Bishop Hill Delingpole on the state of the debate
Mar 8, 2012 Climate: Sceptics James Delingpole has an article in the Commentator, looking at the changed landscape in which we find ourselves:
Something extraordinary is happening in the great Climate Wars. I had a taste of it just the other day on an LBC talk show. The producer had only booked me in for a ten-minute slot, in case the listeners weren't interested in my boring new book about that tediously hackneyed subject Man Made Global Warming. But the switchboards were jammed and the station ended up keeping me in for a full hour to reply to all the calls.
There was one big problem though: "We can hardly find ANYONE who disagrees with you," whispered the show's host, Julia Hartley-Brewer. This was true. By the end, things had got so desperate that I found myself accidentally picking fights with callers who were on my side. An easy mistake to make for someone on my (sceptical) side of the debate: we card-carrying Satanic "deniers" are so used to being vilified at every turn it really feels kind of weird suddenly to be in tune with the popular mood.
Reader Comments (100)
@timheyes
My first reading of Climategate (1) shocked me to the core because of the damage these loathsome charlatans were shamelessly doing to my profession. I've made the point before with some vehemence, but the net effect is that my respect for many 'scientific' fields is hugely diminished - particularly anything with a psychology element or which may be used to 'nudge' our behaviour in a politically correct direction. Given what we see daily with the refusal of apparently serious scientists to throw Mann and his serially discredited lackeys under a bus, they're all damaged goods.
Science without rigorous honesty and transparency is no better than witchcraft.
Justice4Rinka:
Your combination of elegant expression and bullshit nailing is, as ever, impressive.
The real problem is that as government departments grow, as they always do – whether in Britain, the EU, Australia, the US, you name it – their vested interests in keeping the scares alive also grow. There are thousands upon thousands of increasingly well paid and self-important bureaucrats whose livelihoods depend on administering huge budgets to combat whatever they decide are the great matters of the day. How else does the preposterous Department of Energy and Climate Change justify its existence, for example?
That these organisations bear all the hallmarks of a giant in a fairy tale – poor articulation, lumbering gait, limited intelligence and immense strength – only underlines the near limitless devastation they are capable of.
It more or less goes without saying that the views of the great unwashed who finance these self-regarding, unchecked buffoons are by definition of precisely no consequence.
Whatever Delingpole's optimism, I fear we have a long way to go to counter the horrors being inflicting on us all.
Alex
I would really like... who to vote for? But it seems that this is a more than corrupt stitch up - ie there is no one that is offering an alternative - is the Green Camaron any better than the Green Brown. How to say, how corrupt this is and how corrupt the people that are in it (to win it!)? As I say, I watch BBC parliament and their debate are rather obvious and boring - how to best the other fellow in our 'global warming' credentials, without one descenting voice, a bit like the Czech parliament pre 1989. That's what you have contend with - not opinion but very vested interest, those that know and can smell where the money is going. Whilst Delingpole dreams his dream, turbines have mounted around him. That is the dirt of politics, of course. The real world.
The sceptics certainly have not won the war yet. Even if politicians know that the public are turning against the extremism of the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming movement they will not want to admit that the policies they have been supporting are misguided, not to say, disastrous. The instinctive reaction of politicians in most parties, including the Cameron Conservatives, will be to think that their policies require more "spin" to sell them to the public.
That is especially true of a party leader whose background is in public relations. Besides, "vote Blue, go Green" was an integral part of Cameron's campaign to "detoxify" the Conservative Party.
It all comes back to the fact that the journalists who mainly report on environmental issues aren't journalists at all in the professional sense of the word - they're activists masquerading as journalists.
This is some research on the Guardian team I posted on another thread:-
"The trouble is that scepticism has won the intellectual argument too late to make any difference....It was a victory all right, but the war was already lost. "
Well sure, because it all is spawned by the monsters of the UN, the EU, the World Bank and their ilk. Not to mention governmental bureaucracies and rent seeking NGOs around the globe.
To my recollection very few CAGW skeptics ever believed that their "war" was to defuse the UN or the EU, although that might be a coincidental entry on their wish lists. Rather, the main war has been to defuse CAGW hysteria in the public sphere, which has been done quite well.
The CAGW myth will float rapidly into the background within institutional bureaucracies, and become just one more of the many hundreds of things that silly stupid government bureaucracies promote. No longer center stage, no longer sucking up trillions in tax monies. It's becoming an embarrassment.
