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Endorsed? Even the supposed blog experts on Climate Change can’t find an error.
The Guardian Blog has posted John Cook’s thoughts on the new skeptical iPhone App – Our Climate.
Has he found errors, lies, or critical omissions? Read it yourself. No, hardly, and “as if”. Instead he’s found “cherry-picking”, confusion (his), and strawmen.
Really, this is a great endorsement — after all, Cook runs the ambush site SkepticalScience.com. If Cook can’t find an error, or name the peer reviewed paper with evidence for catastrophic positive feedback, who can?
SkepticalScience.com is a parody of skepticism. It is “skeptical of the skeptics”, which is all very well, but it accepts everything offered up by Authorities as if it is the Word of God. “NOAA can do no wrong” (and was that NOAA or Noah?)
All of the points held up by Cook are weak “whatever” issues: things that are hardly a flaw. He’s noticed that the disorganized mass of real skeptics sometimes disagree with each other, golly gee, which proves we think for ourselves and don’t answer to a higher bureaucracy. John Cook — who so wants to be seen as skeptical — instead is anything but, and conforms strictly to […]
A few skeptics got half-way excited when they saw the New Scientist’s editorial a couple of weeks ago, and wondered if it meant the editors were changing their views.
No such luck.
This is a magazine which held the multi-part-Denier-Special-extravaganza only two months ago. When it comes to standing up for independent thinking, maverick scientists and whistle-blowers who bust the establishment, New Scientist don’t just ignore the unfunded little guys, they practically phone the Establishment to ask if they can help with PR to quash the dissent.*
A single editorial and minor article that admits the obvious (for a change) is a good step, but we’re still 42 kilometers (26 miles) from the end of the marathon — and from the rest of the articles in this single print edition, it appears New Scientist is running the race backwards.
The editorial Without Candour We Can’t Trust Climate Science was a landmark event for New Scientist, it was just what we’d expect of any half way serious magazine. Crikey – The Muir investigation didn’t look into the science? It didn’t even ask if those scientists deleted the emails that they conspired to delete? What scientist wouldn’t be outraged at the white-wash.
[…]
Guest Post by Bryan Leyland El Nino/La Nina effect (SOI) predicts global cooling by the end of 2010
A July 2009 paper by McLean, de Freitas and Carter showed that global average temperatures followed the Southern Oscillation Index (El Nino/La Nina) with a 5-8 months lag. The graph below shows that when the SOI is shifted forward by 7 months the two plots change direction together (except when volcanic eruptions caused cooling).
The chart above shows a projection of temperatures to Feb 2011. The chances are that the present warm spell will end quite suddenly before the end of this year. Over the next few months the SOI will indicate whether or not the cooling will continue beyond Feb 2011. Evidence from studies on past climate and sunspot cycle related effects gives a strong indication that the cooling will continue.
4.6 out of 10 based on 5 ratings […]
SPPI has put out an excellent collection of papers in response to NOAA’s State of the Climate Report.
NOAA State of the Climate reply by SPPI
.. As usual, the official taxpayer-funded report is full of half-truths and strawmen. Arctic sea ice is shrinking (no mention of the Antarctic), the world is undeniably warming (yes, so? what’s causing that warming?). There’s the compulsory allusions to “consensus” — 300 scientists, blah blah blah (trust us! we’re experts).
The interesting thing is that the seven different responses are all quite different, yet all skeptical, even though there was no coordination behind the scenes to create that. There are so many holes in the NOAA document, that seven commentators could fire ad lib, and for the most part, all find different targets.
10 out of 10 based on 2 ratings […]
UPDATE: It’s now 900 peer reviewed papers. See PopTech for the additions and answers to all the common criticisms.
Counting papers is not science, but it’s a hell of a way to show just how counterfeit the line is that “deniers” deny the evidence.
The PopularTechnology list of peer reviewed papers is still growing and is up to 900 now. After thousands of sneering believers have ridiculed skeptics because “what-ever-you-say hasn’t been peer reviewed“, when they are given a list of hundreds of peer reviewed references, do they suddenly appear gracious, discover polite conversation and show an interest in the evidence? Not so. Instead, the sneer shifts gear, and attack the list of 800 papers because some of the papers are only a correction, an erratum, a submission (unpublished), a comment, an addendum, or a reply. And that’s a bluff too. Because if they had actually counted the list they’d know that there are a more items on the list than 800. The guys at PopularTech keep those not-peer-reviewed-but-valuable parts of the scientific conversation in the list, they just don’t count them. So this list is really 800 peer reviewed references plus other supporting material.
