Brandon Schollenberger wants to test a theory, so he has made a short poll. He would like a broad sample.
The message:
As you’re aware, Stephan Lewandowsky has written several papers claiming to have found certain traits amongst global warming skeptics. I believe his methodology is fundamentally flawed. I believe a flaw present in his methodology is also present in the work of many others.
To test my belief, I’m seeking participants for a short survey (13 questions). The questions are designed specifically to test a key aspect of Lewandowsky’s methodology. The results won’t be published in any scientific journal, but I’ll do a writeup on them once the survey is closed and share it online.
(click below)
The Poll (closed now)
UPDATE Brandon says thanks, he has thousands of responses. The poll is not open any more.
(Or copy the link — http://kwiksurveys.com/s.asp?sid=jblyccj8lluam18284546)
This poll has appeared at WUWT and Bishop Hill. Feel free to do it (it is very short) or share the link with others.
There are only 13 points arranged as three questions. Click “Next Page” to finish.
I tried clicking on the words “click here” twice before realizing why it didn’t work.
>.<
—–
Ah yes, it’s 2am. That’s fixed… I see what you mean. Thanks! Jo
40
So now that I’ve taken this (what shall I call it, maybe ridiculous) survey where’s my prize? You’re always supposed to get a prize of some sort for doing things like this. Where’s mine? 😉
Kidding aside, Jo, when you rite this up, cover the breakdown on all 13 questions. I’m curious to know how whether I had a wonderful mother, which I did, correlates with anything.
By the way, it should ask if you’ve seen a UFO, which I have. Yes, something very real in the air that I could not identify as any type of aircraft. I still don’t know what it was to this day.
120
Whatever it was, I do not attribute it to anything extraterrestrial. The mere fact that under the existing conditions I couldn’t identify it does not make it alien. Although maybe it was the NSA spying on me. 😉
80
Just that global warming “swamp gas”.
81
Roy I saw a flying saucer once, it came straight at me and hit me between the eyes, and that was the last time I ever complained about Mrs Yonnie’s cooking.
120
Strange! And I’m not pointing a finger at anyone but there are comments about my UFO and none of them asks what I actually saw or under what conditions I observed it, how long it was in sight, what it did or any other important bit of knowledge that would help to understand my statement.
I think this is why the world is in such a mess all the time. We don’t know the right questions to ask — or don’t want to. And I’m not talking about the Lewandowsky types who intentionally do what Brandon Schollenberger wants to test with worthless questions designed to fool everyone but about the people whose daily lives are so negatively impacted by the Lewandowskys of this world and ought to know what to ask and demand the answers.
20
You’ve already stated it was an unidentified flying object, but not believed to be extra terrestrial.
This seems to be a reasonable observation to me.
Were you expecting us to dispute your observation?
00
No, not at all. But if you told me you had seen something you could call a UFO I would ask exactly what you saw, what did it look like, what color, what sounds it made, etc.
It could be anything from a balloon to a lenticular cloud to a witch on a broomstick. Or it might be a real terrestrial aircraft seen under circumstances that hide it’s true shape. The only thing it could not be is extraterrestrial because of the impossible distances to cross to get here, not to mention that all we ever see of UFOs is the beginning of a contact scenario over and over and over again. If they did come here from somewhere else they spent huge resources to get here and they’re going to want something and will go about getting what they want. No such thing is happening.
Why no curiosity?
And now were way off on a tangent. My real point is that most people don’t know to ask questions, much less what questions to ask.
00
Roy no offense intended it was just another poor attempt at humor. 🙂
Personally I would be keen to hear your experiences as you are a pilot and this get’s my interest plus respect as well.
If the mods don’t mind I would like to hear of your experience.
10
No offense taken. I didn’t expect any comment at all and it was fair game for anyone to say something about if they wanted to.
10
Mine was a poor attempt at humour also. I too saw something I do not understand as a kid but cannot remember a lot of it now. What does stick in my mind was that it took 90 degree corners without curving or slowing down. I do wonder if it was ball lightning or similar.
00
Roy Hogue, I think most people have seen unidentified flying objects. At the very least, they’ve seen flying objects they can’t identify.
The same thing that makes your comment sensible makes it boring to discuss 😛
10
Yes, I suspect I could stop people on any street corner and find some with a UFO sighting.
You evidently see my point though — it did get talked about. So if I saw an opportunity to make a point, why not? After all, that’s what you’re doing with this survey, isn’t it?
00
This story doesn’t count as a UFO sighting, but nevertheless a strange emotion of a “presence” that I have not forgotten after more than forty years.
I was flying a C172 from Edmonton to Fort MacMurray in the dead of winter. It was a night just made for flying. Clear frigid air, about minus 45, with virtually no wind, and a big sky full of stars and no traffic. In that dense air, the entire aircraft responds gleefully to the slightest touch on the control column.
Being an uncontrolled airport, I crossed the centre at 1000 feet and joined the circuit up wind on completing a 90 degree turn to the left. I had completed the cross wind leg and turned onto the downwind leg when the cockpit lit up as though someone had turned on multi-coloured flourescent lights. It was of course a display of Aurora Borealis. So brilliant, that it seemed to be right in the cabin. It was not frightening, and I touched down like a feather, but the feeling I was somehow not alone for a few minutes was overwhelming.
