“It is not often realized how much those of us who dare to question the Party Line are made to suffer, and how much is spent on making us suffer.“To take one example, in October 2009 I made a speech in St Paul, Minneapolis, revealing in the peroration that the then draft Copenhagen climate treaty was proposing to establish a global ‘government’. The word ‘government’ actually appeared in the treaty draft. Someone at that well-attended talk filmed the last four minutes of my speech and posted it up on YouTube. Within a week, it had received some five million hits, spread across several YouTube channels. Then the hit-counters stopped rising. I had naively assumed that everyone who had wanted to hear me had heard me.
“Then I took a call from a professor at Texas A&M University, who said that the university’s monitoring had established that the speech would eventually have reached 20 million hits, but that someone had paid a lot of money to set up a dozen bogus pages full of gibberish, but tagged with ‘Monckton’ and related tags, to divert all traffic away from the genuine channel. I asked how it was that those pages had attracted more hits than the genuine page. The professor explained that the major search engines had been paid handsomely to prioritize the bogus pages over the genuine page. I asked how much that exercise had cost. The professor said the cost was, at minimum, $250,000, and probably a great deal more, just to silence one speech.
“It is significant, then, that the attorneys for two cities in the Sunstroke State decided that they could more easily impress the judge in the oil corporations’ case by making personal attacks on our reputations than by trying to answer the two scientific points we had raised: first, that the supposed scientific consensus amounted to no more than 0.5%, and secondly, that climate panic was based solely on a significant scientific error that we had recently discovered.“It was by reputational attacks that the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century established themselves and neutralized their opponents. It is by reputational attacks that the totalitarians of the 21st century seek to do the same. But the totalitarians of the 21st century have made the same mistakes as the totalitarians in the 20th. They have gotten the science wrong, wherefore whatever harm they try to do to us in the short term will rebound on them with heavy interest in the long. They have the money, the power and the glory, but we have the truth, and the truth will prevail.”
A rebuttal to an ugly amicus brief attack in the #ExxonKnew case
Warren Blair has written to me to suggest that we should publish here the brief by Monckton et al. replying to the vicious personal attacks on them by attorneys for “the people of California”. It would indeed be of interest to readers to see Monckton’s recent reply brief and thus to gain some insight into the relentless, baseless and remarkably well funded campaign of personal ad-hominem assaults on the reputations of so many of us who have dared to question the errors and exaggerations of official climatology.
I asked Christopher Monckton if he wanted to comment. He said:
The response: 20180327_docket-317-cv-06011_statement-1 (PDF)
With all we’ve learned about Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc etc on and on…
..it’s amazing to me that people are not reacting…
Oh we/I/they are. Go to adnauseam.io and load it into your browser. They click ads so you don’t have to! The web site owners get paid because all the clicks originate from their web sites. Sooner or later the advertisers will realise that the are getting the “GO” (Garbage Out) in “GIGO”. Then places like Goolag will hurt and maybe change their ways.
It is a way of protesting so effective and so threatening to Goolag that they banned it from the Chrome store. It is worth the little bit of effort to load it from their site. Be the “GI” in “GIGO”!
Startpage.com is a search page that uses Google for its searches but keeps Google from getting any of your personal information.
I have saved hundreds of dollars in the past few days because the cookies can see that I am shopping for a lot of expensive stuff from several sites, looking for the best price on paint, a pro model paint sprayer, new appliances, blinds, flooring, tools, and all sorts of other stuff for some projects I am engaging in.
Suddenly I get One Day Only sale ads for a huge discount for stuff I have been shopping for but have not bought.
On stuff that was already on sale, but then gets cheaper still on multiple sites where I have the items in online shopping carts.
The same Big Data and AI that everyone is complaining about was invented for commerce, for ad targeting, and a whole lot further than just that.
But besides for the fact that they use the information to assist us and offer us stuff we want to buy, the only reason some politicians are upset about the whole thing is because THE OTHER SIDE has used the technology and the information better in the 2016 elections, than they did themselves back in the previous election or two or three!
It is all automated…no one is watching what tens and hundreds of millions of people are doing…but the machines are, and sophisticated technology is at work making sure if you want something, they will be there to sell it to you, and if you are on the fence, they know that too, and will sweeten the deal they offer.
Does not bother me in the least, not the least reason for which is that it is common knowledge, and has been, why all those websites are free.
We are not the customers, we are the product, and our preferences are the currency used to make the wheels turn.
Wait for the market selling to be over and buy the stocks. Or buy puts to make money for the next week or two until the earnings reports push the markets back to previous levels and perhaps new highs.
You cannot beat them, and why try?
Join them, and share the loot.
Another good browser add-on is Ghostery – http://www.ghostery.com. It shows all the trackers on the web page you are viewing and gives you the option of blocking them or not. It also works on smartphones.
So thats why i get adds for weapons and body armor, and my wife gets adds for Alaka cruises and bestsellers?
menicholas,
I don’t disagree that is useful, but, shouldn’t we have the control over that sort of stuff? For example, a couple of months ago I had to find a portable ‘personal hygiene’ device for my wife to use when we travel since she has an immune issue and is subject to infections … I found what I was looking for, purchased it and now for the last 6 months I have been inundated with web ads (I see one just too the right of this post as a matter of fact) on virtually every page I bring up showing me various and sundry ‘portable personal hygiene’ devices for my edification. Yes, I know I can control that to some extent, but it involves a LOT of effort and knowledge that I’m not sure the majority have.
My point is shouldn’t the advertisers/google/et al be burdened with getting us to somehow ‘opt in’ rather that the reverse as it appears to be now?
Thanks!
I love it.
Will find and load it asap.
The tell that Google, FB, etc. are in bad faith is that if they were merely acting in good faith they woukd be common csrriers.
Instead they want to control content and mine user data.
The choice to censor actuallly costs them money.
Thanks!
I love the idea, but how to find it?
Google and at&t deny it even exists
I’ve heard people say they’ve talked about, say, dog food w/somebody on their mobile phone & then had dog food ads immediately show up on their phones AND computers!
adnauseum can be installed on Chrome, Firefox and Opera, not on MS Edge. I guess I’ll have to go back to Firefox. I am morally opposed to using Chrome.
DC Cowboy – April 8, 2018 at 4:30 am
DC Cowboy, you should be able to remedy your problem real quick like and without a lot of effort.
At the top right of your Internet browsers “screen” there should be a line of “clickable” options such as …. Home, ….. Page, ….. Safety, …. Tools, … etc.
Just “click” on Safety and a “drop-down” window will appear.
Then “click” the 1st entry titled ….. “Delete browsing history”
Another new window will appear and just “click” the DELETE button at the bottom
And that should solve your “repeat” AD problem, …… that is until you do another Google search for an advertised product.
Startpage.com might help.
But many/most websites use calls to apis.google.com so even if you don’t use goggle.com, google still knows what site(s) your IP address is browsing. They cam conclude a great deal with this data.
This is very troubling.
You can block those calls (or at least most of them) by using a browser with NoScript
Worry worts.
If you are not willing to share everything you type onto the web, turn the computer off and read a book.
Sheri,
Why should I have to accept the idea that I have no privacy rights or any control over what is done with that information on the web as the ‘default’ setting to using it? Should that concept be applied to using a phone, buying groceries or any other activity in which you use personal info – like what books you read at the Library?) I find that acceptance of the concept you propose to be disturbing. It’s a fine with me if you want to do that, I don’t see why I should have to.
I’ll use Menalicious as an example. He seems fine with the concept that Google, etc can use his personal info without permission. If so, good for him. Shouldn’t he have the opportunity to say it’s okay tho? “Getting permission” should be the default rather than “opting out” – which is really impossible on today’s web. Wasn’t that the entire point of the ‘Do Not Call Registry’ for advertisers of a decade or so ago?
I suppose, from a practical enforcement view, that we may be trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube, but, I’m willing to try.
Personally, I am reacting. I recently deleted my facebook account. I had scrubbed it of all information (It seems to think my birthdate is Jan 12, 1905) and thought that would help, but it doesn’t. When I found out that Facebook makes it’s own decision as to your political affiliation (assigning you to one of 6 political affiliations) and then sells that info to advertisers AND you cannot ‘opt out’ of it, I deleted the account.
My decision was reinforced by the recent comments of the Facebook COO, “we have different forms of ‘opt out’ (of Facebook selling our private info to advertisers), if people want an opt out at the highest level, well, they have to pay for that”. I think Facebook & the like should have to pay US for the use of private information that they sell to others, not that we should have to pay them not to sell it.
“Deleted” accounts on Facebook are not deleted. They just don’t appear. That’s what Facebook says, anyway.
Sheri,
As with Windows ‘OS’ there are different levels of ‘deletion’ with Facebook. You can inactivate and Facebook tells you the info will be retained, just no visible to the public (still visible to them tho) or you can take the ‘nuclear’ option and delete the account permanently (they have to provide that option otherwise Facebook will become overwhelmed with ‘ghost’ accounts – accounts belonging to people who have died for instance). They say it takes two weeks to accomplish that but ALL info, pics, files, etc associated with the account are indeed removed from Facebook servers and it cannot be reactivated (i’m sure they archive it somewhere tho).
In the golden age of Readers’ Digest, when we used to get all sorts of what we now call SPAM ads – competitions, box sets etc – I managed to stop RD from mailing my mother by writing ‘Deceased’ across an envelope and sending it back. Didn’t hear another peep from RD.
I wonder if something similar would work in the situation under discussion.
We may have to start doing what funeral homes are required to do by law with SS, notify SS. It would, of course, make funerals somewhat more expensive and there is the little detail of having some kind of national registry for ‘on-line accounts’ tho. If we are still around in a 100 years or so it could become a problem for Facebook,etc themselves, maintaining all those dead accounts.
still got one (so I can look at company page and few items) yet sledon use it. maybe 3 times a month.
and I signed up using fake name fake bday and email address that I then deleted from server.
seems only zuckerburh is allowed to ACTUALLY have info deleted and scrubbed, rest of us….not so much.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/05/zuckerberg-deleted-messages/
the ‘rebuttal’ is about 2000 words of irrelevancy that wallows in nonsense.
litigation of ‘funding’ is irrelevant and inappropriate but a distraction from the defendants’ winning points.
discussion of john cook? srsly? wtf is that?
is the case about wounded vanities? so why we got a wall of text about the hominem? did somebody lose the plot or is it that these lawyers just love to read their own type? they are not helping their own case by this ‘yam a pundit- watch me mic drop!’
Well established legal huristics are 1) If the facts are on your side, argue the facts. 2) If the facts are not on your side attack the person.
DC: The way I heard it was that you argue the law. If the law is not on your side, argue the facts. If neither is on your side, pound on the table.
“Facebook, Google, Twitter”…and Wackapedia…
By pure coincidence I just happened to watch a segment on CNN Van Jones show today welcoming Al Gore. I never thought such hypocritical ideological trash could be broadcast. And yet it was. My two favorites: 1) when poor Al Gore denounced wealthy lobbyists in Washington… and no one burst laughing. 2) when Big Al explained that the internet and social media were supposed to heal democracy… but that the Russians hacked it all.
Is this the future of the United States of America?
TomRude,
Yes, that is exactly the future of America (I hope), but I think you may not recognize exactly what you just described.
The hypocritical, bloviating personalities will always be with us and their long running enablers (CNN in your case, the internet manipulators alluded to in Mr. Monkton’s case), but their impact is rapidly diminishing.
You clearly presented this in your comment by identifying the BS.
Thank you.
People are seeing the vast tapestry of deceit and propaganda more easily with purposeful engagement on the internet via various sources.
As stated at the very end of the above piece, we have the truth and it will prevail.
I tune into CNN for 10 minutes or so maybe 4 times a week to watch some idiot (making hundreds of thousands a year btw) blather on mostly about the latest of Trumps tweets.
In my opinion ‘The Donald’ plays them like a cheap violin and the idiots fall for it every time. I find these ‘experts’ actually a funny/sad bunch – but worth a laugh one in a while.
I suspect he may even go out of his way to throw some extra fish to the trained seals in the media, just to enjoy the predictable squawks of outrage.
You might try what I did a year or so ago…cut the cable, get rid of paid TV service, and just watch clips on you tube or wherever.
When you pay for cable, you are paying their salary whether you tune in or not, and when you tune in, they know it, and get paid more for your eyeballs.
The juicy stuff is available for free.
John Darrow, We had an Aussie premier (governor) that when he had to do a press conference would say he has to go and feed the chooks. (chickens) Same as your good president is doing.
Which shows the wisdom of Samuel Clements over 100 years ago when he made the statement, “If you do not read the newspaper, you are uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you are misinformed.” I think that statement applies to the Internet in spades.
Have you ever noticed that EVERY time you know something about a news story, the see that the news people get the story wrong. Why then do we believe every other story from them. If EVERY time we know something about the story, they are wrong, we should assume that they are wrong about EVERY story. Anything else is completely illogical, bordering on insane.
i hope you are right, Forrest.
