Saturday, September 27, 2008

Prepare for more global warming hot air from from the celebocracy

One of the put downs of climate skeptics is that they aren't qualified to comment, the fact that most are seriously qualified passes people by. Yet it is OK for those who aren't qualified to comment in favour of climate alarmism, indeed they are encouraged, and it looks like we are just about to have a fresh round of hot air from the celebocracy.

From Watts Up With That we get this news of a bunch of "celebs" I haven't heard of:

Yesterday (September 25), a crew of scientists, artists, engineers, and journalists boarded a science research vessel in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland bound for Disko Bay. Soon, they’ll travel across the front of the Jakobshavn Glacier, “one of Greenland’s largest glaciers moving at a faster rate than ever before, losing 20 million tons of ice every day,” according to the description from expedition organizers Cape Farewell.

The point of the trip, in addition to scientific research, is “to inspire the creative team to respond to climate change both in the Arctic and on their return.”

...

I admit I am not hip. I have never heard of these artists. But it appears this trip includes a veritable who’s who of today’s influential artists.
  • Luke Bullen, an English drummer and percussionist. Bullen joined the band Addict in 1995 and later formed the band Zanderman with Addict’s lead singer Mark Aston.
  • David Noble, a youth leader, consultant, researcher, writer, speaker, activist and “something of a rogue” with a crazy vision of an entire generation of young people contributing all they can in the collective response to the global climate crisis.
  • Tracey Rowledge, an artist who works with the traditional materials and techniques of bookbinding and gilding, making books and wall pieces that explore the line between spontaneity and the deliberately crafted.
  • Julian Stair, a potter, academic and writer.
  • Graham Hill, a self-described serial entrepreneur, do-gooder and designer, who started TreeHugger.com in 2004.
  • Nicole Krauss, the author of the international bestseller, The History of Love, which won France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger and Amazon’s #1 Book of the Year, and was short-listed for the Orange, Médicis, and Femina prizes.
  • Marcus Brigstocke, a stand-up comic, writer, presenter and actor, who hosts The Late Edition, a live topical TV show on BBC 4.

OK, I have heard of Marcus Brigstocke and I find him as funny as sitting in a traffic jam on the M25 of a Friday afternoon. The rest strike me as the usual list of celebs who the hard of thinking in the MSM are prepared to fawn over and lap up every word of crap that is spoken.

I think the technical term for these celebs is "opinion formers" and as such they can be used in the propaganda war to brainwash those who haven't got the time or inclination to get out and look at what is really happening.

So, do you think these celebs will be well informed and have read all the arguments or will just go with the crap they are fed? No, I don't either and its a pity because if they read the Greenie Watch news letter they might learn a thing or two about what real scientists are saying:
Another skeptic: Dr. Martin Hertzberg, a retired Navy meteorologist with a PhD in physical chemistry A letter to USA Today from Dr. Hertzberg [ruthhertzberg@msn.com]: As a scientist and life-long liberal Democrat, I find the constant regurgitation of the anecdotal, fear mongering clap-trap about human-caused global warming (the Levi, Borgerson article of 9/24/08) to be a disservice to science, to your readers, and to the quality of the political dialogue leading up to the election. The overwhelming weight of scientific evidence shows that the Gore-IPCC theory that human activity is causing global warming is false. For details see my article, "The Lynching of Carbon Dioxide", in the "guest authors" section of www.carbon-sense.com . The difference between a scientist and propagandist is clear. If a scientist has a theory, he searches diligently for data that might contradict it so that he can test it further or refine it. The propagandist carefully selects only the data that agrees with his theory and dutifully ignores any that contradicts it. The global warming alarmists don't even bother with data! All they have are half-baked computer models that are totally out of touch with reality and have already been proven to be false.
If they went to CO2 Science they would see a video entitled Shrinking Glaciers and Presidential Politics presented by Dr Craig Idso. In they would learn that the trend in glacier melt has remained constant isnce about 1860 and there is no eveidence it has anything to do with CO2, manmad or otherwise. Furthermore, this is from published research in the Journal of Geo-Physical Research ie grown up science.



OK, this research only looks at four glaciers, but it should make these celebs think that maybe, just maybe, there are other explanations than MMGW?

If that isn't enough how about this one from Greenie Watch:

Another Dissenter: 'Man-made global warming is 'junk' science' - declares analytical chemist? As an analytical chemist who works in spectroscopy and atmospheric sensing, I am troubled by the lack of common sense regarding carbon dioxide emissions. Our greatest greenhouse gas is water. Atmospheric spectroscopy reveals why water has a 95 percent and CO2 a 3.6 percent contribution to the "greenhouse effect." Carbon dioxide emissions worldwide each year total 3.2 billion tons. That equals about 0.0168 percent of the atmosphere's CO2 concentration of about 19 trillion tons. This results in a 0.00064 percent increase in the absorption of the sun's radiation. This is an insignificantly small number. The yearly increase is many orders of magnitude smaller than the standard deviation errors for CO2 concentration measurement. "Scientific" computer simulations predict global warming based on increased greenhouse gas emissions over time. However, without water's contribution taken into account they omit the largest greenhouse gas from their equations. How can such egregious calculation errors be so blatantly ignored? This is why man-made global warming is "junk" science. Source

Still not convinced that there is another argument out there that means we should be careful about we are fed by climate alarmists? Well here's one last topic, for now, to think about.

Remember that famous "Hockey Stick graph that kicked off all the MMGW paranoia in 1988? You know the one that Gore used in An Incovenient Truth? This one from Wiki is close enough:



Well, there are lots of arguments over it but they get quite heavy. So just have a look at this post from Climate Skeptic who, as always, is a thought provoking read. He takes a lot of complicated science and puts it in to a form that still requires some hard thinking but doesn't require a PhD in Statistical analysis to understand.

Anyway, this recent post should get you thinking about Mann's Hockey Stick theory and the way alarmists, including Al Gore, have misled us:

The one area where I thought he made an explicit factual mistake in his presentation was in evaluating Hansen's forecast to Congress in 1988. He argued that one shouldn't judge Hansen by his "A" scenario (which is WAY off) because Hansen said at the time that this was based on unrealistically high assumptions. But in Hansen's appendix, he says that the A scenario is based on 1.5% a year future growth in CO2 output. In fact, the world has grown CO2 output by 1.75 % a year in the last 20 (source), so in fact the A scenario is, if anything, low.



If you are still with me after this long post do you think that our celebs will have looked at these other arguments and will give what they see a lot of thought before inflicting their opinions on us? No I don't either. I expect them to generate more hot air and CO2 than I use in a year, and all of it will be crap.

PS I know that by using pejorative term to describe those who believe in MMGW to the point where it is a religion I have shown myself to be a skeptic, which I don't deny. The reason I'm a skeptic is that about 18 months ago I had an idea for a small business based on man made CO2 being the main cause of climate change. When I started looking round for supporting evidence I realised that I had been fed a line by our political overlords and the MSM and there was more to this than they were admitting.

2 comments:

TheFatBigot said...

I'm glad to see others have found GreenieWatch and WUWT, wonderful resources for the open minded.

Simon Fawthrop said...

I've had them on my RSS feed reader (MS Outlook) for about 6 months. The only problem is that their output is prodigous and I don't get round to reading it all.