20
Rod,
Flying on a clear night with virtually unlimited visibility is something I always enjoyed. But then came the the night I was flying east directly into a rising full moon. The sight of it coming up over the horizon on a clear night can be almost hypnotic from the air.
You can get caught in many traps in the cockpit and I sure embarrassed myself that night. Thankfully I kept up my instrument scan (but not too well for a while) and I suddenly realized that without thinking about it I had started to follow the moon instead of my compass. In the northern hemisphere the rising moon moves more and more southward until it reaches its highest point and I had been slowly turning off course to the south.
Fortunately I was never under any compulsion to tell this story until long after the fact. 🙁
00
Roy:
I once saw a bright light in the sky one very clear winter night which I couldn’t identify. I left it at that but next morning it was reported that over 200 people had “seen a UFO”.
Turned out to be a conjunction of Mars and Jupiter.
As for a strange thing in the atmosphere, it was probably Trenberth’s hot spot. No-one can identify that.
30
Lights in the night sky puzzle many people. But there are only three possible explanations that I can think of.
1. star or planet
2. aircraft of human origin
3. flares hanging from a parachute, dropped from an aircraft to light the ground
The third possibility is responsible for no end of foolishness one night in Arazona when the military did exactly that. A flare creates a lot of heat and can actually cause the parachute canopy to act like a balloon and hover or even rise until the flare burns out.
Even after the military tried to end the nonsense by stating in no uncertain terms that they had in fact dropped flares that night, the true believers carried on anyway.
Several watchers made video of the event and what I saw in the video was exactly what I saw on night maneuvers at Fort Ord during basic training — flares.
20
Roy
You mean they’re after you as well? For the last nine years, I’ve been stalked by paronoid people.
Cheers,
Speedy
20
Hi Roy, Similar experience only I had a couple of sightings all logged. Took it to a mate in the Airforce at the time who dod deal with these things and he could explain what it was up until the point where he asked me what colour it was reds, blues, yellows, greens, whites all covered – awkward silence – no explanation for amber…
00
James,
That intrigues me because along with your Air Force mate I know of no amber aircraft maker lights. Red, green, white and a strobe light that would be blueish white or red or the older rotating red beacon are the only permitted lights usually. But I have seen advertising on the side of the Goodyear blimp that was lighted in all sorts of colors for night use. Are there other details you can fill in for me, size, general shape, speed, altitude…?
00
I certainly hope this survey is ridiculous. I put effort into ensuring it was. The point of the survey to examine a methodological issue. I don’t want anyone thinking the results are genuine. That’s why I chose a question about alien abduction over UFO sightings.
Can you imagine if people seriously claimed their opponents on the global warming issue endorse things like genocide? Calling people conspiracy nuts is one thing, but I doubt anyone would publish claims like that.
By the way, I’m the one running the survey so I’ll be the one doing the writeup. Even without looking at the results, I can tell you your view on how wonderful your mother is will almost certainly correlate with a number of things.
110
Brandon, can you email so I can contact you.
Mike
10
You’ll need an email: chairman at scef * org * uk
10
Sure. I’ll send an e-mail now.
But for the record, my e-mail address is public knowledge. It’s just my name, separated by a period at gmail.
10
Brandon. If I now go to WUWT and The Bish and fill in the survey there, will I still be following the methodology of Lew. Cookie et al?
30
They actually all have the exact same link so there’s no point. If you want to try to game the survey, you don’t need to visit any other sites.
10
Perhaps making the questions so overtly ridiculous might not be the best approach. Critics may well say the survey has no merit as the questions 4-13 are so clearly designed to elicit a particular response
10
The questions are no more ridiculous than many Stephan Lewandowsky asked. In fact, some are less ridiculous. I think it’s a safe bet there are more racists in this world than there are people who believe the moon landing was faked.
But it’d be okay if they were more ridiculous. The point of the survey isn’t to show what people actually believe. The point is to demonstrate the methodology used by Lewandwosky and others doesn’t actually show what people believe. Everyone could respond in the intended way, and the results would still prove my point. In fact, it would prove my point more conclusively.
For example, suppose I told you the results “prove” racists are more likely to believe they’ve been abducted by aliens. We could believe a bunch of racist hillbillies going on about little green men responded to the survey, or we could believe the methodology creates spurious results. I’m arguing the latter is true.
To put it simply, my hypothesis is I can “prove” unrelated things are connected simply by asking the right questions. And I can pick and choose which questions to ask to ensure I get the right sorts of connections.
40
I think there could be a variety of responses. Context is so important. For example, genocide is a terrific idea – if I get to choose who lives.
00
jawohl.
00
No doubt! But seriously, pray tell, with what?
10
I don’t think I can tell you that. I’ve already looked at data. I don’t think I can start discussing what I’ve seen in the data while still collecting more.
In other words, tune in to find out!
20
That should be “stay tuned.”
00
You might get a free frozen frisbee, or perhaps a frozen fizzy freebie.
00
I might settle for a Free Freedom Freebee
00
Once I saw a flying object growing in size. And then it hit me in the face.
