Essay by Eric Worrall
Alan Moran of Spectator Australia’s search to find a metric, any metric, which demonstrates the alleged climate disaster.
Climate change: short on proof, drowning in nonsense
Environmentalism, more particularly its prevalent global warming strain, dominates politics. It is the fourth such banner raised by the disgruntled that has conditioned politics since Medieval times.
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Modern-day environmentalism has embraced forms of socialism – newly re-credited following its demise after the fall of the Soviet bloc – as well as having been reinforced by huckster self-interest in subsidies for politically correct energy supplies.
However, we have now seen a decade during which the projected increase in overall global temperatures failed to occur. The first chart below shows global temperature trends falling since 2015 (with CO2 continuing to grow) and the second chart shows a flat temperature trend for Australia since 2012.
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Read more: https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/02/climate-change-short-on-proof-drowning-in-nonsense/
Alan goes on to show graphs for Aussie temperature, global tropical cyclone frequency, climate related death risk, cool season rain, months with < 12mm rain (proxy for drought), annual rainfall, flood records, area of land burned by fires, and coral reef cover (near record).
Well worth a read, and a great antidote for friends suffering from climate anxiety, because they get their climate “facts” from liberal media outlets.
This is all like Jehovah’s Witnesses explaining away Jesus not returning in 1975.
Or like ‘skeptics’ explaining why cooling never happened after numerous predictions in the early life of this blog.
It’s been cooling for millennia.
It’s been cooling in the United States since the 1930’s.
You suffer from premature expostulation, TNF.
Try staring at the three extrapolations in Easterbook’s Figure 2 until you see what your dogmatic eagerness caused you to miss.
Not seeing it Frank. All forecasts in the EP show cooling after 2000. Warming happened in all data sets. But you will explain what it is that I am not seing, I am sure.
The 1945-1977 line shows ~0.1 C jitter which is undetectable and no more than noise.
testing
Testing for an echo?
It’s cooled somewhat since the Holocene Climatic Optimum
It has cooled substantially since the Holocene Optimum.
I’m English Theo, the art of understatement runs through our blood
Uh, its called the Neoglacial … why?
At least they would leave you alone if asked.
A friend when I was in grade school in the middle sixties was a member of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Most of the adherent going door to door never heard of that miss.
In high school I had what could be described as a phone relationship with a hot “hobbie” girl. I still consider her the best looking girl I have ever met. One of my life’s greatest regrets is not pushing the relationship harder despite her family’s objections.
That, and not recognizing the plain-looking girl that turned into the biggest sexpot after graduation.
GHG nut-cases have been predicting Apocalypse Now! since 1988 and before. They deserve the tar on that brush. not the rationally skeptical.
The environmentalists, of which Climatistas are a subspecies, have been predicting Really Bad Things Right Soon Now since Silent Spring in the early 1960’s. Disaster porn seems to have a ready audience.
Ready believers more than an audience.
They absolutely believe anything that confirms their superstitious fears.
Nothing connected to data and logic can convince a true believer. Long ago in my youth I would sometimes entertain conversations with proselytizers who accosted me in public or at my door. In such cases I often focused on origin and history of the universe and the notion that creation of the universe took some relatively short number of days or years instead of many millions or billions. When faced with the question of why do things like the universe or objects in it or formations on the earth appear to have taken millions of years to happen or are now seen as they were millions of years ago, the believers always said “because it was created to look like that to us.” There is no reasoning with a true believer. I don’t bother with those discussions anymore.
I’m not a religious person, but can’t someone simply argue that god created the Big Bang or evolution?
Less sexy, because scientists came up with those notions, not their bibles. Their gods created the illusions, but we mortals cannot possibly discern his motives (or “will”).
Later, they came up with creationism, which was an attempt to go down that road. It had few followers. However, it was a noble effort, and definitely what we see from “climate science” is remarkably similar to the creationist efforts of the latter part of the 20th Century.
