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/
@ur momisugly Robbie says:
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.
Umm… just ASSERTING that there are lots of examples isn’t a fact. As I recall, we have discovered more species than have been destroyed every year for the past century, so it’s quite conceivable that the number of extant species is going UP. But maybe you believe that evolution isn’t happening any more, so no species should ever die out?
Skeptic’s also agree that climate will warm up with the increase of CO2. Has CO2 increased lately? Answer: YES!
Well, yes. Unfortunately for the CO2 assertion, the temperature has been going DOWN recently – quite a lot! Why didn’t you mention that?
Paul Crutzen and Mark Stafford-Smith have presumed to declare a geological era, based on presumed powers that have not been delegated to them. In their hubris and arrogance, they have but donned the Emperor’s New Clothes.
Ouch!
[My bold]
“On no one’s word” my buttt. The corruption of money has reached the very ‘highest’ echelons of scientific understanding. Sad really.
They should be re-named
The Royal Society For the Preservation of Government Funding.
William Astley says: March 25, 2012 at 10:04 am
Thank you William for your post.
I agree with your conclusions.
Food-to-fuel is generally a counterproductive concept, and corn ethanol is the worst, imo. Although the 45 cent per gallon US ethanol subsidy has recently been revoked, the ill-advised mandates requiring US fuel marketers to include ethanol in their gasoline remain, and these mandates should also be immediately revoked. Regrettably, this is unlikely to happen.
You are correct that the evidence strongly supports the Climate Skeptics position and tends to falsify the CAGW (Very-Scary Global Warming) Hypothesis.
As you mention, one of the methods used by the CAGW alarmists to try to bolster their very weak case is to “fudge” their climate computer models by using aerosols to help “hindcast” past climate, particularly the global cooling that occurred circa 1940 to 1975, the same time that the combustion of fossil fuels greatly accelerated. The big problem for the warmists is that they had to FABRICATE their aerosol data to fudge their models – they literally “made it up from thin air”. 🙂
If they had used actual aerosol data, as available from D. V. Hoyt and others, their models would show a much lower “climate sensitivity“ to atmospheric CO2, and their very-scary global warming story would disappear, and would closely resemble the climate skeptics’ position. Feedbacks to increased atmospheric CO2 would be zero or more likely negative, and there would be NO catastrophic manmade global warming crisis.
Please see below re D. V. Hoyt and aerosols:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=755
Douglas Hoyt:
July 22nd, 2006 at 5:37 am
Measurements of aerosols did not begin in the 1970s. There were measurements before then, but not so well organized. However, there were a number of pyrheliometric measurements made and it is possible to extract aerosol information from them by the method described in:
Hoyt, D. V., 1979. The apparent atmospheric transmission using the pyrheliometric ratioing techniques. Appl. Optics, 18, 2530-2531.
The pyrheliometric ratioing technique is very insensitive to any changes in calibration of the instruments and very sensitive to aerosol changes.
Here are three papers using the technique:
Hoyt, D. V. and C. Frohlich, 1983. Atmospheric transmission at Davos, Switzerland, 1909-1979. Climatic Change, 5, 61-72.
Hoyt, D. V., C. P. Turner, and R. D. Evans, 1980. Trends in atmospheric transmission at three locations in the United States from 1940 to 1977. Mon. Wea. Rev., 108, 1430-1439.
Hoyt, D. V., 1979. Pyrheliometric and circumsolar sky radiation measurements by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory from 1923 to 1954. Tellus, 31, 217-229.
In none of these studies were any long-term trends found in aerosols, although volcanic events show up quite clearly. There are other studies from Belgium, Ireland, and Hawaii that reach the same conclusions. It is significant that Davos shows no trend whereas the IPCC models show it in the area where the greatest changes in aerosols were occurring.
There are earlier aerosol studies by Hand and in other in Monthly Weather Review going back to the 1880s and these studies also show no trends.