00
For Yonnie…
What I actually saw looked like a Coca-Cola can flying along blunt end first. It even had colors similar to the Coke can of the day. I saw no evidence of a vertical fin, which is the most obvious thing about any airplane seen from the side. It passed me at no more than 50 feet higher than I was and about 100 yards away (100 meters), going the opposite direction, so I would expect to see the vertical fin even if nothing else was recognizable.
It was climbing fast at a steep angle as I was descending rather fast on the same path and there’s no way to estimate how fast it was going. But it was doing a steep climb at a high airspeed, which further clouds the identification, since the smaller aircraft common in the area are not that capable.
So what is the conclusion? It was some type of airplane seen, as I said, under conditions that disguised it’s shape.
Let us now be finished with the subject. 🙂
10
Why has Brandon not followed good scientific principles based upon robust, peer-reviwed psychological methods?
Asking contrarians their opinions using anti-science blogs is downright stupid.
How does he expect to get the correct answers?
He should have to gone to SkS, RC or any number of similar web-sites!
Anyway the Science is already 97% in, thanks to brothers Lew, Cookie and their disciple, Dana; so this survey is pointless anyway.
If Brandon wants to retain any shred of dignity he should release the summary of his results immediately!
40
” If Brandon wants to retain any shred of dignity he should release the summary of his results immediately! ” y that, do you mean that Brandon has followed the methodology of Lew, Cookie et al and already written the results before the data was requested?
180
Of course! Isn’t that how Science should be done?
170
It certainly saves a whole lot of confusion and extra effort, if the paper is written post peer review. Isn’t that the whole point of post-rational consensus science?
60
But if Brandon wants to replicate the methods of Lewandowsky et al. in their “NASA faked the Moon Landings” paper he will have to spend the next 18 months divining the real, underlying and irrefutable truths that lesser mortals are incapable of perceiving. I am sure Brandon would not be able to endure the enforced hardships and suffering brought about by inadequate funding, but which is conducive to fully clear the mind and reach those higher planes of understanding.
100
*snorts*
I wish people would pay me to write obvious nonsense. I could have done Lewandowsky’s work for around five thousand dollars, and I’d have done it better.
150
You are clearly not of Lewandowsky’s calibre.
Also while I have the podium:
You should have posted on all-skeptic sites questions aimed at CAGW believers. Then we’d be getting closer to the orginal Lewandowsky study.
40
Nice one Greg. Hadn’t thought of that 180 degree view.
I know I don’t need to tell you this but, sadlyish, warmist sites are anything but.
Recent (non peer luckily) research has proven that acontrarians are lacking that all-important elbow gene and thus lack warmth – just like the last 17 years have!
We can’t beat the big boys with $ but we can keep hitting them with facts but our best weapon is free – I believe the vernacular term is something like ‘taking the pith’
Great idea Greg but, unfortunately, the sample size of your proposed survey would be three decades less than the circa 3000 replies that Brandon has gathered today.
10
Er… That’s what I did. Lewandowsky sought to study skeptics while focusing on non-skeptical blogs. I’m (facetiously) seeking to study non-skeptics by focusing on skeptical blogs.
The point of this survey is to show how you can study one group yet draw conclusions about a different group. You could invert the first three questions, post the survey at non-skeptical blogs, and you’d get the same results just with the names switched. You could replace the first three questions with questions about political views, and the results would still be the same with different names of groups. Heck, you could survey males and find the same patterns with “female” replacing “skeptic.”
All that matters is you ask one group questions then draw conclusions about a different (ostensibly opposite) group.
50
Thnaks Brandon, I didn’t recognise that. I thought you were just studying the methodology. Perhaps the similarity of questions threw me.
Very good then, carry on.
10
Well, that was amusing.
20
Still the question remains..
what is Global warming ?
Is it a created warming trend in the GISS, HadCrut land temperature record, pre-1979
In which case it is definitely one or two humans that are responsible.
How to answer !!!???
And then they want my email address so they can spam me.. Sorry.. not happening 🙂
60
What is it, and how is it measured? What is the accuracy of the measurement?
This Sheehan chap makes a lot of noise about data that I consider extremely questionable.
The accuracy of a measurement apparatus can be estimated and even tested when new, but what changes occur in this accuracy over time? What accuracy can be attributed to reading this measurement? If measurement occurs at different locations, how accurate is the amalgamation of all these measurements in relation to the defined parameter? Folks like Sheehan take these approximations of ‘global average annual temperature’ as gospel when they are far from it. Even with out the interference and manipulation of Giss and NOAA, I would be surprised if you could expect it to be accurate within +/- 3 degrees. No doubt the satellite measurement at least includes a better sample of the globe’s surface, but one is expecting a lot from that type of apparatus. As for 400 ppm CO2 being gospel, it is no more than a measurement made at the top of a mountain in a volcanic region. How accurate is that approximation of some sort of global average?
This is the data by which people proclaim ‘global warming’, and it is such questionable data that I reject the existence of ‘global warming’ for the same reason that I reject the idea of Sasquatch, or alien visitation, or anything else for which there is insufficient evidence.
30
Not only that, but global warming.. since what date?
2000…no, maybe slight cooling
1960’s … probably some
late 1930’s.. probably none
before that.. who knows the details, until you get to the……
LIA .. warming.. thank goodness
MWP… we’re cooler than the MWP
The question is really a pretty silly question that can’t be answered with a 5 position answer.