There once was back in the ’70s and maybe still is a “Creationist Institute” or something like that. They once published books trying to prove this. So, just out of curiosity I bought one of their books that purported to be a geology text. It used many actual geology terms and if you knew nothing about the subject, it would seem like real science. Being suspicious I went to my alma mater and bought all the geology textbooks there and read them all. I concluded that the Institute’s author of their geology book actually understood real geology sufficient to produce a fake version palatble to people who wanted to believe such nonsense. I now think that much of “climate science” in the MSM is the same sort of bullshit- sounds good to anyone who doesn’t dig deeper.
What was your alma mater and what is the consensus of their climate science textbooks?
U. Mass. in Amherst. I have no idea what their climate science textbooks are about if such books exist. But I believe it was a “scientist” from there who published with Mickey Mann one of his major papers. Makes sense because Wokachusetts is a hotbed of the new climate religious cult.
Creationists twice that of which I am aware, tried to ‘prove’ their claims by some sort of trial.
They learned very quickly that their pseudo facts were slapped down immediately by experts in the field.
After which they started trying to prove creationism by currently unexplained animals, geology, physics. Usually their creationist explanation defied rationality.
Currently, in spite of creationist claims, they have yet to successfully prove ‘creation by deity, any deity’.
I tend to equate creationists with people who believe stones or other objects heal.
Yep. It’s just as plausible as a bunch of random shitt happening billions of years ago in a universe far far a way that produced a species with self awareness.
Plausible, yes. Probable, in a limited… our frame of reference. The philosophy and practice of science is, with cause, entertained in a limited of reference, where accuracy is inversely proportional to space, perhaps time, offsets from the observer.
Look up Natural Selection, Mike.
Maybe.
Indeed, but a discussion of the whole issue would take us down a “long and winding road”, or perhaps find ourselves in a “maze of twisty passages, all alike.” Most mainstream faiths now maintain beliefs that are not literal and empirically testable enough to be reasonably challenged by modern physics. This has not always been the case, especially in the early days of modern science, for example when the Catholic church held dogmatically to a geocentric view of the solar system, to Galileo’s anguish when confronted with his own observations. There are however, many subsets of faiths that hold to a very literal interpretation of certain words written long ago, in a time when concepts we now take for granted were inconceivable. An example would be some who hold that creation of the universe (although the actual words largely refer to things we now would consider primarily relevant to the earth and solar system) took 7 days as we now understand that time interval to be 24 hours. That level of specificity is difficult to maintain consistent with our current understanding of the physical processes involved, yet many still hold to that literal, physical interpretation. Other examples have been when proponents of some faith have (unwisely) predicted very specific dates on which the world would end or something cosmic but observable and definite would happen.
For my part, I choose to consider that we should have learned enough about the large scale structure of the universe and the strange (to us) structures that seem to populate it as well as the seemingly infinite processes that comprise our everyday realization of consciousness and sensation via almost (perhaps literally) infinite quantum processes dependent on effects of observers, the more we should realize we have a lot more to understand before we should be over-confident in what we “believe.” We should be prepared to be wrong about a lot of things. John Wheeler once said that the job of a theoretical physicist is to make mistakes as fast as possible, and I think we have a lot of mistakes to make before we should get too dogmatic or cocky.
But I also hold that it is not required to have no “faith” at all, particularly the faith that it is a good thing to try to understand more about the universe and our place in it. As long as we accept the notion that, like infinity, we may approach that understanding more and more but never actually reach the end.
All that said, there is nothing that seems to me inherently awful about proposing that CO2 is the dominant substance driving all things climate. What is inherently awful in my view is the unwillingness to change one’s mind about it. Many have opined about the necessity of being the best at finding one’s own theories wrong (Feynman) or about changing one’s mind as in Churchill’s “those who never change their minds, never change anything.” A little more humility and a bit less hubris would go a long way, I think.
Note the dates in the following:
Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for a stubborn adherence to his then unorthodox beliefs. He was direct in his statements. On 17 February 1600, in a central Roman market square, with his “tongue imprisoned because of his wicked words”, he was hung upside down naked before finally being burned at the stake.
Galileo was more circumspect and was not burned. He did get house arrest and after suffering fever and heart palpitations, he died on 8 January 1642, aged 77.
