WUWT-TV's answer to Al Gore's 'Dirty Weather Report' is ON THE AIR

I look forward to rewatching Burt Rutan’s presentation from Youtube. I’ve seen his slide shows from 2 years back, but the refresh he did for this show is a treasure. Getting the IPCC reviewers comments was a great add. The background of his office with the slanted bookshelf s classic Rutan: why use bookends when a slope bookshelf holds them better.

I am disappointed. I have now tried to watch a number of times, but the streaming is so broken that I can only get sound for around 2 seconds out of every 10. Hopefully I’ll be able to watch the best bits on line later.

From the Boy who Cried Warming: The bit about the ice cap on Mars shrinking as seen from telescopic observations from 1960s to 1990s and confirmed by Global Surveyor is a claim worth a return. It is either a stunning coincidence, error in data collection, or smoking gun that “It’s the Sun, Stupid!” I can’t think of a fourth possibility.

I forgot to add I loved Rutan’s aside about why it is true that talking to plants makes them grow better: You are breathing CO2 on them. Moist, warm, CO2 rich air…. heaven.

Feeds works. Only I noticed is a flickering blue bar at the bottom

Brian Johnson uk says:
November 14, 2012 at 11:46 pm
Someone please make PM David Cameron and his Cabinet watch/listen to Burt Rutan/WUWT/Telecast
Brian
Don’t be stupid 😉 They don’t watch anything more engaging than Sesame Street.

Burt was simply great, his slides ideal, simple and to the point for all. No rocket science needed.

If you can control the bit rates (like on The Boy who Cried Warming movie) and are set at HD 480, maybe 360 sure would help. Somewhere along the ol bit-chain even my high speed link that normally can just keep up at 480 is breaking up about every 20 seconds.

I’m quite miffed with myself. 30 minutes before the start ( that was 1am here ) I lay down to pass the time with a bit of TV as I waited. Woke up 7 hours later having missed all the good bits ( well most of them, had no interest in luke warmers Mosher & Fuller try with more of their sitting on the fence alarmism through the back door. )
Hopefully there will be youtube presentations of the live talks available. It would be a travesty if they were missing in the future debate.
Been enjoying the recorded filler as America sleeps but I’ve seen it all before.

The weather is getting worse. New paper just out. Pay attention Al Gore
“Little change in global drought over the past 60 years”
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v491/n7424/full/nature11575.html
H/t Marc Morano

davidmhoffer says:
“The one thing they got correct was that the debate is ultimately about sensitivity. On this I would make the point that I have made many times before. If sensitivity was high, we wouldn’t be having this debate, the impact on global temps would be pronounced and unequivocal. It is not, we can barely discern the signal if indeed that is what we are discerning at all. If sensitivity is low, then we have nothing to be alarmed about, and that is precisely what the preponderance of evidence points to.”
Spot on. Where is the global warming from the rise in CO2??
Real world evidence shows conclusively that sensitivity to CO2 must be so low that it can be completely disregarded. Thus, the “carbon” scare is ipso facto falsified.
Any questions?

Had to chuckle hearing John Coleman describe Margaret Thatcher as the Prime Minister of England.

