BBC and Plane Stupid

Despite feeling like shit I had to drive to "oop north" yesterday, 175 miles of mainly motorway driving. Set off about 9:15 and about 10 mins in to the journey discovered my iTrip was broken which meant that I had to listen to the radio. No liking the prattle of DJ's I was flipping between Radio 4 and Radio 5.

Radio 5 seemed to dedicate itself to a vox pop on the Plane Stupid demo at Standsted airport. At first I wasn't too bothered although I didn't think they had done themselves any favours on the PR front. However as the morning went on we had ever more callers claiming that they were right and coming up with ever wilder claims of what will happen if we don't stop emitting CO2 now. One even claimed that we only had 7 years to the "tipping point".

Not one guest was brought on to bring a modicum of reality to the proceedings. The presenter, Victoria Derbyshire, seemed to be complicit in all this. Anyone listening wouldn't have believed there was any sort of debate at all.

Anyway, rather stupidly I continued driving with my blood pressure rising as I shouted at the radio every time another idiot from Plane Stupid came on with another, wilder, claim.

This is a shame because I believe they could have made a very good point. Plane fuel isn't taxed which means that they aren't paying a Pigovian tax on the fuel. Instead they relied on ignorance and fear and the unquestioning obedience of the BBC to getaway with claiming there is positive feedback in the environment.

For an explanation of this see Climate Skeptic:

Frequent readers will know that I have often criticized climate scientists for assuming, without strong evidence, that climate is dominated by positive feedback. Such an assumption about a long-term stable system implies that climate is relatively unique among natural processes, and is a real head scratcher when advocated by folks like Michael Mann, who simultaneously claim that past temerpatures are stable within very narrow ranges (Stability and positive feedback are two great tastes that do not go great together).

Well, it seems that those of use who were offended by the notion of a long-term stable natural process being dominated by positive feedback may have been right after all (via Tom Nelson):

Cirrus clouds are performing a disappearing act which is taking scientists by surprise.

In the global warming debate, it is assumed that temperature rises will lead to more rainfall, which in turn will see an increase in high-altitude cloud cover that will trap infrared heat.

But research on tropical climate systems has found the opposite is happening, with cirrus clouds thinning as the air warms, leading to rapid cooling as infrared heat escapes from the atmosphere to outer space.

I also recommend looking at Climate Skeptic's video's for an even better explanation which you'll find in the sidebar

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.

Carbon Chastity

Every now and again I read something that I think yes, that's exactly how I think, and wish I could express myself only half as well. Via Greenie Watch we find this excellent OpEd in the Washington post:

I'm not a global warming believer. I'm not a global warming denier. I'm a global warming agnostic who believes instinctively that it can't be very good to pump lots of CO2into the atmosphere but is equally convinced that those who presume to know exactly where that leads are talking through their hats.

I started to become a skeptic when I realised all the great and the good had made up their minds and that anyone who challenged them was somehow deranged. I thought it was me but:

For a century, an ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous knowledge class -- social planners, scientists, intellectuals, experts and their left-wing political allies -- arrogated to themselves the right to rule either in the name of the oppressed working class (communism) or, in its more benign form, by virtue of their superior expertise in achieving the highest social progress by means of state planning (socialism).

Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher's England to Deng's China, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more people out of poverty more rapidly than ever in human history.

Just as the ash heap of history beckoned, the intellectual left was handed the ultimate salvation: environmentalism. Now the experts will regulate your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian socialism but -- even better -- in the name of Earth itself.

Great summation of the arrogance of the Pollys, Monbiots and general Beeboids of this world; for it is their arrogance and closed minds that does the debate on AGW most harm. Their may well be a problem with CO2, but if there a problem is their cure worse than the decease?

But this is the real reason why they want the debate to be finished and their consensus accepted:

Only Monday, a British parliamentary committee proposed that every citizen be required to carry a carbon card that must be presented, under penalty of law, when buying gasoline, taking an airplane or using electricity. The card contains your yearly carbon ration to be drawn down with every purchase, every trip, every swipe.

There's no greater social power than the power to ration. And, other than rationing food, there is no greater instrument of social control than rationing energy, the currency of just about everything one does and uses in an advanced society.

Its all about controlling the minutiae of our lives so that we only do the things of they approve.

Go and read the whole thing, it is very good.

