Proper wrong - Josh 194

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Cartoons by Josh

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[Paul]

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/mps-say-wind-farm-contracts-are-shocking-8449897.html

Remember that in these times of ice and snow to check on any elderly neighbours and check their thermostat is turned down a degree or two in order to save the planet.

[Manfred]

From the same newspaper

David Bellamy: 'I was shunned. They didn't want to hear'

"...But his fame and acclaim rolled off the rails in 2004 when – in the teeth of public opinion and mounting scientific evidence – he said global warming was nothing but "poppycock". He was deserted by fans, shunned by peers and, he says, ostracised by broadcasters and conservation groups that once thrived through his endorsement: he was sacked as president of the Wildlife Trusts.
...
All of the work dried up after that. I was due to start another series with the BBC but that didn't go anywhere, and the other side [ITV] didn't want to know. I was shunned. They didn't want to hear the other side." But does he still believe he is right? "Absolutely. It is not happening at all, but if you get the idea that people's children will die because of CO2 they fall for it," he says, perhaps buoyed by forecasters at the Met Office this week downgrading a prediction for global warming to suggest that by 2017 average temperatures will have remained about the same for two decades."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/david-bellamy-i-was-shunned-they-didnt-want-to-hear-8449307.html

[Pharos]

The Metoffice lame 'rebuttal' for the Delingpole Mail article is still attracting a lot of comments on their blog.

http://metofficenews.wordpress.com/2013/01/10/addressing-the-daily-mail-and-james-delingpoles-crazy-climate-change-obsession-article/#comments

but not nearly as many as for James response to the rebuttal

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100197657/the-met-office-defending-the-indefensible-as-per-usual/

[shub]

Rose talks about the 'dissenter-trashing machine'. I have seen it well in operation even within sceptic blogs. Heh.

[John Shade]

Well done Josh.

[Rhoda Ramirez]

Josh is a national treasure. Hell - he's an international treasure!

[LevelGaze]

@shub, 23:17

Ah, shub,
I too have seen it, within these very hallowed pages even.
Neither side has totally clean hands.

[Radical Rodent]

I, too, have read the Bellamy article – he is one of my own personal heroes – and had wondered why he had dropped off the radar; now we know. He was candid in admitting that he had trawled the depths of his personal knowledge, but his presentational skills can be little bettered – only David Attenbrough comes close, but he is more clinically detached (and obviously more politically astute), and does not have that child-like glee David Bellamy enthuses into everything he says. If you are reading this, sir, I am abasing myself in your general direction.

The comments below the article are not worth comment..

[steve ta]

It was the disgusting treatment of David Bellamy in the Grauniad that first led me to examine skeptical arguments. There was a Moonbat rant about a Bellamy comment regarding glaciers in the Alps that was the key.

In fact, the Moonbat was right, and DB had made a silly error, but that in no way explained the vitriolic attack, so I was intrigued and read as much background as I could so find out why DB was anti-AGW.

So for me at least, I don't know when I'd have discovered that CAGW was a scam had the Moonbat simply been polite in his response to DB.

[Beth Cooper]

Say Manfred, re Bellamy being shunned ... I guess shunning is a behavioral ploy
of the virtuous consensus,like 'we've got yer on our LIST' and consensus climate
science or consensus anything. Ref Freeman Dyson on 'Why I am a heretic' OMG!

[Beth Cooper]

Like Rhoda says, Josh, yer a treasure. Treasure catalgogue fer the open society.:
Socrates (not Plato the philosopher king)
Galileo
Montaigne
David Hume
Voltaire
de Tocqueville
Karl Popper
Friedrich Hayek
F Dyson
Nassim Taleb
et al

[Barry Woods]

Short explanation of why the Met Office story isa big news story... in my opinion.

Pre Copenhagen Climate Conference (Septemeber 2009) The BBC issued a press release, that states global warming is set to continue, that temperature slowdown has been observed for a decade, which is consistant with model, but not for much longer and warming will resume, stating 3 out of 5 next 5 years will be warmest on record. All whilst referring to the very same (now describes as 'experimental' no consequence for climate change, by Slingo) decadal forecasts

'the 3 out of 5' got a lot of coverage ..

