Open Thread

for those looking at the Saudis – here is my very favourite article, which i’ve kept since it was published in 2001. worth reading every word. interview with the powerful & enigmatic saudi oil minister (1962-1986), Sheikh Yamani. in this excerpt he is talking about 1973 when OPEC hiked crude prices by 400 per cent:
January 2001: UKObserver: Saudi dove in the oil slick
Sheikh Yamani tells Oliver Morgan and Faisal Islam why a production cut would hurt everyone – even Opec
Special report: the petrol war
At this point he (Yamani) makes an extraordinary claim: ‘I am 100 per cent sure that the Americans were behind the increase in the price of oil. The oil companies were in in real trouble at that time, they had borrowed a lot of money and they needed a high oil price to save them.’
He says he was convinced of this by the attitude of the Shah of Iran, who in one crucial day in 1974 moved from the Saudi view, that a hike would be dangerous to Opec because it would alienate the US, to advocating higher prices.
‘King Faisal sent me to the Shah of Iran, who said: “Why are you against the increase in the price of oil? That is what they want? Ask Henry Kissinger – he is the one who wants a higher price”.’
Yamani contends that proof of his long-held belief has recently emerged in the minutes of a secret meeting on a Swedish island, where UK and US officials determined to orchestrate a 400 per cent increase in the oil price.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2001/jan/14/globalrecession.oilandpetrol
i tried to confirm this “secret meeting” on a Swedish Island for years, until i found out that the 1973 Bilderberg Meeting was held at the Grand Hotel Saltsjobaden in the Stockholm archipelago, referenced as an islet in wikipedia.
1973 Bilderberg Meeting Participant List – Saltsjobaden Conference, Sweden
Levy, Walter J. – United States
http://publicintelligence.net/1973-bilderberg-meeting-participant-list/
just looked for further confirmation & found the following, mentioning a Walter Levy, whose name i have checked on the above list, & he was there, so i’ve included it with the link:
(scroll down) The Bilderberg Group Planned to Increase Oil Prices by 400% in 1973
It’s well-known that at Bilderberg Group meetings, participants discuss (in secret) the globalist agenda and issues pertaining around the new world order. However, what is not commonly known is the fact that in 1973 the Bilderberg Group planned to increase petrol prices by up to as much as 400%.
In May 1973, with the dramatic fall of the dollar, ‘Prince Bernhard’s Bilderberg group heard an American participant, Walter Levy, outline a ‘scenario’ for an imminent 400 per cent increase in OPEC petroleum revenues. The purpose of the secret Saltsjöbaden meeting was not to prevent the expected oil price shock, but rather to plan how to manage the about-to-be-created flood of oil dollars, a process from U.S. Secretary of State Kissinger later called ‘recycling the petrodollar flows.’…
Finally, he then projected an OPEC Middle East oil revenue rise, which would translate into just over 400 per cent, the same level Kissinger was soon to demand of the Shah (See images Below)…
http://www.theglobalistreport.com/bilderberg-group-facts/

What would the increase in temperature be if the average temperature of the Medieval Warm Period was used instead of 1850?

I saw that the NFL Rules Committee was considering moving the goalposts and I wondered if they were bringing in M Mann as an expert consultant….

Sunstein doing a Lew? says it’s adapted from the opening chapter of Cass’s new book, published this week. “adapted” might explain the inclusion of the Malaysian Airliner & Ukraine in the article. MSM like it – Miami Herald, Japan Times, Canberra Times & more have picked it up:
19 March: MalayMailOnline: Cass R. Sunstein: Everywhere you look, there’s conspiracy afoot
Why do people accept such theories?
The first explanation points to people’s predispositions. Some of us count as “conspiracists” in the sense that we have a strong inclination to accept such theories. Not surprisingly, conspiracists tend to have a sense of personal powerlessness; they are also more likely to conspire themselves.
Here’s an excellent predictor of whether people will accept a particular conspiracy theory: Do they accept other conspiracy theories?…
Remarkably, people who accept one conspiracy theory tend to accept another conspiracy theory that is logically inconsistent with it…
Efforts to establish the truth might even be self- defeating, because they can increase suspicion and thus strengthen the very beliefs that they were meant to correct.
Such efforts are far more likely to succeed if they begin by affirming, rather than attacking, the basic values and commitments of those who are inclined to accept the theory.
Conspiracists like to say that the truth is out there. They’re right. The challenge is to persuade them to find their way toward it.
http://www.themalaymailonline.com/opinion/bloomberg/article/everywhere-you-look-theres-conspiracy-afoot-cass-r.-sunstein
(Cass R. Sunstein, the Robert Walmsley university professor at Harvard Law School, is a Bloomberg View columnist. This article is adapted from the opening chapter of his new book, “Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas,” which Simon & Schuster will publish today. Sunstein is a former administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.)