TomRude, I also saw the CNN segment with Van Jones (self-described communist with a little “c”) and Al Gore and the lies were truly astonishing. The scarey part is a lot of the left believes this garbage and CNN, especially CNN International, seems to have become so focused on this hate everything the right does angle that there is no going back for them. I would encourage everyone to watch the CNN segment and try to count the lies from both Van little C and AlGore. Upsetting.
I’m not watching CNN. I have no desire to watch Lunatic Lefties spewing their irrational hate. These people really do have Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). They have this false narrative embedded in their minds about evil conservativees and they can’t see past it. They really believe Trump is the worst person in the world.
But they believed the same thing when G.W. Bush was president. I don’t think the name is as important as that a conservative is in power.
Any conservative is going to get bad press from the Leftwing News Media. Trump just happens to get much more criticism because he is effective at thwarting the Leftist agenda and because he fights back against the Leftwing liars and their lies.
You want to know why most other Republicans are rather wimpish when it comes to taking on the Leftwing News Media? Well, just look at what they do with Trump. Who needs that kind of attack? Not most Republicans.
Fortunately for Truth, Justice and the American Way!, Trump throws it right back in their Leftwing faces, but most of these other Republicans would wilt very quickly at the first sign of criticism from the Left. That used to be how the Left kept the Right under control. It doesn’t work with Trump. And the Left hates it. And him.
You mean he signed the bill presented to him by all our conservatives in Congress? Where were the conservatives on that thing?
They (CNN and Al Gore et al) are only preaching to themselves and the rest of the faithful and already converted.
I am astonished that people here pay money to watch that parade of clowns and fools spew their silliness at each other.
TA:
Spot on!
+ a whole bunch of plusses.
Trump signed the spending bill in order to get the U.S. military adequately funded. We may need it in the near future.
Trump is a conservative, but he is also a pragmatist. Give Trump the line-item veto and we will see how conservative he is.
The Republican congress had a big part in doubling the national debt during the eight years of the Obama administration, so it should be no surprise that they sent up another pork-barrel spending bill.
The American People need to elect fiscal conservatives the next time around. Just calling yourself a Republican doesn’t mean you are a fiscal conservative.
What the President signed was a continuing resolution, or something like that.
Not a budget.
My understanding is he is able to spend the money anyway he wants to.
I live in Mexico and have Dish TV. The only news channel here in English is CNN (international).
I watch many segments, and then get the real news from the Mark Levin radio show and podcasts, and levintv, and crtv… I’m not sure why CNN has the communist Van Jones as a commentator, but many of the others there are of the same ilk…
It took the Russians 70 years to “get over it”, and they didn’t have Second Amendment.
Gums sends…
It took the Russians 70 years to “get over it”, and they didn’t have Second Amendment.
It took the Russians 70 years to “get over it” BECAUSE they didn’t have the Second Amendment.
Well, Van Jones is a known communist who was in/on the Obama administration, until it was relieved that he was a communist…Why is he a commentator on CNN??? Let him go to N Korea, or Cuba…Or maybe Venezuela…
“Well, Van Jones is a known communist who was in/on the Obama administration, until it was re[vealed] that he was a communist…Why is he a commentator on CNN???”
Birds of a feather, flock together. 🙂
There isnt any such thing as free will. Lab experiments have proved that your self is an illusion, The brain decides everything you do based on the company you kept and all other life experiences. That is why group think is so powerful. Also the same reason why association long enough with your abductors can sometimes force you to side with their cause. Of course abducting someone just to simply take them prisoner without some kind of ideologue agenda will not engender them to you. If your life experiences make you a skeptic generally, then it is very difficult to program you even by someone that has an ideologue agenda. Thus skeptics generally are more valuable to the truth than others. WE ARE LEARNING THAT SAD LESSON EVERYDAY WITH THIS GLOBAL WARMING HOAX. But of course it will take a long time to deprogram Nick.
You mean the other Nick I hope.
Gore made a fortune lobbying to get alleged “green tech” mandated by government.
Did Gore ever file as a lobbyist?
The problem is that this is happening all over the world. In Europe it is even worse.
Here’s some Van Jones from 2011, when he again shared a platform with AL Gore
Particularly bizarre was Van Jones’ concept of fossil fuels, (11 minutes 45 secs in):
“We have an energy system, a civilization powered by death.
Fueled by death. Why do they call them fossil fuels?
Oil – dead for 60 million years, we pull it out of the ground
We take Coal – dead for 300 million years – pulled out of the ground.
We burn it in industries. We burn death.
We act shocked, having pulled death out of the ground, that we get death out of the skies in the form of global warming.
Let’s stop fueling death. (cheers)
Let’s stop digging those holes in America.
Shift the power.”
“Shift the power” was a phrase repeated constantly, as a brainwashing mantra. Van Jones was then on the Board of Trustees at the National Resources Defense Council and a ”Senior Fellow”, at Podesta’s Center for American Progress, where Carol Browner was a director. Currently on the board of trustees at NRDC are renowned scientists Robert Redford, Leonardo DiCapreo and James Taylor.
We are resurrecting the fossil fuels.
They were alive, then died, now we bring to the surface of the earth, and burn them to sereve as a fertilizer for new life (plants). Where do you think all those carbohydrates come from?
J,
I think you’re concept of where the ‘carbohydrates’ in oil/gas come from may be dated. It turns out that recent research is coming down on the side of oil/gas being formed from methane gas subjected to intense pressure/temps deep within the mantle that finds its way to being accessible to us near the surface. There’s a really good chance that it is being created as we speak in a continuous process.
DC Cowboy … your mantle source for oil and gas is nonsense and I wonder what your “recent research” is? Also I bet you never took a geology course and especially never worked in the oil industry and never found a drop of oil. You are delusional and believing in childish stories …. take a good look at the current horizontal well / fracing success and the type of reservoir rock being exploited.
Stewart PID,
Your r”delusiuonal and childish” response to DC Cowboy is comprised only of ipse dixit faith-based assertions (hence the absence of any reference to physical evidence) seasoned with a generous serve of ad hominem abuse.
Mendeleev—father of the table of elements–knew that the fossil fable was an outrageously stupid story. Unfortunately, our western propaganda system decided to ignore the historical debate in favor of shoving an evidence-free thermodynamically unconstrained cartoon down our throats that allows oil companies to cry “peak oil” once every decade, like drug dealers crying “drought” once a year (usually at Christmas) to increase profits.
“The capital fact to note is that petroleum was born in the depths of the earth, and it is only there that we must seek its origin.”
–Dmitri Ivanovitch Mendeléev, 1877
See my webpage
http://living-petrol.blogspot.com
(recommended for study by Martin Hovland — a rather well published petroleum geologist from Norway’s Statoil)
When someone acts like a truth is blasphemy, you can be sure they are defending a religion.
Despite the claims of the abiotic oil crowd, oil, gas and coal continue to be found where the theory of biotic origins says they will be found, and has never been found in places where only the abiotic origin theory says it should.
The theory has been refuted by the facts in the ground.
“oil, gas and coal continue to be found where the theory of biotic origins says they will be found”
Dead stuff has a mysterious an unexplained attraction to natural faults and fractures:
And comets:
(1/3 kerogen, a.k.a. oil shale)
As predicted by the theory of biotic origins – according to Mark W’s unscientific ipse dixit assertion.
(Notice how faith plays a key role in the belief.)
Alan: You’re heading down the rabbit hole on “there is no free will”. It’s fun at 2 am in a college dorm hallway to play with the concept, but it’s nothing but mental gynastics to make you feel you know something. There are things we cannot ever know.
(This thread has meandered worse than a flooded river……)
What experiments? Actual quantum mechanics experiments conducted as early as 1972, and repeated many times since then, have unequivocally disproved the deterministic theory of physics.
The existence of craniopagus twins — twins conjoined at the head and sharing the same brain tissue — also gives the lie to a completely materialistic theory of mind. Such twins can “hear” each other’s thoughts and even speak out of each other’s mouths. They have the same relationships and same life experiences (on account of being, you know, stuck together). Yet each twin develops a distinct personality and set of interests, and will even come to disagreements. (Imagine being in an argument with someone you literally cannot get out of your head.)
And a favorite pithy comeback: If you are an illusion, who is there to be fooled?
Rumors of free will’s death have been greatly exaggerated.
The Chicken Noodle Network along with the other national and international networks, the Goracle and Mikey, et al, are sad, sick jokes that are being played over and over on the most gullible among us. Is drivelous a legitimate word?
I may have taken the Russians 70 years to ‘get over it’, but I’d submit they are willingly heading back to that era presently. ‘Free Will’ is messy and chaotic and many people prefer the order of totalitarianism to the messy environment of ‘Free Will’ (not just in Russia – the Chinese are a better example of that).
Alan,
I think the reference to ‘Free Will’ is shorthand for ‘the concept of Free Will’. It’s messy and chaotic
Forrest Gardener, unfortunately the present marxists in the US have made the Soviet-type of indoctrination amateurish. The avg Soviet citizen was always cynical and suspicious of the government, but several US generations now have been so indoctrinated as to accept/embrace their goobermint w/o question. I don’t have your confidence since as old generations die off, the indoctrination becomes even more entrenched — look at the deterioration in just the last 20 yrs. Most of Europe is even worse.
The Russians did not have the ICPP, U.N., E.U., MAINSTREAM MEDIA, the Dark State, all of the various Global Enviromental NGO’s, like the Tides Fdn, Geo Soros and the the other Globalists, working for them. They were fairly isolated.
Forrest, at the rate with which the left is attacking the integrity of the ballot, it won’t be long till it doesn’t matter who the people actually vote for.
Perhaps Facebook, Google and the like will finally overreach, and anti-trust action will be taken against them. They have managed to annoy both political parties in the US, and the resulting crossfire might be effective.
The new-socialist media have also annoyed an increasing number of their core user base who helped create the alt-tech base in the first place. I think they have made the serious error of assuming their platforms are now dominant enough to ignore potential loss of disgruntled customers to rivals. Worse than that, like Hilary Clinton, they appear to have calculated that it is even safe to start directly insulting potential customers to their face.
This now transparent political censorship at Google/Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook is only made worse by the incompetence of the algorithms and political naivety of the partisan humans charged with implementing censorship on their platforms. That and their inability to even enforce their own terms of service in a consistent manner, or respond to user feedback in an open, honest, and timely manner. Witness that tragic Death-by-Youtube last week. The unhinged young woman who shot several people at Youtube before killing herself was almost certainly ticking very few or none of the boxes that Youtube likely wish to target as online ‘deplorables’. Yet it seems to have been the clumsy censorship and throttling of her Youtube channels that tipped her over the edge. The dollars of lost users and lost advertisers will eventually have its say at these companies, probably now in the medium or short term.
A pair of pro-Trump black comedians had their accounts severely restricted because in the words of the Facebook censors, they are a “danger to the community”.
Forgot the link
http://www.theamericanmirror.com/facebook-penalizes-pro-trump-diamond-silk-deems-duo-unsafe-to-the-community/
In other case, a California Democrat has just introduced a bill requiring all online publishers to get their articles fact checked by a government approved fact checker before they are permitted to post it.
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2018/04/it-begins-california-senator-introduces-bill-to-kill-free-speech-requires-state-sanctioned-fact-checkers-to-approve-online-content/
I noticed that earlier. That is so over the top, if true. I was starting to feel some sympathy for Zuckerberg over the government roasting which he is currently getting, but if this is the new face of FB, then screw him.
Diamond & Silk are regulars on Fox, so it’s no surprise FB deems them a danger.
I think it would be hilarious for them to sue FB for racist censorship. They probably won’t, but I wouldn’t enjoy the show if they did.
The Left, whether media, politicians or pundits, react the same way regarding firearms. Present them with facts and its a blizzard of ad hominems. Or we need more gun laws. But they can’t say exactly what new law would help. Especially when it was a total failure of the authorities to enforce existing laws.
Different subject but same goal as AGW. Power! Global Control by a few. Take away all the guns so those in power won’t be opposed. Take away our cheap reliable power and bankrupt our prosperous countries.
The standard response of Liberals to government failures generally takes the form that there wasn’t enough government. Same for failure of government assistance to alleviate poverty, answer — more assistance was/is needed.
Quotes from Thomas Jefferson, who at 33, wrote the Declaration of Independence.
How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened
My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much
government.
Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.
The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.
The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretense of taking care of them.
Educate and inform the whole mass of the people… They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.
Somehow, the solution to failed Socialism is always “more Socialism.”
The socialist government-granted paradise meme pervades much of academia today. Many will think their way past it, only to be threatened with peer censure if they speak honestly.
Even Brexit and Trump have been deflected, so far.
I think Jefferson was channeling something that was obvious 2000 years ago, and is as true today as ever: Power corrupts. We see it every time a fresh batch of new blood gets elected, and promptly falls into the same habits as those they campaigned against.
Nothing new under the Sun.
Get over it. It is just noise.
That prompted Kennedy’s now famous opening toast to the 100 Nobel Laureates he had at a White House dinner, to wit, “this is the greatest collection of minds to ever dine at the White House with the sole exception of when Jefferson dined alone.”
I’ve seen several “documentaries” on how capitalism can be fixed.
Inevitably it boils down to “by turning it into socialism”.