The only people soon to be left promoting the zealot religion of CAGW are people like Hansen, Gleick, and Mann, all three of whom have apparently gone completely insane due to their strange religion.
We might be winning the debate over the global warming scam but the madness and spending continues unabated.
Edinburgh has 'won' the contest to host the new 'Green Bank HQ' and will have £3Bn to waste, sorry invest, in order to 'fight climate change'.
So the madness and spending goes on..
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-17298240
Bishop Hill has by far the best commentators on the skeptic side of the internet. I love WUWT., but BH and his commentators seem to explain in away that us layperson can understand and it makes it fun.
When Climate Audits Steve McIntyre get on a roll it pretty cool as well.
Well at least TPX has gone from thinking we are wrong all the time and admits we can be right once in a while. Hopefully it is the crack in the dam that will let the flood of knowledge through but somehow I think they'll plug it up. This time at least. Eventually, the dam will fall.
I disagree that in the long term science will be damaged. Science is self-correcting and doesn't need our misguided notions to sway it. It is ultimately though philosophical, metaphysical, the search for truth in chaos. That's why beliefs are more powerful than facts, at its base it's all belief and axioms. Luckily, truth (whatever it is) seems to prevail.
Poland resists EU push for deeper CO2 emission cuts
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-17300952
Veto?
Polish Environment Minister:
"Our common ambition is to decrease decarbonisation costs radically, to commercialise new innovative technologies and to save energy. But the risk that the EU faces is that our climate efforts will clog, rather than oil, the wheels of the economy. Jobs and wealth will start to leak from Europe as companies seek a less stringent regulatory framework. This could change the flow of goods in the world economy but would certainly not reduce global emissions. That is not the basis for a sound economic policy – and, therefore, for a sound climate policy."
http://www.europeanvoice.com/article/2012/march/climate-roadmap-at-a-crossroads/73827.aspx
Polish Environment Minister:
To paraphrase: "We can save Gaia by annihilating ourselves, but we probably don't want to do that."
Unraveling secret is that Greens and eco-zealots want to do exactly that. At least to the big procreators in third-world countries.
Nano pope, the concern is not that Science as a body of knowledge or a way of increasing or improving that knowledge will be damaged. It is that science as a human institution will lose a lot of the trust invested in it. We will see!
"Why is it OK to suggest that Einstein might have got it wrong but be subject to vilification if you question climate science?"
it's not OK , since both have been verified rather than falsified over decades.
Unfortunately this has not deterred the silly and villainous from urging us reject both.
Geronimo: “Has anyone else noticed that the Guardian has pretty much abandoned allowing comments on climate change pieces in CiF?”
You can comment on the article about Lord Lawson’s links with a company which once had links to a company which once did business with a company which owns a Polish coal-fired power station, but not on the article about how global warming is causing gazelles’ testicles to overheat, making their sperm curl up, according to Kenyan expert Risky Agwama.
It would be nice if they’d combined the two, under the headline “’Coal Shill Lawson Boiling Gazelles’ Balls’, says Dr Risky”.
“’Coal Shill Lawson Boiling Gazelles’ Balls’, says Dr Risky”.
Mar 8, 2012 at 7:42 PM geoffchambers
;-)
or even briefer (The Sun vesrsion?) -
"Risky - Lawson Boiling Bambi's Balls"
nano pope 5:31 PM
TPX ?
Only asking .....
Dont know if it is the same "ThePowerOfX" but somebody of that name added a definition in the Urban Dictionary for Watts Up With That.
It begins:
Over hyped and over played , the reality may be the heights of the AGW scare , and scare is very much the right word as from the beginning some of its lead advocates made clear that was they wanted to do, with political support and questioning press . Made its advocates lazy , for like a spoiled child they grew used to having what they wanted when the wanted it . So when it came down to 'the cause' facing series challenges they were to arrogant to engage , as they had far to high opinion of themselves, and to slow to realize the easy days of summer were over.