Yet more bleating….this is from the new American Academy of Sciences document “What We Know” –
Based on well- established evidence, about 97% of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening.
http://whatweknow.aaas.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/AAAS-What-We-Know.pdf
*ahem* I’d expect the gross majority of “climate” scientists to agree with the mainstream!! What about environmental engineers, astronomers, biologists (myself), physicians and others? Are we less trained/skilled than these climate scientists?

@jai Mitchell, Peter, Sandi
>Since arctic amplification is 2.5 to 3 times the globally averaged warming, how much more warming, on the global average, would we need to surpass the MIS-11 temperature?
Good point. If Arctic amplification is 3 times global average, suppose, then the rest of the world will warm far less than the Arctic when the mystical 2 degrees is reached.
M Mann proposes that 2 degrees of warming will precipitate a global environmental calamity, even though it frequently gets 10 degrees warmer than average on a hot day all over the world. OK, suppose he and his minions are correct for a moment. Let’s look a little deeper into the numbers this implies.
Please realize that 2 degrees of total average warming with the whole Arctic being 3 times the amount the rest of the world warms (not three times 2 degrees, the average is +2 degrees).
Then the rise in the rest of the world will necessarily be less than 2 degrees so that the average =2, correct?
This being the case, and the average is 2 degrees up, then most of the world will 2 degree overall average) or are we to believe what Mann says, the global average being 2 degrees higher will be a catastrophe? Inquiring minds want to know exactly when this thermageddon will arrive.
I think the ‘2 degrees’ is nothing more than the pure speculation that was Milton’s inner circle of Hell and Mann’s temperature hockey stick. It is just more Renaissance alchemy turning coprolite into gold.

J. Philip Peterson says:
March 21, 2014 at 12:22 pm
“I thought Michael Mann had lost all credibility as a climate scientist.
How come he is allowed to write an article in Scientific American?”
Birds of a feather.
SciAm lost all credibility a LOOONG time ago.
My response: Yes! Yes!! YES!!!!!
Sad, isn’t it?

If one ever had questions about Mann’s credibility, this should put them to rest. Labeling something that is real and has been measured as “faux” meaning false, is the height of untruthfulness. His own graph shows it as measured temperature. Yet he calls it false. If he had said temporary OK I could buy that. But it can’t be both measured and false. It’s obviously a pause.

george e. smith says:
March 21, 2014 at 2:04 pm
First, the Trenberth and Kiehl diagram it is not a ‘Radiation Budget’, it is an ‘Energy Budget’ and it includes other forms of heat transfer besides radiation transfer.
As someone has already told you, Power is simply Energy per Second and watts per square metre specifies how much Energy one square metre receives in one second. There is nothing complicated about this, I hope.
The energy budget diagram, whilst not being exact, is still very useful. In science we try to measure things. This is how we make progress. The school of thought that says we don’t know everything and so we know nothing does not advance anything very much.
The great misunderstanding is that something receiving a heat input of 342 W/sq.m is somehow limited in the temperature it can achieve. The temperature is governed by two things, the heat input and the heat loss. If the rate of heat loss is restricted by some insulation (say a blanket or a layer of CO2) then the temperature of the object will rise. If not it will be cooler. You cannot determine an objects final temperature by its heat input alone.
As for the discussion on averages, I admit to not understanding the point you were trying to make. It seemed more semantics than substance.