By Rud Istvan,
Those who have been at WUWT a long while know my ignominious start here was two years after ClimateGate, to which I was then oblivious. My first 2011 post here was motivated by discovering deliberate misinformation by the NRDC to Congress, based on what then became underlying provable scientific misconduct while doing three years of research for my first ebook, Gaia’s Limits. Was a personal wake up call.
Since then, I have tried various ‘CAGW’ debunking approaches both at WUWT and at Climate Etc. Show measurements are unreliable (e.g. Jason 3 Fit for Purpose here), show conclusions omit crucial facts (Tottam Glacier there), show the climate math does not follow (many mathematical posts here on the inherent deficiencies of climate models, like my first “The Trouble with Climate Models”. Show clear academic misconduct, as with Marcott’s 2013 Hockey Stick Science paper (CE, and then published as essay High Stick Foul in ebook Blowing Smoke), after Science then editor Marsha McNutt acknowledged receipt of my written proof but never replied.
So, now a decade later, I think a different debunk approach is needed. Logic does not work. Science does not work. Provable facts do not work. Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals #5 says Ridicule might work. There is a lot of it to use. Following is a VERY rich example.
Yesterday, the august BBC published an article then widely spread by MSM, (I caught it on Yahoo News (not): Climate Change causing albatross divorce!!!
When you read the article, it studied 15,500 Falkland Island breeding pairs of albatross over the last 15 years. The ‘divorce’ rate went from 1 % to 8%, so disaster follows. Well, maybe not.
Now, it is true that some birds “mate for life’ more than humans; these include Canada Geese, Bald Eagles, and Albatross. Not BoJo.
It is also true that the main reason for a ‘remating’ if ever a ‘spouse’ is lost is rebreeding, like with the avidly hunted Canada Goose.
That means it is also true that the Falkland albatross ‘divorce rate’ the past 15 years per the new alarmist paper is also of no population significance (since ‘divorce’ just means former pairs then just mate with others…shades of humans).
Meanwhile, despite supposed Falkland albatross climate induced divorce rates the past 15 years, it is worth noting there has been no southern Hemisphere climate change (albatross warming stress) during the observational period. NONE. So are albatrosses just emulating human (BoJo) non-monogamy?
My first thought was: oh dear, oh dear, wonders that only the magic molecule can achieve number 24,387. However, linked to the article was an older one:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-50095808
Of course the subject of this latest WUWT post is the usual BBC climate catastrophe drivel. Was the study, however, prompted by the earlier anti-Brexit rubbish with its attendant agenda of calling for more money?
Looks like someone was trying to promote more than one woke meme at the same time.
They studied that for 15 years??? 15,500 pairs, 31,000 birds??? I guess the stress of all those researchers in their patch of land was too much.
That must have cost a lot of money, too.
They claim the birds are affected by climate change warming, yet the Antarctic hasn’t warmed.
They see warming everywhere they look even where it is not warming. This is called delusion.
The two factors that the fanatics rarely mention in their silly stories. One is they never actually state how much the sea has risen in the area they are talking about. The other is how much the actual temperature of the sea has risen. Very clever really because that way no one can challenge them with real scientific evidence..
You can see it can’t you?
“Honey, I love you, but every time I come home this human is sitting here with you. And… and… I am sorry, but you have to choose. Me or the human!”
Jokes aside do these researchers actually factor these things in. If one of the pair starts to associate the other with a foreign animal is that bird likely to seek more private locations?
Strikes me as a valid discussion point to be honest.
Take care, Rud, trying to communicate correctly with the CAGW crowd is like trying to teach a pig to sing, it doesn’t work and it annoys the pig. Come to think of it this analogy is quite appropriate.
You can always tell an alarmist, you just can’t tell them much.
Alarmists are pre-programmed, “Don’t confuse me with facts, my mind is made up!”.
OT but Energy Sec Granholm can’t even answer simple questions she should know..