So when MacRae (#321) says: “I suspect that both the climate computer models and the input assumptions are not only inadequate, but in some cases key data is completely fabricated – for example, the alleged aerosol data that forces models to show cooling from ~1940 to ~1975. Isn’t it true that there was little or no quality aerosol data collected during 1940-1975, and the modelers simply invented data to force their models to history-match; then they claimed that their models actually reproduced past climate change quite well; and then they claimed they could therefore understand climate systems well enough to confidently predict future catastrophic warming?”, he close to the truth.
_____________________________________________________________________
Douglas Hoyt:
July 22nd, 2006 at 10:37 am
Re #328
“Are you the same D. V. Hoyt who wrote the referenced papers?” Answer: Yes.
_____________________________________________________________________
Royal Bladderfest, bed wetting convention for scientists.
Richard Black quickly earning his invitation to the “Blatherfest”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17488450
Dodgy Geezer says:
March 25, 2012 at 10:16 am
….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!
_________________________________
Peak water? – Never if the politicians would spend tax money on the infra-structure they are SUPPOSED to instead of buying votes and paying off donors.
Thorium and Desalinization Plants should make that topic a non-starter. Civilization’s limiting factor is cheap energy (and food) The only thing holding civilization back is the greedy Politicians/Regulating Class.
Alexander K says:
March 24, 2012 at 5:49 pm
The Royal Society has had occasional lucid moments in its long history; this is very definitely not one of them. This nonsense is similar in spirit to the long-ago attempt by the RS to delay the promised payment of substantial prize monies owed to the village carpenter and self-taught clockmaker Harrison for solving the navigational problem of establishing longitude, on the grounds that ‘Harrison was not a gentleman’.
1/21
If you would believe them, you would be happy they are going to do something about it – save the world etcetera.
If you look at what has been done till now, you see even with all the money spend nothing substantial has happened. Even mainly targeting CO2 for years now, CO2 it is still rising happily. So they are powerless. Yes they can create bureaucracies and rules to no effect – that’s about all they can.
The astonishing fact is not they believe in CAGW, but they still think they can do something about it. They should be happy with the “skeptics”. It would relieve them from an unbearable responsibility.
The Doctors of Alarmism have obviously prescribed a placebo to be administered PR by Nurse and others to further the cause. The therapeutic effect evoked may not be as expected. Some may expect the effect to be similar to that of a glycerine suppository, but in reality it may cause symptoms consistent with those of a bowel obstruction; initially constipation (psychogenic cause due to anticipating conversing with ‘the Brotherhood’), followed by projectile verbal faecal matter emanating from the oro-pharynx this will be accompanied by an offensive malodour that sceptics may be particularly sensitive to.
Delegates will also be expected to don their ‘holistic paradigm thinking caps’ (same shape as a dunce cap).
The result of the placebo effect will be hourly alarmist indoctrination bulletins on BBC NEWS 24 (The BBC version of subliminal advertisements).
No change really then.
Hopefully this may eventually lead to the Queensland effect…
Anybody remembers “The age of aquarius”? And a song of the Mamas&Papas?
Is this over now and we enter the Mannocene….? Any Mannocene song
……its time….
Robbie says:
March 25, 2012 at 7:59 am
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?
How many plant and animal species went extinct long before we arrived on the scene?
You people want facts. Well there are some.
Skeptic’s[sic]also agree that climate will warm up with the increase of CO2.
That’s not a fact — that’s wishful thinking. What we agree on is that CO2 levels rise *in response* to warming — correllation is not causation.
This strange claim can be traced back to informal musings a decade ago by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen.
———-
Looks like Ray is an anal retentive for whom metaphor is just too sophisticated an idea to grasp.
Let’s just take a wild guess here. No one is seriously suggesting that anthropocene is an official geological age.
I believe there was a typo or something…
Should anthropocene actually be anthropomorphism?
Which I think is when the attribution of humans or human traits is carried too far.
I think Blatherfest has a nice ring however.
The RS is no longer a Scientific Societry. It has been turned into a Missionary Society.