The London Science Museum has abandoned it’s fort like barricade–the “NoDebateCorral” and many skeptics are rejoicing that the formerly Gung Ho institute seems to have done a major about-face. I remain highly skeptical of their new “skepticality”.
Remember, this is the same museum that was blatantly telling you the UK taxpayer which policy you were supposed to vote (and pay) for:
Note the claim about “seeing the evidence”. I have seen the light!
This is the team that only last October launched the Proveit Exhibition to “help” Copenhagen. They were not even remotely equivocal then about their political aims and beliefs:
““The Copenhagen conference is a crucial opportunity to find an international solution to the threat of climate change and to transform the way we generate and consume energy…
Dr Vicky Carroll, Prove It! Project Leader and Curator of Science at the Science Museum said: “Scientific evidence shows that climate change is happening. We need to tackle it urgently. Prove it! allows visitors to explore the evidence for climate change in the Science Museum and online, get to grips with the Copenhagen conference, and make their view count.”’
See that phrase: Make their view count? They were hoping to use their poll results to pressure politicians into “doing something”. But the poll results shocked them… with skeptics outnumbering believers by 5 to 1 initially, and amassing thousands of votes). Even though the Museum have made the minor concession of changing the gallery name to “Climate Science” instead of …”Climate Change” I remain very unconvinced that they have really shifted position themselves. The new exhibition won’t open until just before the UNFCCC deals in Mexico, and we all know that these exhibits can be stacked with loaded questions and half truths. If they were willing to get a consultant skeptical scientist, I’d be convinced this might be more than some token “trick” to appear to be impartial, (while they assembled the camouflaged AGW guns in every exhibit).
You have to wonder how much they wanted you to “make your view count”? Not apparently enough to keep the poll results up on the site page. Perhaps I missed them, but the current ProveIt page doesn’t even mention that the poll existed. It hardly looks like they’ve taken the poll results to heart. The poll itself was launched by no less than two of Her Majesties Ministers, but the results evidently don’t bear repeating. And speaking of poll results, the tally shown below from Ric Werme (who has all the data) bears all the hallmarks of a typical climate science graph–namely there are suspicious discontinuities, gravity defying changes in trends, and we all suspect some “adjustment” of the data. True to form, an FOI has been put in…
Proveit poll, Thanks to Ric Werme
Watts Up had a post on the slipshod nature of the poll security which pretty much seems to have let anything go.
The Science Museum’s director says they will be neutral, which appears to be laudable, but he also says:
“The climate science community, by and large, has concluded that humans have intervened in the system in a way that will lead to climate change. But that is their story. It’s not our story, so that can’t be our conclusion. If we take sides we will alienate some of the people who want to be part of the discussion.
Obviously he still believes carbon is a problem, and his real concern is not about getting the science right, but about alienating people.
It appears the Science Museum has realized they will be mocked if they don’t change their highly politicized position. They can hardly appear to be an impartial museum after all, if 30% of the taxpayers who fund them outright disagree with their pat conclusions. The taxpayers might revolt. (Oh look, I think they did.)
The only thing I’m sure of, is that the new version of Climate Science will be more subtle that the old one.
An interesting volte face from this esteemed institution.
Is Climate Science any more worthy of space in the Science Museum ‘though that one on Sociology for instance ?
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Strictly OT but perhaps just as interesting to note, linked to from beside the same article in the British Times, one is hearted to note:-
Government’s adverts banned for overstating climate change
That is the Depertment of Climate Change’s (DECC) attempts to scare children with alarmist adverts, distorting nursery rhymes and drowning dogs at bedtime, have been banned, but only for overstating the IPCC’s own case for AGW (AR4).
One wonders will the DECC follow the Science Museum’s example and change it’s name once again – there’ll be an election before Mexico though.
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[…] UK Science Museum hit by skeptical ICBM, makes small concession … […]
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Has Climate Change been X-rated ?
Here’s how the Science Museum now presents cooling the planet & capturing CO2.
“A night of free adults-only entertainment”
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This area in the museum should be named THE GALLERY OF FRAUD!