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/fake-it-till-you-make-it-biden-energy-secretary-fumbles-two-simple-questions-one-day
Naw … they’re clearly flying into the N. Hemisphere devastation and then reacting to the mayhem there. These are very sensitive birds.
Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals #5 says Ridicule might work.
______________________________________________
Rule #4 “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”
Do Alinsky’s rules work against a religion? We’re up against a cult. We’re up against left wing operatives that seem to have infiltrated just about every institution of western culture that there is. The Pope seems to be one of them for God’s sake. It’s all very depressing. It looks like every thing that Yuri Bezmenov said in his 1984 Interview, The Four Stages of Ideological Subversion (1984) You Tube is coming true.
There’s always those yellow jackets in France that the left-wing media studiously avoids any reporting on. I’m retired and could and would march if some were organized. Of course that happened January 6th and the left is successfully calling it an insurrection. People are still held in jail without due process over that, and the Capital Police aren’t held accountable for killing an unarmed woman.
Wasn’t there supposed to be a third and final dump of all those e-mails? Not as was pointed out that it did any good.
Pretty piss-poor insurrectionists, showing up against armed police without any firearms themselves.
British gun laws were formed primarily after the First World War, where the “heroes” were to return to a “land fit for heroes”, but high unemployment & general poverty lead to unrest especially for those returning “heroes”. Britain was virtually awash with guns mostly souvenirs from the conflict, & the government of the day were fearful of a possible revolution, as was witnessed in 1917 Russia!!! However, I recall some fella from the Virginian Colonies once said, “The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep & bear arms, as a last resort, is to protect themselves against tyranny in government!” Some old fella called Thomas Jefferson, I think 😉 !!!
Well what would you call a violent invasion of congress with the express intent of stopping congress from doing its duty if not an insurrection? Those people were also busy chanting about hanging the vice president which again makes it an insurrection.
They might not have had any chance of succeeding but that doesn’t mean they were trying.
And what would you call night after night after night of Burning, Looting, and Murdering, all with the nudge-nudge-wink-wink of city officials, if not outright connivance, police ordered to pull out, social distancing and mask mandates waived … all spring and summer and into the fall?
If you thought Jan 6th was actual insurrection, but did not speak out against all that peaceful burning, looting, and murder, then you are a hypocrite par excellence.
Felix,
why not simply call it burning looting and murdering as you stated? None of it was aimed at preventing the lawful transfer of power or stopping a democratically elected president from taking office.
Several cities surrendered control of “autonomous zones” to the burners looters and murderers. If that isn’t surrendering or even aiding and abetting insurrection, what is it? If that doesn’t turn over a government to burners looters and murderers, in violation of democracy, what does? Oh right, Jan 6th, where no government was actually overturned, no one was killed by the “insurrectionists”.
Felix,
Trying to educate Izick is a losing battle! He doesn’t appear to have the intelligence to think his way out of a paper bag, much less discern that Jan. 6th was a false flag operation run by the FBI with help from from their Antifa and BLM leadership cadre! If you want to gain a better understanding look into The Five Basic Laws of Human Stupidity! My new theory is that there is now an inverse relation between education level and intelligence, as our schools are intentionally pushing students to become stupid and/or victims (oppressed!) Trying to end human civilization to solve a non-existent problem is almost a perfect description of Cipolla’s stupid people; those that destroy without even benefit to themselves!
Heck, he probably doesn’t see anything wrong with Zuckerberg donating $350,000,000 to massaging the 2020 vote!
Just let me go and put on my tin foil hat and then we can talk about FBI conspiracies.
And which do you prefer (1) that people wait for hours in a queue to vote suffering lost wages because the government hasn’t properly funded elections for years or (2) people can vote quickly and easily because some rich billionaire donated money for voting equipment and staff?
Zuckerberg donated the money with strings attached, which required local officials to use it to get out the vote in Democratic areas and not Republican. If it was the other way around, Democrats would be screaming that he was trying to undermine our democracy. But as long as the playing field is tilted in their favor, Democrats don’t care if it is unfair and violates election laws.