91
That question had me stumped for a while too.
Was is the fact that the world has warmed since the Little Ice Age?
Or was it the political/social movement associated with restructuring society called “Global Warming”?
I think he meant the latter, but it isn’t obvious.
10
I have to confess, I do have psychic powers. I have the sixth sense. Sometimes I know what people are thinking. It’s like synaesthesia where you experience one sense via a different sense. I see their lips moving, hear their voice talking and then… bam! I know exactly what they were thinking. Freaky huh? 😉
When its time to analyse the results, remember that everyone who says they had an awful mother will be the warmists who take the survey pretending to be skeptics.
Bonus points if Brandon can fool Lewandowsky into actually using these results in Lew’s next paper. Self-publish it in arxiv.org under a pseudonym and Lew won’t think to look a gift horse in the mouth.
K. Thermalolsky, “Paranormal ideation in global warming skeptic cohort”. Harvard, 2014.
Hey, it uses the same methodology, so it must be fine, right?
100
People who say their mothers were terrible won’t all be warmists taking the survey while pretending to be skeptics. In fact, I’d wager most won’t be.
As for Lewandowsky, I’m pretty sure he would never use the results I’ll get. You seem to be under the impression I’m going to find correlation between skepticism and the craziness the survey lists. My hypothesis holds I’ll find the opposite.
60
But I thought that warmists blamed their mums for the current CO2 level and warming ??
40
Warmists obviously weren’t breast fed, so as a consequence they’ve been on the public teat ever since. Overcompensating it would seem, right Lew. At least that’s the Freudian interpretation anyway.
40
> My hypothesis holds I’ll find the opposite.
Or the greatest discovery in cryptozoological history.
As long as you don’t stuff up the totals for the categories like a certain unmentionable person of great repute once did. Gosh darn he called you some names that day. His remarkable powers of telepathy ensured that he knew the intentions of the survey authors better than they did when they wrote the category long form definitions. Now that’s what I call a psychic power. Let’s not have a debacle like that again.
Shhh! It is The Name That Must Not Be Spoken.
I would ask what the point of the final set of questions was, but that might prejudice the results.
Presumably the warmists will tick Neutral on Eugenics since they like the idea of it but don’t want to admit they like the idea of it. It appeals to them as they like Central Planning and centrally planned selection pressure sounds much more efficient than de-centralised natural selection pressure. They will want to keep it as an option in case the “Denier” forehead tattoos and re-education camps don’t work.
30
“What is Global warming ?”
Thats what happens if you erect so many wind turbines that you weaken cooling convection. Man made all the way.
110
Ok, seriously, was that a joke?
Am I missing something?
20
I don’t know that I’d call it a joke, but it certainly wasn’t meant to be taken seriously. My hope is the results of the survey will be so absurd everyone can agree the methodology that creates them is bad. If they do, that’ll mean rejecting the results published by many people, including Stephan Lewandowsky.
Plus, it should be good for some laughs.
100
It’s making me smile already, but whether it’s believed or not is in the delivery.
I’m confident; if you publised the thing and made it as serious as posible, including press conferences and a book sale, too many would believe it.
You’re just not putting you’re heart into it 🙂
20
Nah. I asked the wrong questions if I wanted to get people to believe it. The questions I asked were designed to (mostly) paint global warming advocates in a bad light. Those are the people who care the most about global warming. They’re not going to accept mockery. The only people who would are the ones who don’t care enough to be blinded by zealotry.
I think the only question I asked which could be used to criticize skeptics is the racism one. I anticipated finding a racism-skepticism correlation when I created the survey (for bogus reasons). That’s not enough to get headlines, especially not with so many other data points to discuss.
That said, if I had done things differently, I probably could have gotten ludicrous results taken seriously. In fact, I might still be able to. Depending on the responses to the results of this survey, it might be worth trying to do an inverted version of it in a couple months (under a pseudonym).
30
A 5 sided dice works well. 🙂
Used it on one of the surveys I answered.
10
u want laughs!
bbc radio had luck-baker on an hour or so ago, laughing at sceptics laughing at shokalskiy getting stuck in ice. am sure he used the words “pseudo science” – now to try to find the item! meanwhile…
10 Jan: BBC: Antarctic rescue ship’s stop-off thwarted
By Andrew Luck-Baker BBC science producer, on board Aurora Australis
The Australian mercy mission icebreaker is being thwarted yet again in its attempt to unload cargo and fuel at Australia’s Antarctic base, Casey.
The only compensation for the crew and passengers is that the Aurora Australis is cruising up and down what looks like a graveyard of gigantic icebergs, in a holding pattern for when the weather allows…
The calving rate of icebergs from glaciers is predicted to increase as climate change proceeds in Antarctica.
Sights such as these may be more common in the frozen South in coming years and decades…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25681076
Luck-Baker three days ago:
7 Jan: BBC: Rescued Antarctic expedition arrives at Casey base
By Andrew Luck-Baker BBC science producer, on board Aurora Australis
The AAE is only making a short stop at Casey before heading for Hobart.