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Joe Veragio: #4
Perhaps they are going to explain all of the “naughty bits” (snigger, snigger)?
——————
It is interesting to note the Science Museum’s use of the phrase, “Scientific evidence shows that …”.
In my very first physics lecture, the lecturer asked if any students were majoring in law.
One or two hands were raised. And he said, “Well, law may well be based on amassing evidence that ‘proves’ a proposition. But science is based on the continual search for evidence that disproves a proposition that was previously accepted. Law relies on precedent, science never does. Enjoy your course, I am sure you will find the different perspectives interesting”.
The phrase, “scientific evidence shows …”, was a deliberate construct of the advertising industry, back in the early days of television in the USA. Adverts showed people in lab coats, staring at beakers containing coloured liquid and such, working hard to prove that pile of washing “A” was “whiter” than pile of washing “B”.
Of course, the whole thing was a crock because the early black and white TV technology did not reproduce colour brightness correctly. Consequently, the lab coats and the pile “A” (the “whiter” wash) were actually lemon yellow, and pile “B”, was actually white.
The advertising brilliance of this is that people who have not studied science do not understand the difference in the two philosophies. Almost everybody is used to the idea of legal proof, so they do not question the “Scientific evidence shows that …” message.
The real questions are whether the people at the Science Museum understand the difference, and whether they are being disingenuous in their choice of words.
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By Mexico the cooling climate might expose these propagandists even more at the museum.
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No doubt Robin “The science is settled” Williams will give this plenty of coverage in coming weeks.
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It’s running it’s course, and it’s all down hill from here. I was ridiculed by some pretty educated types 18 months ago for suggesting AGW was a short term religion, but now we have a slow motion implosion. Slow enough for them to morph into other things and they will. The remnants will reform but they could never possibly dream of a better policy lever than CO2 reduction. So good it came by accident, they just couldn’t quite pull it off. Scares me now that people like us have had such an impact on this. Subtract our activities(sceptic) and picture it. Scary.
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Rereke #6
Your physics lecturer was spot on – do you know what Charles Lyell did to geology during the early 19th century? Introduced the legal way of proving something scientifically – Lyell was a lawyer, and set about proving so and so in geology was right. The science of geology has since been tainted by Lyell’s politically motivated interference.,
The classic case was when he visited the US and discovered from a local that the Horseshow Falls moved upstream by a measured 3 feet per year. Lyell deemed it more reasonable to assume 1 foot per year for the erosion rate, and it’s been considered this rate to this day.
Lyell’s worst damage was dismissing the Old Testament as literature and not historical fact. (There are some obvious descriptions that cannot be accepted at face value, such as the Joshua Ben Nun story of making the sun stand still in the middle of the day, no person can do that, so if the story had a factual origin, then something else could have affected the sun and one researcher wondered if it might be an electromanetic force in operation).
Notice also how the progressives rewrite history in order to make it compatibale with existing societal mores and beliefs. Here in Australia they invented the aboriginal stolen generations story, and general fabricated Aboriginal history. I’ve got contact with an archaelogist, Peter Jupp,who has worked out that the massive number of Aboriginal skeletons around Lakes Victoria and Mungo were actually aboriginals killed by ancient plasma events between the earth and some other body.
He wrote in an email to me
Here we have humans terrified of the auroras as told in their traditions, and today with a science that rejects all past catastrophes and in the same breath invoking a futuire catastrophe due to humans burning coal and oil.
If these Aboriginal stories are even half accurate, then the recent past is not what science and the Lyellians made it. The past was violent, millions of humans were killed, as described in the old testament and in similar stories the Spanish learned from the South Americans when they invaded that continent. And it seems to have happened rather recently as well. Notice how modern science refuses to incorporate the Korean history of the medieval period documented in teh Choson Annals – the Koreans noted prolonged periods of earth pasing through meteor swarms, causing all sorts of catastrophic climate phenomena, and to this day science puzzles over the cause of the LIA. It’s what I call Lyell’s Legacy, of his lawyerly skills in proving something to be true simply by verbal virtuosity.
