Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
In discussing President Obama’s latest boondoggle, the one billion (with a “b) dollar Climate Resilience Plan, The US Under-Assistant Minister of Scientific Silly Walks, John Holdren, wandered way off of the party line. The party line in question, of course, is …
“Although we can’t ascribe any given weather event to climate change, we still insist that blah blah blah …”
Perhaps Holdren’s teleprompter was broken, but anyhow, here’s what he said (emphasis mine):
During a call with reporters on Thursday evening, the assistant to the president on science and technology, John Holdren, said, without any doubt, the severe drought plaguing California and a number of other states across the country is tied to climate change.
Now, that quote was bad enough, since everyone from the IPCC to my cat agrees that
• There is no link between historical post-Little-Ice-Age warming and extreme weather, and
• Droughts are more common in colder times than in warmer times, and
• For the last decade and a half there’s been no statistically significant warming, certainly not enough to cause increased extreme weather.
• We have neither the understanding nor the information necessary to ascribe ANY single weather event to climate change, and we’re a long ways from having either one.
But despite Holdren going way off piste in his comment, it wasn’t truly of the quality needed for a quote of the week. It wasn’t concise enough for an epigram … or for an epitaph, for that matter.
However, just when it all looked hopeless, Holdren rallied, came back and captured the gold by uttering the deathless words that will ring forever in the halls of climate academe:
Weather practically everywhere is being caused by climate change.
There you have it, folks, Holdren’s Law of Climate Causation, all you need to know about droughts and such … weather practically everywhere is being caused by climate change.
…
… and people wonder why the alarmists are having trouble these days peddling their nostrums? Well, mostly it’s not a communications failure. Mostly, it’s because we’ve been lied to before by these same folks (including Holdren), and Holdren’s current pathetic shilling for the Obamaclimate program is just more of the same.
The issue is not how the science is being communicated, as Judith Curry and many others seem to think.
The issue is that what is being communicated is so obviously not science, but merely poorly framed and scientifically absurd scare tactics, that as in this case, the communication just makes people point and laugh …
Regards to all,
w.
Hillary ’16.
I need the reign of Commies and clowns like Holdren to continue into the future. I need something to rail against, lest I become complacent and shiftless.
Wiliis’ mention of the Ministry of Silly Walks is apposite, although a re-named “Ministry of Random Walks”, would be a good fit with recent climate history. There is a great line in the original Python sketch (hard to hear over audience laughter) that fits very well the attitude of the Climate Catastrophe industry. Just add a two or three zeroes to modernise…
“I’m afraid that the Ministry of Silly Walks is no longer getting the kind of support it needs. You see there’s Defence, Social Security, Health, Housing, Education, Silly Walks … they’re all supposed to get the same. But last year, the Government spent less on the Ministry of Silly Walks than it did on National Defence. Now we get £348,000,000 a year, which is supposed to be spent on all our available products. “
Perhaps Mr. Holdren’s words were a moment of dyslexia, and he meant to say “Climate practically everywhere is being caused by weather change.”
Nothing wrong here. Move along. 😉
95% of Climate Models Agree: The Observations Must be Wrong
GREAT LAKES BECOME NEARLY COVERED WITH ICE
Ergo, it must be warmer! (/sarc off).
Holder has replaced the scientific method with the alarmist/fund raising method!
Nic Stokes:’Its effect is totally unrelated to statistical significance’
Spot on. Significance depends on sample size and effect size. It is a judgement in a decision procedure. Actually, a ‘statistical significant effect’ is a nonsensical expression as it confuses an effect and our judgment, something like a ‘beautiful effect’ or an ‘overwhelming effect’. Some commenters here should take a course in statistics.
Regarding “we can’t ascribe any given weather event to climate change”, the BBC Jeremey Vine Show today : “Climate Change Did you used to doubt global warming, but after this weather, you’ve changed your mind?”) featuring Professor Tom Burke.
A couple of choice quotes (from many):
listener: ” the climate is in control and will always change… if we banned all cars and factories for a year it wouldn’t make any difference ….”
Burke: “The climate doesn’t change … the weather changes within boundaries we understand…. what we’re now doing is breaking those boundaries …”!
listener: “the high water this year is a once in a hundred years event, it doesn’t prove anything ….”
Burke: “That’s exactly like trying to ask which cigarette gives you lung cancer, you know if you smoke you are going to get lung cancer”
So who is Burke?. From http://www.e3g.org/people/tom-burke: “Tom Burke is the Chairman of E3G, Third Generation Environmentalism … He was formerly Executive Director of Friends of the Earth and a member of the Executive Committee of the European Environmental Bureau 1988-91 .”
