Ray G writes:
Donna Laframboise has a post up on the upcoming Royal Society-sponsored meeting with 2,500 attendees expected. the topic is climate change. Donna holds up the ridicule the list of attendees, singers, bureaucrats, song writers, PR professionals. The list is short on physicists, chemists, statisticians and, of course, she supports her conclusions with facts. The RS deserves the attention that your megaphone provides.
happy to help Ray
The Royal Society’s Blatherfest
A “major international conference” will begin on Monday in London. It’s being hosted by the Royal Society, the oldest science academy in the world and previously the most prestigious.
But over the past decade the Royal Society has abandoned its longstanding neutrality and become a political lobby group.
The depths to which this formerly esteemed body organization has now sunk may be seen on the website for this conference. A number of official blog posts appear there, including one written by the event’s co-chair, Mark Stafford-Smith. It declares:
our science tells us that the Earth has entered the ‘Anthropocene’, a geological era in which human impacts are now as important in driving how the planet operates as geological and astronomical forces have been in past eras. [backup link]
But this is nonsense. As I observed last August, a scientific body called the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) is responsible for naming geological eras. It has made no such determination that a new one has begun.
This strange claim can be traced back to informal musings a decade ago by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen. He is not a geologist. He’s doesn’t belong to the ICS. He has no more authority to announce the beginning of a new geological era than I do.
more here:
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2012/03/24/the-royal-societys-blatherfest/
The Idiocene.
(Not quite as rude as it sounds; idio – from the Greek, ‘one’s own’, ie a peculiarity in language or behaviour of a particular person or group).
I’m thinking we have a devolution going on here. maybe a sub-species, ‘homo pathetic’, of the ‘asinine’. motto: ‘audire unum’ (pronounced ‘ oh dear… un…um….) ((nothing in mind))
mandate: ‘stercore fit, asinos fecere’ (!@ur momisugly#$ happens, asinoles do it).
clivebest says:
March 25, 2012 at 2:38 am
You will learn how :
“Humanity is at a crossroads. Social, economic and environmental crises that have played out in recent years offer a unique opportunity for a step change in the way humanity does business. Although the concept of the ‘green economy’ was introduced to address today’s challenges, its continued dependence on traditional – and questionable – trickle-down economic growth theory has rendered it inadequate. “
————————————————————-
Waaaaah, fake-socialism and fake-environmentalism can only survive by taxing private sector capitalism. Waaaaaah. No fair.
Who woulda thought it ….. ?
For these people and the enviro-NGO’s, government bureaucrats and rent seeking business people the problem is as follows.
Humans are causing the world to rapidly warm. This climate change causes extreme weather events like floods/blizzards/droughts/hurricanes to increase and the global sea level to rise.
Therefore the industrial countries apart from decarbonizes its economy has to pay climate debt to the development countries so that they are compensated for having variations in their weather.
Problem is, there is no evidence that incidents of extreme weather events has increased.
There is no credible evidence that humans are casing dangerous global warming.
If nothing else I’m sure the delegates at this Gaia catastrophism feast meeting are going to be feed well with good food.
All I can say, the world has gone mad. Scary that adult people with this level of political and scientific power have become this perversely deluded.
My worry is that the Royal Society hierarchy actually believe this **it, I was hopeful they just needed this because the gravy train was running out. From what I can see climate alarmism is now all they do. This is a ‘science’ talks activist rhetoric meeting.
There are many peed off sceptical members. I wonder how much this is costing me as a UK tax payer.
In this day and age the Humanities rule, and those in said field have decided that Critical Theory and Speculation trumps Empiricism.
…..the horror….
J.
re:
Thanks so much for the additional info. I haven’t had the time to conduct exhaustive research on this matter. I merely assumed that, when The Economist ran a cover story in May 2011 titled Welcome to the anthropocene – geology’s new age it roughly knew what it was talking about. Silly me.
The the RS has entered the Chimpanocene era
I think that’s the core of it.
The world has a climate chancer cancer.
DennisA says:
March 25, 2012 at 3:25 am
“The director of the Age of Stupid, Franny Armstrong, was the director of the 10:10 climate campaign “snuff” movie, “No Pressure”, which “blew up” dissenters. So much for the science of the 300 year old Royal Society and its friends.”
Franny’s defense: “We ‘killed’ five people to make No Pressure – a mere blip compared to the 300,000 real people who now die each year from climate change”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franny_Armstrong
Be careful though, when tempted to use such an argument to justify your own actions; it is only acceptable by MSM SOP when directed AGAINST western civilizations…
Hi Donna,
The Economist became an acolyte of Global Warming Hysteria about a decade ago. – I wrote the editor, got the usual sillly reply, and cancelled my subscription.
Regards, Allan
The Obscene gets my vote.
Geologically our era is called “the Recent”
Come on! Face it: We entered the ‘Anthropocene’ long time ago.
How many plant and animal-species would have survived if humans weren’t there in the first place?
The dodo, huia, great auk, passenger pigeon etc etc. are just some of the thousands of examples.