I have always thought that some of climate sciences problems are becasue it went from a cozy little club little heard off and less cared about even within academia , to having national and indeed international prominence. But it still acted like a 'cozy little club ' that in the old days was never challenged becasue frankly no one outside the club give a dam about what they did . But that same prominence . which some like Mann went whoring for , meant people now did really care and now were asking some serious questions , to answer to many of these was often very poor indeed.
timheyes. I've being saying it for a long time now, that is all science will suffer because when the scale of the suffereing that these activist scientists have been instrumental in imposing on populations world wide to avoid a none existent catastrophe finally dawns on the politicos. Of course I'mo assuming that our democracies will still be intact, which is by no means certain. For many scientists, even those who support the CAGW threat, it is a question of getting on with the job and doing the best science they can. However I don't believe they have any idea of the severity of the impacts the policies they are advocating will have on the poor and needy worldwide. I had a discussion about Julia Slingo's famous petition with Richard Betts who made clear that it was about the attack on the science that the petition was about. The rest of us saw the CRU attacking science by hiding declines, passing papers given to them for peer review to others, rigging the peer review process, allowing papers into the IPCC process after the cut off dates because they lent support to the views of the team, demanding that editors who published papers they with be sacked from their jobs, trying to get Chris De Freitas sacked from his day job etc. etc. But Julia and her 1700 co-signatories saw people challenging their science as attacking it and saw nothing wrong with the activities of the CRU. Or if they did they've stayed schtum about it so as not to upset the progress of the "cause". Science, in my opinioN, has reached a new low when thousand of scientists witness malfeasance on a grand scale by their colleagues and say nothing. The "cause" is everything and nothing must be done to threaten it's acceptance by the politicians.
All this will come out as time goes on, and, yes, I believe they have set back science and the respect for science and funding will be cut to because ofnthe activities of environmental activists in scientific institutions, and the willing acceptance ofnthe scientific establishment to of the activities in the CRU.
But I could be wrong!
ThePowerofX is brilliant. Depending upon the antecedent of 'you', that bit could be either from a rabid alarmist or a snot-nosed skeptic.
Dislosure, I did not write it but wish I had.
=====================
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUQcCvX2MKk
Climate Change got going because Mrs Thatcher had defeated the Miners the Argentinians the TUC
the IRA hunger strikers the Brixton and Toxtieth rioters Jeaque Delores Micheal Hesletime Micheal Foot the print Unions got Regan and Gorbachev together created the YUPPIES had the IRA bombers in Gibraltar and the Iran hostage takers all taken care off then got rid of Thames television franchise because of Death on the Rock Documentary
Caught the Yorskshire Ripper sold off council houses
Got us an opt out over the European Socal Chapter and an EU rebate
And got a truce between Iraq and Iran so Saddam could turn his envious attentions towards his richer neighbor Kuwait
The Iron Lady was unstoppable
She even survived the Brighton Bombing
Then BANG the Chernobyl Nuclear reactor blew up as did Piper Alpha cost us 2 billion pound per month
Then came the Hurricane on the Thursday and then the stock market collapse on Black Monday
So thinking fast she went to the United Nations and gave her first famous Global Warming speech in 1988 Which finally made the UN seem important
But the UN hasnt manage to stop any Genocides since
All Climate Change has ever been about is getting the public to accept Nuclear power
Mrs Thatcher eventually got done by her nemisis Hesaltine and Jeffrey Howell and Ken Clark and the rest of the cabinet they all turned on her over Europe and the poll tax
And i can remember Mrs Thatcher with her handbag coming out of that building in Paris dodging an interview with John Sargent and my mum crying her eyes out because Maggie had gone
Back in 1979 when my Nan had died and her funeral had been held up for 2 weeks by NUPE
it was the Winter of Discontent
My mum auntie s uncles and cousins they were all proper old clause 4 Labour supporters and my Grandfather had been a Communist in the general strike of 1926 he must of known Jack Dash
Well after that they all turned True Blue ( Margo from the Good Life ) Tory
It was Maggie Maggie Maggie in in in
Remember the 1980s Kylie and Jason and Rick Asley big shoulder pads and big mobile phones
Ironic Mrs Thatcher said "You have to get up early to fight Socalism"
Funny thing is Before Climate Change Socalism was defeated the Labour Party had imploded and was all but gone
The Berlin Wall had Fallen Russia and China had turned Capitalist
But after Maggies speech and Global Warming really took off
So did Eco Fascism
Socalism was back with a green instead of a red flag
Rebranded reinvented as Smug Environmentalism
More green taxes more legislation more propaganda Less reasoned debate
Just the same thing Politicians just trying to get a bit more control
With former Socalist politicians Chris Hulme Ken Livingston Prescott Ed Milliband George Galloway Tony Blair Al Gore
Then George Monbiot and Sir Paul Nurse who used to be in the SWP
They never though they would have to sell out Arthur Scargill and his Yorkshire miners when they were out collecting for them ( or the proud working class steel workers in Redcar )
I can understand them jumping on the Climate Change Band wagon
They took advantage to use this false manufactured Climate panic to impose their authoritarian believes
And when Mrs Thatcher finally goes what will her legacy actually be
Her old party the Conservative Party
Conservative with a small c
Thats c for caring or c for Climate and Change
Steve Hilton was David Camerons old Spin Doctor he had him going round the Arctic on a dog sled
And the Arctic looked no different from when the Vikings and Captain Scoot and Captain Oats and Amonson and Top Gear were there
Alistair Cambell invented the phrase "The peoples princess" about Lady Diana
And Steve Hilton invented the phrase "Vote Blue to go Green" and the Conservatives still didn't win outright
Delingpole got it wrong the true watermelons "Green on the outside red on the inside" is now Cameron and the Conservative Party
I dont think my mother and Mrs Thatcher would be very please about that
The Climate Change Act 2008 has targets to meet right through to 2050 so, until we have a government that revokes this bill, it will trundle on with pointless monitoring, reporting and controls.