It’s easy to see that capitalism doesn’t always result in what many humans regard to be the optimum solution.
The problem then is, is there a way under which capitalism can be regulated to produce a more optimal solution. It’s easy in hindsight to say, if only we had put a little more resources here, or if only there had been a little more regulation there.
The problem is, as always, how do you predict and regulate an unknowable future.
The wisdom of the market is that every person, using knowledge that is often only available to them, makes decisions about what they believe will be best for themselves.
The stupidity of socialism is the belief that a handful of people have the wisdom to decide what is best for everyone.
“Educate and inform the whole mass of the people… They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.”
That’s right. We, The People, are the guardians of our own freedoms. It’s up to us to make sure they don’t slip away from us, at the hands of greedy, power-hungry, deluded elites.
“Educate and inform the whole mass of the people… They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.”
And who is educating and informing the mass of people today? It is the radical Leftists who have taken over the education system, the entertainment industry, and the news media, which all feed Leftwing lies to the American people and the world.
The Leftwing Media is the most dangerous organization in the world to our personal freedoms because they combine to create false realities which serve to confuse and misdirect millions of people into voting the wrong way. I mean, that’s a pretty good propaganda job when you can sell a loser like Hillary Clinton and get millions of people to vote for her.
It would be a heck of a lot different today and tomorrow had she been elected. She almost was. And she got 90 percent of it because the Leftwing News Media was running interference for her, and lying about her opponent. If Republicans ever got fair press coverage, the Left wouldn’t stand a chance at the ballot box.
If President Trump can get the American people to see what liars the Leftwing News Media really are, that would be more important than anything else he did in Office, imo. He’s made a pretty good start on it. I saw where CNN is down to number 7 on the cable list instead of number 3. It’s probably going lower. Let’s hope. It’s nothing but a leftwing propaganda organ. As is MSNBC. And 90 percent of the rest of the press.
Ever notice how the press gives a free pass to the sexual indiscretions of their leftist heroes like JFK, Teddy “Chapp’ed-dick” Kennedy, Bill “Dry-hump” Clinton, etc. etc. but goes “full court press” when a conservative gets caught with his pants down?
This is just one example of the extreme bias of the lefty press – nobody should bother reading their nonsense – I stopped years ago.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/03/21/boom-federal-judge-dismisses-claim-of-a-conspiracy-to-suppress-global-warming-science/comment-page-1/#comment-2771544
“MILLWEE: He [Bill Clinton] came in [to the editing room] behind me, started hunching me to the point that he had an orgasm. He’s touching, trying to touch my breasts and I’m just sitting there very stiffly, just waiting for him to leave me alone. And I’m asking him the whole time, ‘Please do not do this. Do not touch me. Do not hunch me. I do not want this.’ And he finished doing what he was doing and walked out.”
http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/10/former-tv-reporter-accuses-bill-clinton-of-sexual-assault-229987
Bill reminds me of my friend’s dachshund. When I was a kid I used to visit my genius friend Peter, and he would always admonish me to put my shoes in the closet and close the door. Seems his dog had a shoe fetish, and would make wild passionate love to your footwear if you left them in sight. Gives whole new meaning to the term “wiener dog”. If I ever encounter a dog like this again. I’m going to call him “Clinton”. 🙂
Even notice how the press gives lefties a free pass when they (all too frequently) reveal themselves as sexual predators? Canadian NDP leader Jack “Mehoff” Layton was caught by the Toronto police in a raid of notorious massage parlour, famous for their “happy endings”, and was given a free pass by the police AND the press.
I am pretty certain that if voter fraud was eliminated, the results of the past election would be about what we would get for the next bunch of elections.
The issue I see is that people do not have enough time today to spend scads of it meticulously researching whatever issue to make their own decision. I think they use the following to prioritize the energy associated with researching a particular issue or a philosophical issue (like ‘Free Will’ and it’s implications), 1) How much effect does this have on my everyday life ( ability to feed, house, educate my kids), my health, etc? If a lot then I should devote a lot of energy, if not (again in their perception) then accept a ‘trusted source’ for an opinion and move on.
When you ask people on the street who want more gun laws, what laws they would like to see.
Invariably they give a list of laws that already exist.
“Good science” is essential but not nearly enough! The ‘collectivists’ take no prisoners, have no ethical standards, and are so very heavily invested in the CAGW ‘device’ that they need to be exposed at every possible turn! Keep the challenge alive!
Well, if things go bad for the Earth the way certain scientists are suggesting it might, the ice sheet growing over New York City might make them change their tune about CAGW, but then again, they would probably blame that on man made warming as well…
They already have, 15 years ago: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2003/nov/13/comment.research
Loved this line in Monckton’s reply to attacks….
“that the emoluments actually received by Dr Soon from these contracts were approximately equivalent to the annual wages of a burger-flipper at McDonald’s.”
The thing is, though, you don’t flip burgers at McDonalds, unless the grill malfunctions. They have a machine that cooks burgers on both sides. Burger King has a flame broiler with a conveyor, so they don’t flip burgers either.
So, burgers at McDonalds leap from the grill right to the hamburger buns, along with tomato slices, lettuce, cheese and McD’s secret sauce?
At every McD? all across the country?
Sounds the burgers still get flipped.
At rural locations they may still get flipped by spatula, since not every McD’s owner has their installation where burgers require mechanization.
There is no McDonalds that I know of that does NOT have the machines; given that an area can’t get a franchise without having enough people to provide the sales numbers to support it. As far as making the sandwiches themselves, once the meat’s been cooked, that’s done on an assembly line. A crew there is four people; a manager, a counter person, a drive-thru person and a cook. If the unit does not have a drive-thru, that person splits cook duties. The shifts overlap. Plus, the mechanization has been increasing over the years.
The higher the minimum wage is driven, the more cost effective automation becomes.
Dr Jordan B Peterson Chats with Some Black Guy (long 1:48 ish), And yes it’s relative/relevant,
Sorry :58 ish,
,.That was a very professional, workmanlike, and thorough rebuttal of the hostile attack launched”People of California” on the credibility of the Monckton Team et.al.
Arrrgh! ….launched by “People of California”…
Launched by “People of Calizuela…”
I clicked on the link at the top of the post and read through.
The plaintiff lawyers make all the same personal attacks that we have all seen before.
1) Monckton and Co. are not really “Climate Scientists”
2) They are all in the pay of Big Oil
3) Soon in particular, is a shill for Big Oil and has undisclosed conflicts of interest
4) Briggs is not really a professor at Cornell
5) They have associated with the Heartland Institute which is a mouthpiece for Big Oil.
And on, and on, and on.
Fake News, but this time not in the media, in the courts instead.
It seems that some big group has all the false charges sitting on the shelf somewhere. They can then whip out charges and deploy them at a moment’s notice.
The whole thing absolutely reeks of an organized effort which is much larger than what might appear from a single court filing.
The Monckton and Co. reply seems very well done, at least.
The fact that Monckton and Co aren’t climate scientists is the same argument from authority used by the warmists over and over against everyone, but the warmists’ own excuse for not being climate scientists themselves are that they don’t have to be to see Climate Change™©® and all they have to do is look out the window – a blatant lie which The Goreacle uses frequently to excuse himself.
There are far more “climate scientists” with degrees in mathematics, statistics, geology, chemistry than there are university degree bearing climate scientists. Degrees in climate science are a relatively new phenomenon.
With your position taken to conclusion… most mainstream climate scientists should be disregarded and thrown out of work.
The reality is the science of climate is multidisciplined. Anyone who is a degreed “Climate Scientist” is knowledgeable of everything, a master of none of it. Useless when expert opinions are needed in a particular question.
Horsefeathers and Bullpatties.
Let us see what it takes to be a real live “Climate Scientist”, shall we?
{From his Wikipedia (gasp) page}
Michael E. Mann: Creator of the (in)famous “Hockey Stick” chart
Education:
A.B. Applied Math and Physics
M.S. Physics
MPhil. Physics
MPhil. Geology
PhD geology & geophysics
Occupation:
Climatologist
Willie Soon
Does climatology for decades, not a “Climate Scientist”.
Sure. Not a personal attack at all. No. Not at All.
Joel O’Bryan has it exactly right.
RB, ” Soon is an aerospace engineer”.
That’s according to wiki. And yet if you click on the supposed links (10 and 11); the Smithsonian says “astrophysicist”, the other goes to Heartland institute and says “Page not found”. If you search Heartland Institute it says “astrophysicist”.
@ Rob Bradley
An orchestrated smear campaign against Dr. Soon. Perhaps you have not dug into the filthy details of this episode and are just accepting what you have seen elsewhere.
But be assured, around here people have dug into these matters and exposed the rot for all to see.
As I said, Fake News, and we are not going to buy it.
A question for Rob Bradly:
If the science is so strong, why the need for an organized smear campaign whenever a skeptical researcher speaks?
I have been is the physical sciences all my life and I have never seen anything like this stuff in any other field.
Not in Biology.
Not in Biochemistry.
Not in Chemistry
Not in Physics.
Why is “Climate Science” so different?
Rob Bradley:
“Monckton and Co. are not really “Climate Scientists” is not a personal attack…. Soon is an aerospace engineer, and Monckton studied architecture.
Are you really trying to make a point that the relatively straightforward math and physical principles of the AGW hypothesis are beyond the ken of an aerospace engineer or an architect? Really? A “Climate Scientist” (whatever that means academically) somehow has a better technical background? Are you kidding?
Rob- my good fellow, I have acquaintances with very fancy sheepskins who found second careers in unrelated fields. It’s not what your degree is in, it’s what you have practical experience in that really matters. The credibility of expert testimony is based on the level of expertise, not the level of education.
Evariste Galois wasn’t a mathematician; just a student. Gregor Mendel was an Augustinian friar, not a ‘scientist’. I guess their work must by junk.
Albert Einstein was a patent clerk, not a practising scientist.
Most of the so called warmest scientists are far from meteorologists and have a background in weird stuff. The Australian warmest guru is a mammologist expert in ancient Kangaroo bones? Climate scientist Huh he is not a scientists bootlace.
@ Rob Bradley
“Soon is an aerospace engineer”
Is he?
Rob Bradley – It would have been a good idea if you had read the rebuttal, before making your misguided comments here.
Plaintiff says: … “the proposed amici are (with one exception) not climate scientists …”
Response: Amici are happy not merely to admit that this is true, but to embrace and champion that truth. The whole point of our amici brief is that climate scientists do not know what they are doing in a crucial area of science that actually is outside their expertise, which is knowledge of control systems and feedback in those systems. Climate scientists’ ignorant mishandling of this crucial material requires intervention and correction by Engineers and Statisticians. Amici are able to supply that necessary expertise.
The amount of actual classroom time it takes to get an undergraduate degree in any of these subjects, when separating out the part that is directly applicable to the major, is tiny compared to a lifetime of reading and informing oneself on the relevant material, and graduate degrees are generally even less time than that.
Anyone can acquire the relevant knowledge as easily as someone sitting in a classroom or lecture hall as a youngster, especially when you consider that most students are not getting straight As in between their elbow bending at parties and pubs whilst in college.
The idea that one needs a particular degree to know anything is foolish.
And quoting Wikipedia on anything controversial, most particularly regarding anything even peripherally related to the CAGW meme, is as dumb as it gets.
Do you think we were born yesterday, Rob Bradley?
Get real.
ЯΞ√ΩLUT↑☼N
“The fact that Monckton and Co aren’t climate scientists is the same argument from authority used by the warmists over and over against everyone…”
It is actually an ad hominem. The root argument is that the person should not be listened to because of something “they are not”, i.e that they cannot know something relevant.
If you say, “You must accept what Monckton says because he is well known”, that is an argument from authority (reverence) because “he is revered”. Saying the “revered” must be believed or followed is ad verecundiam. Argument from reverence.
How many climate alarmists are qualified climate scientists? Not as many as one might think.
Facebook: “The mad men of climate alarmism“.
Then shout it out loud when Gore, Di Caprio, Arnie, Geldoff, Prince Charlie, Merkle, the Pope, The E.U. The U.N. all the ”unfortunates living in danger of climate change and risisng seas…” Everyone who has been paid to promote the alarmist agenda, Bankers, Insurance Co, T.V. show hosts, celebrity pseudo scientists, Journalists, movie stars, Pop stars… etc etc… You know. The ”real” climate experts. Silence them the same way you don’t want to hear from Sceptics.
The biggest enemy of establishing true science, is the de%*al of open debate. If you have a case, it will stand the test. Present and defend it. Otherwise,this is your ”Flat Earth”
I conclude that the reason climate alarmists won’t debate “The Science” is most of them don’t know it. They know they’ll be ripped to shreds. Most alarmists know various bits of GHG theory. Not the same thing as the science of climate. That is a vast topic covering all sorts of things; with little connection to carbon dioxide, GHGs, GCMs or other models.
Monckton and Co. are not really “Climate Scientists”. They have not be licensed by Dr. Mann, who licensed Al Gore and himself as Climate Scientists.
Some time ago I spent a couple of days researching the educational background of the authors of the 2014 IPCC report. You may find the results interesting. Accuracy is not guaranteed but I believe it to be reasonable, given the difficulty of digging up the information.