Met Office - News - Global Warming Set to Continue - September 2009
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2009/global-warming

"One such internal fluctuation over the last decade could have been enough to mask the expected global temperature rise. However, the Met Office's decadal forecast predicts renewed warming after 2010 with about half of the years to 2015 likely to be warmer globally than the current warmest year on record."

So this Met Office story in January 2013 is that the new projections seem to negate all this, and suggest a slowdown in temps for 20 years, which goes against the models (this is confirmed by a link in that ACTUAL September 2009 press release to a scientific paper.

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/pdf/j/j/global_temperatures_09.pdf

"The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate."

The very same paper (and press release) confirms a decadal slowdown of temperatures. (not even using 1998). How many times have people been abused for talking about this temperature slowdown... by an activist media? or in fact been told that global warming was accelerating?

"Observations indicate that global temperature rise has slowed in the last decade (Fig. 2.8a). The least squares trend for January 1999 to December 2008 calculated from the HadCRUT3 dataset (Brohan et al. 2006) is +0.07±0.07°C decade –1—much less than the 0.18°C decade –1 recorded between 1979"

So this is why it is a story, previous projections were 'wrong', which were based on decadal forecast now described as 'experimental, nothing to do with climate change, which were then widely used and quoted in the media to push policymakers at Copenhagen.

Slingo (Met Office) should have been asked to answer this on BBC's feedback.

But she was presented with 2 callers that were BOTH climate change activists, (not stated in the programme, person made the transcript looked the names up)

https://sites.google.com/site/mytranscriptbox/home/20130111_fb

One of the BBC Feedback callers a founder of a group which has a 'Sceptics - Hall of Shame
http://www.campaigncc.org/hallofshame

(Campaign Against Climate Change) - producing lists of deniers, and another senior member George Marshall (who writes for the Guardian on occasion, the Guardian's George Monbiot is President) ) states (talking with Greenpeace) on how to deal with sceptics.

http://www.joabbess.com/2010/04/17/sceptic-backlash-questions-answered/

" Look at the word “sceptic”. It’s a very carefully chosen word.
- I rather use “denier” – and I’m delighted to say it works." - George Marshall CaCC

And now we have the Guardian hyping it up allover again...

"In fact, the Met Office's figures indicate that most of the years between 2013 and 2017 will be hotter than those of the hottest year on record. "

despite the Met Office's Chief Press Officer thoughts:

http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/comment-permalink/20577864

In my opinion, the scientific institutions, cheif scientists, etc need to confront the environmentalist activists (and that includes part of the media) not 'sceptics' . And the Met Office needs to be perceived as an honest broker on the science and not perceived as warm for policies sake.

and not put out changes on Xmas eve, with no press, and on the same url as the old forecasts.

http://i46.tinypic.com/123147s.gif

http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/major-change-in-uk-met-office-global-warming-forecast/

[Mike Jackson]

Remember that in these times of ice and snow to check on any elderly neighbours and check their thermostat is turned down a degree or two in order to save the planet.

Paul, there are undertones in there of a Goodies (or perhaps Feldman) sketch, details of which escape me except that I seem to remember it involved a list of dos and don'ts for tourists by Tim Brooke-Taylor.

[Pharos]

The first and original David Rose article criticised by the Metoffice, now nearly a year old, is well worth revisiting in the light of the recent decadel revision. It assembles in an impressively well presented and source-backed fashion powerful sceptical challenges to the orthodoxy, backed by some notable quotes from such as Judith Curry.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2093264/Forget-global-warming--Cycle-25-need-worry-NASA-scientists-right-Thames-freezing-again.html

In contrast, the Metoffice 'rebuttal' was pathetic

http://metofficenews.wordpress.com/2012/01/29/met-office-in-the-media-29-january-2012/

The second Rose article was as penetrating as the first-

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2217286/Global-warming-stopped-16-years-ago-reveals-Met-Office-report-quietly-released--chart-prove-it.html

and the Metoffice response nearly as lame, producing only the warm year bar graph as the strawman offering to counter the stalled temperature graph.

http://metofficenews.wordpress.com/tag/david-rose/

And now we have the deja vu rebuttal of Delingpoles Daily Mail article rolling on.