http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/legislation/cc_act_08/cc_act_08.aspx
And there is so much else that could be done instead that would be more wealth creating as well as friendly to the environment!
geoffchambers + Geronimo: “Has anyone else noticed that the Guardian has pretty much abandoned allowing comments on climate change pieces in CiF?”
Yes I have. The Suzanne Goldenberg (if I've got the name right) pieces in particular. She was pretty much allowed to post anything she liked, unchallenged via the comments. Her articles appeared to be little more than "reprints" off the alarmist blogs - St Gleick the martyr, that sort of thing.
No objectivity there I'm afraid. I'm sure I read somewhere that the Guardian had become reclassified as a "Special Interest" publication,
"The UK's leading purveyor of Enviro-porn - for the more discerning gentleman"
The most sagacious words of wisdom ever uttered by the consensus....
date: Wed, 3 Sep 2003 08:32:11 -0400
from: Edward Cook
subject: An idea to pass by you
to: Keith Briffa
'...we know with certainty that we know fuck-all...'
One has to be aware of the power of the Groaniud, to punch way above its weight, due to its close working relationship with the BBC. Not many people actually buy the Guardian, not many at all. In a country of roughly 25million homes, it sells something like 280k copies. Even if you add the Indy sales to the Graun, you get a niche 'elite' market of around 450k or so.
Now people do tend to buy newspapers which they feel represents their views. So if you look at newspaper sales, even excluding the tabloids, the left of center big state view is quite small. However.....that view is then magnified across all 25million homes via BBC news associated items. ITN is just a copy of BBC news. So every home gets the editorial that comes from this small niche (shall we call it Hamersmith set?) worldview.
If anyone is in any doubt, one only has to look at the desperation at the BBC to stop Murdoch from starting a Fox News TV in the UK. The BBC/Guardian sucessfully 'showed' that Murdoch was 'unfit' to run a news TV station...they used the Milly Dowler story and phone hacking to do so.
I make no apologies for the people hacking that number, it was disgraceful, but lets be honest here, we all know every paper does it, yet the Murdoch press was targetted.
Sooooooo.........climate alarmism will still continue to be pumped into our homes, and MPs will respond to what this axis tells them. Long way to go yet. The end is coming as more scientists start to question their colleagues. What happens when the elite niche realise they have been conned, I dunno, but I don't expect too much mea culpa.
@SayNoToFearmongers - Well said.
@SayNoToFearmongers
echo....
With the addition that conversations with a rather senior academic acquaintance in the medical / public health field paint a now depressingly familiar picture of self delusion, paid advocacy, tarting for favours and cash.
So rampant has the corruption of that branch of science got that she's opted for retirement - cynical and disillusioned I think - which is a shame, a real shame.
W.H.Auden:
(Quoting from memory!)
Giants do what giants can,
Things impossible to man
But they cannot master speech
(And something like)
Around a decimated land
They drool and dribble (?)
Etc. He was referring, of course, to the brutal European tyrannies of his time but it has a general resonance and, in this context, quite apt as regard the 'climate change' 'unstoppable' tanker. All thing must pass but the damage they do in there wake...!
(By the way, if anyone can dig up Auden's actual words I'll buy them an, at least, metaphoricle pint!)