You mean the FBI assets…
No violent invasion of Congress ever took place, so it doesn’t matter what you want to call one. There was a violent assault on the White House in the summer of 2020, but the left doesn’t want to admit what an actual insurrection looks like.
A good call would be: Hooliganism
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/fbi-confirms-there-was-no-insurrection-on-jan-6/ar-AANxOuQ
A mostly peaceful protest?
Things will change for the better with the November 2022 elections.
Then Republicans will have the power to investigate all the lawbreaking in and out of Washington DC that has taken place since Biden took office.
The communist Biden wanted the U.S. Senate to confirm for the Treasury Department has lost five Senate Democrat votes and will not be appointed.
Texas has 10,000 Texas National Guard and many Texas State Troopers on the Texas/Mexican border. Many other States are making moves to resist the tyrant in the White House.
The pushback is taking place in many, many places so don’t get discouraged. The radical Democrats are not going to have it all their way and when the Republicans regain control of the U.S.House, they won’t have anything their way.
You can see from the polls that Biden’s base constitutes about 40 percent of the American people. Those are the only ones that would give him a favorable rating now seeing how badly he has screwed everything up.
We need lots of investigations starting in January 2023.
That’s not to say the Biden administration isn’t still dangerous to our freedoms. The FBI raided a woman’s house in Colorado a couple of days ago. She had done nothing wrong, and they didn’t arrest her for anything, all they did was bust in her door at 9am, while three of her children were there and then confiscated all her electronic devices. The FBI handcuffed her and her husband and an adult child and scared the hell out of the younger chlldren, and all for what?
It was harrassment for this woman protesting the way her children were being taught Critical Race Theory in her school. She did not threaten anyone, she just happened to be the person running an online forum for people who were upset about CRT. A target of opportunity for the Biden administration and their efforts to racialize everything in our lives.
This was Biden government harrassment of an innocent American citizen. This woman ought to be suing the Biden administration. Biden better hope I’m not on the jury.
I’m sure this will be one of the numerous investigations the Republicans start carrying out in 2023. We want to know all about why Biden thought it was a good idea to invade this woman’s home and harrass her and her family and everyone that knows her. No! This can’t stand!
ROFL, while the fraud of 2020 continues, people still think voting in 2022 isn’t futile…
We keep hearing that the US is a federacy unlike France (and Russia), but from where I am (France), it looks like a vaguely less ignorant, way bigger, English speaking monolithic (une et indivisible as we say) france. Not a federacy!
Things will change for the better with the November 2022 elections.
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The democrats will pull the same stuff next November now that they know that they can get away with it. I’m rather sure they’ve been fine tuning the methods they used last year.
I certainly hope that you’re right, Tom. But we all wondered why Dementia Joe hid in his basement and barely campaigned. Turns out that there was no point in him campaigning. It would have just required a bigger 3am vote if more people had been exposed to how demented and corrupt the Big Guy is.
How are we going to stop them from pulling the same scam with lessons learned?
On a hopeful note, it may be more challenging to cheat in 80 competitive races than in a handful of swing state big cities run by Democrat machines.
“How are we going to stop them from pulling the same scam with lessons learned?”
Well, the Republicans have learned some lessons, too. They are taking measures now to try to keep the vote honest. That’s what you hear Biden complaining about. He calls it denying the vote to some people, but we call it limiting the vote to legal voters.
And we don’t need to win a presidential election in November 2022, all we have to do is win a bunch of individual elections, and if the 2020 election is any guide, the Repubicans will win big. Recall that Republicans won in every election venue in the United States in 2020 except for the presidency, which mysteriously slipped away.
Now that 75 percent of the American population are unhappy with Biden and his insane ideas, I think the 2022 elections are going to blow the Democrats off the stage, cheating, or no cheating.
Thanks for the pep talk, Tom. Again, I hope you’re right.