Naomi Oreskes claimed that […]
Re: Climate change ‘brown wash’
Kellie Tranter attacks imaginary deniers who she doesn’t name, cite, or reference. All her inferences and innuendo are backed up by assertive confidence, a pile of convenient guesses, and nothing else. Everything she accuses the Deniers of is something that those on the Big Scare Campaign do–and if the Deniers do it at all, those who sell-the-scare do it 100 times more.
Shouldn’t we be suing the guys who lost the data we paid for?
And countermanding her legal speculation: sanctions for those who provide inaccurate or misleading information are surely more appropriate for the workers who are paid by the citizens to give balanced and careful reporting — rather than those who offer a product for voluntary purchase in the private market.
The citizens are, after all, forced to pay for the services of the Department of Climate Change, the CRU, the CSIRO, BOM and ABC. No citizen is forced to buy Heaven and Earth. The official organisations are chartered to provide the whole truth, not just their favorite parts. Who in their right mind expects a single speech or book from a private individual to encompass the entirety of scientific knowledge?
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The Guide to the unSkeptical Guide to the Skeptics Handbook (Czech translation)
…
Who would have thought?
SkepticalScience.com has a Czech translation of their attempt to debunk the Skeptics Handbook. And so, as the wheel turns, we have a Czech translation of my debunking of that debunking:
My most sincere thanks to Mirek Pavlicek.
He’s a fast man!
The original English version:
The Guide to the Unskeptical Guide to the Skeptics Handbook.
And I’ve done up an PDF version of the original English language debunking for those who want to have a printed copy to sit side by side.
I would not have guessed the Czechs would beat me to it.
7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings
Guest post by Anthony Cox on the legal side and on ABC bias
Anthony Cox and David Stockwell sent the letter below to the ABC in response to the article Climate change ‘brown wash’. They wrote:
“Dear sir, On the 27th July I sent you this e-mail:
“Dear sir,
On the 26th July, on Unleashed, an article by Kellie Tranter was published;
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2962929.htm
Since the article was very critical of the sceptical approach to anthropogenic global warming [AGW] it would be reasonable for a sceptical view to be published in response, especially in this election period. Accordingly I have attached a response entitled “suing the Sceptics” which was the theme of Ms Tranter’s piece. Details of the authors of the submitted article are here:
Anthony Cox, lawyer and secretary of The Climate Sceptics.
Dr David Stockwell, environmental scientist.
Regards
Anthony Cox”
I have yet to receive a response from you. The article, with some small typo corrections, is again attached. I can only repeat that, since Ms Tranter’s article was critical of the sceptics’ position, a reply is justified […]
UPDATED! It’s rocketing up the rankings 🙂
NEWS: Can you believe there are 570 Apps in the Canadian weather apps list! No neither can I.
But Our Climate has made it to number one 🙂
“The Our Climate App will prove to be an enduring tool for all open-minded individuals who yearn for the uncensored truth about the Earth’s weather-climate system.
Enjoy!”
Dr Willie Soon Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Our Climate
Behind the scenes a veritable who’s-who of the skeptical world has been working away on yet another way to reach people, especially young people.
For those of you with iphones, if you want the latest graphs, blog information, or answers to questions at the pub debate, there is an option from the iphone store with dozens of excellent articles of the right size, lots of pictures, graphs, quizes, world-wide polls, and more.
The skeptics community grows stronger through projects like this. Kudos to Lubos, and Willie Soon especially, as well as Richard Lindzen, Roy Spencer, Fred Singer, Henrik Svensmark, Will […]
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Ken has been a very busy man. Another soul in the dedicated army of volunteer auditors. He’s been going through the entire Australian High Quality Data Set as supplied by the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM). He’s been assisted by two readers from this site — Lance and Janama — and we’ll be looking to increase the team (see below).
In the State of the Climate report, both the BOM and CSIRO told us that “since 1960 the mean temperature in Australia has increased by about 0.7 °C. The long term trend in temperature is clear… ” but as usual, what they didn’t say was that the raw data since 1910 (not just from 1960) increased only 0.6°C.
The BOM claim their adjustments are random and neutral. Yet when Ken looked at the raw data from Australia’s 100 high quality rural sites, the adjustments increased the trend in the raw data by 40% — from a 0.6°C rise over 100 years, to 0.85°C over 100 years.
In an email to Ken, Dr David Jones, Head of Climate Monitoring and Prediction, National Climate Centre, Bureau of Meteorology, made a clear claim that the adjustments had no […]
Will a hotter world lead to more intense storms?
