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….”

STRIKE 3

“British American Tobacco Biodiversity Partnership: Fauna & Flora International, the Tropical Biology Association and Earthwatch Institute. Through the Partnership, we are involved in more than 30 biodiversity projects worldwide.
We donated £1 million per year to the Partnership in its first five years, and £1.5 million per year for the five years from 2006. In 2010, we agreed the scope of work for the next five years of the Partnership, with a commitment of £1.5 million per year. ”
Source:http://www.bat.com/ar/2010/directors-report/business-review/strategic-review/responsibility.html
——————
“Earthwatch partners with organizations across all sectors of business to improve both environmental and corporate sustainability…….
British American Tobacco (BAT) is the world’s second-largest tobacco group,…..Royal Dutch Shell is a global group of energy and petrochemical companies,”
Source:http://au.earthwatch.org/corporate-partnerships/partnership-profiles
“Climate change can seem like a remote problem for our leaders, but the fact is that it’s already impacting real people, animals, and beloved places. These Faces of Climate Change are multiplying every day.”
Source:http://www.earthday.org/faceofclimate/?gclid=CN6Xp9Px9bkCFeY82wodKnAAMA

Richard D says:
January 30, 2014 at 2:15 pm
Get rid of the pads, helmets and the huddle thing, where they stand around holding hands waiting for someone to tell them what to do next like a bunch of big, stupid, babies.
Well said. If anyone want to see the original game consisting of just a field, men and balls, tune into the six nations over the next few weeks and see how it should be played. By the way, as a health professional I can confirm that frequent blows to the head are strongly correlated with cerebral damage, in the same ways as boxers suffer as Muhammed Ali can demonstrate, It a much less complex correlation than the complexities of climate science and rather more obvious. As a result I’d be happy for my sons to play rugby, ( at a pinch) but advise them to avoid American football like the plague, not that it is played overly in Wales!

Gareth Phillips says:
January 30, 2014 at 4:20 pm
“…I can confirm that frequent blows to the head are strongly correlated with cerebral damage…”
As I said, who knew? But for most of their prime years and significantly beyond, they live like royalty. Fame, money, adoring women, children worshiping them as heroes… They get a lot more out of life than most people who maintain their faculties into late years. I know a lot of people who’d take that option in a heartbeat.

@RogerKnights
I played for years and yes rugby can be a little rough 🙂 …..Too often head injuries in football are the result of the false security of helmets and using a helmeted head as a weapon/spear. American Football needs to protect its players better from brain injuries.

Actually the comment about the IPCC is possibly noting the fact that the IPCC views now actually reflect the sceptics better than the catastrophists – IE IPCC Extreme weather NOT related to CO2 etc. From what I can see there are only really two points of difference. The IPCC still declares positive feedback when the feedback is negative, and the IPCC underestimates the level of natural variation (Ie their statement that more than 50% of warming is CO2 related is wrong). With a change in just these two positions the IPCC would be on message for the sceptics – strange as it may seem. If fact many of the mainstream news items refuting catastrophist claims use the IPCC to cite from.
“It is extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together.”
Translated, this means that the IPCC declares that only 50% can be relied upon as the likely increase in temperature due to CO2 (1951 to 2010). Warming 1850 to 1950 is presumably natural cyclic phenomenon- this implies that the net warming since the little ice age cannot be accepted to be more than 50% of total warming and manmade component less than about 30% (though the IPCC unwisely just declares a minimum rather than a range).
Using temperature rise VS CO2 rise since the LIA as a baseline , this in itself implies the climate has a sensitivity to CO2 of less than 0.8 degrees per doubling, and a sensitivity to the manmade, non- cyclic component of only 0.6 per doubling – Case closed.
Strangely, the IPCC does seem to be on trajectory to intersect mainstream sceptic views that sensitivity is between say 0.2 and 1 degree per doubling, even though the models still have gains that are too high, higher in fact than the IPCC concedes. Unfortunately, since this doesn’t feed into the UN’s world government agenda very well, I’m not overly confident that the trajectory will be maintained.

The IPCC still declares positive feedback when the feedback is negative
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Intuitively this is what makes little sense to me. How can there be positive feedback when historically temperature has been so consistent – varying by just a few degrees plus or minus. I’m more familiar with human biology where negative feedback is the norm and positive feedback is usually operating in an overall negative feedback, or else its usually bad BAD….