Mildly OT but since @SayNoToFearmongers ahem... started it I just tripped over this which is - I supect - an example of the sort of thing my friend finds too tiresome these days
It's also noticeable that the Indy has toned down its alarmist AGW stance to a large degree. It can't bring itself to publish skeptic material, which means that its Environment section has retreated to talking about littering, horses, and folding bikes.
But the AGW scare will not go away until the leading players grow up enough to realise that things don't become true just because you want them to be; that reality is often different from how you would wish it to be.
Hence, wanting wind power to be the great green future doesn''t automatically make it so, and they have to come to accept that both rationally and emotionally.
There is a simpler narrative explanation.
It is that Dellers, confessedly free of the attainder of science A levels, let alone grounding in science tripos basics, simply doesn't get how silly his serial and uniform endorsement of good , bad and ugly climate science seems.
For every seemingly reasonable objection to textbook climate science Dick Lindzen has run up the peer review flagpole, crackpots and PR men have adduced dozens in the popular press and blogosphere. Introduced with the utmost seriousness, these Fatal Flaws in the fabric of Warmism unfailingly evaporate upon scientific scrutiny.
This doxology of Weird Science, from Iron Sun theory to contrarian thermodynamics gracing these columns ranks among the comic wonders of postmodernity- where else can you see Roadrunner cartoons transformed into a political tableau vivant?
GSW: “The Guardian -The UK's leading purveyor of Enviro-porn - for the more discerning gentleman" - excellent.
“Get the hots under the collar with our centrespread - Lord Lawson displays his fossil fuel interests”.
Foxgoose: Sorry, I got Dr. Risk’s story all wrong. The gazelle’s goolies are just fine. It’s the cheetah’s sperm which is curling up since it can’t catch the gazelles due to the heat and is having to make do on a diet of low protein zebra.
The important thing to remember is that it’s all because of Lord Lawson’s interest in Polish coal, and the fact that Delingpole can’t answer a straight question from the President of the Royal Society about cancer.
Russell:
“where else can you see Roadrunner cartoons transformed into a political tableau vivant?”
Just about everywhere. Brussels, Wall Street, and the Elysée, for starters.
There’s not a lot about the iron sun on the sceptic blogs. It’s more about the non-warming earth.
Lewis Deane -
I believe you're looking for Auden's "August 1968":
There’s not a lot about the iron sun on the sceptic blogs. It’s more about the non-warming earth.
Mar 9, 2012 at 5:55 AM | geoffchambers
Really? to his immense credit , Dick Lindzen has just sent a note of apology to the NASA GISTEMP
researchers for understating the last century of global warming by .14 K in a slide accusing NASA-GISS of "Data Manipulation.", which he showed in his recent Commons presentation.
Here is the RC comment :
'171 Deep Climate says: 8 Mar 2012 at 6:37 PM
Like Gavin S and Eric S, I am inclined to ascribe Lindzen’s mistake of mixing up LOTI and Met indices to incompetence (and perhaps not a little bias in failing to check his work when confronted with an inexplicably large difference between two versions of ostensibly the same data set).
But should he refuse to unequivocally withdraw the accusation against GISS, that would be a different matter.
[Response: Note that I have received a note from Lindzen apologising for the error (and I have passed it along to the people involved in GISTEMP). - gavin]
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/03/misrepresentation-from-lindzen/comment-page-4/#comments
I think the advocates are currently still a bit surprised by receiving any setbacks at all, but they'll probably regroup. The real issues and facts are still quite a long way from reaching the consciousness of the general population or the 'body politic'. It's only the end of the beginning.
But things are moving. China is banning airlines from buying Airbus because of the EU carbon tax. Governments in China Russia India Canada & USA have never really bought into it, despite what they may say in public. Richard Black at the BBC knows this and is clearly getting anxious and frustrated at the increased foot-dragging that is starting to be applied from these countries. The IPCC may run into the sand soon. We should give politicians some credit, they can be very professional in these matters. There will probably never be any big announcements.
My guess is that Greenpeace lobbyists are still very busy working the rest of the world at the moment, and giving us a bit of a breather. They know Europe has saddled itself with some laws that will take a lot of undoing, and we are going to suffer as a result. The USA probably will too if the EPA can't be reined in.
But look on the bright-side. Greenpeace will get told where to get off by China. And precious little change out of other nations apart from (hopefully) cleaning up some of their smoke-stacks and grossest pollution. CO2 will continue to rise, regardless. Environmental Armageddon will continue to not arrive. The very unpersuaded will continue to point to the failings in the theory and practice of global warming. Climate scientists may well start re-branding themselves back as oceanographers, glaciologists, meteorologists etc., hopefully before it's too late.