2010 might be on track to be the warmest ever (according to GISS), but right now, we may be about to set a new record of tropical storms — in inactivity. Ryan Maue tracks the global accumulated activity and reports that by the end of July we might break the record low we set last year.
Ryan N. Maue’s 2010 Global Tropical Cyclone Activity Update
July 15: If no additional ACE occurred in July, the 24-month global ACE total would be 1095 compared to last month at 1173. The previous 30-year low was 1091 set recently in September 2009. No lower values exist during the past 30-years.
Global and Northern Hemsiphere Tropical Cyclone Activity is near a record low
Looking at the National Hurricane Centre, it doesn’t seem like there is much activity on the way between now and the end of July.
Advisories issued for the North Atlantic, The East Pacific, The West Pacific, and the Indian Ocean are all the same:
There is no tropical storm activity for this region.
4.6 out of 10 based on 5 ratings […]
Video available on the CFACT site.
Another Green soul declares enough is enough. It’s a question of conscience.
Physicist Dr. Denis Rancourt is a former professor and environmental science researcher at the University of Ottawa (as green as they come), and has officially bailed out of the man-made global warming movement. He runs a radio show, and speaks with many activists and NGO’s around the world. He claims that the “activists in the developing world, who need to directly defend their own neighborhoods, they understand that this global warming thing is an invention.”
Climate Depot has released a video of Dr. Rancourt: Man-made global warming is nothing more than a “corrupt social phenomenon.” “It is as much psychological and social phenomenon as anything else” .
“I argue that by far the most destructive force on the planet is power-driven financiers and profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed by military might; and that the global warming myth is a red herring that contributes to hiding this truth. In my opinion, activists who, using any justification, feed the global warming myth have effectively been co-opted, or at best neutralized,” Rancourt said.
“Global warming is strictly an imaginary problem of the First […]
There are many ways to play the game, and many loopholes to push. Unfortunately there are all too many players who are willing to step outside the spirit of what Democracy is supposed to be about. The lame-duck session is a loophole. This is well written, though focuses only on the government-grab-for-tax, and not on the banker-benefits of trading…– Jo
Foxnews: Senate Energy Debate is Still all About Cap-and-Trade
Phil Kerpen A headline on Thursday screamed: “Democrats pull plug on climate bill.” Don’t believe it. It’s a diversionary tactic.
The Obama administration and Democratic congressional leadership, seeing their window for shoving the country to the hard left closing quickly, are intent on making one last major push for cap-and-trade. It starts with their “spill-response bill” or “energy bill,” but it’s really about cap-and-trade.
The irony is that the political genius of cap-and-trade was supposed to be that it hides a tax hike from the American people.
7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings […]
UPDATE: The more I think about this, the more sinister it seems. Gillard won’t put the policy on the table for all of us to debate, but she’ll get a quasi-mandate for an ETS by proxy. She’s playing both sides of the field. The Greens will assume the “citizens committee” will be convinced, they’ll be angry at the delay, but vote for the ALP anyway, the mainstream voter thinks they can relax and worry about it later. The skeptics know that any committee can be whitewashed or biased, and Gillard has pretty much said an ETS is inevitable. Michael Cejnar in #7 is exactly right (read his comment).
What’s a politician to do to convince the masses? They’ve tried the panel of 2,500 so-called experts at the UN who spend five years writing 3,000 page reports. They’ve tried spending millions on advertising campaigns, prize winning documentaries, coloring in competitions in schools, and they’ve tried bullying, name-calling and endless rounds of repetition.
Now instead of convincing the masses, they’ll just “convince” 0.01%. Democracy be done with it.
By “moving forward” to the Rudd summit of 2008 (or as Bolt points out, the Republican deliberative-poll farce of […]
Guest post by Cohenite
To natural born critics AGW is the gift that keeps giving. It would be cruel to say these papers all exhibit unworldly qualities because that is inevitable if your purpose is to generate a virtual reality with computer modeling. But, as the old saying goes, you have to be cruel to be kind; so some of these papers are speculative and unrealistic; others are eristic and the rest egregious in intent or execution. A scientific theory such as AGW is, like all human endeavours, only as good as its best examples; the following papers, all peer reviewed, represent the best of AGW. The papers are in no particular order, or lack thereof, of merit.
Part I and Part II of The Worst Papers according to Cohenite. Conversely: Ten of the best
8.2 out of 10 based on 5 ratings […]
People from the How Arrogant Art Thy Name-calling thread were wondering what we call people who toss out “Denier.” I suggested that the best response to “denier” is just to point out they are name-calling thugs trying to stop people talking about the evidence.