An example of BBC balance in action.
It has often been said that you can not legislate against stupid.
Unfortunately for America many of your legislators are stupid.
That makes any thing possible.
WillR says (February 14, 2014 at 2:14 pm): ‘People basing their story on “The Hill” (Blog) are using the word “caused”.
Reuters is claiming he said “influenced”.’
The White House’s version of the call transcript has “influenced”:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/02/14/press-briefing-secretary-vilsack-and-dr-holdren-presidents-trip-ca
for whatever that’s worth, given that deception is the very foundation of this administration.
The full quote is “First of all, we know that scientifically, no single episode of extreme weather, no storm, no flood, no drought can be said to have been caused by global climate change. But the global climate has now been so extensively impacted by the human-caused buildup of greenhouse gases that weather practically everywhere is being influenced by climate change.”
In other words, we can’t link the California drought to CAGW, but then again, yes we can. I find that just as funny as the version reported by The Hill.
In fact, it’s so eerily similar to what Nick Stokes wrote about “statistically insignificant warming” (BWAHAHAHA!) that now I’m wondering if Nick Stokes & John Holdren are one and the same. 🙂
John Holdren, said, without any doubt, the severe drought plaguing California and a number of other states across the country is tied to climate change.
Here in Britain politicians and the media are blaming the floods in the south and west of England and the storms that have been battering our coasts on climate change.
Can’t we come to some sort of arrangement with the Californians? We would gladly swop some of our climate change for some of theirs. Wouldn’t that be a win-win situation?
He got to be the President’s science advisor by being an idiot. So why should he stop now.
Dayday, why is that jerk sitting in a canoe with a protective helmet when the water is only a foot deep?
Q: Which came first – the chicken or the egg?
A: The egg.
Some organism or other evolved until at some point it could be called a chicken.
That chicken was hatched from an egg laid by a pre-chicken organism, so the egg came before the chicken.
Obviously with gradual evolution, there would be no one generation after which everyone would agree that an organism suddenly became a particular named species which it wasn’t before; but I don’t think that negates the argument.
Regarding the English floods:
http://autonomousmind.wordpress.com/2014/02/09/somerset-levels-flooding-when-will-baroness-young-be-called-to-account/
Yeah, the droughts are the result of, not climate; but “climate CHANGE”! As are the floods in England and the normal, not too wet and not too dry weather nearly everywhere else … you science DENIERS!
Over on NRO I was debating a warmista who tried to claim that 99.9% of peer reviewed literature supports the catastrophic AGW view.
I pointed out how the climategate e-mails detailed how the backers of AGW were going behind the scene to pressure journals to not print any opposing studies, even getting one editor fired for opposing them.
His response: Who are you going to believe, the climategate e-mails or 99.9% of peer reviewed literature.
Alethakusehan 12:56 pm
Good one!!!!
Eugene WR Gallun
“Weather practically everywhere is being caused by climate change.”
In case one wonders as to the locale where weather is not cause by climate change, it’s Hansen’s static feed-forward “climate” box with all the feedback loops broken. Climate nirvana in our lifetime. We’re almost there, just another trillion or two.
unbelievable, especially exploiting victims of flooding, given Green extremism seems to have played a part in worsening the situation.
2:14 VIDEO: 14 Feb: BBC: Ross Hawkins: Greens calls for clear-out of ‘climate change deniers’
The Green Party of England and Wales has called for a purge of government advisors and ministers who do not share its views on climate change.
Any senior advisor refusing to accept “the scientific consensus on climate change” should be sacked, it said.
Party leader Natalie Bennett said the rule must apply to all senior advisors, including those with no responsibility for environmental issues…
Pressed on the issue, she agreed that even the chief veterinary officer should be removed if he didn’t sign up to the view on climate change also taken by the Green Party…
Ms Bennett added: “It’s an insult to flood victims that we have an Environment Secretary (Owen Paterson) who is a denier of the reality of climate change and we also can’t have anyone in the cabinet who is denying the realities that we’re facing with climate change.”
She said her party took the consensus view shared by many other organisation including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change…
INSERT:
Speaking on the BBC’s Any Questions programme in June, the environment secretary said: “The climate’s been going up and down” for centuries and pointed out that the earth’s surface temperature “has not changed in the last 17 years”.
He added: “The real question, that everyone is trying to address is: Is this influenced by man-made activity in recent years?