My personal carbon usage

Mulling over the latest idiocy policy pronouncements on Personal Carbon Credits from our glorious leaders in Westminster it struck me that I might have a problem given some of my hobbies as well as commuting costs. Now, I'm a great believer in polluter pays and Pigou Taxes that cover the external costs but I really don't like this idea and I reckon there is another motive. But before I expand on that lets look at how this will work.

Its just cost me £90 to fill my car. I suppose my carbon usage for that one will be easy - the petrol station will have my registration number and being linked in to the Vehicle Licensing Centre computer my carbon usage can be very quickly calculated.

I play a lot of golf and I suppose the carbon usage of charging the battery for my electric trolley will be counted against my house usage, which will have been surveyed by some licensing authority who will decide on how efficient it is and award credits. But a golf course needs lots of machinery for grass cutting etc, how will those credits be allocated? Do I get a proportion based on how many times I play? What happens when I visit another club to play? It sounds like we need a central database to figure this out, probably on a rolling mean like a telecoms network Long Running Incremental Cost (LRIC) model.

Next, I am an occasional dinghy sailor. Now you might think that this is easy because we use wind power, but you would be wrong. We need safety boats and committee boats and a boat that cuts back weeds. Again, how do I pay for my portion of these? And do I pick them up if I am on safety duty or when I'm racing? Also, like many sailors I often take my boat off to other places where they have safety boats and committee boats. Looks like another database.

This evening I went water skiing and that is horrendous, more databases? What about the gym, all those machines, swimming pools, saunas etc, another database.

Given all these activities I probably consume more calories than the average person - more databases? I haven't even got to holidays (where I do most of the above activities) or other any other activities like going to the pub.

Anyway, this isn't about bragging about everything I do, its about how my enjoyment is going to be seriously curtailed, but more importantly to demonstrate that the only way this will work is if bureaucrats can snoop in to every single corner of our lives to measure and allocate carbon credits to it.

Now you can see why MP's, Guardainstats and BBC luminaries think its a good idea, they're all such a bunch of control freaks that they can't bare the rest of us enjoying ourselves and doing as we please and this lets them take control of us. Bastards.

The there's this:

But Mr Benn said there were problems with the plan: "It's got potential but, in essence, it's ahead of its time, the cost of implementing it would be quite high, and there are a lot of practical problems to overcome."

The practical problem you will need to overcome, Mr Benn is that if you will be dangling from the end of a rope if you even think about implementing this and that twat Monbiot will be next to you as well:

Environmentalist George Monbiot applauded the scheme. "It's more progressive than taxation, it tends to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor; it's transparent; it's easy for everyone to understand, you all get the same carbon ration.

"It also contains an inbuilt incentive for people to think about their energy use and to think about how they are going to stay within their carbon ration."

No, George, it will make me think about the enjoyment I will get from stringing up you Benn and the rest of your ilk.

Another nail in the cimate alarmist coffin

Climate alarmists dismiss any research and data that challenges their pet positive feedback claims as being from non climate scientists and therefore not worthy. Well this research should be harder to dismiss:

Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist in UAHuntsville's Earth System Science Center

He has been researching clouds and their role in positive feedback and seems like someone who should know a bit about climate and how it works, or doesn't work as the case may be. Whats more, he appears to be an open minded researcher who has looked at the latest data and decided that his original assumptions were wrong.

For those who haven't been able to keep up with the climate debate nobody disputes that CO2 is a warming gas, the problem, for climate alarmists is that it will only cause, at most, 1deg of warming for each doubling, and even that is being challenged. In order to make their wilder claims that allow them to control our lives climate alarmists need positive feedback in the climate. Climate modellers have built this in to their models by claiming that as the climate warms we get a build up of clouds, which in turn causes more warming.

Unfortunately for climate alarmists Dr Spencer's research doesn't support this theory:

"All leading climate models forecast that as the atmosphere warms there should be an increase in high altitude cirrus clouds, which would amplify any warming caused by man made greenhouse gases," he said. "That amplification is a positive feedback. What we found in month-to-month fluctuations of the tropical climate system was a strongly negative feedback. As the tropical atmosphere warms, cirrus clouds decrease. That allows more infrared heat to escape from the atmosphere to outer space."