And the 52 scientists and tourists from the expedition will not even be going ashore…
Greg Mortimer: “[We had] an enormous area of very old ice (frozen sea ice of 10-15 years of age), which was to the east of where we were, and to the east of the famous Mertz Glacier.
“All of a sudden, the mass of ice was just spat out to the west, like a cough-ball if you like.
“It was a massive area of ice hundreds of square kilometres in size, and we just happened to be there at the time.”…
“Every time, I’ve been there, I don’t know what to expect of Antarctica. It doesn’t treat fools kindly. Whether or not we go into the basket of fools, history will tell. But [Antarctica] tends to jump on the back of your neck if you make a mistake.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-25647689
20
Pat:
“I don’t know what to expect of Antarctica. It doesn’t treat fools kindly”.
So you swan down there with an inadequate boat, taking along your wife, children and a load of amateurs, and not looking at the forecast?
They should have called it The Antarctic Frozen Turkey Delivery Service.
40
My only comment is this: will there be some sort of filter to keep out the ecoloons posing as sceptics?
An ecoloon posing as a sceptic is certain to answer the way supposedly predicted in Lewandowsky’s ‘research’.
50
There is a filter in place that uses cookies to prevent a person from taking the survey multiple times. It’s easy to get around though. All you need to do is delete the cookie the site creates on your machine (or use a different browser/device). The results will still list a timestamp and information about the user’s location (just regional, not IP) though. That means if a person wrote a simple script to repeatedly complete the survey, it’d be easy to detect. They’d have to take a number of steps to hide themselves.
That said, there’s no filter for single instances of fake responses. If someone wants to lie, I can’t stop them. What I can do is consider the possibility when I examine the results. It is relatively easy to find out which responses contribute to any correlation you find in any data set. That means I can check any results I get to see if they originate from suspicious responses.
I’m not too worried about it. With the number of responses I’ve already gotten, it’d take a great deal to change the correlations in the data. Given I have timestamps for responses, it’d be easy to tell if such a significant change happened.
50
Brandon,
You just had to bring up the alien abduction thing didn’t you, I had only just gotten over the last attempt from those perverted little green so and sos. Now I’ll have to go back to my therapist again….
/sarc
70
Ah; I miss their cold thin digits, and the wicked little things they did.
I go out at night occasionally and look up at the night sky, hoping to see them fly by. But they have never returned, I do wonder why?
30
Too funny!
00
“those perverted little green so and sos”
oh.. the Greens tried to recruit you too, did they. !!!
50
Mmmmm just a thought. Jo; if the original 97% Lewanwhateverhisnameisski survey still exists could it (that means you as I’m not competent) be rerun but this time done accurately / meaningfully?
10
Just wondering …
Spot the lowest common denominator.
SEPTEMBER 27, 2010: Talks of climate change committee must be secret because of economic sensitivity: PM
Four “expert advisers” will sit on the committee – Professor Ross Garnaut, Professor Will Steffen, Rod Sims and Ms Patricia Faulkner.
JULY 12, 2011: Team of investigators will probe carbon tax rip-offs
But Mr Swan’s office refused to explain how many new staff and extra funding the ACCC would need to perform the new monitoring role.
Rod Sims was appointed Chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission in August 2011 for a five year term.
Tuesday, 02 July 2013: RM Williams Agricultural Holdings, which spent several million dollars buying a cattle station in the Northern Territory back in 2007 as part of a plan to build the world’s largest carbon farm, has been placed in receivership.
The company was founded and is run by former News director Ken Cowley and counts Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Rod Sims as a shareholder – although Sims was trying to sell his stake as long ago as 2011.
. . .
Looking at Rod Sims wikipedia page, he has NO qualifications to sit on the Secret Climate Change Committee. What was he doing there?
Just wondering …
50
NYT, Jan 2014: Spain’s Solar Pullback Threatens Pocketbooks
ÁGUILAS, Spain — Six years ago, Justo Cruz Rodríguez, who runs a small business here designing signs, was looking for a way to generate a steady, if modest, pension for himself and his father.
So when the government passed a law offering attractive rates for solar energy — and guaranteed them for the next 25 years — he mortgaged his house, his father’s house and even his workshop to install half a dozen rows of solar panels in his father’s garden, with the idea of selling his excess electricity.
“It seemed so safe,” he said recently. “It was a government guarantee.”
But the Spanish government has changed its mind. It plans to pay less, a lot less.
Under legislation that goes into effect this year, it will drop its per-kilowatt-hour payment system altogether and effectively impose retroactive cuts in payments.
It also plans to make solar power producers pay a charge on electricity they generate and use themselves, a measure that angry protesters have named the “sun tax.”
“I am going to lose everything,” Mr. Cruz said, standing near the panels he thought would make his old age easier.
“I will be homeless. At my age, homeless.”
. . .
Paging Rod Sims, we have a warning …
50
Here is one link from the names mentioned on Rod Sims ACCC link above:
Ingeus Limited
Saturday, 25 February 2012
While Kevin woos Labor, Therese embroiled in UK labour scandal
10
Obviously decisions about imposing the World’s Biggest Carbon Tax are best handled by our Betters – the public couldn’t possibly comprehend the complex issues.