It can be found at my website — https://goo.gl/Dd1p4f
Well, to be fair, any degree in anything like hydrology or oceanography are physical geography degrees and the core classes include the basic fundamental basis of meteorology and climatology. And anything relating to geology includes plenty of Earth history which is a good part of my insight into why current climatological alarmism is nonsense: The Earth has never been hostile to life and CO2 has almost always been far higher than it is now.
But anyone can read and understand everything that was/is known about climatology without a lifetime of work in the field. It is not like degree programs in such areas require some magical incantations known only to a few elite professors who pass along all the knowledge.
Just as having such a degree does not make anyone automatically a smart person or uniquely knowledgeable, (and it surely does not make them automatically correct about anything they offer an opinion on, even if it is a strongly held one) not having one does not mean a person is an ignoramus who is unqualified to understand a subject, and climatology is not rocket surgery.
The atmosphere is extremely complicated and difficult to understand in all of it many facets and aspects, but getting a degree is not. I went to school with plenty of people who wound up with graduate degrees in chemical engineering and chemistry, and many of them were not the best students in any of the classes, or the most insightful or genuinely brilliant people one could come across. At all.
It mostly just takes showing up.
Almost everyone I knew or knew of in all of my years of formal studies spent more time partying than studying, as a full load in college is only 16 hours (which are not even a full hour) of classes a week for each of two 15 week semesters a year.
People who read a lot can easily read more in a year than a typical student does in four.
Rob Bradley
Soon didn’t not get caught doing anything, that was a total smear job and 100% not factual as chronicled here many times. Your blatant smear attempt reminds me of another fraud who posted here for many years and come to think of it I don’t remember you posting here until after he “left”. Slander away if you must but you will be called on it every time by me for one.
If that’s true, then there are no “climate scientists”, since there are no universities that give degrees in “climate science” until very recently.
As usual, Rob lies and believes he can get away with it.
Soon never took money from a coal company so he didn’t have to report it.
Heartland got a dedicated grant for an entirely different subject several years before Soon joined.
The grant was the equivalent of only 1 or 2 percent of Heartland’s total budget, and it was only for one or two years.
That is the sum total of the so called connection that you and your fellow trolls keep ranting about.
Let’s assume that Rob’s claims were actually true. That if one’s employer getting even a penny of money from a group with interests in the debate is enough to disqualify you.
It’s in the government’s interest for the claims of the AGW crowd to be true. The more catastrophic the predictions the better. They are an excuse for huge new taxes, which the politicians can use to buy votes. The vast new powers grant new opportunities to sell access to enrich yourself as well as friends and family.
Therefore, anyone who works for an organization that recieves any money from government is to be ignored if they have an opinion in favor of the AGW theory.
Which unfortunately for Rob, includes almost every one of his so called “climate scientists”.
While I thoroughly applaud Monckton et al’s efforts, I still cannot get past what I feel is an underlying, gaping, eventual weakness in their approach, … namely relying on an argument that succumbs to a underlying, gaping error in the Party Line’s (to use Lord Monckton’s terms) basic science — where radiant temperature is compared to physical temperature.
It makes no difference whether emission temperature can be envisioned as existing at the planet’s skin or higher in a planet’s atmosphere. Emission temperature and physical temperature are NOT the same category of phenomenon, and so comparing them EVER seems wrong. Alas, I do not have the expertise to explain why I think such a comparison is wrong, but I have a strong intuition that screams for a learned explanation.
Robert Kernodle. May I recommend that you first study such issues. e.g. see Caltech lecture Emission Temperature of Planets
David,
Robert is correct, the emission temperature of real materials cannot be determined by the radiation emitted. The Caltech lecture you link to makes this classic mistake, equating the surface of a planet to a blackbody where radiation emitted can be used to calculate emission temperature. No known planet in this solar system has a surface or atmosphere that in any way resembles a blackbody. So for a planet like Earth, knowing it is absorbing around 240 w/m2 and emitting 240 w/m2 only tells us that the planet is in radiative equilibrium, but tells us nothing about the temperature at any point on the surface or in the atmosphere.
To illustrate this point, here are the emissions temperatures of three different materials, each emitting 240 w/m2:
Polished Aluminium 612K
White Titanium oxide paint 260K
Blackbody 255K
As to the Caltech pdf, we know with 100% certainty that the calculation methodology shown is utterly wrong. The very same methodology was used to estimate surface temperatures of the Moon. Albedo was set at 0.1 an absorptivity and emissivity assumed to be close to unity. The S-B calculation indicates an average surface temperature of 271 kelvin. However the empirical results from the DIVINER mission gave lunar surface Tav almost 90 kelvin below this.
David is right. The greatest error in the AGW conjecture was the miscalculation of “Surface Tav without radiative atmosphere”. The accepted figure 255K is over 55K too low.
Wolf April 7, 2018 at 9:44 pm
Thank you for that.
I’m with you and Robert Kernodle.
Wolf
Thanks for that. The bigger error I see is that of comparing, repeatedly and confusingly, the temperature of a non-radiative atmosphere with having no atmosphere at all. I find this bizarre. The temperature of a non-radiative atmosphere would be determined by the temperature of the surface with which it has contact. If the moon had a surface temperature of 200 C in the daytime, and you introduced a non-radiative atmosphere, that atmosphere would cool the surface and warm up considerably, perhaps to 199 C. Thermals would carry away the heat which would remain in the atmosphere because is it, by definition, non-radiative and has no way to cool. So at night it would remain hot, unlike the Earth’s atmosphere which is radiative.
How can such a basic error be repeated? Because initially the comparison was made (by the IPCC and others) between the naked moon having an average temperature of -18 C (supposedly) and the Earth being 15 C, and the difference being attributed to ‘GHG’s in the atmosphere”, implying that without GHG’s there would be no surface heating of the non-radiative gases, which is poppycock. The implication, stated clearly years ago but now hidden behind cleverer words, is that removing all the GHG’s would leave the atmosphere at the same temperature as the naked moon. Since when does convective heat transfer cease in the absence of GHG’s? Hot surface heating of gases is Convective Heat Transfer 101.
If I have a container of non-radiative argon and heat one side, the argon will not remain cold just because it can’t intercept IR from the hot wall. This whole GHG roadshow is more defective that it first appears, and it already appeared to be pretty defective what with the feedback error and all.
David L
I looked at the linked document http://web.gps.caltech.edu/classes/ese148a/lecture2.pdf. Thanks for that.
See Fig 2.4, Radiative and non-radiative energy flow diagram for Earth and its atmosphere. The numbers are in % values.
Note the 21% for radiative transfer from the surface, and 29% for non-radiative (convection heat transfer) which heats the air and is lost eventually by radiation from the atmosphere. Consider what happens if it was instantly transformed into a non-radiative atmosphere. The incoming energy reaching the surface rises from 50 to 100. The 21/29 split would remain about the same because of the effective heat gain by the atmosphere, giving (in a initial non-equilibrium state) a 42/58 split radiative/convective.
The atmosphere would heat at twice the current rate from convection, until it was hot enough to heat the night surface by the same amount the atmosphere receives during the day, raising the radiative component from the surface into balance. It would reach radiative equilibrium when the convective heat transfer from the atmosphere to the surface equaled what was received from it by convection during the day. Now, in that condition, would that equilibrium temperature of the non-radiative atmosphere be 255K, or some higher temperature?
The IPCC (and many others) have it that as the downward-emitted 89 approaches zero without GHG’s, the 29% non-radiative component would also drop to zero. In other words, if back-radiation ceased, convective heating of the atmosphere would also cease, even though more (double) the incoming radiation reached the surface. Odd, that.
Robert Kernodle is seeing what many of us are seeing, and what many still refuse to see. To put it bluntly: radiative physics is messed up. It has bitten off more than it can chew. It is wanting to be the controller, much like those who promote the CO2 warming theory want CO2 to be the controller. It has not grounded its key theories in concrete experiments, and in fact seems to have deliberately and arrogantly refused to verify its assumptions. Let’s start with the assumption that trapped IR raises surface temp: prove it. I still can’t believe that this assumption rests on a small series of more-or-less backyard experiments that come to contrary conclusions, the most carefully done of which says it ain’t so. Let’s prove that GHGs raise the temperature of N2 and O2 through transfer of internal energy. Let’s prove that CO2 distort earth’s temperature profile. Some basic experiments, for Pete’s sake? Or is science today just about computer models and whichever theory we think sounds best?
We can put this climate nonsense to an end if we get on the same page and think more carefully about what must be happening and not let our assumptions and long-ingrained ways of thinking get in the way. We can clear a lot of things up if we’d slow down and carefully test our assumptions.
Some basic physical experiments, please?
@ Wolf and Crispin
Thank you. For several years I’ve pondered just what you have explained but didn’t know how to present it as you have.
While I fully understand ‘back radiation’ from radiative gas theory as explained clearly by Robert G Brown’s and Willis’ many past posts, I continue to have a nagging thought that the overall net effect of CO2 and other non-condensing radiative gases may be a net cooling of the earth to some degree. Convective heating, from the surface as well as from/to other non-radiative and radiative gases, of all gases in the atmosphere seems to warrant a net cooling effect of earth by the radiative/greenhouse gases. In consideration of CO2 and other non-condensable gases being somewhat slow to change and Willis’ well presented fast response thunderstorm hypothesis, it seems earth has a lot of thermostatic regulating/controlling influences. I haven’t even included the inertia of the oceans massive energy storage. I don’t know the answer, but there is that nagging thought that hasn’t been resolved in my mind.
It’s all extremely complex and so many factors involved with the earth’s ability to regulate its temp to a relatively narrow range over the short term of hundreds/thousands of years. Other, possibly galactic, factors my affect the equilibrium temp over the long term but even then it was probably a narrow range at that point in time. It’s a fool’s errand to try to model it.
Error in my above comment (big one):
“Convective heating” should have been written as “conductive heating”.
Proof reading before posting is a virtue that I sometimes fail. 🙂
”To put it bluntly: radiative physics is messed up. It has bitten off more than it can chew.”
Don,
I strongly disagree. I feel our understanding of radiative physics is fine, it is just one branch of science, climatology, that is misusing radiative physics calculations. Nowhere else in science is this gross abuse occurring.
To illustrate my point, engineering spacecraft thermal control is highly dependant on getting the radiative physics exactly right. To achieve thermal control without expendable coolants, radiative balance of the spacecraft becomes a critical issue. Yet aerospace engineers now routinely build spacecraft that achieve passive thermal control, just by getting the thermodynamics and radiative physics right.
But of course to do so they take into account everything climatologists ignore. Aerospace engineers consider the true solar absorptivity and true LWIR emissivity of materials. They consider the specific heat capacity of materials, their conductivity and their thermal inertia. They also consider where in a material solar radiation is being absorbed and emitted from (at the surface or below the surface?). Because no material is infinitely conductive or has zero heat capacity, a critical variable the aerospace engineers include is “Time”. Now look at the Caltech paper David L. linked to. Every variable that aerospace engineers consider critical to calculating radiative balance is missing.
Don, radiative physics works fine, it’s just that climatologists aren’t any good at it.
@ Wolf April 8, 2018 at 5:26 pm
I stand corrected.
Is there anything climate science hasn’t screwed up?
”Is there anything climate science hasn’t screwed up?”
I struggle to think of anything those pushing the AGW barrow have got right.
But what causes real anger is the political power a small group of agenda driven scientists has wielded, and the damage they have caused to many other areas of science in their efforts to defend their failed conjecture and the funding it attracts.
In planetary science, no one can discuss real planetary atmospheres without paying lip-service to the non-existent “greenhouse effect”. Even as the New Horizons probe discovered the atmosphere of Pluto was cooling the surface, the scientists involved still had to add the caveat to their work that this was in no way a challenge to the AGW conjecture for Earth’s atmosphere. Everyone is still forced to say that the surface temperature on Venus is caused by a radiative GHE, and the 90 bar surface pressure, convecting atmosphere and sunlight being absorbed well above the surface must be ignored.
In geology and palaeontology, plant stoma records must be discredited and previously accepted work trashed as climatologists demand even geological history be re-written so CO2 appears to drive all past and future climate.
In oceanography, studies on turbidity, depth of solar penetration and heat content must be suppressed, lest solar influence on climate enter the discussion.
In meteorology some of the greatest damage has been done. Radiative subsidence of air masses, once accepted as a critical component in Hadley, Ferrel and Polar tropospheric convection cells had to be written out of the science as it raised questions as to why such circulation would not just speed up with more radiative gases in the atmosphere. Unwarranted adjustments and homogenisation has trashed the surface temperature records, possibly beyond repair. And worse, new theories on atmospheric circulation such as the Makarieva effect (2010) are subject to pack attack and torn down if they are perceived to be the slightest threat to the AGW gravy train.
The politically driven AGW conjecture has damaged far more than the study of climate. Gatekeeping is science is to be expected, but add national and international politics, billions of dollars and the pressure to trash and suppress valid science to defend pseudo-science becomes immense. Fixing the scientific train wreak caused by the AGW conjecture will take decades, and we can’t even start repairs until sceptics stop arguing for an ECS over 0.0.