Let’s also not forget on what scale we destroyed many natural habitats on this planet. Having at least some effect on local climate as well.
You people want facts. Well there are some.
Skeptic’s also agree that climate will warm up with the increase of CO2. Has CO2 increased lately? Answer: YES!
We are in the Anthropocene. Stop apologizing for that!
EJ says:
March 25, 2012 at 3:16 am
But how well will that work when they need to use a bathroom?
I’m confused…are we supposed to take our own guitars or what?
Holds up to ridicule? In intro.
What bothers me is that the second bullet of the Royal Society’s ‘five strategic priorities’ is to ‘influence policymakers with the best available scientific advice’
Influence policymakers? Is their organizational stated goal (second in importance) to become a lobby group?
“Inequality destabilizes societies and leads to environmental degradation through ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ and the hedonic treadmill effects. We must strive for a post-consumerism and post-materialist society.”
Ba ha ha, to a crowd of $1000 dollar suits and corporate expense accounts, that will sink right in I’m sure. /sarc
Jimmy Haigh. says: March 24, 2012 at 9:55 pm
Early days of the Royal Society
1768
The Royal Society backs an expedition to observe the transit of Venus from Tahiti. The vessel Endeavour, commanded by Lieutenant James Cook, reaches Australia and New Zealand.
That reminds me – there is a transit of Venus this year, on the 6th June.
___________
A transit of Venus across the Sun takes place when the planet Venus passes directly between the Sun and Earth, becoming visible against (and hence obscuring a small portion of) the solar disk. During a transit, Venus can be seen from Earth as a small black disk moving across the face of the Sun. The duration of such transits is usually measured in hours (the transit of 2004 lasted six hours)… …Observations of transits of Venus helped scientists use the principle of parallax to calculate the distance between the Sun and the Earth.
Transits of Venus are among the rarest of predictable astronomical phenomena. They occur in a pattern that repeats every 243 years, with pairs of transits eight years apart separated by long gaps of 121.5 years and 105.5 years.
A transit of Venus took place on 8 June 2004 and the next will be on 6 June 2012.
(wiki)
___________
Thank you Jimmy.
Franz Kafka might have appreciated this scenario:
The Fellows of the Royal Society are metamorphosed by the transit of Venus in 2004. The 1450 Fellows of this ancient and esteemed scientific Society are intellectually metamorphosed into a swarm of insects, infested with global warming mania. They become a nuisance and an embarrassment, and risk being swept into the dustbin.
But, there is hope: The Fellows of the Royal Society regain their senses in June 2012, when Venus again transits the Sun. Sorry – at this point in the story, it just gets unrealistic and silly.
mitchel44 says:
March 25, 2012 at 9:17 am
We must strive for a post-consumerism and post-materialist society.
Cell phones, iPads and laptops will be collected at the door and distributed amongst the needy in developing nations.
I do not understand how any intelligent informed person could support the extreme AGW ideological position. There appears to be a pathological block to independent analysis and thought.
The science unequivocally supports the so called “skeptics”.
Billions upon billions of dollars are advocated for carbon trading scams, conversion of food to biofuel scams, on wind farms scams, and so which will result in no significant reduce in carbon dioxide emissions. Back of the envelop engineering and economic analysis can be used to show the schemes are scams, that fail due to fundamental issues.
There is an astonishing lack of basic reasoning and diligence by those persons advocating the extreme AGW position. Ignorance of the scams is no defence.
There is no CO2 climate crisis. The crisis is a suite of scams that will bankrupt Western countries; result in food shortages in the third world countries, and will result in inefficient use limited energy resources.
The following is a very clear simple explanation of why the “skeptics” are correct. There is no climate crisis.
http://www.climate-skeptic.com/
http://blogs-images.forbes.com/warrenmeyer/files/2012/02/gw1.gif
http://blogs-images.forbes.com/warrenmeyer/files/2012/02/15yr-temps.gif
“The problem for global warming supporters is they actually need for past warming from CO2 to be higher than 0.7C. If the IPCC is correct that based on their high-feedback models we should expect to see 3C of warming per doubling of CO2, looking backwards this means we should already have seen about 1.5C of CO2-driven warming based on past CO2 increases. But no matter how uncertain our measurements, it’s clear we have seen nothing like this kind of temperature rise. Past warming has in fact been more consistent with low or even negative feedback assumptions.”
36. Ahead of the summit meeting of the G8 industrial nations at Gleneagles in 2005, the Royal Society was signatory to a public challenge to political leaders. Although the Society’s press release declared that this was an unprecedented step,26 the document was in essence little different from the joint academies letter of 2001 (see above). The new statement was endorsed by the academies of all the G8 countries, plus China, India and Brazil, and declared that the evidence of the cause and effect of global warming was now highly persuasive: …the scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action.