That said, the discussion reminded me that I had another more sneaky, devious and comic response way back two days before ClimateGate broke, (and my web traffic numbers soared) and many people may have missed this post. Times have changed since then, and now even Pachauri is paying token lip service to the “value of skeptics”. But there are still plenty of people who want to disown the word skeptic because of the long PR campaign to slur it. I say that only makes it o-so-much more valuable. Let’s use their own PR campaign against them.
The rise of the unskeptical scientist
Nov 17, 2009: I’ve done it, I’ve finally solved the dilemma of how to refer to scientists who actively promote a crisis due to carbon, but can’t provide the evidence that carbon causes major warming. Not Team-AGW, not alarmist, a far better one has come to me.
Once upon a […]
Ivar Giaevar
The guys at Popular Tech have done a Very Nice List. They’ve put together seven names of eminent scientists who are skeptical of man-made climate catastrophe, along with their stellar biographies and quotes. It tells us nothing about the climate, but before you write it off as just a fallacious appeal to authority, ponder that these eminent people are the same people that teenage tree-huggers would call “deniers”.
To see just how mindlessly puerile “denier” is, try the thought experiment of putting those-who-use-it in the same room as one of the more notable “deniers”.
Julia Gillard (the new PM downunder) used “denier” 11 times in one recent speech. So imagine she’s in a room talking with, say, Ivar Giaever. She studied arts and law, he got a PhD in theoretical physics two years before she was born, and won a Nobel Prize by the time she was nine. Picture him talking atmospheric physics and her telling him he’s a denier.
Julia Gillard, PM of Australia. Source: The Daily Telegraph
A Nobel doesn’t mean he’s right, but when Gillard says “Denier” she is referring to thousands of people including Freeman Dyson, Ivar Giaever (Nobel Prize), Robert Laughlin […]
Click to download The Italian Translation of The Skeptics Handbook
Dario Buso has finally accomplished a task I’ve been looking forward too for a long time. The Italian Translation of The Skeptics Handbook is here ready to be sent to all your friends among the 62 million speakers of Italian around the world.
He has done a marvelous job of putting it all together, along with help on the in-depth and careful review work done by Guido Botteri and Patrick. It’s just another example of the remarkable productivity of exasperated people. Citizens who won’t let the half-truths and distortions stand unopposed.
As always these things take a team (all up, involving people in six countries).
Dario writes:
Guido and I would also like to mention the final review by Colonel Guido Guidi, an Italian Army weather forecaster who manages and presents some weather forecast programs on national RAI TV channel. Col. Guidi also keeps a very informative blog in Italy on the status of the global climate, as a skeptic of the AGW hypothesis. He’s our Anthony Watts “made in Italy”…
Guido’s Italian blog is Climate Monitor.
The 15th translation of The Skeptics Handbook.
7.4 out of 10 […]
… 😮 UPDATED with GLOBAL values! The questions get bigger. (See below) July 18th.
Frank Lansner has been a busy man, and he’s asking some very thought provoking questions.
The Northern Hemisphere has a ratio of 40% land to 60% oceans, and the Hadley Met Centre seems to use a similar ratio (NH HadCrut Series: 58% ocean, 42% land). But Frank Lansner wondered why, when he graphed the GISS land-data-set alongside the combined-sea-surface-temperatures (CSST), GISS comes up with an “averaged” line that runs much closer to the land data set and not the sea surface set. If it were weighted 60:40 (ocean:land) the combined Northern Hemisphere line ought to run slightly closer to the ocean based temperatures.
So Lansner mixed the land and sea temperatures in different ratios and graphed them and an odd thing occurred. Perhaps there is some good reason for it, but the GISS NH average line is currently running close to a mix that could be almost 70% land, and only 30% ocean. Back in 1985 the NH Average was closer to the sea temps as would be expected. In fact as late as 1995, the NH line still ran at around 40% land area. But […]
I’ve added a page with a list of abbreviations, there’s a link to it in the sidebar on the top right. If you are looking for an abbreviation and can’t find it, or have a correction to make, please comment here so we can improve the page.
The “find things” list at the top right is becoming more organized and useful. (Yes, the social events page needs to be updated).
Find things INDEX ABBREVIATIONS ARCHIVES Links&Sources Latest Comments & News Guide for Comments Social Events
Thanks to both Bob, Rob and Barry who compiled the list. Sorry it’s taken so long to get it finished.
10 out of 10 based on 3 ratings
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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