But what exactly the RAN ships did to give us 3 weeks without a SIEV? Well we need a blow-by-blow commentary and videos of the procedure on YouTube! Abbott666 is turning us into a Stalinist state with his refusal to disclose military operational details.
20
What Brandon is attempting here is an example of the same sort of scientific replication activity that has been noticed as valuable in very different fields of knowledge. Earlier there was a discussion on Reddit about the aims of deceased activist Aaron Swartz, and one of the head honchos of the Electronic Frontier Foundation made a very pertinent observation:
It’s not the consensus or the peer review that makes it true, it’s whether what’s been published actually works as advertised in practice when other people test it.
You have to wonder how much self-censorship happens amongst climate scientists who don’t want to burst the funding bubble. Citizen scientists could be the most valuable type in this pre-emptively politicised field.
60
Here’s a little food for thought. The pale blue dot.
While we’re stumbling about trying to make sense of ourselves with science, perhaps a more humble viewpoint is what we need instead.
20
Knew exactly what it would be before I clicked it.
Still clicked it anyway.
There’s a few issues about which Sagan was not exactly humble. And in fact when it comes to being humble about matters that are beyond one’s understanding, Sagan was a bit of a hypocrite. He was happy to tell all and sundry that a nuclear WW3 would create a worldwide nuclear winter, despite the physics of it not really supporting that outcome at all. He was an early example of Steven Schneider’s (CAGW) attitude that scientists faced a choice between being truthful and being expedient. Perhaps for Sagan it was more important to raise the spectre of a nuclear winter to bolster the case for disarmament.
Certainly he was not humble in his atheism.
As for the scale of the universe and our place in it, well you could look at it both ways. Earth seems to be the only planet with life on it, so maybe Earth’s rarity can only be explained by divine selection. On the other hand, look at all that stuff out there that clearly has nothing to do with us. If we’re centre stage for this gig then why were so many other stages built to begin with.
The one thing I can say with certainty about my place in the universe is… it’s currently lunchtime there and I want chicken.
40
“devine selection”
Funny that.
10
it’s currently lunchtime there and I want chicken”
leg ham, King Island smoked cheese, some nice bread, and a glass of shiraz. 🙂 🙂
20
Yes, Sagan was not exactly humble. And indeed hypocritical as well. However, taken at face value the video is rather humbling. We think of ourselves as so important, yet when you look at the larger context of where we live and what we can and cannot do, we look more like a flyspeck on the hostesses best china, discovered by a guest as dinner is being served — a great big embarrassment to the universe which totally ignores our whining and complaining while it follows its rules instead of ours.
It’s breakfast here and I’m looking forward to scrambled eggs, hash browns and bacon. While I can enjoy life I’ll do so. And I’ll make no comment about how we got here or why it happened.
20
Like… whoaahhh…
00
Smoked a bomber then watched this…….hey man I saw GOD mann!
I gotta find some Doritos………..
00
That’s interesting. I read ‘pedophilia’ as a fear of feet (pedometer, pedicure, pedal, etc) and thought it an extra silly question; I hadn’t realised it’s an american spelling of peadophilia. I should maybe have checked before answering…
00
I would have hoped you would find EITHER undesirable?
10
Prof Lewandowsky likes to say that climate sceptics believe the moon landings were faked.
With great amusement I read this from intrepid Antarctic explorer Prof Chris Turney, which was reported in Nature last week:
History is not a strong suit of his, it appears.
110
That is just hilarious…a Turney/Lewandowsky/AGW own goal.
50
+1 for a skeptic who believes (at least aspects of the footage taken on the moon) was fake!
Shock horror!
The entire logic of dismissing a persons opinion on the basis of what hey think about something unrelated that happened decades ago is flawed.
I can believe that the moon landing was fake, I can believe that CAGW is a hoax. I could be right or wrong in either of my convictions. So what?
20
Even though my personal belief is that we did in fact go to the moon.
I can accept that it would be possible to stage the event while spending a lot less money than it would take to actually go. Then if you spent the same amount it would take to go on the hoax, the hoax becomes quite plausible.
01
Safetyguy66, it was in fact impossible to fake the moon landing at the time …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_loUDS4c3Cs
41
Brilliant. That guy is as good as Topher, or is it the other way round!
21
You really think its easier to land on the moon than fake a video about landing on the moon? Wow!
I suppose it’s impossible that NASA had more advanced technology in cinematography than the public knew about ….
Seriously, the lunar lander was so obviously a stage prop It’s baffling that anybody can look at it and think that it has any engineering integrity whatsoever. Yet despite known failures in trials in earths atmosphere, somehow it performed flawlessly in outer space…
This is what happened. The astronauts stayed in low earth orbit and fake footage was Beamed down to earth. Research it. Then deal with it and move on.
“One small step for man, one giant fraud for mankind.”
I wonder who pocketed the proceeds???
Follow the money!
10
There is a flaw in your logic. How did they plant the prism from a low Earth orbit may I ask?
00
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/AS11-40-5922HR.jpg
Will you believe your own eyes? Cardboard and duct tape lands men on the moon…. YEH RIGHT!!!