Note that is a strongly negative feedback; this may even mean that the increase in temperature of 1 deg for each doubling of CO2 may be too high.

And just to add insult to injury for climate alarmists Dr Spencer is no lone maverick, as the alarmists often claim:

The results of this research were published today in the American Geophysical Union's "Geophysical Research Letters" on-line edition. The paper was co-authored by UAHuntsville's Dr. John R. Christy and Dr. W. Danny Braswell, and Dr. Justin Hnilo of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA.

If you read the report you will see that there is still some uncertainty of what this means and that the results of the research still need to be modelled, but that is part of the scientific process followed by those with open minds. However, this latest data is another step in calming the wildest claims and hopefully starting a grown up debate on what is really happening, but I won't hold my breath.

H/t Climate Science

April snow, so what?

Occasionally the weather can even take a rather wintry turn during June. On the 2nd June 1975 snow fell in a number of places with midday temperatures held down at only 2°Celsius!

Then all the great and good were forecasting an ice age and anyone who challenged them was some sort of nutter.

If climate models are so good

how come they don't model La Nina and El Nino?

Global temperatures for 2008 will be slightly cooler than last year as a result
of the cold La Nina current in the Pacific, UN meteorologists have said.
The World Meteorological Organization's secretary-general, Michel Jarraud, told the BBC it was likely that La Nina would continue into the summer.

They are, after all, well known phenomena. And if they can't predict these how can they make this statement:

and in a few years time we are confident that the current record temperature of 1998 will be beaten when the La Nina has ended

And yes i do understand the difference between weather and climate and long term trends. My point is that alarmists seem happy to use peaks like 2008, El Nino high? to make their point, yet when another phenomena is only a blip.

At last the penny's dropping on bio fuels

Even the beeb is starting to realise that all that is said and done at the alter of the almighty "global warming" is not necessarily good. This morning I nearly had an accident whilst driving when Today carried a piece on the insanity of bio fuel legislation which comes in to force in April. The we article can be read here:

The UK's chief environment scientist has called for a delay to a policy demanding inclusion of biofuels into fuel at pumps across the UK.

Professor Robert Watson said ministers should await the results of their inquiry into biofuels' sustainability

Some scientists think biofuels' carbon benefits may be currently outweighed by negative effects from their production.

The Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation (RTFO) is to introduce 2.5% biofuels at the pumps from 1 April.

On the radio he claimed he hadn't even been consulted by ministers before they implemented the policy. I am sure that, like me, you would expect any right thinking layman to at least the consult the experts before making up their mind. You would certainly think the Government would before passing legislation, wouldn't you? I'm sure you can guess why they didn't bother -

The DfT is itself under pressure from an EU policy demanding the inclusion of 5% biofuels in road fuels by 2010 in an attempt to cut carbon emissions.

Yep, the good old EU appears to have come up with a policy that not even rabid environmentalists support:

His [Professor Watson] comments in an interview with BBC Radio 4's Today programme appear on the day when a coalition of pressure groups from Oxfam to Greenpeace writes to the Department for Transport (DfT) demanding that the policy be delayed until after the review.

So what do the EU have to say:

The EU's Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas earlier told BBC News that this target should only be reached if the biofuels could be proved to be sustainably produced.

But its EU policy you fucking numpty, one that you and your fellow collection of failed and corrupt politicians have implemented without knowing the facts. And you wonder why the EU is being held in contempt by so many people.

The closing piece though is the real killer:

But many will question why energy experts promoting biofuels in the EU were
allowed to go unchallenged so long by the views on biofuels of agriculture
specialists or soil scientists.

Is it because they are making a shit load of our money promoting scare stories and promising their pet solutions alone have the answer? Surely not?

Anyway, its a good start and all we need now is people to question why the climate alarmists are allowed to get away with making outlandish claims of 8 deg warming based on positive feedback in nature and we might be able to have a grown up debate on the subject of global warming.

Global Warming Stress Syndrome Increasing, Psychologist Says

This is a great post and I strongly recommend that everyone takes the time to read it. It taster:

Dr. Hyde described typical symptoms: “A belief that mankind causes every bad event, excessive hand-wringing, frequent bowel movements, a tendency to lurk on Internet message boards and post things such as, ‘There is a consensus! There is a consensus!’, an irrational desire to measure one’s personal ‘carbon footprint.’” But the most worrying of all is the, “Urge to make idiotic comments in public tying global warming to any event.”