just posted these cached versions of judith curry’s pages on bishop hill in response to a comment by omnologos from memory mentioning mark thompson was being quoted last time he went to her site. now i don’t see the comment i responded to:
cached version of homepage with the Mark Thompson quote:
ClimateEtc: Policy, rhetoric and public bewilderment
Posted on November 14, 2012 | Leave a comment
by Judith Curry
Science is the most formidable intellectual force of our age, perhaps any age. The irony is that, without the insights of the humanities, it may still find itself without words. – Mark Thompson
Continue reading →
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:5Hf4842Llg0J:judithcurry.com/+%22judith+curry%22+%22mark+thompson%22&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au
full cached version:
Policy, rhetoric and public bewilderment
Posted on November 14, 2012 | Leave a comment
by Judith Curry
Science is the most formidable intellectual force of our age, perhaps any age. The irony is that, without the insights of the humanities, it may still find itself without words. – Mark Thompson
Bishop Hill points to a remarkable essay by Mark Thompson, the former head of the BBC. This was a lecture given at Oxford about science and rhetoric, focusing on the climate change debate and the problems of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. It is rather lengthy (16 pages), the whole essay is well worth reading. I excerpt here the parts of his argument that I found particularly interesting:
I’m going to explore the present state of the argument from authority through a single prism—namely the way in which science is handled in argumentation about public policy. And I’m going to attempt to tease apart a paradox which genuinely perplexes most of the scientists that Iknow, which is this: almost everyone accepts that science gives us our most secure understanding of the physical world – so why doesn’t it always carry the day?
Surely, if anything can, science can pierce what I’ve called the cloud of unknowing and replace public bewilderment with public enlightenment. So why is it so often questioned and challenged by non-scientists witout anyone accusing them of stupidity or absurdity? Why, when it comes to public policy formulation or media discussions, is science typically regarded as one of the considerations rather than the card that trumps every other card?
Hume’s sense that science represents an epistemological gold standard almost universal today. Like most non-scientists of my age and background, I accept that fundamental authority completely and whenever it comes to an argument I usually find myself instinctively on the side of mainstream science. I don’t do that because I have personally checked the evidence which underpins The Origin of Species or examined Bohr’s or Schrodinger’s equations: I haven’t the expertise to do either. No, I back science because I find Popper’s account of the scientific method and its falsifiability intellectually compelling and because, at the level of common sense, the explanatory and predictive success of science is so overwhelming. Moreover, I’ve spent enough time with scientists to be wholly convinced that the culture and practice of science genuinely aim at truth.
As non-scientists then, our acceptance of the primacy of science is based less on our own scientific training than on a mixture of cultural, social and philosophical factors. This is exactly what is implied by the argumentum ad verecundiam if you can work out the equation for yourself, after all, you don’t have to take it on trust.
At the same time, many of us know that it’s too simplistic to say that science always and immediately right. Sometimes there’s not enough data, or the puzzle of what the data means has yet to cracked, or the whole thing is still a work in progress: sometimes, in other words, the science is or at least appears unfinished.
On other occasions, scientists disagree there are rival explanations, or there’s one candidate explanation which some sicntists back but others oppose: in these cases, the science is disputed.
On still other occasions, someone may call into question the good faith of the scientists – they’rein the pay of the government or Big Pharma or they’re committed to some cause and therefore their work may lack impartiality and thus reliability: we might call this corrupted or even perverted science.
We also know that, on a few very rare occasions, there have been dramatic revolutions in the history of science when a consensus view has been overturned in favour of a radical new theory Copernicus, Einstein and that, before such revolutions, scientific group-think is possible; this is what Lee Smolin alleged about contemporary American physics and M-theory and string theory in his 2006 book The Trouble with Physics, though one would need to understand the science rather better than I do to judge whether he’s right or not.
So as we listen to a given scientific debate, in theory any number of doubts can appear. Yes, of course we still believe in the authority of good, finished, honest science but maybe in this case it’s not quite ready; or maybe we’re in the middle of a he-says-she-says wrangle and God only knows who’s right; or maybe there is something fishy about the way that report was paid for; or maybe that lone scientist I heard on the radio is right and it’s the other 99% of physicists who will be proven wrong in the end. In an age of pervasive suspicion and uncertainty, and it doesn’t take much for the weevils to get to work.
Sometimes one comes across a letter about some matter of public concern signed by a long list of notables from many different and unconnected backgrounds: this is authority sliced and diced and repackaged like the Collateralised Debt Obligations which precipitated the financial crisis, authority each piece of which may be far from its point of origin and justification, but where it’s still hoped that the whole can be greater than the parts.
We might have hoped that authority might be one sure way of piercing the cloud of unknowing. Instead, we find that even the most clear-cut authority, that derived from science, can find itself in the most opaque, impenetrable regions of the cloud. And if what I’ve said this evening is true of science, it is probably even more true of economics and the other social sciences, indeed of any area of professional expertise which intersects with the world of public debate and policy.
Misrepresentation is undoubtedly often part of the problem, but it’s too easy to blame the public’s lack of knowledge of, or unwillingness to trust science entirely on the dark forces of misrepresentation. When science enters the public arena, it almost always ends up having to play by at least some of the rules of that arena, rules which often confuse the question of authority. It also finds itself in competition with radically asymmetrical rhetorical forces which derive their power from the spheres of morality, culture, superstition, even the mystic.
But to wish we could eliminate those ‘divisive cultural meanings’ is to wish away the freedom and openness on which modern democracies are built –and, short of dictatorship, its impossible to achieve anyway. In my view our task rather is to find practical ways of helping the public to pick their own way through this difficult, cluttered landscape. I’ve tried this evening to give some examples of how it is possible to parse public statements about science and disentangle them so that one can analyse and understand the different elements: exposition, assertion, opinion and advocacy. It takes time and, in its own way, a little training. Our challenge is how to encourage more people to take the time and acquire the skills to do this for themselves
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QKSn2u4sU7EJ:judithcurry.com/2012/11/14/policy-rhetoric-and-public-bewilderment/+http://judithcurry.com/2012/11/14/policy-rhetoric-and-public-bewilderment/%23more-10472&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au