As an atheist I am constantly amused by many other atheists’ preoccupation with religious people and their dogma. They seem bound and determined to prove there is no God(s). In the immortal words of … somebody … who cares?
There was no certainty that any kind of the Big Bang existed or even less that anything or anyone brought into being.
Initially catholic priest Georges Lemaitre and later Einstein did a bit of maths which needed a solution, and hey presto ‘BB’ was born, i.e. it was a bit like a climate model that needed to have a solution and the CO2 was given the honour.
According to Einstein a photon that left the earliest universe (~300 k years after ‘BB’) as far as ‘it’ is concerned, it hit your retina (or an infrared sensor) at the same instant as it was created.
Richard Feynman added something of this kind; an electron from such early universe ((~300 k years after ‘BB’) had a ‘handshake’ with an electron in your retina (or an infrared sensor) and they ‘agreed’ to exchange a photon.
BB was Fred Hoyle’s disparaging name for the idea of the emergence of the universe, proposed after Hubble discovered the red shift, vuk. The discovery surprised Einstein as much as anyone.
In QM, the probability density of an electron equals unity only when its wave function is integrated over the entire universe.
Photons travel at the speed of light, which means time’s arrow has no extension. T = 0 so far as they are concerned. They occupy all of space and all of time.
Feynman told the story that Wheeler phoned him at 2 am once, to tell him that he (Wheeler) knew why all the electrons were identical. Feynman asked, ‘why?’ Wheeler said, ‘because there’s only one.’
So it goes in QM. No one understands it. Some can work with it.
Imagination is a wonderful thing.
Sounds as reasonable as God putting dinosaur bones in the ground to test mankind.
That was pretty much the thesis of Philip Gosse, Dave, who published, Omphalos in 1857, which argued that god created Earth with fossils in the ground and the moraines as apparent evidence for long-gone glaciers.
His book was an attempt to rescue the creation idea from the advances in Geology and Biology since the late 18th century.
His fall-back idea, and book, didn’t get very far because no one wanted to believe god is a trickster.
I’m not a religious person either; so if someone asked me that, I would ask them where this ‘god’ person came from.
I’m sorry that so many here, and apparently you, have never felt his presence.
I’m glad you have been specailly selected to do so.
Of course you are a religious person. You believe that any natural warming is fine and normal, but any man made global warming is unnatural and therefore undesirable. For that to be so, then the humans that caused it must also be unnatural. That requires divine intervention as there is no other explanation. QED.
CAGW is a religious precept, and you are a fervent acolyte. No amount of contrary evidence will ever convince you of its absurdity.
God the deceiver?
Long ago in my youth I would sometimes entertain conversations with proselytizers
I know someone who stopped those visits by answering his front door in the nude. That got rid of the church ladies. Strangely. no alcohol was involved.
Maybe there was something frightening or disappointing with the beandang diddly wang.
I assume your acquaintance was lying to you. He’d get his naked ass arrested.
I have no real problem with “hobbies” coming around. It’s just that I was usually very hung-over when they visited my friend’s crash pad.
Return to reasonably original copies of the Bible or Torah and actually read the beginning chapter, Genesis!
Note that during “Creation” the deity does not effectively create time until most of the creating is completed.
There is no chart or table to specify how long each step of creation took.
What is curious, and this isn’t confined to one religion, is that people thousands of years ago, somehow understood that there was existence prior to the sun igniting in solar fusion.
Far too many people base their beliefs on the easy reading comic style books where the entire Genesis chapter is covered by a dozen or so extremely simplified graphic pages.
I’ve argued with people proselytizing/speechifying on streets, in schools, at work.
Sometimes, I brought along a bible and read chapters back at people making, quite frankly, absurd claims.
All things considering, Genesis reads very well for a religion beginning well over 6,000 years ago.
And quite similar to reading about Gilgamesh, Egypt’s or India’s Gods or any religion’s origins.
There a re a number of ‘Creation’ theories running around academia, none are proven.
When comparing “The Big Bang” to Genesis, they are both similar in that they lack veracity.
Also, keep in mind that the Torah from which the bible is drawn and shares a similar Genesis, is acknowledged a generic oral history, e.g., Adam is the word for Man.