I so hope you are right, Tom. I may no longer live in the US but my fate is still tied to what happens there, especially financially! It breaks my heart to see what is going on under the guise of Social Justice, nothing more than free-for-all looting! This need to stop and the police must be restored to a place of respect for the very difficult job they do.
I saw it in the Grauniad and laughed
“Babs and Clean Willie were in love, they said
So in love the preacher’s face turned red…”
The albatross around the avian neck is social progress,including: climate of infidelity including friendship with “benefits”, and chicks’ Choice conceived in the carbon-based “burden”.
Yes, ridicule. For example, how can anyone be so closed minded to reject considering the legitimacy of testable science who’s result shows that the obsession with green is unnecessary? This would be a good thing, even for the Marxists pushing this nonsense, as all the money wasted on ‘clean’ energy could be put to better use funding the otherwise unfundable social programs they use as bait to gain and retain power.
People that produce such garbage should be pitied, as they are idiots. The people that fund it, however…
Shags divorce too and just go on to shag other shags until shagged out. Like BOJO
You owe me a new keyboard.
Rud,
For ridicule it is hard to top The Guardian article on 19 August, 2011-
“Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilisations, say scientists.”
Rising greenhouse emissions could tip off aliens that we are a rapidly expanding threat, warns a report.
..when they see what a mess we’ve made of our planet, extraterrestrials may be forced to take drastic action.
Yes, it was a straight report and not a parody.
I will have to track down the report which must be a cracker.
Missed that one, since even Yahoo News is not that wacko, and I gave up on the Guardian many years ago. Sure it wasn’t a parody? Hard to tell with Guardian.
Here we are. Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilisations, say scientists | Alien life | The Guardian.
Wow! So the Grauniad has risen all the way up to the level of the National Enquirer now!
Does this mean that they are going to have to do some REAL journalism in order to get one or two articles correct in every edition?
Remember this came from the same sort of people who had the genius idea of training billions of birds and insects to fly into rotor blades to make them turn turbines to produce electricity.
Whatever next?
I would think that global warming would be heating up their sex life
Jim,
That is offset by the warmer waters of the Atlantic lowering male albatross testosterone levels!
This has led some researchers to speculate that the females are increasingly attracted to royal and wandering albatrosses; probably due to white privilege in the case of the royals!
This article about the divorce rate of albatrosses has reached Super-Stupid level. The poor Albatrosses deserve their privacy and protection from public harassment.
While there are several species of birds that mate for life, penguins, canada geese, eagles, the sad fact is that there is still divorce among these faithful birds. Back in the 1970s the keepers at the Baltimore Zoo were studying their penguin colony and discovered just that, divorce among the penguins.
What about the children?
Ah yes, it’s always the albatross chicks that suffer the most when the parents split up. Albatross juvenile delinquency rates must be skyrocketing. Especially among The Poor. Quite apart from the devastation of Climate Change ™, it’s clear that albatross society needs bigger government and much more socialist regulation.
And lest I forget, it’s not the Falklands albatross, but the albatros de las Malvinas!
Rud,
Is the Grauniad now claiming that correlation is causation?
What about the possibility that the albatrosses have been influenced by the Progressive scientists following them around like porno directors? It could be the bad human examples being shown, or maybe they’re just shy of giant, ugly, featherless monsters following them around during mating season! I know that that would spoil the mood for me!
I am somewhat bemused by the automatic link between ‘warmer’ and ‘harsher’, especially in the context of an area that can be loosely described as ‘F…. Cold’.
When talking about these areas the usual cliche is to describe the ‘Harsh Winter’.
If I was cynical I might even say that these researchers were coming up with their conclusions ( “due to climate change…” ) before they even start their research projects.
Maybe I should apply for grant money to research if ‘Due to climate change’ more research papers are being published that describe adverse events that are ‘Due To Climate Change’.
Ridicule: AGW stands for Al Gore’s Wevenge
Oh Dear.