[No more moon landing is faked comments OK?] ED
20
Safety,
They sure did spend a whole lot of money developing those giant Saturn rockets that we all saw jump off the ground at each launch. One has to ask (if no other question) why bother if the end result was a fake trip, not once but six times, not counting the pre-landing orbital flight of Apollo 10 around the moon which also returned many hard to fake photographs?
But it would still not be possible to fake the moon landings for one very critical reason. A whole lot of people would be in on the secret and would have to avoid even a hint that it was faked for all the years since then. And as we have recently seen, the likely hood of someone spilling the beans is very high. So let’s never mind the technical problem and just think about the secrecy problem. How much do you think some publisher would pay for the inside story of the huge charade we’re talking about here?
And I’ll dare to say it would still not be possible to fake the whole thing, even today for strictly technical reasons. They would trip themselves up somewhere just because fakery of that magnitude is very tough to get right.
10
a whole lot of moon landing fake deniers here I see.
[No more moon landing is faked comments OK?] ED
00
No problem, I will keep my skeptical comments strictly grounded to issues relating to climate, banking and medicine (Jo’s approved to comment conspiracy theories)
00
I saw an interview with one of the old German engineers that made it happen. He said they thought about faking it but decided it was easier to just go do it!
00
I watched it live on television. They did not have good recording tecnology then and low gravity is hard to fake without attaching visible overhead spring lines to the guys’ suits.
Besides which Kennedy and Johnson would not fake such a thing. Too many people involved to guarantee zero security breaches. In the height of the Cold War just after the Cuban missile crisis faking something like that could have ghastly consequences. As it was Kruschev was very close to pushing the button. The only thing that would be acceptable is to make the technology work conspicuously and irrefutably. Keep in mind programs like Redstone had been plagued with failures…of what were basically dual use orbital lauchers and ICBM’s. You do not want to give the impression to your deadly enemy that your ICBM’s are fake and don’t work.
30
I watched it live on TV also, and it always gets me into trouble when I say that.
I explain that I watched Neil Armstrong stepping off the ladder live on TV, as it was actually happening in a practical subject classroom at Electrical Section at RAAFSTT, at Wagga Wagga, just after lunch on Monday 21st July 1969. The landing had happened just before we started classes, but we came back from lunch a little early as the TV in that one classroom was on all day, and a group of three or four classes watched it in that prac room.
People try to tell me I’m either lying or that must have been a replay, because all of that actually happened on the 20th, but they always get the time differential wrong, and it’s the same with the Kennedy assassination which I heard about while playing junior club tennis on the Saturday morning (23Nov1963) when our coach called it out from the balcony when he heard it on the 9AM news, only a couple of hours after the declaration of his death.
Incidentally, Truthseeker, great video.
Tony.
40
Correct, it was actually my wife’s 9th birthday.
When asked in an exam years later, she gave the answer to the date of the moon landing as 21/7/1969 and was marked incorrect, in spite of explaining it with the teacher afterwards, who didn’t believe her and didn’t get it. Numbskull.
40
While the rest of the World has to live with the fact that you guys are always way ahead of us, surely the correct time of the Moon Landing is whatever time it was on the Moon at the time.
50
Greenwich Moon Time?
40
Since time is arguably an artificial construct of man, there may have been no time on the Moon until man arrived. Then I guess it must have been whatever it said on either Neil or Buzz’s Omega Speedmasters, at 4:17 PM Eastern Daylight Time (or was it 3:17 EST).
10
The time NASA would have been using would certainly be UTC but I think it was still called GMT (or Z time) at that point. Local stations would probably report it as whatever the local time was if they mentioned time at all.
It happened in the middle of the night here and I stayed up to watch the, “…one giant leap for mankind,” happen in real time. The picture was so bad it couldn’t even keep up with Armstrong’s movements adequately and he left behind a brief ghost of himself as he jumped down to the surface.
The technology developed rather fast after that landing.
20
Wouldn’t that have meant having to adjust their watches after taking off from Florida then ?
00
Joe,
They probably had their time set at GMT starting out. I was well used to correlating GMT with local time while in the army and it’s no real trick once you get used to it. The clock in the ops building where I worked was set on GMT so we could time stamp things and there would be no confusion about the time no matter who looked at our output or where.
Consider that NASA had facilities, including ships, all around the world, all needing to know what time they would be in contact with the lunar missions or need to pick up the returning astronauts. The only sensible thing is to use the one official time standard that’s used everywhere in the world — GMT.
10
UTC is not quite the same thing as GMT. It is complicated.
Roy is right, UTC does derive from GMT.
But GMT was not suitable for use by Astronomers, because the GMT standard was based on the earth’s rotational speed, which is not a constant, and so required adjustments to be made on a semi-regular basis. However, science has yet to define a single set of adjustments that will meet all Astronomical requirements, so an independent theoretical time was defined for astronomical use. This is known as UT1, and that is the mathematical standard that underpins the more practical UTC system.
The official basis for terrestrial time is the International Atomic Time (TAI). A TAI second is defined by the constant rate of decay of a cesium atom — an “atomic clock”. A Universal Coordinated Time (UTC) second is then defined as an integral TAI second, plus any adjustments that must be made to keep time to within a given tolerance when compared to UT1. These adjustments are known as leap seconds, but are usually applied at the scale of tens of milliseconds.
But that still only applies at the clock.