“There is almost certainly bound to be some influence by man-made activity but we have just got to be rational and make sure the measures we take to counter it do not actually cause more damage.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-26187711
Roy says:”Can’t we come to some sort of arrangement with the Californians? We would gladly swap some of our climate change for some of theirs. ”
Can’t arrange that but I’ll swap you any number of envrowackados for some Tories, one for one.
ectiAlmost no one in the general public is going to be able to comprehend the actual definition of climate and its relationship with weather.
All they hear and think is that our atmosphere has been changed permanently because of all the carbon pollution we spewed into it. Now, the entire system is going bonkers, causing extreme weather events, that even include record cold and snow.
The strategy is to sell the connection between extreme weather events/climate change and mans burning fossil fuels. There is no scientific evidence to support this but the battle field in not being fought in the world of science. If that were the case, they would have been laughed out of the battle.
This is purely a marketing strategy, much like the ones that advertisers use to sell their products to consumers.
They spend many billions to do so because it works. What makes it even easier to sell climate change and extreme weather to the public, is that there is an unlimited supply of extreme weather going on across our planet every year……………there always has and always will be.
Seriously, the tactic is to convince people of this connecting by repeating it over and over. Using examples that are unlimited. People don’t have an archive of weather records at home, so they can’t look into past weather and see these extreme events happening just like the latest one to compare it with even worse weather extremes in the past.
You probably have some older folks living in the area effected that remember previous similar events. However, younger folks were not living then and the key is to sell a regional extreme event to the entire country. A Super Storm Sandy, while just a minimal hurricane was probably understood to be so by some long time residents in that area. They can remember 1954 when 3 category 3 hurricanes hit the East Coast area in 3 months………….before CO2 went up.
Everybody else believes the propaganda and distorted historical significance/reality as it framed as unprecedented.
The Midwest drought became the poster child of climate change………..but the prior 24 years, a new record without a severe widespread drought in this area and the best growing conditions in history didn’t count. Neither did the Dustbowl decade of the 1930’s.
The 2012 Midwest drought was effectively sold to the public as a consequence of “climate change”.
Same thing with the California drought now. Nothing else matters except to create the illusion and connection in peoples mind. They don’t have to prove anything. Of course not, that would be impossible.
A good example to prove how far they will go to make the connection was Dr. Holdrens statement that we should expect more record cold waves because of global warming.
They have a captive audience that are in the brainwashed trans which allows absurd explanations and statements to be stored in their brains as knowledge which reinforces the brainwash. If we entered another Little Ice Age, these people would simply morph their tactics and explanation to account for it. They’ve already taken a step in that direction with Holdren saying record cold is caused by global warming. Gore and others have stated for years, that blizzards and record snow are caused by global warming.
In the minds of their faithful, there is now almost no weather that could not have been caused by climate change(from humans).
Adolf Hitler would have admired the effectiveness of this brainwash.
We can scoff at how absurd their claims are and the lack of authentic science involved but must recognize, the public has bought into it………..already. Once somebody thinks they know something, it’s 10 times harder to convince them of the opposite, while they will allow anything that confirms what they think they know into their brains with very little scrutiny!!!
***RESILIENCE has been the CAGW buzzword for a while. Stern uses it here:
14 Feb: Guardian: Nicholas Stern: Climate change is here now and it could lead to global conflict
Extreme weather events in the UK and overseas are part of a growing pattern that it would be very unwise for us, or our leaders, to ignore, writes the author of the influential 2006 report on the economics of climate change.
The record rainfall and storm surges that have brought flooding across the UK are a clear sign that we are already experiencing the impacts of climate change…
The upward trend in temperature is undeniable, despite the effects of natural variability in the climate which causes the rate of warming to temporarily accelerate or slow for short periods, as we have seen over the past 15 years…
In fact, the risks are even bigger than I realised when I was working on the review of the economics of climate change for the UK government in 2006…
We are already seeing low-carbon technologies being deployed across the world, but further progress will require investment and facing up to the real prices of energy, including the very damaging emissions from fossil fuels…
Fortunately poorer countries, such as China, are showing leadership and beginning to demonstrate to the world how to invest in low-carbon growth.