Crispin,
you raise the question of the heating of a non-radiative atmosphere of gases like O2 and N2. Such an atmosphere would overheat, expand and be lost to solar wind. It is notable that there are no worlds with an atmosphere in our solar system that have managed to retain said atmosphere without radiative gases to cool them.
But this does not mean radiatively cooled atmospheres always cool the surface of a world.
On Earth and Pluto, radiatively cooled atmospheres cool the solar heated surface of the worlds. On Venus, the radiatively cooled atmosphere heats the surface of the world.
There is only one solid rule. If your climate calculations for Earth include the figure of shame (255 K), then you need to spread your fingers, put you hand vertically above your head and say “gobble gobble”. Anyone that accepts “255K surface Tav without radiative atmosphere” for this ocean planet is a Turkey.
Crispin, it’s good to see not all at “lukewarmer central” have stopped thinking and fighting.
You are not a Turkey, Crispin. Through rainy marching and painful fields, your heart is in the trim.
@ Wolf, April 8, 2018 at 10:54 pm
When I received basic meteorological training as part of my Environmental Science degree course in the 1970s we were taught that the latitudinal reach of the Hadley cell was determined by the amount of radiative cooling to space of the dry air uplifted to the tropopause by the convection storms of the equatorial Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). The model used to explain this latitudinal reach of the Hadley cell contained the following elements:-
1. The daily convective thunderstorms of the ITCZ (aka “the doldrums”) lift moist solar heated air from the surface to altitude. This moist air cools at the wet adiabatic lapse rate. The rising air inside the storms loses water back to the surface as rainfall. This process of rainwater separation and removal by gravity dries the lifted air which can then only descend at the dry adiabatic lapse rate (because the air’s original moisture content has been lost back to the surface).
2. The dried adiabatically cooled air, which remains aloft at the tropopause through buoyancy, then further cools by thermal radiation to space. Eventually the sufficiently cooled and therefore denser air returns to the surface in the descending limb of the Hadley cell to form the subtropical high pressure anticyclones of the Horse latitudes.
3. This dry descended and adiabatic warmed air, now back at the surface, flows towards the equator as the trade winds, collecting more water through surface evaporation en route and then, at the doldrums, the cycle repeats.
The key element of this model is the role of polyatomic gases (aka greenhouse gases) in emitting thermal radiation to space. First some comments about thermal emission:-
1. Fluids cannot transmit shear waves. This means that solid surfaces, that can transmit shear, are far more effective at emitting thermal radiation than either fluids or gases.
2. Mono-atomic noble gases and bi-atomic molecular gases (such as nitrogen) cannot flex, molecular flexure requires two or more covalent bonds. Consequently only polyatomic gases (e.g. carbon dioxide) are able to flex and so provide the mechanism by which thermal radiation can be emitted to space from the dry air at the tropopause.
My understanding of the process of planetary thermal loss in toto has now changed because of the following two papers dealing with the rate of daily planetary rotation, these are the key works that have altered my views on the role of greenhouse gases and climate change:-
From the abstract of Hunt, B.G. 1979: The Influence of the Earth’s Rotation Rate on the General Circulation of the Atmosphere. Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, Vol. 36 (8), 1392-1408.
From the abstract of Del Genio, A.D. & R. J. Suozzo 1987: A Comparative Study of Rapidly and Slowly Rotating Dynamical Regimes in a Terrestrial General Circulation Model. Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, Vol. 44 (6), 973-986.
Prior to reading these modelling studies I had always assumed that the canonical climatic explanation I was taught at university was correct. These two papers both demonstrate however that the size of the Hadley cell is determined by the rotation rate of the planet. The implications of the role of daily planetary rotation in determining the latitudinal reach of the Hadley cell are truly radical for the dynamics of terrestrial planetary atmospheres.
For a slowly rotating planet, such as Venus, the Hadley cell reaches from the equator to the poles. On Venus the polar vortex marks the return route of descending air down towards the planet’s surface. So I have to conclude that the process of radiative cooling to space at the top of the Venusian atmosphere does not determine the latitudinal location of the descending leg of the Hadley cell, instead the latitudinal reach of the Hadley cell is determined by the slow rate of planetary rotation and not by the efficiency of gaseous cooling at the top of the atmosphere.
On Venus the presence of a Hadley cell that covers the full latitudinal extent of each hemisphere means that the polar vortices are only two places where the air can descend to the surface. Because solid surfaces are more efficient thermal emitters than atmospheric gases, it follows that planetary cooling on Venus originally relied on the surface area of the planet exposed to space at the poles. This imbalance of area between the percentage of the surface covered by the latitudinal reach of the Hadley cell and the area covered by the descending polar vortex means that Venus cools inefficiently by surface emission to space and relies instead on thermal emission from the top of its gaseous atmosphere. Consequently the surface of Venus became a hot world with no crustal lithic store of carbonate rock able to remove and sequester the CO2 gas generated and released from the planet’s mantle.
Our home planet Earth however, unlike Venus, is a fast rotating planet; this means that the latitudinal reach of the Hadley cell is constrained to the tropics. Consequently there are four zones on Earth where air is forced to descend from the tropopause to the surface, these locations are the two Horse latitude belts and the two polar vortices. This increase in planetary surface area exposed to descending air on Earth means that direct thermal emission from solid land surface to space is more efficient on our planet and so Earth is able to lose a significant amount of heat from any tropical landmasses, such as the Sahara desert, through the radiative thermal window of the clear skies formed in the descending dry semi-transparent air of the subtropical anticyclones.
The new model of terrestrial planetary dynamics contains the following features:-
1. The latitudinal reach of the Hadley cell is determined by the rate of planetary rotation and not by the efficiency of gaseous cooling at the top of the atmosphere.
2. The surface area of the climatic zones located in mid-latitude belts is larger than the surface area of climatic zones at a planet’s poles because of spherical geometry.
3. The land surface of the tropical anticyclones beneath the Hadley cell causes more planetary heat loss than land surface below the polar vortices because the effectiveness of radiative heat loss depends both on absolute temperature and surface area.
Therefore a hot mid-latitude desert, such as the Sahara, loses more heat to space through the descending dry air of the Hadley cell, than the cold polar ice desert of Antarctica does through the descending dry air of the southern Polar vortex. This difference in radiative efficiency from ground to space explains why Earth, unlike slowly rotating Venus, will never develop a dense hot high pressure carbon dioxide atmosphere.
As both papers referenced above show that on Earth the latitudinal reach of the climatic zones are governed by rapid speed of our planet’s daily rotation rate, not by atmospheric temperature and certainly not by the gaseous composition of the atmosphere. It therefore follows that in order to extend the Hadley cell towards both poles simultaneously; it is necessary to slow down the Earth’s rate of daily planetary rotation.
Maybe we need to reconsider the policy of removing global atmospheric angular momentum from the wind?, as this increased frictional loss will add to the present natural oceanic tidal friction and increasingly slow down the speed of the Earth’s daily rotation, thereby causing the climate to warm. /sarc
Robert K “Alas, I do not have the expertise to explain why I think such a comparison is wrong, but I have a strong intuition that screams for a learned explanation.” but you know deep down in your heart of hearts that they must be wrong, because if they’re right it would be so hurtful to mother Gaia. Griff by any other name- at least your trolling is better articulated if no more intelligent.
Well, I thought that I would get slammed for my last comment, but it seems that I have good cause to admit what I admitted.
Still in admiration of Monckton et al, just to be clear, I worry that depending on a fundamental error in conceptualization to prove a greater error of that conceptualization’s expansion into a full-blown argument … is merely a short-term triumph of wisdom. Monckton et al use words like martial arts masters that direct the force of an opponent against him/her/?.
A greater triumph of wisdom would be to avoid the fundamental error in the first place. And then build an even stronger argument on a premise different than that error, … for the sake of truth, rather than for the sake of overcoming opposition.
For example, in Lord Monckton’s explanation of incoming flux and outgoing flux that leans towards the “slowed cooling” approach to the radiative greenhouse effect, the belief that “slowed cooling” is warming seems misguided.
My question has always been, “Slowed with respect to WHAT time frame? — a 24-hour day?, a week?, a century? OR How slow is slow? — a second?, a fraction of a second? — and so what? — so what if the time it takes to cool is a second slower, or a fraction of a second slower?, or even an hour?, or a half a day? — the cooling STILL happens, right? Again, with respect to WHAT time frame is this alleged “slowing” occurring? And how is this “slowing” considered adding heat? Nothing is added by taking longer to be removed — it STILL gets taken away.
Adding more CO2 to Earth’s atmosphere would seem to add more VOLUME to the mass of gases that have infrared-active characteristics. This would seem to mean that MORE radiation from those gases would occur, BOTH outward, as well as downward (if we must view the division so neatly). The outward radiation is going, … well, … OUTWARD, … MORE of it. The inward radiation, okay, maybe you want to say is doing a little “slowing”, but, again, so what? How slow is too slow? That downward radiation cannot heat anything, right?
So, what could “slowing” mean? — maybe somehow “pushing against” the outward-moving radiation, holding it back (but NOT stopping/trapping it)? But still the outward radiation is pushing against the inward radiation, pushing the inward-moving radiation OUT, okay, maybe “slower”, but so what? More outward radiation happens overall, when more CO2 is added, and the more downward radiation also produced by the more CO2 just gets pushed outward by the higher energy of the outward radiation. It’s all STILL going outward, isn’t it? It’s going away from the planet. Why is this not an overall cooling effect, then?
I think many more people are beginning to see the obvious: it’s pressure, not back-radiation. Once we let go of our fascination with climate radiative calculations, which are just elaborate and high-level hand-waving that’s unconfirmed by experiment and driven by assumptions, then we can begin to see.
Robert, The Caltech lecture makes this statement about the Greenhouse Effect on page 4
Really? The atmosphere absorbs all terrestrial radiation? The lecture goes on to use this slab model to explain the Greenhouse Effect but fails to mention that the real atmosphere is not opaque to thermal radiation, it is in fact semi-transparent and the thermal radiation window in the atmosphere not only exists, it allows the formation of ground frost on still air cloudless winter nights when the solid ground cools by direct thermal radiation to space through the overlying warmer atmosphere via this thermal radiation window.
The best example of this ground surface thermal cooling comes from temperature data collected in Antarctica. The Dome Argus automatic weather station on the Antarctic icecap at an elevation of 4084m can, in the total darkness of an austral winter day in May, experience an ice surface temperatures of -76C while at the same time the overlying air 4m above the ice has a temperature of -60C (16C warmer). Given that these measurements take place in the total darkness of winter, it is clear that the ice surface at Dome Argus is producing atmospheric cooling by thermal radiation from the ground directly to space through the radiation window in the overlying semi-transparent thin dry air.
This sort of behavior would seem to be disrespectful ….to the Judge .
It should reflect badly on those representing “the People “of California .
Dear Lord Monckton, they will run out of money before you run out of ideas and lectures to rebut their insane thoughts.
INTERESTING FACTS from #ExxonKnew
HAGENS BERMAN SOBOL SHAPIRO LLP for the plaintiffs will be paid 23.5% of any net monetary recovery!
Alsup wants the United States to submit an amicus brief!
He wants Donald Trump’s thoughts on California blaming the energy industry for climate change. “Case 3:17-cv-06012-WHA Document 118 Filed 03/01/18: The United States is invited to read the complaints, motions to dismiss, and oppositions and to submit an amicus brief on the question of whether (and the extent to which) federal common law should afford relief of the type requested by the complaints. The Court would appreciate receiving the amicus brief by APRIL 20. If the United States can meet the April 20 deadline then the parties will be given an opportunity to respond to the amicus brief via supplemental briefing”.
Chevron will progressively file third-party complaints against everyone responsible for extracting, marketing and burning fossil fuels. Chevron has already commenced this strategy by filing a complaint against Norway’s state-owned oil company Statoil (seeking to include Statoil in the current lawsuit). Ultimately Chevron will seek to include everyone if necessary; no joke. A Chevron executive recently stated . . . “These include other fossil fuel producers (agencies or instrumentalities of sovereign foreign states, the United States, the numerous States including California {see California Public Resources Code § 3106(d)}; promoters (the manufacturers of automobiles, aircraft, heavy machinery, farm equipment, home and commercial heating equipment etc.); emitters (Plaintiffs themselves, private entities and individuals around the world) who actually consume and burn the fossil fuels that Plaintiffs allege give rise to global warming and the sea-level rise of which Plaintiffs complain”
+10
Isn’t there a simpler rebuttal to the charge that the energy sector has caused climate change( via CO2 emissions) in that my understanding is that the electricity generation industry in most countries causes about a third of all CO 2 emissions, the rest being about one third from transport and industry (with cement production a single big part of that ) and one third from land use ( eg Agriculture Forestry and land clearing etc) Unless of course one allocates petroleum and oils and natural gas etc used in transport and agriculture etc to the product producing industries (ie natural and coal seam gas and gasoline producers)
This is what I have suggested with Hansen’s suit. Sue the kids for using fossil fuels for entertainment, no Xbox for you kids you have admitted the fossil fuels used to make them are going to cause me harm. No video games on phones etc. See how fast the parents withdraw when they are threatened with court ordered no TV
So long as we’re talking about joining those who produce, promote, emit etc., Chevron should propose to join Judge Alsup (does he drive a car? Ride plane? Heat/Air C his home & office) and every fed judge in the district emitting dangerous co2 gas. Who could hear this case, Ed Begley? Not to mention finding a jury of non-emitters. The farce is strong in these greens.