And there will be much entertainment watching the BBC, The Guardian, etc. struggling to come to terms with this. [And a special mention for "New Scientist", ho ho, I used to be a subscriber]
Robert Christopher:
You urge revocation of the CCA 2008. But, for many reasons, revocation is unlikely - but it's not necessary to achieve your goal. Here's part of an email I sent to my MP (Peter Lilley) confirming an observation I'd made at the last but one AGW meeting in the HofC:
I asked if he thought there was any merit in such an approach. He replied that there was. Of course, since I wrote that, we have a new Secretary of State who, from his pronouncements so far, seems to be following in the footsteps of the old. But that doesn't invalidate my argument.
To be fair, there's quite a lot of iron sun on sceptic blogs (at least, on Climate Etc., where Oliver Manuel does his bit for that - he's either banned from posting on other blogs, for various reasons, or he doesn't post there). There's quite a lot of other scientific nonsense on sceptic blogs, except perhaps on climateaudit where Steve is ruthless in deleting it. In fact, he was suggesting in a recent comment on Bishop Hill (I forget where) that all serious sceptic blogs should snip skydragon/iron sun postings. At one level, I agree - they are tiresome and also provide ammunition to people who want to find reasons to ignore all sceptic arguments. At another level, I enjoy the rough and tumble of blogs - where great insights are mixed up with dross in the most haphazard way. After all, that is also how science works. One of the complaints sceptics have about climate science is that it is driven in a top-down way where only ideas approved by some kind of consensus commissar are allowed to be expressed. I can live with some iron sunning as a reaction against that.
On topic, James Delingpole is certainly wrong that the 'war' has been won on the political side (we'll have to wait and see). He is also wrong that it has been won on the basic science side - the victory in that field will be in shades of grey, not black and white. But he's certainly right on one important level: public opinion really does seem to take global warming much less seriously than a few years ago.
Mar 9, 2012 at 5:44 AM Russell
Russell - would you care to reveal your own qualifications?
Just curious, having read your earlier posting that seems to imply that you believe that "climate science" has been verified to a similar level of certainty as special relativity and the quantum theory of the photoelectric effect.
Thanks, HaroldW, your a champion. Of course, I couldn't find it because I was thinking 'Giant' rather than 'Ogre'! I lost my Auden in a move - must get him back.
And the actual poem is so much more apt than I thought - written just after the crushing of the Prague Spring and the farce that was Paris '68! O what japes!
Enjoy the metaphorical pint, HaroldW!
Russell
"these Fatal Flaws in the fabric of Warmism unfailingly evaporate upon scientific scrutiny"
Such as..?
Russell
Compare and contrast Lindzen’s rapid acknowledgement of error with Mann’s steadfast refusal to admit any such thing in his output.
Have you read the HSI?
Lewis Deane --
Thanks for the virtual pint. I Auden't drink so early in the day, but I never metaphor I didn't like. ;)
James P
For openers Michael' & Singer. What little scientific street cred they brought to the debate evaporated with this 2004 declaration in the Cato Institute paper “Meltdown for Global Warming Science”:
“Bombshell papers have just hit the refereed literature that knock the stuffing out of the United Nations, and its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In two research papers in…Geophysical Research Letters…we have a quarter-century of concurrent balloon and satellite data, both screaming that the U.N.‘s climate models have failed, as well as indicating its surface record is simply too hot.”
They were dead wrong—the satellite data they cited was seriously in error - Spencer and Christy agreed to its retraction in Science in 2005, and in 2006 told Newsweek “our satellite trend has been positive.”
Solar variability and the impact of the galactic cosmic ray flux have likewise been deeply and deservedly discounted- the latter is quantitatively pretty silly, the common denominator being not the umpteen orders of magnitude by which relativity is right, but the three or so that separate getting the sign right from discovering phenomena that are quantitatively germane to a debate in which the pendulum has swung from triumphant climate hype to idiotic denial.
Today, idiotarian climate memes are launched almost monthly, only to sink without a scientific ripple. But instead of scientific retractions of the sort Lindzen has just so graciously delivered , all we see from the PR flacks at Heartland and elsewhere is wholesale goalpost shifting ,as the usual suspects hasten to insert the saving adjective 'Catastrophic' in front of the now undeniable words " anthropogenic global warming.