On this day

in 1633, Galileo Galilei arrived in Rome for trial before the Inquisition.

Galileo's championing of Copernicanism was controversial within his lifetime. The geocentric view had been dominant since the time of Aristotle, and the controversy engendered by Galileo's opposition to this view resulted in the Catholic Church's prohibiting the advocacy of heliocentrism as potentially factual, because that theory had no decisive proof and was contrary to the literal meaning of Scripture.[7] Galileo was eventually forced to recant his heliocentrism and spent the last years of his life under house arrest on orders of the Inquisition.

I have commented a few times that climate sceptics are more like Galileo than "flat earther's" as claimed by climate alarmists.

I suspect it won't be long until climate skeptics are rehabilitated in the same way Galileo was.

Forget Inconvenient Truth, this lecture should go to all schools

Courtesy of William Briggs, Statistician, again, we get a video of a lecture given by geologist Bob Carter. This guy is brilliant, he knows how to give a lecture and get across a complicated subject in a clear and straightforward way. He is also very humurous in the way he destroys the climate alarmist predictions.

So, grab yourselves a glass of wine or whatever you have wen relaxing and take the next 35 minutes or so to watch these videos.

Part 1


Part 2



Part 3



Part 4

Climate skeptism not sexy to statisticians

William M. Briggs, Statistician, is at an American Mathematical Society (AMS)conference on climate change and has some interesting, but very dry, conference reports. One almost throw away comment in today's report (day 3) is quite shocking:

The rest of my talk went well, though I noticed that, for our session, we had only about one-quarter the number of people listening as listened to the people who were sympathetic to the idea that mankind causes increasing temperatures

This is worrying, because if dry old mathematicians are focusing on the pro climate change debate how can we every expect and full and balanced review of the data and debate on the subject?

There was a more heartwarming end to his report though:

I ran into Jim O’Brian, also from FSU, in the COAPS group. Jim tried to recruit me to that group last year: it was a good job, but circumstances would not let me move from New York City. Anyway, Jim was wearing his Nobel Peace Prize pin, somewhat ironically. He was, and is, one of the many 100s of scientists on the IPCC, but Jim is openly skeptical of man-made global warming. Which should give you pause next time you hear the word “consensus” used to describe scientific thought about the matter.

I suppose there is still hope that the catastrophists won't get it all there own way.

Anthropogenic Continental Drift: An Incoherent Truth

From Climate Skeptic we get this highly amusing link:

A new menace to the planet has been discovered and validated by a consensus of politically reliable scientists: Anthropogenic Continental Drift (ACD) will result in catastrophic damage and untold suffering, unless immediate indemnity payments from the United Sates, Europe, and Australia be made to the governments of non-industrial nations, to counteract this man-made threat to the world's habitats

It is a wonderful parody of how some of the wilder claims for AGW are made. I particularly like this one:

This widening of the Atlantic is taking place at an astounding rate, according to indisputable IPCD scientific data. Today it costs almost a third again as much to fly an Air France jet from New York to Paris than it did in 1997, a clear indicator that the ocean has indeed increased in size in the past decade. Surface shipping rates have likewise increased dramatically.

Well, I don't think anyone could deny that costs have gone up, it just the cause of those rising costs that is in dispute. And next comes the wonderful climate fascist clincher:

"This is a clear and reliable indicator of the speed of ACD," said Passapotapissalong, "much more so than the global positioning satellite data often cited by 'Continental Drift Deniers.' The GPS system was, after all, originally created by the US military to enhance their empire-building program, and we all know who controls the US military." He paused at this point and pulled his ears out to each side, a clear reference to the ape-like countenance of the American president.

Now there are still some who won't believe this is closure and want to rely on statistics, but hey, lets look at who pays for their research and data:

"Although these so-called 'scientists' claim that there is no GPS data to support the rapid widening of the Atlantic Ocean, they are all employees of American corporations or have been paid to falsify their data by the American government. Air France fuel costs are a much more reliable indicator of distance flown." He added that he and his right-thinking colleagues had "nothing to gain" by presenting their findings, pointing out that their stipends, expenses and salaries were drawn from the IPCD General Fund, not corporate or government grants.

I commend the whole post and comments to one and all