As for who should be blamed, why don’t we consider the question, “Who actually consumes the fossil fuels?”
Are we not all guilty? We all should be sued. Al Gore should be sued. M. Mann …. And, well, the list is quite long, I’m sure, as to who KNEW and STILL kept consuming the nasty stuff.
I hereby submit the suggestion of a class action lawsuit against all the consensus, for KNOWING and NOT doing shit in their personal lives to significantly remedy their evil, nasty, carbon polluting ways.
My Arlington with neck order interred father taught me something early on. Never start a fight, but always finish one on top. We are in one, and must finish on top. This silly plaintiff garbage, as with Oreskes recent silly whining, suggests we are indeed finishing on top.
ECS something between 1.45 (adjusted Monckton Bode), 1.5 (Lewis 2015 using IPCC AR5 except for newer Stevens aerosol estimates) and 1.65 Lewis and Curry 2014 (energy budget methods using only IPCC AR5 values), all suggest game over. Not to mention pause is back, cooling is coming, and modeled tropical troposphere hotspot does not exist, Arctic ice has not disappeared, Polar bears are thriving, and SLR is mot accelerating. Plus, Planet is greening.
NOT ending well for warmunists.
Cooling is here you idiot
It sure is unusually cool around here for this time of year.
I am cold. 14F this morning 🙁
When will Spring start?
Looks cool from this vantage point, …https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/overlay=temp/orthographic=-42.51,82.21,408
Until you have ECS < 0.0 for a doubling of CO2, your climate modelling is still out.
If the shoe fits, Rob…
Antigo WI -3F this morning, -7F forecast for tonight.
Don’t need a crystal ball to see the actual bloody cold temperatures for April 8 2018.
It’s fall in the southern hemisphere.
To use Rob’s favorite distraction.
Just talking about something will never be enough. I suggest that all people with their own home (not rental – i.e.: Not paying by some heat meter) start going a little redneck and build their own solar heaters – air heater (the easiest) or water heater (the best). Both of these heaters yield way more benefits than what is pushed by “green” mainstream and governments. And they are good for your economy no matter wether you believe in AGW or not.
I simply believe this is important because what the governments push, is always something which makes you a customer at some big utility (i.e. A serf), and the way they make “green” energy is in no way “green”.
The 0.5% consensus really is pushing it. Yes, I know it’s correct in the most strictly technical sense but we all know that more than 0.5% of climate scientists agree with the definition set out in Cook et al. 2013 which is that at least half the 0.6°C warming since 1950 is anthropogenic. That’s 0.3°C,
a pretty low bar to start with.
At a guess, one might expect that say, 2/3 of climate scientists who are actually contacted (as opposed to having their abstracts assessed for them by Cook’s AGW fanatics) would agree with the IPCC definition. Well, Cook did contact a bunch of climate scientists who wrote those abstracts.
Nearly 1200 authors replied and 62.7%, not 97%, *assessed themselves* as agreeing with the IPCC definition. It’s right there in Cook et al. 2013 Table 4, columns 1 and 4:
“Endorse AGW _____62.7% (746 [of 1189 authors])
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024/pdf
That’s less than 2/3, not much more than half, a lacklustre majority agreeing to a low-bar definition.
In fact, 54% of those authors whose papers were assessed by Cook’s team as neutral/no opinion on global warming decided to up their neutral category to the ‘endorse’ category. Cook et al. had left these abstracts out of their final calculations for the abstract assessment phase of the paper because they hadn’t yet spoken to the authors (which was the phase 2 work, resulting in Table 4). Cook’s team couldn’t assess one way or the other whether a neutral-looking paper was authored by endorsers or rejectors of AGW. But now that they had these authors communicating with them via email in phase 2, they could ask them categorically and include all of them in their final analysis- and that’s what they did.
Obviously, those authors who saw that their papers had been rated by Cooks team as neutral, but knew that they themselves were endorsers of AGW, gladly changed their category to ‘endorse’. Those who had this chance but decided to remain in the neutral category were clearly not endorsers of global warming, otherwise they would have followed suit and changed to ‘endorse’. Instead, they were indifferent (and a few changed to being outright rejectors of the consensus). Thus, they and the rejectors made up the other 37.3% of the 1189 who didn’t endorse the consensus. This 37.3% of non-endorsers is a totally solid result because it came from the horse’s mouth- the authors themselves. It also meant the whole 1189 cohort of contacted authors (real people, not Cook-assessed abstracts) were included in the final calculation that showed that only 62.7%, not 97% of those 1189 authors were endorsers.
Somehow, the 67.2% consensus of actual authors asked, never made it into the abstract nor the conclusion of Cook et al. 2013.
**The 0.5% consensus really is pushing it. Yes, I know it’s correct in the most strictly technical sense but we all know that more than 0.5% of climate scientists agree with the definition set out in Cook et al. 2013 which is that at least half the 0.6°C warming since 1950 is anthropogenic. That’s 0.3°C,
a pretty low bar to start with. **
I would suggest that the .5% consensus probably applies to all scientists. You have to note that “climate scientist’ can be a loose definition. The Hockey Stick Mann may be at times called a climate scientist but is he? Similarly with many others.
REPLY
That would indeed be a good hypothesis. However, the 0.5% really was derived from the data used in Cook et al. 2013. Christopher Monckton did a post here on WUWT to prove it. It’s derived from the 40 or so contacted authors who rated themselves as category 1 (out of 3 possible endorsement categories). These 40 authors set against the original 11,000 abstracts gives the 0.5%.
Category 1 was “explicitly endorses the consensus” as opposed to categories 2 and 3 which were various levels of implicit endorsement. 4 was neutral and 5-7 were three rejection categories mirrored to endorsement’s 1-3 categories. When you add in categories 2 and 3, you get a bigger endorsement cohort of actual self-assessed authors but the implicit nature of their endorsement is arguably not explicit enough for saying they really do endorse the consensus. It certainly wasn’t enough so for CM. Categories 1-3 had 62.7% of the 1189 contacted authors and category 1 was only around 3.5% of the 1189. But the 1189 was only a small number of authors of the original 11,000 abstracts, hence it ending up as 0.5%.*
It remains that the most robust result concerning the consensus in Cook et al. 2013 is the 62.7% consensus of contacted authors. This is because the authors were specifically asked to assess themselves and presumably know what their own view on the consensus is. Also the entire 1189 cohort was used so as to get a full picture of the category 4, self-assessed neutrals. These are what turned the 97% of phase 1 into the 62.7% of phase 2. The category 4 neutrals weren’t included in the phase 1 (abstract assessment only) an omission which obviously skews the endorser abstracts up to 97%. It’s a disgraceful sleight of hand to dismiss these neutral abstracts as irrelevant when a couple of pages later the actual authors indicate that somewhere around 50% abstracts would not have endorsed the consensus.
*The reason I didn’t go into detail on this before is that a) quite a few WUWT readers know at least some of this and b) I’m not sure how Christopher Monckton dealt with the author numbers versus original abstract numbers. It would be comparing apples and oranges but I think he corrected for that somehow.
Consensus ought not be discussed or debated, but dismissed.
You play their game by their rules when you do so.
No it isn’t. Monckton is looking at all the papers, not just the self rated papers.
Endorsement levels 1 and 2 were both explicitly endorsing the consensus. Level 1 is ” Explicit endorsement with quantification”, level 2 “Explicit endorsement without quantification”.
But the real problem with Monckton’s analysis is that he includes all the level 4 papers, those that either took no position or were uncertain. These make up two thirds of the papers studied, so it makes a huge difference if you count them or not. Cook’s analysis excludes them and only compares the papers that either implicitly or explicitly endorsed or rejected human caused global warming. Whereas Monckton includes all of them as not endorsing it.
I have to agree with Scute here, whatever you might think about Cook’s analysis, claiming that this means there’s only a 0.5% consensus is “really pushing it”. It is though amusing to think he wrote a 40 line BASIC program to “down read” a csv file.
It does not matter anyway.
Votes are not evidence, not in a court of law and not in science.
“No it isn’t. Monckton is looking at all the papers, not just the self rated papers. ”
Actually it seems I’m mistaken, Monckton’s first brief is talking about the self rated papers, but in his rebuttal he switches to talking about the independently reviewed papers.
His first argument is even worse than his second. He talks about only 41 of the 11,944 papers as having “stated their authors’ assent to the “consensus” proposition…”, but only 2,142 papers were self marked, so even allowing for his highly dubious definitions, that should still be 1.9% not 0.3%.
In reality, 62.7% of all self marked papers showed explicit or implicit endorsement, and only 1.8% were marked as rejecting it.
Based on their models and their estimates on the effect of CO2, then the planet should be 900°C because of past CO2 levels. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that CO2 was sitting at 5000 ppm…
I’d love to put 5000ppm into the current climate models and see what they say the climate of the earth should have been.
Scute:
May I suggest that raising this thread is irrelevant. It is as the Romans said: an “arguementum ad populum”(by headcount). Not an “arguementum ad verum” (by truth).
Pre Galileo a headcount would have firmly established the Earth as the centre of the solar system. Not true.
Why are you bothering with this ? Just a waste of time methinks.
Regards.
Exactly.
Science is not conducted nor is it advanced by a count of hands.
That is called politics.
It aint done by peer review neither…not done properly.
menicholas:
Science is not conducted nor is it advanced by a count of hands.
Quite right. But public policy is. So is public opinion, in the hands of the current media majority. I share cognog2’s exasperation with having this issue come up repeatedly, but it is unavoidable when the public is uninformed about the science and has, as a practical matter, to decide which authorities may be credible.
You are quite right menicholas, which makes it all the more important that the authorities are made aware that their duty is to the truth. Often a difficult choice in the political scene and does require doing the homework.
“May I suggest that raising this thread is irrelevant. It is as the Romans said: an “arguementum ad populum”(by headcount).”
But the Cook paper isn’t an argumentum ad populum. That would be arguing that if the majority of people believe humans are causing global warming it’s probably true. This is very different to arguing that most climate scientists believe it.
But the Cook paper doesn’t even say that most scientists endorse this. It’s saying is that the majority of papers written on the subject endorse the claim.
Of course, you can argue that the numbers don’t matter and it’s the quality of the evidence in the papers that matters, but if you want to argue ad verum (whatever that means), you need to explain what’s wrong with all the papers endorsing human caused global warming, rather than arguing against the numbers.
Yes, all true, but the important thing to understand, and that far too many want to simply ignore, is that science itself is a believe in the fallibility of experts.
Geocentrism is but one of an endless list about which the majority of expert opinions has been exactly wrong.
Besides, I can think of no other endeavor in which becoming a purported “expert” required no actual expertise in anything.
As Einstein said, It would only take one to disprove me.
It’s still an argument by head count. It’s just that you are pre-selecting which heads to count.
@menicholas
@cognog2
You’ve both completely missed the point. My comment wasn’t about rallying around a new figure (62.7% instead of 97%) to use as an argumentum ad populum. It’s about showing the gullible 97% fanatics that they were lied to. That’s why I concluded with:
“Somehow, the 67.2% consensus of actual authors asked, never made it into the abstract nor the conclusion of Cook et al. 2013.”
…And in my subsequent reply:
“It’s a disgraceful sleight of hand to dismiss these neutral abstracts as irrelevant when a couple of pages later the actual authors indicate that somewhere around 50% abstracts would not have endorsed the consensus.”
The fact is, Cook et al. 2013 took their most robust finding (in terms of the data, not the argumentum ad populum meme attached to it) and added exactly 50% to it. 62.7 x 1.5 = 97. They all but buried the 62.7% and touted the 97%.
By telling the gullible 97% fanatics that they were duped with this simple lie, it will cause them to have some doubts over whether to trust Cook and his co-authors on this or anything else.
This lie has nothing to do with the jiggery-pokery of omitting the neutral papers or the many other dodgy aspects of the paper that will fly over their heads if you try and explain it. It also has nothing to do with the argumentum ad populum fallacy because it’s a simple identifiable lie. They may still adhere to the fallacy in principle but realise they’ve been lied to.
The fact that this lie is collateral fallout to the 97% consensus paper doesn’t mean I’m “discussing” the consensus at all. The lie is a stand-alone factor that is independent of the dubious data analysis that came before it and the appeal to authority meme that (for them) follows on from it.
To say I can’t point out a brazen lie in a paper just because a particular erroneous meme was attached to the results is fallacious in itself.
There’s also a big difference between shady practices behind the scenes that are difficult to identify (e.g. their not releasing detailed data for replication) and a clear, identifiable sleight of hand on their part to take a figure, add 50% to it and present it to the world.
A lie is a lie regardless of the irrelevant consensus meme that also happens to be spouted by the authors. Calling out the lie is by no means “play[ing] their game by their rules”.
