Tweet of the Week – 'big climate' and 'big tobacco'

Sheesh, what a tool.

To me, being in the employ of “big government” is worse.

I’ve had problem with jnr for some time. He seemed to me to be ambulance chasing with the greens but just on a different accident. Where the hell is the IPCC back on track. What an idiot.
Give me snr any time.

What?

*meant (@mod)

“Big Tobacco is history, and the IPCC is back on track..” The ignorance he displays should be embarrassing to him (and his father). He’s obviously not tracking tobacco stock sales and stock prices. He apparently failed to notice the IPCC, in their predictions, is stepping away from the models he holds so dear. Maybe he’s right about the NFL …

The IPCC is no longer the source of AGW extremism. The IPCC has in fact moderated its views on climate change and attribution quite a bit. To that extent it can be said “the IPCC is back on track” with a straight face.
That is why the AGW hype industry is ignoring the IPCC more and more.
But, as he and many others have pointed out, the IPCC still suffers from the fatal flaw of being controlled by political decision makers.

Using twitter isn’t as easy as it looks. Whittling one’s thoughts down to 140 characters requires some awareness of how your reader will receive it. Clarity and brevity are difficult to merge successfully and RP Jr. needs more practice.
With that said, I’m tired of the comparisons between the science of climate change and research in other fields. With both tobacco and concussions there are a number of independent “experiments” available, as each smoker and NFL player represents a trial, and every non-smoker and individual without a concussion is a control. It’s possible to compare data from a huge number of people reach a statistically valid conclusion. There is only one Earth.
A better comparison would be climate sensitivity vs. Hubble constant. Alarmists won’t use it because it’s not as interesting a people dying of cancer or brain damage. That shouldn’t matter, however, because this is supposed to be science, not marketing. The Hubble constant has been worked on since the 1920’s and the current range of accepted values is about 1/20th of where they started. The range is still immense with some published figures being almost double those of competing studies done at nearly the same time.
Sorry for the length of this. I suppose I could have just written:
ClmteSci =/=MedSci ya dope. #bonehead/alarmists

But…. But… The models projected we weren’t at the terminal yet!
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Train_wreck_at_Montparnasse_1895.jpg

Far be it from me to lead a cheerleading section for the IPCC but many of the comments in the AR5 WGI Chapter 2 on extremes do sound fairly cautious and moderate (from Pielke Jr.’s blog). Of course this is before the political process puts a scary spin on the science.
•“Overall, the most robust global changes in climate extremes are seen in measures of daily temperature, including to some extent, heat waves. Precipitation extremes also appear to be increasing, but there is large spatial variability”
•”There is limited evidence of changes in extremes associated with other climate variables since the mid-20th century”
•“Current datasets indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century … No robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin”
•“In summary, there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale”
•“In summary, there is low confidence in observed trends in small-scale severe weather phenomena such as hail and thunderstorms because of historical data inhomogeneities and inadequacies in monitoring systems”
•“In summary, the current assessment concludes that there is not enough evidence at present to suggest more than low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought or dryness (lack of rainfall) since the middle of the 20th century due to lack of direct observations, geographical inconsistencies in the trends, and dependencies of inferred trends on the index choice. Based on updated studies, AR4 conclusions regarding global increasing trends in drought since the 1970s were probably overstated. However, it is likely that the frequency and intensity of drought has increased in the Mediterranean and West Africa and decreased in central North America and north-west Australia since 1950”
•“In summary, confidence in large scale changes in the intensity of extreme extratropical cyclones since 1900 is low”

Football is tough on the body? Who knew?
Why don’t the busybodies just cut out the small talk and go ahead and strap us all up in plus sized amniotic sacs on the wall, to be fed nourishment intravenously so we don’t hurt ourselves?
Sheesh. Existence isn’t life.

Bart says:
January 30, 2014 at 2:57 pm
Football is tough on the body? Who knew?…
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
But it is the drive to and from the football game that can kill you.
I really hate the wrapped Cotton Batting Syndrome. Next thing you know parents will be required to put helmets and knee pads and elbow pads and bum pads on babies learning to walk and if they do not they will be accused of ‘Child Abuse’ and the child taken by the state and put in foster care.

Ahhh the tobacco thingey again. If you look very closely and don’t inhale you will see smoke.
STRIKE 1
Al Gore, the climate change campaigner, has been quoted in 1996 by the New York Times saying:

“Throughout most of my life, I’ve raised tobacco,”……..”I want you to know that with my own hands, all of my life, I put it in the plant beds and transferred it. I’ve hoed it. I’ve chopped it. I’ve shredded it, spiked it, put it in the barn and stripped it and sold it.”

Earlier in the same article the New York Times said:

“Six years after Vice President Al Gore’s older sister died of lung cancer in 1984, he was still accepting campaign contributions from tobacco interests. Four years after she died, while campaigning for President in North Carolina, he boasted of his experiences in the tobacco fields and curing barns of his native Tennessee….”