Yet modern science rejects the lot of it as primitive mumbo jumbo, or rewrites it to be compatible with their Marxist philosophy.
It’s the whole of science which is under assualt by the progressives, not just climate science.
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It would be awesome if an FOI request discovered that the museum had been fiddling the poll data: They might be forced to come face to face with their own mendacity in pursuit of a delusion.
Because that’s all it takes to turn a warmist into a skeptic: the sudden blinding realisation that you have been lying, and lied to, all along.
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Rick Bradford, #11
Except the Marxists – as they live in a world of moral relativity,so lies have no meaning for them, and will then dismiss it as another narrative and continue on their AGW waggon. However the mob will become sceptical once they realised they have been conned.
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Louis , if more of the mob were exposed to the thinking in this paper discussed at the recent UN sponosored Bali talkfest, and had it explained in plain English then we’d get the realisation of the con.
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/02/25/bali-hoo-pushing-global-environmental-control/
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Ross #13
So it’s proceed as if Copenhagen never happened? I can see another Henry article in the drafting. Hmmm, so they have gone underground and apart from the embarrassment Christopher Monckton caused them last year, it’s business as usual. These progressives are really hellbent in implementing their policies.
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Quoting H.L. Mencken
“The urge to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it.”
Here’s the propaganda,
straight from the U.K. government:
ACTONCO2 “Bedtime Stories” TV advertisement, October 2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w62gsctP2gc&feature=player_embedded
Cap And Trade Bedtime Story
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BptZ7CXHziA&NR=1
The 2nd youtube is a parody of the first one, which is ACTON CO2 commercial scaring children into believing that they are killing the planet.
http://minnesotansforglobalwarming.co…
EARTH HOUR: HOW TO NOTHING OF ANY VALUE WHILE STILL ENJOYING THE SMUG FEELING OF MAKING A DIFFERENCE.
Shut off your lights for an hour, that’ll fix things!
What “EARTH” hour will do is reinforce the scam. It is appropriate and highly symbolic that the so called environmentalist will be sitting “ in the dark!” Besides, a burning candle gives off more co2 as it burns than does a lightbulb, candles fuelled by 02….go figure! NATURE planned the perfect cycle for Co2. Funny how this truth is so distorted these days.
EARTH hour just as stupid as “Daylight Saving Time”… To quote a native elder: “Only the white man’s government would be so stupid as to cut a foot off the top of a blanket, sew it onto the bottom, and think they have a longer blanket.”
Does Daylight Saving Time work? Ask a Rooster, – if you can find one that isn’t laughing….
Then of course there is the fact that the very soil we stand on respires and gives off C02 as a product of decomposition…. So should we denude the earth of soil too, pave it over??
STOOOOOOOOPID PEOPLE!!!!!!!
And now for the REAL agenda, global governance:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1260594/EU-summit-IMF-joint-plan-likely-Germany-set-Greece-debt-victory.html
Britain faces losing power over its own Budget under new plans for an ‘economic Government of the EU’
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Mia Nony #15
In this instance I have to side with Hayek in concluding that the slide to a totatalitarian system isn’t the result of a purposeful agenda, (though in the case of Maurice Strong that is very true), but that we end up at the same destination by happenstance as the result of economic stupidity requiring extraordinary interventions.
The Daily Mail article describing the EU proposal of economic control is expected – basket case economies like the UK, Greece, Portugal etc, that need to be rescued need to have their economies supervised, much as a bankruptcy administrator manages the bankrupt into paying the accrued debts. So if I were Germany or France, and I had to front up the cash to bail out the Greeks, for example, then I would want some say in what they propose to do with the bail out funds. (Gee I hope I am writing in a clear manner for JM).
Hayek’s point was that once we get onto the road of government(state) intervention in the economy, our final destination will be a quasi-totalitarian state.
But your point of a world governance objective is correct, if I understand David Rockefeller’s argument via the Bilderberg Group. This group seems to have the goal of implementing a world government for the express aim of eradicating world-wide wars. Their reasoning, if I have it right, is that if we have a world government ruling all of humanity, (and I wonder if they briefed the Chinese and Indian governments) then, theoretically wars between nations should be impossible. Laudable goal, to say the least.
