heart of Texas, give us a shout. The Mrs. and I would be happy to take you to eat BBQ, drink beer, shoot guns, go to a good bible thumping church service, and all of those other things that us Red-Neck Texans (and proud of it) do!
Regards,
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewett’s evil twin)

I bought “Don’t Sell Your Coat.” It’s an excellent, gently humorous introduction to the many fallacies of AGW. I recommend it as an ideal Christmas gift for any friend or relative blinded by warmist propaganda.