The 62.7% should be shouted from the rooftops, not discounted as “irrelevant”, so that the 97% fanatics can do a bit of navel gazing and question the next inevitable instalment.
Scute
Your argument is about whether you should count papers that didn’t take a position on AGW as counting against the consensus. This might make sense if it was just an opinion poll of scientists, and a third had said they didn’t know if humans were causing warming. But it isn’t a head count, it’s scientists being asked if their paper was endorsing AGW or not. This doesn’t mean that the authors didn’t accept the human cause , just that it wasn’t the purpose of the paper to determine the causes.
You claim that 50% of authors of neutral papers would not have endorsed the consensus. But that’s not what the paper says. It says that “Among self-rated papers not expressing a position on AGW in the abstract, 53.8% were self-rated as endorsing the consensus.” There’s no suggestion that any rejected the consensus, or that the 46.2% were undecided on the subject.
Circumstances have allowed me to meet and chat with Lord Monckton. Those who have similar good fortune would be churlish not to admit to meeting a formidable intellect, the type that sensible people listen to, rather than preach to.
I say this as a retired scientist, hard sceptic and businessman whose past introductions were many and varied, but seldom as impressive.
Lord Monckton deserves to prevail in this amicus matter and in my view, probably will through innate superiority. Geoff
Truth floats unaided. Lies and mistakes can only tread water for a while and then sink into the abyss along with reputations if all those who spend their energies defending them.
Tea burns a little when you blow it out of your nose:
Plaintiff says: … “the proposed amici are (with one exception) not climate scientists …”
Response:
Amici are happy not merely to admit that this is true, but to embrace and champion that truth. The whole point of our amici brief is that climate scientists do not know what they are doing in a crucial area of science that actually is outside their expertise,
I’m not a climate scientist either, but I am a lawyer (now retired). I think this filing will probably reduce the influence these amici have on the court’s decision. It comes across as defensive and implicitly treats some of the accusations against these amici as more relevant or important than the court was likely to treat them (it isn’t shocking to most judges that experts who appear as witnesses have been paid for their expertise either in this case or elsewhere). A shorter and more focused response to the accusations might have been helpful, either in this filing or at a later stage.
+10
-10
I agree with Eric’s thought that “…a shorter and more focused response…” would be more appropriate.
You only take flak when you are over the target. Keep calm and Carry on.
The flak you receive over the Target comes from the Wal-mart across the highway. 😉
Just recently when I finally caved and got a ‘smart’ phone for my work, I had some time to kill and of course I looked up Watts Up With That…the very first choice offered to me was NOT WUWT but a ‘debunking site’ called Wotts up with That. Clearly someone or some organisation set up this mis-direction…like Monkton I wonder who pays for this propaganda?
Google and Wackapedia are one and the same…unreliable when it comes to GW (climate change)…I have found it as such since the beginning of both…
They are unreliable in any topic that has an influence on politics.
Indeed, or if you’re ‘recorded’ as a regular WUWT reader and Google Watts Up With That, you get:
Watts Up With That? is a blog promoting climate change denial that was created by Anthony Watts in 2006. Wikipedia
Willard Anthony Watts is an American blogger who runs Watts Up With That?, a popular climate change denial blog that opposes the scientific consensus on climate change.
Wikipedia
And still we’re winning…’go figure’!
The problem lies with the upper levels of the scientific bureaucracy. eg AAAS NAAS and RS etc. They are the ones who give credibility to the alarmists. Usually the scientific bureaucracies are staffed by non-climate scientists. You have to imagine what political leaders and other parties can do. No matter how much evidence you give to a politician, no matter how much integrity they have, they must turn to the scientific bureaucracy for advice. The self-interest of the scientific bureaucrats lies in further the flow of money and respect to themselves, the more alarm the better. Until this problem is recognized (or a yet bigger hobgoblin than climate appears) all the efforts of Monckton, Soon, and Briggs, et al are wasted.
I think you hit the nail on the head, hillrj.
You take the video, rename it, and move it. Make the players pay repeatedly to stop you.
Having read this I wonder how many “Amicus” would come to stand with them if the boot was on the other foot.
A very well put together and succinct rebuttal.
James Bull
Not one amicus brief filed for Mann against Steyn (ongoing!) says quite a lot.
Yet Mann will probably win that case.
Mann isn’t behaving like someone confident of winning.
He could only win if the judge is incompetent.
“… someone had paid a lot of money to set up a dozen bogus pages full of gibberish, but tagged with ‘Monckton’ and related tags, to divert all traffic away from the genuine channel.”
Some time ago, during the Obama Administration, I attempted to find the video showing Mrs. Obama stating, in essence, that she had been ashamed of the US all her life. I found dozens of videos, none of which contained the anti-American statement. Now I know why. They were buried by the search engines. This is Evil.
Is this the quote from 2008? Its a similar sentiment but not quite the words;
“….for the first time my adult life I am proud of my country.”
http://www.newsweek.com/michelle-obamas-proud-remarks-83559
Its also on you tube. I found it (in the UK) by typing in
“mrs obama i have been ashamed of america all my life”
tonyb
“Now I know why. They were buried by the search engines. This is Evil.”
Conspiracy ideation in action……
“Its also on you tube. I found it (in the UK) by typing in
“mrs obama i have been ashamed of america all my life”
tonyb”
LOL
For those in need of cheering up I suggest looking for Jolie Holland – ‘Goodbye California’. Works for me every time.
The main point here is that the sad old tropes about Willie Soon’ s funding and Monckton’s expertise etc etc are to be exposed in court as arguments for ‘global warming’. Let’s hope for lots of publicity.
Btw my qualifications as a climate scientist are impeccable – I have a degree in railway engineering and I write steamy novels. And if you don’t spot the joke here you haven’t been paying attention.
I see what you did there.
RE: “I have a degree in railway engineering and I write steamy novels.”
Not a fan of diesel-electrics, eh?
IPCC chief, railway engineer, smut-author and all-round horny-old-bastard Rajendra Pachauri resigned over allegations of sexual harassment in the workplace.
The complainant “handed hundreds of emails, texts and WhatsApp messages to the police for investigation. Pachauri denies the charges, claiming that his computer was hacked.” Right-O!
The irony is that, compared to many of the deceitful climate scientists who promoted the global warming scam, Pachauri is a “straight-up guy”. 🙂
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/30/ipcc-now-in-bizzaroland-pachauri-releases-smutty-romance-novel/
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/02/24/rajendra-pachauri-stands-down-from-ipcc-over-sexual-harassment-allegations/
Interesting comments.
From my perspective, when a debate as large as Climate Change starts being discussed in the minutia, the whole concept is crumbling. Or like a woollen jumper, beginning to unravel.
The longer this goes on, the more bored, complacent and sceptical the man in the street becomes. Articles on Climate Change in the media will gradually move from front page news to small columns somewhere near the back as people stop believing them.
And people will stop believing them when they realise that nothing climatically dramatic is happening. That will take some decades, however, as our rebellious youth (as we all were once) grow older and begin to recognise that the planet is in much the same state as it was when we old fogies were young, and our parents, and grandparents.
And by then, the debate will have moved on to some other global discussion, perhaps the pernicious pick pocketing of the worlds masses by their political leaders to fund wilder and wilder schemes, like…….Climate Change mitigation.
It a long downhill slope for the alarmists now, but they are on it, and can’t get off.
And as I posted on notalotofpeopleknowthat “Isn’t it just unbelievably tragic that we AGW sceptics must wish for precisely what we don’t want [a colder climate], to disprove a phenomenon that doesn’t exist.”
The problem is that your average persons memory of climate only goes back a decade or two, at most.
So when the alarmists scream that the latest storm is unprecedented, they are liable to believe it. The fact that similar storms have occurred in the past escapes their memory and they aren’t interested enough to look it up for themselves.
MarkW
Good point, but I don’t think you credit the average man in the street with as much sense as he actually has.
I remember Typhoons as a child living in the far east in the early 60’s, then hurricanes in Scotland as a teenager in the early 70’s, the baking hot summer of 1976 across the UK, and snowfalls in Southern England in 2009/10 as bad as I have ever seen in Scotland. And that particular event saw the NE of Scotland under snow for almost 6 months, I cant recall that ever happening in my 20 years there.
And yes, as an uneducated man, I realise there is a distinct difference between weather and climate however, these events remain engrained.
But perhaps the point is that we have always had, and always will have extreme weather events, irrespective of climate change. Will they ever go away? I doubt it, they will just move location and take another form.
One man’s extreme weather, is another man’s norm.
Sorry, kind of rambled a bit there.
Monckton is not only a good man but bright as a button, these kalifornication lawyers are well out of their depth. They will soon need a safe space like most snow flakes.
Rob Trolley referred to Wikipedia. Fail. The Anarchist People’s Green Army of SJWs has attacked and the very results appear in Wikipedia. It’s sad that smear campaigns show up so badly there. A good example of fact-making. I like Wikipedia at many topics, but unfortunately global warming related stuff is like an article named ‘results of communism’ in Sovietopedia. This is SJWs for you.
They attack persons instead of argumenting. They attack some people and they try to silence them, as no argument other than slander works. The more scathing sceptic or lukewarmer, the more vicious attack.
I assume that WP gatekeeping is an orchestrated activity, where a group of admin-powered SWJs makes sure ‘dissent’ like Pielke and Curry quotes are kept away.
Hugs – look up Wiki’s Chief Gatekeeper William Connolley.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/14/willia-connolley-now-climate-topic-banned-at-wikipedia/
Wikipedia is about as reliable as Facebook.
http://anonhq.com/beware-wikipedia-never-trust/
Doesn’t even need overt orchestration. Edit wars are won by whoever has the most time to waste on waging them. An unemployed citizen on the dole can sit around and refresh a wiki page for a lot longer than a taxpaying citizen holding down a job.
Someone who’s job depends on belief in AGW can afford to spend even more time.
But it is also the internet that is allowing the fight back, without the internet the global warming scam would have won the day.
Nigel Farage would have not succeeded without youtube- it is here he picked up his following.
I recall an instance when a regular citizen, a project opposition agitator I believe, made a completely valid scientific comment about the safety of a particular project and the comment got a look by staff, standard response that all was well, “this is standard procedure that has been historically proven safe yada yada” and all that, then on to the next question, there are lots and lots of such opposition comments after all, most bogus, and eventually I suppose one tended to dismiss them as a matter of routine. Even the government regulators saw the comment and it got by them. Well in a few years the exact point of the comment became 100% horrifyingly true and cost the company untold $$$. The comment was rediscovered in the post mortem, in retrospect the comment was embarrassingly simple, scientifically true and undeniable, yet somehow it got lost and forgotten probably because the comment was from a opposition agitator and not a recognized “expert”. If the comment was taken at face value and properly and rigorously addressed at the time all that could had been avoided.
The issue was a little bit outside of the expertise of most, and that’s why it got missed. Eerily parallel to the issue raised here. The issue must be addressed on its merits.
(I’m being purposely vague about the specifics to avoid additional embarrassment)
Think about it.
The really evil people throughout history have had a clever trick up their sleeve – for a while.
Just like the “people” who run social media platforms in the early 21st century.
From the article:
“…the brief by Monckton et al. replying to the vicious personal attacks on them by attorneys for “the people of California”.
… thus to gain some insight into the relentless, baseless and remarkably well funded campaign of personal ad-hominem assaults on the reputations of so many of us who have dared to question the errors and exaggerations of official climatology.”
A few observations about the Law Business, based on actual practice in my province in Canada:
There is no downside to blatant lying in Court, so dishonestly is actually encouraged within our so-called “justice system”.
Legal organizations appear to be deeply and widely corrupted and incapable of self-governance. Given their history of dishonest process, all such organizations should be placed under strict external governance. Perjury by lawyers and their clients should be severely punished, as should deceit and delay in court proceedings.
Lawyers, Crown Prosecutors and judges who collaborate in “Fraud Upon the Court” and “Breach of Trust by a Public Officer” should be disbarred and in some cases imprisoned, according to existing (unenforced) laws.
http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/section-122.html
Indeed, all legal systems are corrupt.
Soft corruption gives rise to an expensive, profitable industry that perversely benefit the primary participants.
Magistrates and judges drag out cases to enrich their court and fill the pockets of their lawyer mates.
The case in question is a good example.
Alsup should have dismissed it on day one; however, he didn’t because that’s not what the litigation industry expects (soft corruption). Alsup knows there is no case because the statute of limitations for Nuisance is 3-years.
It has been said ok let’s ignore the statute of limitations . . . if you discount plaintiff’s top estimate of $55 billion damages at 7% (the same rate the CalPERS uses to discount their pension obligations) for a period of 250 years to adjust for when the primary damages are expected to occur then the present value of the asserted damages is roughly $2500.
As I’ve often said; The primary purpose of the legal system is to employ lawyers.
Warren and Mark – it appears we have a clear consensus:
“100% of those polled agreed that the Law Business is systemically incompetent and widely corrupted.”
That’s even better than the 97% claimed by some climate hysterics.