[Mike Jackson]

Barry Woods
I have always said that the use of "anomalies" — itself a pejorative term; what's the matter with "variation"? — is designed and possibly even intended to confuse the layman, in which category I would also include most politicians.
I understand the theory underpinning the idea but a close examination of that theory, which is allegedly meant to cope with variation in the number and location of reporting stations, shows that it falls foul of Jackson's Principle: "If you have no data, you have no data." Interpolation or extrapolation are no better than making it up which when practised by five-year-olds is called "lying".
(In reality,five-year-olds are usually better at it!)
In effect the MO are saying that the global mean temperature (whatever that is) is going to be a little less than half-a-degree warmer than the 1971-2000 average (assuming they actually know what that was) instead of a little more than half-a-degree warmer at the end of the next five years.
Forgive me if I don't see this as a major catastrophe. Forgive me if I don't understand how the supposedly reasonably intelligent people who are employed by the Guardian and the BBC can't work out when they are being conned.
As you say, it certainly is time that the environmental activists were called to account but first it is going to be necessary to disentangle the facts from the flannel, to explain that (eg) the West Antarctic Peninsula is not warming twice as fast as we thought just because somebody has made up some figure to fill a gap in a temperature record and we need to do it in words that even the most simple-minded of us can understand.
As I've said previously and elsewhere we have given the enviro-activists a 10-length start because they have been prepared to distort data, to distort facts, to make up both to produce the result that they wanted, and to lobby shamelessly for their views to be acknowledged as the only ones that mattered because, after all, it's for The Planet, etc., etc. The people and the politicos have gone along with it because it all sounds very plausible and they don't know any better and it's not until the likes of Moonbat put their foot in it that people like steveta (among many, many others) suddenly start to dig below the surface and discover what lies beneath.

[DaveS]

Jan 14, 2013 at 12:26 PM | Mike Jackson

"The people and the politicos have gone along with it because it all sounds very plausible and they don't know any better "

And because politicians love a good crisis - what could appeal more to the self-righteous grand-standing insticts of your average modern politico than to be seen to be leading the charge to 'save the planet'?

[Barry Woods]

Ref BBC feedback on the Met Office story -

Campaign Against Climate Change say the BBC Feedback programme cut out the fact that Hilary was a campaigner... Which led me to think she was dishonest. I hope she complains to the BBC..

Barry Woods ‏@BarryJWoods
why didn't Hilary disclose 2 @BBCR4Feedback that she @HilaryGander was a @campaigncc founder and activist? @aDissentient @clim8resistance

Climate Campaign ‏@campaigncc
@BarryJWoods They cut that bit. Not sure what you're getting at though - it was about clear misrepresentation of Met Office @hilarygander

Barry Woods ‏@BarryJWoods
seriously?. the BBC cut that out? ! @bbcfeedback why did you cut out the fact that a caller was a campainger! @campaigncc @adissentient

Barry Woods ‏@BarryJWoods
Are you not annoyed that they allowed the public to think you misled the public, when BBC cut it! @campaigncc @adissentient @bbcfeedback

Barry Woods ‏@BarryJWoods
Are you not annoyed that they allowed the public to think you misled the public, when BBC cut it! @campaigncc @adissentient @bbcfeedback

[Pharos]

The thrust of research funding is deliberately targeted at justifying, underpinning and perpetuating the political policy of using AGW (aka 'climate change') as a vehicle to justify social behavioural change as part of the UN's 'sustainable' goal agenda. NERC is the main funding authority in the UK for Earth Science Research. Their present policy is clearly stated on their website.ie

'NERC's strategic goal

To deliver world-leading environmental research at the frontiers of knowledge:
-enabling society to respond urgently to global climate change and the increasing pressures on natural resources;
-contributing to UK leadership in predicting the regional and local impacts of environmental change from days to decades; and
-creating and supporting vibrant, integrated research communities.'