But the worry is that coupled with the Bilderberger’s lofty goals is an undercurrent of renewed neo Marxism in the form of the US democrats, the Australian ALP, and the English Labour Party, which has another goal, also of world governance, but for quite different reasons.
I can also understand the European revulsion of war, being of European stock myself, and from a personal involvement with the politics of those times via my parents, I can sympathise with the basis for EU policy framing. Who, indeed, wants to go through another 20th European century.
But is socialism the answer? That is, government control of our daily activities? No, all that system does is divide society into the ruled, and thus poor, and the rulers, and thus the rich; socialism, when all said and done, is a modern version of medieval feudalism.
History shows that humanity goes through ages of enlightenment and ages of darkness.
I think we are headed for another dark time.
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Louis @10
the massive number of Aboriginal skeletons around Lakes Victoria and Mungo were actually aboriginals killed by ancient plasma events between the earth and some other body.
What???? Can I have some of what you’re smoking?
If these Aboriginal stories are even half accurate, …
Oh, I see. Aboriginal stories of massacres and abductions during the colonial era are to be completely discounted as fabrications and mere “stories”, while legends (aka “stories”) are pretty solid evidence of ancient catastrophe – completely in the absence of any corroborating evidence.
I can see where you’re coming from.
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Regardless of whether the AGW alarmists eventually win the propaganda war or not, the people will continue to be fed with exaggerations, distortions, lies, etc. It’s situation normal. All one can do is for each individual to maintain an open mind, scrutinize all evidence and use their intelligence and thinking abilities to make up their own mind. Unfortunately, this pretty much rules out the vast majority of the public. In some ways I look forward to an Orwellian society. At least we won’t have any more arguments. Hopefully, it won’t happen in my life time but I might not be so lucky. Time will tell.
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JM:#17
Don’t attribute statements by others to me.
The rest of your post seems an incomprehensible diatribe.
QED.
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And JM
Please do supply properly documented evidence for stolen generations, British genocide of native peoples, and other divers acts of oppressive colonialism.
It’s called “evidence” if that term escaped your mind.
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@ Mia Noney #15:
Daylight saving aligns human activity with natural daylight, thereby keeping the lights off & saving the planet, not to mention other benefit’s like reducing accidents etc. At least that’s the idea …
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OT – but has anyone been following the extraordinary thread at Bart Verheggen’s blog? Bart showed a few GISS and HadCRU plots with the inevitable OLS trends and it all would have passed unnoticed with maybe half a dozen comments. However a statistician VS materialised and proceeded to claim with a series of well documented statistical tests and Monte Carlo runs that the temperature record contains (under these tests) a unit root in its characteristic equation. It is therefore non-stationary and so OLS trend lines are statistically meaningless.
This has produced fits of apoplexy amongst some. The post is now approaching 1000 comments. It has everything; VS’s comments are exceptionally well documented and presented. Tamino’s attach dogs put in appearances and were put to the sword by VS. His wiping of the attrocious Josh Halpern (Eli Rabett) is brilliant and a must read. Zorito is commenting (in a very civilised and constructive manner), Lucia is commenting, Scott Mandia, Steve Mosher and Jeff-Id are commenting. Eli has scampered back into his little wabbit buwwow.
Please read it from the start if you have the time. It is quite an amazing and enlightening post.
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Louis @19
The words I quoted @17 are a direct quotation of you @10. If they are not your words and belong to someone else, then you presented them as your own.
As for evidence, you may not be familiar with the couple of times we’ve canvassed this over at Catallaxy during the last 2-3 years but each time I’ve pointed out that I’ve evidence from my own family, stories I heard from from my ancestors – including some of them which were documented in a series of published books from about 40 years ago – which confirm massacres. The most recent of them comes from the early 20thC and involved members of my family as perpetrators.
No I am not going to tell you where to look. People who are still alive would be hurt. (And I’m referring to the children and grandchildren of the perpetrators, for those who want to count back the years. I heard the stories from the perpetrators themselves before they died.)
In short, Windshuttle is a crock. Bolt is just a misguided loony.