Observational evidence does not support the extreme AGW paradigm.
http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1175%2F2009JCLI3461.1
Why Hasn’t the Earth Warmed as Much as Expected? Stephen E. Schwartz, Robert J. Charlson, Ralph A. Kahn, John A. Ogren, Henning Rodhe Issued January 19th, 2010
The observed increase in global mean surface temperature (GMST) over the industrial era is less than 40% of that expected from observed increases in long-lived greenhouse gases together with the best-estimate equilibrium climate sensitivity given by the 2007 Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Possible reasons for this warming discrepancy are systematically examined here. The warming discrepancy is found to be due mainly to some combination of two factors: the IPCC best estimate of climate sensitivity being too high and/or the greenhouse gas forcing being partially offset by forcing by increased concentrations of atmospheric aerosols; the increase in global heat content due to thermal disequilibrium accounts for less than 25% of the discrepancy, and cooling by natural temperature variation can account for only about 15%. Current uncertainty in climate sensitivity is shown to preclude determining the amount of future fossil fuel CO2 emissions that would be compatible with any chosen maximum allowable increase in GMST; even the sign of such allowable future emissions is unconstrained. Resolving this situation, by empirical determination of Earth’s climate sensitivity from the historical record over the industrial period or through use of climate models whose accuracy is evaluated by their performance over this period is shown to require substantial reduction in the uncertainty of aerosol forcing over this period.
There is evidence of criminal negilegence of those advocating these policies.
Biofuels ‘crime against humanity’
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2008-04-14/biofuel-production-a-crime-against-humanity/2403402
Biofuels ‘crime against humanity’
Massive production of biofuels is “a crime against humanity” because of its impact on global food prices, a UN official has told German radio. “Producing biofuels today is a crime against humanity,” UN Special Rapporteur for the Right to Food Jean Ziegler told Bayerischer Runfunk radio. Many observers have warned that using arable land to produce crops for biofuels has reduced surfaces available to grow food. Mr Ziegler called on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to change its policies on agricultural subsidies and to stop supporting only programs aimed at debt reduction. He says agriculture should also be subsidised in regions where it ensures the survival of local populations. Meanwhile, in response to a call by the IMF and World Bank over the weekend to a food crisis that is stoking violence and political instability, German Foreign Minister Peer Steinbrueck gave his tacit backing.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1725975,00.html
The Clean Energy Scam
The U.S. quintupled its production of ethanol–ethyl alcohol, a fuel distilled from plant matter–in the past decade, and Washington has just mandated another fivefold increase in renewable fuels over the next decade. Europe has similarly aggressive biofuel mandates and subsidies, and Brazil’s filling stations no longer even offer plain gasoline. Worldwide investment in biofuels rose from $5 billion in 1995 to $38 billion in 2005 and is expected to top $100 billion by 2010, thanks to investors like Richard Branson and George Soros, GE and BP, Ford and Shell, Cargill and the Carlyle Group.
But several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it’s dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it. Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous. Even cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass, which has been promoted by eco-activists and eco-investors as well as by President Bush as the fuel of the future, looks less green than oil-derived gasoline.
Meanwhile, by diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry. The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. Harvests are being plucked to fuel our cars instead of ourselves. The U.N.’s World Food Program says it needs $500 million in additional funding and supplies, calling the rising costs for food nothing less than a global emergency. Soaring corn prices have sparked tortilla riots in Mexico City, and skyrocketing flour prices have destabilized Pakistan, which wasn’t exactly tranquil when flour was affordable.
The Royal Society of Post Normal Science.
From NoFracking…
“Still another blog post was written by Eva Flinkerbusch, who edits the newsletter and manages the website for the Global Water System Project. She refers to the “alarming state” of freshwater resources declares that the “problem of water scarcity is going to escalate worldwide in the foreseeable future” and discusses “the need for changes in…governance systems..
What I want to know is – When will we hit Peak Water? More importantly, When will all the water run out? We must be drinking lots of it and this can’t go on forever – soon we will have drunk the last lake!
PR professionals are included. This isn’t surprising and reflects the continued theme of CAGW believers that the reason people don’t believe in CAGW is that scientists haven’t communicated it properly. Of course, the real problem is that forecasts of almost all climate-related issues have been overstated and have not occurred. Of course, one or two of the ~20 GCMs come close to fitting the real data just by chance (have you noticed what a broad range the models cover?!), but then there are the ocean level predictions, which now aren’t even going in the “right” direction.
Even worse are the absolutely ridiculous papers attributing every change under the sun global warming. My favorite is using unvalidated regional climate models (which, according to Pielke Sr., do not work) to obtain output that is fed into a model of crop production, the output of which is fed into a third model to predict migration (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 2011 108 (33) 13432-13437). The bottom line is that the authors conclude that millions of Mexicans will migrate to the U.S. due to climate induced food shortages. Maybe you noticed that this paper did not incorporate any observational data, so if any of the dozens of assumptions in these three models are wrong, the results will not only be wrong, but potentially harmful, if governments use them for planning. I cannot think of any other field of research in which something like this would even be tried, let alone published. Until climate scientists stop accepting mathematical speculation as real science, all the PR in the world will not help.