To conclude, I regard the climatic bracket creep arising from the growth of industrial civilization in much the same light as inflation. Though tolerable at modest rates, it has been seen to run away into the realm of catastrophe if left entirely unmanaged.
My writing has again and again emphasized the disconnect between the time scale of politics and that at which atmospheric chemistry and ocean temperatures respond to human activity. While making the problem harder, that disparity does not make it go away.
If our host sends me a copy of HSI I will peruse it, but my humble superstition is radiative forcing, not palaeoclimate , and I had my fill of the hazards of data splicing back in the day when the editors of Nature ( in which, to answer Martin A's query, my work has often appeared ) demanded and got a prompt corrigendum from Mann. From what I have seen of HSI's text, it seems, like most such polemics, to make predictable points about how the sociology of science leads to scientific detours while ignoring the bottom line- like most heuristic endeavors climate modeling tends to get better, not worse.
Russell - Mar 9, 2012 at 4:37 PM:
"wholesale goalpost shifting ,as the usual suspects hasten to insert the saving adjective 'Catastrophic' in front of the now undeniable words " anthropogenic global warming."
Hey genius, the 1988 IPCC charter expressly states from the very outset that "human activities could change global climate patterns, threatening present and future generations with potentially severe economic and social consequences." The call the consequences "disastrous."
Ain't no goalpost shifting going on except inside of your head.
http://www.ipcc.ch/docs/UNGA43-53.pdf
And by way, in the 24 years since 1988, the only "severe economic and social consequences" we've seen have been the trillions wasted on climate alarmists and their feverish machinations such as windmills, CCS, Cap and Trade, "carbon" taxes, ethanol from food, solar panels, energy obstructionism, and the relentless assault on Western liberties.
Nothing personal, but the climate alarmist worldview seems a little bent, if not completely off the rails and heading into a ditch.
"hardly think we are going to have an Arab Spring moment due the climate change bill. As usual we will stocially carry on feeding money to the muppets MP's so they can enjoy the trappings of power and leave the decisions to the EU mafia. Cynic mode off ;)
Mar 8, 2012 at 12:48 PM | Breath of Fresh Air
I not the "Cynic mode off" BOFA but a letter from over a hundred M.P.s tends to warn me that votes are vanishing at an alarming pace and those guys in Parliament do like the gravy train they are on! My Cynic mode off :=)
Mail Man
"The reality is that the laws of the land here in the UK are passed in Brussels NOT London. So even if the clowns supposedly in charge in Westminster WANTED to change things around they cant. They dont have the power to!"
I think the E.U. have to fulfill their side of the bargain first before we even start to implement ours and they have some way to go, Ours, as usua just fall over backwards to be first! They (E.U.) have other things on their mind. Greece is not over yet, to be followed by Spain, Portugal etc, etc. The answer is blowing in the wind but it is not the wind of turning turbines, its the one blowing the bank doors open! Hence the falling in line to give Greece the pay out the other day.
To refresh Garry's memory, which seems focused on 1988, here's Spencer blogging in the here and now:
"In this instance I am going against my better judgment to answer a particularly crazy article entitled, “Roy Spencer’s Fatal Error: Believing the Vacuum of Space Has a Temperature“.
I can’t tell whether John O’Sullivan really believes what he has written there. While I will assume he does, it still feels like I’m being challenged by a supermarket tabloid to offer proof that Elvis was not abducted by space aliens."
Please be warned the John O'Sullivan in question is not the stalwart Tory former National Review editor, but an eponymous teapartista crank whose science is sui generis.
Thank you Russell for that cool story bro!
We aren't of course, our government is steaming aheadnwith an energy plan that will ultimately lead to fuel poverty, and energy rationing, even with the knowledge that the UK's annual emissions of CO2 are the equivalent of 4 weeks of China's output.
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Mar 8, 2012 at 12:26 PM | geronimo
Fortunately, here in Canada we're out of Kyoto, completely. Ontario is shafting itself with stupid AGW green energy policies, but on the whole, we're out of that game. And the US House is not going to pass any more AGW legislation; with any luck the Senate and Administration will be onside after next January in reversing what is on the books and removing EPA from the energy arena it tried to take over by declaring CO2 a 'pollutant'.
So that leaves the UK in the clutches of the EU and its minions. It's possible that the world price collapse of Natural Gas will indirectly save your hineys; good luck!