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JM:
” I’ve got contact with an archaelogist, Peter Jupp,who has worked out that the massive number of Aboriginal skeletons around Lakes Victoria and Mungo were actually aboriginals killed by ancient plasma events between the earth and some other body.”
You wrote:
“The words I quoted @17 are a direct quotation of you @10. If they are not your words and belong to someone else, then you presented them as your own.”
Better read what I wrote for what you comprehend is not what I wrote.
The rest of your post #23 is neither here nor there since they are unfounded allegations.
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JM, I might as well point out that the Lake Mungo and Lake Victoria sites occurred before whites arrived in Australia, so your narrative is doubly problematical.
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Charles #22
Fascinating commentary thread – I have to make time to read it 🙂
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Rick Bradford, #11:
> It would be awesome if an FOI request discovered that the museum had been fiddling the poll data
The data is well fiddled. Before I started logging the counts there had been a lot of ballot stuffing going on. The museum adjusted counts during the polled period and afterwards, answers to FOI requests said it was to discard duplicate votes their software hadn’t corrected before. I think the museum staff was genuinely surprised that what should have been a slam dunk poll attracted the attention and comments from visitors (not part of the poll) that it did.
Even had there been no abuse of the voting process, the non-random sampling make the poll results essentially meaningless. The “legal vote stuffing” from people encouraging large groups to vote turned this into more a popularity poll of blogs and newspaper columnists. (I’m amazed at the following PZ Myers has at http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/11/a_poll_to_advocate_a_strong_re.php .)
The most telling thing of the whole affair is that it actually had some effect on the Museum staff. Director Chris Rapley is (was?) a strong warmist and no doubt behind some of the science-is-definitive poise of that exhibition. He is also a member of the “Honorary Staff” at the University of East Anglia, so maybe Climategate influenced the change of tone. Or maybe the recent weather that isn’t following the script. http://www.desmogblog.com/shell-oil-behind-london-science-museum-decision-take-anti-science-stance-global-warming says that Shell Oil’s £4m principal sponsorship might have some influence.
So who knows? I’m in the US, there are a lot of Brits better informed than me. One quote I see is according to Rapley, it wants to “minimise the shrill tone and emotion that bedevils discussion of this subject.” That’s one of the things I’d like to see too, both inside and out of the scientific community. While the discussion won’t be free from acrimony, I hope it it least moves in the right direction.
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Louis, @24 are you nuts?
I don’t know a Peter Jupp, but you claimed to @10 and indirectly quoted him.
You repeat the quote (of yourself) @24 and then attribute it to me.
What’s the logic?
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Joe Romm on climate progress recommends cheating. He posted some survey on Treehugger; the voters could vote for him once a day. Romm works for convicted felon George Soros. We had voter fraud in America run by a group called ACORN. It is ironic tha John Podesta is the board chairman, and also works for the crooked Soros.
Remembe,r I call this the data-fudging industry.
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Louis @24
The rest of your post #23 is neither here nor there since they are unfounded allegations.
No, Louis. They’re well founded admissions. Spot the difference (or I don’t want you on a jury).
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JM: “No I am not going to tell you where to look. People who are still alive would be hurt. (And I’m referring to the children and grandchildren of the perpetrators, for those who want to count back the years. I heard the stories from the perpetrators themselves before they died.)”
Too bad, eh? We can’t provide evidence of the source ’cause someone may be hurt. And “it’s true ’cause I heard it from someone somewhere who told me so themselves who are now conveniently dead so we can’t ask them.”
Trust me … ???!!
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To Louis Hissink~
I read back through what you wrote. In # 10, you say ‘I’ve got contact with an archaelogist, Peter Jupp,who has worked out that the massive number of Aboriginal skeletons around Lakes Victoria and Mungo were actually aboriginals killed by ancient plasma events between the earth and some other body.’
And then you proceed to quote the email which Peter Jupp sent to you.
jm has it WRONG. The line I quoted from your own writing, is your paraphrase of what Peter Jupp said. It is Not something you yourself said, as jm claims when he says ‘Can I have some of what you’re smoking?’