Politicians were not reactive to the climate agenda, but proactively created it. Ultimate responsibility for the mischief lies entirely with the politicians. Were the scientists also instigative? Perhaps one or two, Royal Society comes to mind, but in general just gullible and opportunistic.

[Barry Woods]

Hilary Gander ‏@HilaryGander
@BarryJWoods @campaigncc I'm happy that @BBCR4Feedback exposed the flaws in BBC report. They cut my intro as CaCC but that's less important.

So I would like to to Hilary for thinking her dishonest, it was the BBC's fault...

the other caller 'listener' appears to be a founding member of a solar action group

[Justice4Rinka]

I don't know when I'd have discovered that CAGW was a scam had the Moonbat simply been polite in his response to DB.

Me too, in general terms.I recall reading Usenet 10 or 15 years ago and happening across the holocaust deniers, whom I'd heard of but never encountered. They were easily taken down by posters who didn't need to resort to abuse to do so. The abuse-hurling and the attempts to shut down discussions by wrecking the threads with junk always and only came from the side without a good argument.

When I encountered ecofascists and their "arguments" - that the debate happened without you, so shut up - it all seemed eerily familiar. If you have good arguments you can advance them, and if they are challenged, then you defend them; if you can't, maybe your arguments aren't strong enough.

If someone doesn't want to discuss the evidence for, and uncertainty within, their views, it is always a bad sign.

As Orwell said, "Within any important issue, there are always aspects no one wishes to discuss."

My hunch is that all sceptics were created by environmentalists.

Incidentally, and just for ZDB, here's a highly topical news story. I know you like this one, Zed.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html

[ssat]

David Whitehouse at GWPF;

http://www.thegwpf.org/met-office-attacks-bbc-global-temperature-standstill/

[Radical Rodent]

It is strange that most “denialists” do not deny that there is climate change or global warming. What they do deny is that the process is fully understood, or can be properly forecast, or what (if any) action needs to be done – or CAN be done – to counteract it. However, most “alarmists” deny that the science is still in flux, that there is still a lot of data to be assimilated, and that we still do not understand what exactly is going on. Just who is in “denial” here?

I was duped into the scam by Al Gore’s film, but, wanting to know more about what I could do to help, I began searching the internet. What I did find was hostility towards anyone who asked questions – ANY questions, but more so if it was questioning the “facts” (aka lies) – all they wanted was wholehearted, blind support, whereas “denialist” sites tended to be more informative and pleasant. What eventually pitched me into your camp was one site where not one shred of scientific argument to my questions was offered; I was ridiculed and reviled, with recommendation for self-harm and suicide. And they call US crazy!

[Adrian Kerton`]

UK Met Office

“UK Outlook for Monday 28 Jan 2013 to Monday 11 Feb 2013:

There is greater than average uncertainty through this period, with no strong signal for any one weather type to dominate. However, on balance colder conditions are more favoured rather than the milder weather experienced so far this winter.

Issued at: 0400 on Mon 14 Jan 2013″

Enough said?

[Mailman]

Funny how we NEVER get that kind of forecast when it comes to heat in the summer?

Mailman

[Pharos]

Samizdata quote of the day - On the shame of the UK’s Met Office

http://www.samizdata.net/2013/01/samizdata-quote-of-the-day-241/

[Roy]

Lord Monckton has a highly critical piece on the Met Office on WUWT.

Has the Met Office committed fraud?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/14/has-the-met-office-committed-fraud/

[Stephen Richards]

only David Attenbrough comes close, but he is more clinically detached (and obviously more politically astute),

I call that politically unprincipled. What I consider to be dishonest.