Real history, also told by oral tradition for a long period, starts with Exodus. There is much real history included with the unexplainable. Hey, it’s a religion!
A major indication that climate alarmism, envirowackism, renewable energy delusionalists are religions is that their soothsayers, proselytizers, believers all claim ridiculous things that are false in any reality.
Just like religious crackpots, climate alarmists are fact intolerant and somehow forget they were corrected by honest data or facts within seconds of their running away from the truth, mentally and physically.
Can death rates and longevity be used as a metric to argue for or against anything without dubious corrections for x, y and z?
Consider this force-feeding nonsense for ChatGPT.
Eric, I think Alan has identified the problem: we’re keeping too many idiots alive.
When intelligent people are kept quiet to not offend stupid people we’re in deep trouble.
Sooner or later natural selection will take over when civilization collapses.
And once again the gene pool will be reduced down to it’s essence.
That’s why the religion has embraced attribution theory.
They’re going to count all the earthquakes and tsunamis from the last 20 years and they’re not going to count all previous earthquakes and tsunamis.
They are evangelists for the climate apocalypse, not scientists in any rational sense. And politicians and pre-teens are listening to them, not to reason.
Yeah. Throw another baby on the barbie, it’s over.
I check four Australian websites every morning hoping to find a good article. I usually find one or two each day. This was the big winner today.
There is also a good article on wind energy each day at the Stop These Things link below. They feature articles mainly found elsewhere, to which they add an introduction. One good article for me to recommend every day of the week at my: Honest Climate Science and Energy
STOP THESE THINGS
What does this actually mean, please?
Really, can anybody supply and explanation for what the above-quoted selection of words actually mean?
Are they just chosen at random?
Try reading the link provided!
Very good. This needs wide distribution so the average guy can see he has been lied to and cheated. Time for this nonsense to end.
My main concern is about politicians who get on the climate alarmism bandwagon and try to use it to enact new laws, restrictions and taxes that ostensibly will protect the populace from extreme weather events. Then we find out that they have conflicts of interest because they’re either getting money under the table to push such an agenda or they’re directly invested in businesses that can profit from it. In the end, it’s the taxpayer that winds up paying, while the climate proves to be amazingly resilient to such “preventive” measures.
Could you PLEASE correctly label it “WEATHER RELATED” risk?!
None of this has ANYTHING to do with the “climate.”
Saved me the trouble. Thanks.
Well worth a read, and a great antidote for friends suffering from climate anxiety, because they get their climate “facts” from liberal media outlets.
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So I asked the guy with arms folded, “Where do you get your news from?”
NY Times, BBC, Washington Post etc.
Unfortunately tropical cyclone Gabrielle struck parts of New Zealand last month ,
extremely heavy rain fall and high winds .
Of course the news media are blaming climate change but a lot worse damage was caused because of forestry slash was washed into rivers and became dams on road and rail bridges .
The damage is extensive but homes should not be built on flood plains .
Forestry companies and logging cotractors have to change the way they leave tree branches and reject logs for floods to carry down stream .
It was indeed a 100 year flood event but the climate doomsters are having a field day .
Otto Friedrich wrote an interesting book, “The End of the World, A History”. The Albigensian Crusade, the Lisbon Earthquake and others. None of them involved climate change.
There is a tendency to keep calling that graph “Climate Related Death Risk”. Isn’t it more realistic to call it “Weather Related Death Risk”, and then use it to show that 30 year “climate” is getting better ?
Might be a little late but I found something interesting.
The record daily rainfall for SA is at a semi-arid cattle station (ranch). There was 272.6 mm (11 inches) in one day. 345.8 mm was the whole rainfall for the month. The mean for that month is 17.7 mm but the median is 3.7 mm (less than a fifth of an inch). The lowest yearly rainfall on record since 1970 was 53 mm (2 inches).
The highest monthly total was in Blinman, 100 km away that had 246 mm on that same day, but more 6-11 days later for a total of 676 mm (27 inches), 15 times the lowest annual rainfall on record since 1945 (of poor records).
It really highlights how much the rainfall varies away from the coast. There has to be a very large trend to claim anything is significant.