In # 23 jm says ‘The words I quoted @17 are a direct quotation of you @10. If they are not your words and belong to someone else, then you presented them as your own.’
Again, he is mischaracterizing your paraphrase of Peter Jupp’s email, and making the FALSE claim that you stated a paraphrase as fact.
Typical agw religionist, jm is.
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Otter I read the same and agree with you.
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For reference about what I am posting below please see post @168 http://joannenova.com.au/2010/03/picasso-brain-syndrome/
JM is an idiot.
JM is an idiot.
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Otter @32
The line I quoted from your own writing, is your paraphrase of what Peter Jupp said. It is Not something you yourself said
So Louis’ paraphrase are not words he said? This is hair-splitting on a champion scale.
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JM,
Apart from quoting me out of context, the responses by others to your posts about mine say it all, so I won’t add insult to injury, but add a clarification.
I paraphrases Jupp but the reaction I got from you was that I alone made that statement which you found to be so fantastic, hinting that I must have been smoking something to think of something like that.
However as others have pointed to your errors, we are now given the spectacle of yet another Climate Worshipper backpeddling as fast as he can manage to avoid having to state publicly here that he was wrong.
Faith does run strongly in the Climate Worshippers and your devotion is to be commended, but it doesn’t mean that you have the right to force the rest of us to kowtow to your Climate God.
Perhaps you could think about Oliver Cromwell’s advice to the Cavaliers some centuries ago, that they ought to consider the possibility that they might be mistaken.
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If hairsplitting were a championship event, you’d win the Frizzies awards hands down, jm.
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Louis you are spot on. Again! There was and still are hot spots
in Victoria and around SA. Last eruptions were around 4000 years
ago. Before Australia was colonized by Europeans. My major is in Archaeology and Palaeoanthropology.
JM, Lake Mungo has one of the oldest skeletal evidence of a burial
in Australia. 29k ago if I remember rightly. It was once a lake and river system during the last ice age. Another Dreamtime legend was made in a film ‘The Last Wave’ about a tsunami hitting Sydney.
Although Dreamtime myths and philosophy are very colourful such as the first Aborigines came from the North over a boomerang
bridge… this could be true, if the sea levels were low enough
during the last ice age and when NT was joined by a landbridge to Papua New Guinea.
Phil Jones exonerated by the Commons committee, what a bummer, eh?
Though it was expected.
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[…] Museum becomes an exhibit in itself for global warming history of propaganda, Another ‘green’ NGO quietly amassing power and influence, European climate data failing as did America, Australia etc, Earth hour propaganda, […]
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Changing from GW to use of the term “Climate Change”, well that’s fashionable, but then attempting to dignify it by calling it Science, provokes such paroxyms or mirth that it does the case no favoirs at all.
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regarding lake mungo and lake victoria. Colin Pardoe believes around 15000 bodies are at this site.( His assosciate Jeanette Hope disagrees believing more like 6000 ) ,most dated millenia before white settlement. At Lake victoria there was a so called massacre of aborigines around the 1840( approximately 40 souls). but this was a totally unrelated incident. Certainly there have been disagreements and bad incidents at the time of white settlement and I am sure ,on reflection ,everyone regrets this but far more aborigines were wiped out by a smallpox epidemic around 1790 and a later one in the early 1800.s. This caused much devastation. To cut to the chase the assemblage of dead bodies is totally unrelated to what I believe is a geophysical calamity dated to a much earlier era. I suspect circa 5000 years ago. However this is not set in concrete and could of been much earlier or later. NOONE knows for sure
Peter Mungo Jupp
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I hadn’t heard of that one (15,000) is a huge collection of people?
I know some of the hot spots erupted around 5,000 years ago. In South
Australia?
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Yes bush Nunny as you say there were eruptions well before threpresent time and the ones at Mount Gambia and the Western district have plenty of aboriginal mythokogy related to the eventsd. I personally believe they are very hard to date but I guess traditionally at the close of the ice age conventionally dated at 10,000 years ago. You might enjoy my website http://www.ancientdestructions.com Peter Mungo Jupp
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