I feel I may have gone a bit ‘End of Week’ on my logic, but Samuel Taylor Coleridge seems to have been all over this.
Example One – Rime of the Ancient Mariner: A barking mad old sailor stops a WEDDING guest to talk about Albatrosses!
Example Two – Kubla Khan.
First
“Down to a sunless sea” – which is clearly about the failure of green energy. Probably.
and
“Beware Beware, His flashing eyes, his floating hair” – which is clearly BoJo.
So there you go – Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a future visionary and not just some 18th century guy who took lots of drugs. Probably. 🙂
The BBC article was truly sad – first that the scientists are getting on stools to be be able to scrape the very bottom of the climate crap barrel, and second, that the BBC can’t see how silly they look publishing this crap.
Joe Albatross:
🎵
“Let’s get it on
Ah, baby, let’s get it on
Let’s love, baby
Let’s get it on, sugar
Let’s get it on, woo hoo”
🎵
Mary Albatross: “Don’t touch me, I have a CO2 induced migraine”
Joe: “I wanna divorce!”
They also appear to be emulating BoJo’s fecundity. A Falklands Conservation 2005 survey estimated the Falkland Islands Black Browed albatrosses (the subjects of the BBC cited study) population to be 399,416 ± 9,743 breeding pairs. The Falklands Conservation website currently gives a figure of 500,000 pairs.
Nothing for it but to cover the Falklands in wind turbines and solar panels then. These birds need to know we care about family breakdown.
I recently had this reply from a supporter of Extinction Rebellion. She had said that the protestors should call for something simple, like ending Fossil Fuels. (Simple as in ‘easily understood.)
Ha, ha, ha, ho, ho, oh. That’s why we are all going to die. There is no practical, technologically and financially possible way to end fossil fuel use. The second we do, our society collapses. I am not going to replace fossil fuels. When it happens, it will just stop because the capacity to extract and deliver that resource will fail. My personal usage is irrelevant because this requires all of humanity to stop, not just one person. We can only survive by doing the impractical. We have to drastically change all human behavior. This is why the only real solution to ecological overshoot is to stop being humans (i.e., evolve). Okay, maybe if we learn to transcend our existing human behavior…. I would not, however, put that in a protest message as it is too complex. 🙂
Why wouldn’t albatrosses get divorced? Would you want the same albatross around your neck for the rest of your life?
From the reanalysis site https://climatereanalyzer.org/reanalysis/monthly_tseries/
Choose top left for “Dataset” “Gridded Obs – NOAA ERSST V5 1854/01-2021/08”, next for “Variable” “Sea Surface Temperature”, next for “Level” “Surface”, next for “Month” “JJA” (June, July and Aug, albatross breeding period or even “Annual” for the whole year), next to “Region” “Specify Area”, below for “Lower Left” on the left the latitude “-54” and on the right the longitude “-64”, for “Upper Right” as latitude “-50” and as longitude “-57”. Then click on “Update Map”. In the bottom map you will see a red rectangle centered on the Malvinas.
Then click on “Plot”. After three seconds you will see a graph of the ocean surface temperature anomaly around the Malvinas/Falklands. For the period of the study to which it gives space, there were NEGATIVE anomalies of about half a degree from 2006 to 2016 and positive anomalies of less than half a degree from 2016 to 2020: where would there be a “warming of the waters” that caused the albatrosses to divorce?
I wonder where the authors found that SSTs would increase in the area.
I recall reading long ago that swans mate monogamously for life. Then later, that genetic studies indicated ~30% of offspring were not sired by the male partner.
Just how do these clown investigators know one albatros from another? They look the same to me.
Climate? No. I think the albatrosses are watching too much television.
Sure enough, good ol’ NPR picked up the story and ran with it in today’s “Morning Edition” radio broadcast.
I burst out laughing. NPR is sooooo predictable.
I’ve sent them a complaint with a link to this wonderful piece by Rud Istvan.