The UK must continue to set an example to other countries…
The government will also have to ensure the country becomes more ***resilient to those impacts of climate change that cannot now be avoided, including by investing greater sums in flood defences…
A much more sensible way to raise money would be to implement a strong price on greenhouse gas pollution across the economy, which would also help to reduce emissions…
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/13/storms-floods-climate-change-upon-us-lord-stern
14 Feb: Christian Science Monitor: Will Obama’s ‘climate resilience fund’ help cope with global warming?
President Obama’s 2015 budget will include $1 billion to help communities deal with the effects of climate change. He made the announcement Friday on a visit to drought-stricken California
RECOMMENDED: Think you know the odd effects of global climate change? Take our quiz…
“Communities across the country are struggling with drought, a longer fire season, increasing summer temperatures, more heat waves, and rains coming in the form of deluges,” Angela Anderson, director of the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), said in a statement. “Congress can no longer ignore the consequences of climate change. The president is now putting a plan on the table that Congress needs to fund.”…
Ms. Anderson at UCS points to one example: Miami Beach is spending more than $200 million to overhaul its drainage system, which has been compromised by sea level rise…
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/2014/0214/Will-Obama-s-climate-resilience-fund-help-cope-with-global-warming
Re: • Droughts are more common in colder times than in warmer times
Let’s build a conceptual top-down model of the Earth. Let the variable W = all the water on earth. Some of that water is locked up in ice caps, glaciers, sea ice, etc. Let’s denominate the fraction of W locked up in ice as W_ice. Let’s denominate the fraction of W that is not locked up in ice as W_not-ice. The fraction not locked up in ice, W_not-ice, is free to participate in the world’s water cycle. The fraction locked up in ice, W_ice, is not. In general, we would assume that W_ice + W_not-ice = W.
Sometimes in industrial refrigeration, for convenience, we used a unit we called a Frigorie. It has the same value as a Calorie (4.1868 joules), but is of opposite sign.
When a glacier grows or ice caps grow or global sea ice extent increases, then Frigories are being accumulated and the fraction W_ice should increase. That leaves less water available to participate in the world’s water cycle, so the world is drier. Conversely, when the world warms, Calories are accumulated, and the fraction W_ice should decrease. More water should be released to participate in the world’s water cycle, so the world should be wetter.
It would seem reasonable to say that global water vapor is proportional to W_not-ice, so that an increase in global water vapor should mean an increase in W_not-ice (and a corresponding decrease in W_ice). W can, of course, change for other reasons as water can be locked up in chemical reactions other than being locked up as ice. W can (or should) also increase due to anthropological emissions. Every time CO2 is emitted during the combustion of fossil fuels, H20 is also emitted.
However, global water vapor either appears to be declining (in spite of anthropological emissions) (Ref. 1) or is not increasing (Refs. 2 and 3). A decline in water vapor would seem to be consistent with an accumulation of Frigories or global cooling – not global warming. Similarly, a lack of change in water vapor, in the face of large anthropological emissions of H20, is also not consistent with global warming.
Colder times would be consistent with a larger W_ice and, thus, less water available for the world’s water cycle, which should mean more droughts. There would simply be less water free to circulate. Consequently, Ice Ages should mean a very dry world. IIRC, the driest part on earth is Antarctica.
Hope that makes some sense.
1. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/06/nasa-satellite-data-shows-a-decline-in-water-vapor/
2. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/14/another-ipcc-ar5-reviewer-speaks-out-no-trend-in-global-water-vapor/
3. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/18/new-paper-on-global-water-vapor-puts-climate-modelers-in-a-bind/
Mosh: “Does adding c02 change the weather? Of course.”
===
Mosh, CO2 does not change the weather….the effects of CO2 might change the weather…
…but since those effects are hiding in the bottom of the ocean…obviously for the past ~17 years….that’s quite impossible
btw how funny the President had to go to California to make his CAGW announcement. running from the snow, Obama?
10 Feb: Reuters: White House to transform tent to Monet masterpiece for Hollande
The White House will turn a HEATED tent on its frigid South Lawn into a Monet-inspired gala fit for a French president on Tuesday, the highlight of a two-day state visit to Washington by Francois Hollande…
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/11/us-usa-france-statedinner-idUSBREA1A02220140211
” Alan Watt, Climate Denialist Level 7 says:
February 14, 2014 at 1:52 pm
The depressing part is John Holdren is not a stupid man — far from it. He holds a BS from MIT and a PhD from Stanford. I don’t know whether he made that statement because he believes it, or because he thinks we will believe it….”
___________________
Chris Field is also at Stanford. The day is now long past when the institution itself offers any measure of quality. Mediocrity and intellectual incompetence is the new norm of higher learning. Being from Stanford, Harvard or any number of “prestigious” colleges, means you’re not likely just dumb, but spectacularly so…