+100 …full agreement. There are undoubtedly good men and women in the legal system who strive to maintain objectivity and honesty, but the potential big money aspect of the legal system leads to the problems which you highlight. I would like to see monetary restraints imposed on what lawyers can make. In many legal matters only the lawyers come out winners. That is a sick joke.
Hello goldminer,
Deceit and Delay are the primary tools of the Law Business, and if lawyers and judges had any true competence or ethics they would root out this endemic corruption within their “profession” – but they do not, because Deceit and Delay are highly profitable for the Law Business.
If the Law Business were run competently and ethically, society would need only a small fraction of the lawyers and judges that now infest our courtrooms. These people are parasites, bleeding society of wealth.
The legal system should be looked upon as a public service/utility, imo. That should be the basis for regulation, as the legal system is an essential part of our free society.
Hello again goldminer – we may agree on the problem, but not the solution.
Lawyers and judges are already far too close to governments, and are already deeply and widely corrupted. Here, they are actively engaged in covering-up their own incompetence and corruption as well as the murder of civilians by the police, with the complicity of the Crown Prosecutor’s office. See
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/anthony-heffernan-calgary-police-shot-asirt-charges-1.3730911
The same cop who murdered Anthony Heffernan also killed quadriplegic Dave McQueen – what a man!
Making the Law Business into a utility will simply make the problem worse – more cover-up and even less accountability – although less than zero is moot.
I suggest disbarring and jail time for Perjury, Fraud Upon the Court and Breach of Trust by a Public Officer – for the lot of them.
We are far off-topic here, so let’s end this discussion.
The are quite a few search engines. duckduckgo is one.
The Response to the Motion is indeed an ugly thing, and I hope the judge appreciates its ugliness. He should do. Its very first point
(A) Plaintiff says: … “the proposed amici are (with one exception) not climate
scientists …”
renders the judge himself not qualified to rule on any of this.
Since climate scientists are tested to prove they have a belief in man made climate change based on CO2 they should be excluded as biased and unreliable witnesses. Surely no court would in say a burglary case accept that the detectives and the prosecution were pre selected by formal testing that they believe the defendant guilty and any witnesses for the defence banned as not qualified as they were not pre tested to accept that belief.
Answer to California lawsuit:
1. Who burned all that fuel?
2. If you knew it was bad for 20 years and let your people keep burning the fuel, it’s YOU we should be suing.
Have never belonged to Facebook. Never will. I prefer “friending” the old fashioned way. At least then I have a chance to apply my own discernment.
Here’s a thought: Auto manufacturers produce something that actually kills people and has been for many years, unlike oil companies. Furthermore, they have known for many years how dangerous their product is, the proof being that they keep adding more and more “safety” features. Despite all that, thousands continue to die every year due to their product, and many thousands more will. But wait, there’s more. In addition to causing many deaths, and indeed many injuries from crashes, exhaust from said cars has also contributed to smog, injuring people’s health, and causing those with asthma and other breathing difficulties serious, and even life-threatening health conditions.
Kookifornia should therefore sue auto manufacturers for the multiple harms automakers have caused, and will continue to, despite them knowing all along of the extreme dangers of their product. About $500 bil ought to do it, and they’d be getting off cheap at that. Other states could as well, but they’d better act fast. The dough supply could run out pretty fast.
Took them to the woodshed! As a former some time consultant both to plaintiffs and defendants involving petroleum interests, among others, I have read a few legal documents of this kind. However, I rarely, if ever, recall this kind of detailed rebuttal, but never encountered this amount of lying either. Lord Monckton, et al., should be applauded for this as a well worth reading classic.
Unfortunately, I am afraid all this is true across a wide area of academia, and I hope it gets cleaned up before somebody else does it, for as history suggests, it would be worse for the innocents.
Getting down to philosophical brass tacks, a scientist is someone who studies, poses questions about a subject and investigates those questions through experiment and reasoning. The result of this process is supposed to be that the people with the most knowledge are able to ask the most relevant questions. They may not be able to answer those questions but that’s ok. The science will need to await a new effort but the body of work to that point retains its integrity and usefulness.
In climate “science” , political biases poisoned the scientific well early on. It became necessary for the climate cognoscenti to declare that the science is settled. This either makes climate the ONLY SETTLED SCIENCE KNOWN TO MAN, or else it is the most politically corrupted.
No real scientist would ever declare their field of study settled, but political activists masquerading as scientists are more than happy to do so, and to continue to apply for grants to find results they already “know”.
This was a legitimate area of study that got over fertilized and infested with parasites. It is now a dead zone in terms of scientific legitimacy. Time to bury it as the stench is getting too bad. It smells “settled”.
I think the primary statement Christopher Monckton intended here is that we in the disorganized opposition are up against a broad, resolute sedition by identifiable but dissembling Marxist functionaries. Many are “useful idiots” who don’t even know it. The rest are right on target. Monckton, Darwall, Ball, and others familiar with that flavor of politics have already spotted it and done their best to expose it.
It should be no surprise. If so, it is time we woke up. Every tactic of our Left is out of the old (but very effective) Marxist playbook. (Or Alinsky, if you want new.) I have recommended, and again urge on everyone, a reading of Friedrich Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom.” He was a Nobel Prize winning economist, a close colleague of Keynes. His analysis should have laid to rest socialism’s shifty, bloody history decades ago. The problem is that nobody reads the book any more.
Ignorance can be very un-blissful.
I agree with you Tom. Well said!
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/12/25/al-gore-bilks-people-at-christmas-asking-for-climate-crisis-money/comment-page-1/#comment-2701695
[excerpt]
Marxism made simple!
The Groucho Marxists are the leaders – they want power for its own sake at any cost, and typically are sociopaths or psychopaths. The great killers of recent history, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot. etc. were of this odious ilk – first they get power, then they implement their crazy schemes that do not work and too often kill everyone who opposes them.
The Harpo Marxists are the followers – the “sheeple” – these are people of less-than-average intelligence who are easily duped and follow the Groucho’s until it is too late, their rights are lost and their society destroyed. They are attracted to simplistic concepts that “feel good” but rarely “do good”.
George Carlin said: “You know how stupid the average person is, right? Well, half of them are stupider than that!”
One can easily identify many members of these two groups in the global warming debate – and none of them are ”climate skeptics”.
An introductory lecture about Hayek in historical context:
Thank you Jurgen for posting on Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom”.
Following are my own observations based on business trips to Honecker’s East Germany and Castro’s Cuba:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/02/26/strategic-minerals-our-next-energy-and-security-crisis/comment-page-1/#comment-2753300
[excerpt]
I certainly agree that bigwigs are too often given the “gilded tour” of the Potemkin Villages and many are too stupid or corrupt to realize it – we had a socialist leader of the NDP political party return from East Germany and the traitor extolled it as the “economic model for Canada”, circa the early 1980’s. I was there in 1989 just before the Berlin Wall fell, and it was a sh!thole. Details below.
I was also in Cuba under Fidel, for a Board meeting, and it was also a failed state, economically poorer but less repressive at that time than East Germany.
Best, Allan
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/12/31/mother-jones-trump-effect-undermining-support-for-german-green-energy/comment-page-1/#comment-2386559
[excerpt]
Here is something I wrote long ago on the subject.
This article is true. I’ve also been to Cuba, and it is a cesspool of poverty and degradation (Trudeau boys, please take note).
What is truly interesting is that there are still apologists for Castro and Cuba here in Canada, even as Fidel himself has recently admitted that Cuba is a failed state.
They are probably the same “useful idiots” who said that Communist East Germany was a good model for Canada to emulate. I seem to recall several former NDP leaders who tried to sell us that line of BS (the names Broadbent and Lewis come to mind).
I travelled to East Germany, going through the Berlin Wall at Checkpoint Charlie in 1989, shortly before the Wall fell. East Germany was a cesspool too. While not as materially poor as Castro’s Cuba, it was an even more vicious police state where neighbour spied upon neighbour, and nobody felt safe from the Stasi secret police. Those who tried to escape were shot, and allowed to bleed to death in “no-man’s land” between the many barbed-wire fences that formed “the Wall”.
Epilogue
The last person to be shot and killed while trying to cross the border from East to West Germany was Chris Gueffroy on February 6, 1989. He was 20 years old. Rest in peace, kid.
More on East Germany here:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/01/09/hewlett-packard-report-includes-planned-penal-colonies-for-climate-skeptics/comment-page-1/#comment-2713070
Hayek was a great man and a great thinker
Shortly after he was awarded the Nobel prize the Reform Club arranged a dinner in his honour. I invited several financial journalists, the Government Broker and a number of City economists to the dinner. After a fine meal with excellent wines we eagerly awaited the talk that we were about to hear. He rose to loud applause and then spent almost all of his speech describing his experiences, during the war, as the honorary librarian of the Club.
Hayek was greatly influenced by Von Mises. He was detested by Keynes, whose socialist-inspired theories he debunked, Margaret Thatcher was a great admirer and the Road to Serfdom certainly influenced her thinking.
Warren and Anthony: Thank you for publishing this – I hope one of the awake journalists (David Rose? Christopher Booker?) publishes that rebuttal in full in a mainstream media outlet.
Somebody paid off Google for 250k? Really??
No, they paid an SEO company to bury the link to the post.
The response: 20180327_docket-317-cv-06011_statement-1
Sad work, to my mind, but the response is necessary and well done.
Tom Anderson
Keynes was not a “colleague” of Hayek. He was a contemporary “public intellectual”. Hayek criticized him for writing his book about employment, before doing any in-depth study of economic theories or financial history.
However, his confected theories were used by ambitious governments to add to the power and wealth of the state.
Just as in climate, the state chose the theory that enhances its wealth and power.
As an aside, statists are hung up on the number “2”.
If the rate of CPI inflation is not kept above “2” something bad will happen.
It the Earth’s temperature rises “2” C above some arbitrary level, something bad will happen.
Bob Hoye
I use Epic for a browser, and yandex for a search engine. An unexpected side effect of Epic: when I play youtube clips, ads just don’t show. In Firefox, I tried to listen to a meditation clip (ah, rain sounds. . . ) and was interrupted every ten minutes or so by some ad; when they popped into the middle of discussion clips, I just hit “mute” until done. But youtube in Epic has been completely ad-free.
Epic boasts that it does not track you. As far as I can tell, it does not. Amazon no longer offers me suggestions based on pages they have no business knowing that I visited at all.
What kind of monitoring can “establish” the number of views a youtube video will eventually attract in the future?
A modelling excercise could take a stab at forecasting or predicting the final view count based on past trends for similar videos, but establihing the final number would be impossible, unless the number was fixed in advance as part of a premeditated sham.
Also, did the Lord make any effort to substantiate the Professor’s dubious claim, by say, attempting the search for himself?
e.g.:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Is+Obama+Poised+to+Cede+US+Sovereignty
Top 3 results:
Is Obama Poised to Cede US Sovereignty? – YouTube
Oct 16, 2009 – Uploaded by mnmajoritydotorg
2,717,187 views
(v=PMe5dOgbu40)
Is Obama Poised to Cede US Sovereignty – YouTube
Oct 18, 2009 – Uploaded by Ann Ubelis
5,382 views
(v=oz5Cid9pxTM)
Is Obama Poised to Cede US Sovereignty? – YouTube
Oct 17, 2009 – Uploaded by ttj1776
4,861 views
(v=gUk-ULVGILM)
I visited a museum (The William Seward home) and there was a picture of the guy who tried to kill him the night Lincoln was shot. That night while surfing the web an ad came up (clickbait really)–“Can you identify these historical figures? Take the quiz” and the picture they showed was this same guy (who I had never seen before). The odds of this by chance seem to be nil and it really creeped me out.
WordPress wouldn’t publish this with the word a**assin in it, which is a**inine.
I really hope the Monckton, et.al. feedback analysis holds water, but I can’t tell. It seems logical that there is always feedback in a complex system like climate, so it’s likely that there was feedback in play in 1850-1950. However, it seems unlikely that the feedback is linear as presented in the Monckton testimony (if I’m reading this correctly). It’s also possible, as Roy Spencer points out, that by modelling all the underlying mechanisms correctly, all feedback is accurately simulated in the models (very unlikely IMO).
That said, regarding this amicus response, I think Monckton addressed most of the ad-hominem attacks, but I was left concerned by the Obama birther thing. I read the Monckton affidavit on the Obama long form birth certificate, here:
http://www.wnd.com/2015/03/affadvit-white-house-birth-certificate-is-a-forgery/
and I have to say that I feel his analysis is very weak.
Avoiding too much detail, he assumed “discrepancies” in the original memo are independent, when it seems probable they are not. (e.g. line spacing and letter spacing irregularities as well as coding errors could all be due to an inexperienced typist, etc.) Since the events described are potentially not independent, the combined probability is not a product of the individual probabilities.
Second, by assigning a probability to each “discrepancy” Monckton creates a false choice. In each case the options are not “random error” vs. “document not genuine” and analyzing only those options shows bias. Further, the assumption that evidence of an electronically assembled document implies the document is “a forgery” doesn’t follow.
The result, IMO, indicates a willingness to participate in bad thinking to achieve a goal, something I generally associate with alarmists. While this doesn’t mean that the same lack of rigor exists in the climate feedback analysis, it leaves me skeptical.