Knowing the accurate time anywhere else requires a knowledge of the transmission route for the time signal, and the propagation delays of electrons (or photons) along that route. So the time shown on your computer, is always behind real time, by several milliseconds.
For most practical purposes, this delay is inconsequential. But for those on the moon, the transmission delays were measured in seconds rather than milliseconds, and you can hear that in the round-trip delay (from Mission Control’s perspective) in the recordings.
And finally, politics gets into the act. Yes, the world is defined into 24 time zones, but they are not regular, because politicians arbitrarily decide the time within a countries borders, sometimes “changing it” by as much as two hours.
As I said, it is complicated.
10
Well, leave it to Rereke to explain it until it’s totally incomprehensible. 🙂
The important thing about time keeping for terrestrial needs is that it’s still tied to the rotational period of the Earth, one day = 24 hours of 60 minutes, each having 60 seconds. And UTC is it!
Leap seconds bother only scientists, engineers and those with similar demands for timekeeping. And since I get my time from either an internet service run by NIST or an NIST time signal broadcast 24 hours a day from Fort Collins, Colorado (WWVB, 60 kHz), that both get adjusted as necessary, I don’t worry about the small stuff.
NIST, if you don’t know, is the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology. They’re charged with maintaining the official time for the United States among other things. Also they’re one of the few government organizations from which we get anything like our money’s worth in return.
Maybe worth mentioning — if you live in the states you can now buy fairly cheap clocks and watches that set themselves using WWVB every night. Other countries may have similar services.
10
It may be worth mentioning that leap seconds predate UT1 and UTC.
00
It wasn’t totally incomprehensible — I understood it. 😉
UT1 and TAI seconds are important, because they are the only way to synchronise events over very long distances, when the limitation of the speed of light starts to become significant.
As such UT1 is just a counter, and has no concept of leap seconds.
The leap seconds come to the fore when you need to convert UT1 to a time system related to the planet you are on. A Martian day, is not the same as an Earth day, so it will require different adjustment factors. UT1 is the common standard that allows the conversion between Earth time and Martian time.
00
Rereke,
It actually was a good explanation and it brings up a question: how accurately would NASA need to coordinate time on Earth with time on the moon or in transit? As I remember they actually recorded time in terms of mission time; so many hours, minutes and seconds from liftoff for every event. Those times of course, would correlate with GMT or UTC/UT1 but how important would it be to keep everything on a common time standard between Earth and moon?
Telemetry could be time stamped on board and that should be accurate enough as far as I can see. You could always process data like that after the fact to find out it was 03:00.178 in Houston. The only really critical thing it seems to me, would be to have orbiter and lander clocks correct so they could start an engine burn at exactly the right time to get where they needed to go instead of somewhere else. And I have no idea how much tolerance there could be in that timing. But I do know that after every burn the spacecraft read the residuals back to Houston as soon as they could compute them (or read them out of the computer) — differences between actual measured acceleration, duration, etc. and the theoretical, as measured on board.
And you can tell I’m definitely not a rocket scientist. 😉
00
Well, I am not a rocket scientist either, so we are both equally well qualified. 🙂
But I have done a fair amount of work involving telemetry across multiple locations, in situations where time comparison was critical in establishing cause and effect.
As I mentioned in passing before, the TAI second is just a counter of a very accurate local time signal.
At the moment of launch the counter on the ground, and the counter on the spacecraft, would be simultaneously set to zero. This forms the basis for “mission time”, using UT1. UT1 time is just a conversion of the TAI second count to an hours/minutes/seconds display format, and requires no adjustment for leap seconds.
As the craft moved away from earth, the rate at which the time signals were received would slow down because of the increasing propagation delay. Mission Control is therefore always working with the history of what has occurred on the spacecraft, and there is always a similar time delay in signals from earth reaching the spacecraft, so the ground controllers need to predict what they need to do in the future, based on the historical information they have. Do you see why Armstrong took manual control of the landing?
Computers can always adjust for the delays after the event, because all of the variables are known. But doing it in real time, and with the valve and transistor technology of the day, was an incredible feat.
p.s. As a point of trivia, the theoretical speed of light in a perfect vacuum (the electromagnetic constant, “c”, in E=mc2) is 299,792,458 m/s. If you thought it was 300 * 106, you were lied to.
00
Indeed I do. And it had nothing to do with time delay from Earth to moon or moon to Earth. The on-board computer was handling it all quite nicely until Armstrong saw that they would crash in a field of big boulders if he didn’t do something. Like any pilot faced with trouble he took steps to fix it. I think he finally landed with just seconds worth of fuel left in the descent stage.
Now that’s cool under pressure.
Aside from the fact that Armstrong was the only civilian astronaut at the time and that was more than enough incentive to want him in command for political reasons, there is another reason. It’s been rumored that NASA wanted him to command that mission because if they had been stranded on the moon Armstrong would be the only one found still trying to get home again when a rescue mission arrived (don’t remember the exact words or the origin of this).
Now of course, there never would have been a rescue mission. But that (very untrue) story shows how much confidence NASA had in Neil Armstrong. And the rest of his life was a testimony to that character all the way. If even half our leaders had even half of Neil Armstrong’s character we’d be in a much better world today.
10
Isn’t there a name for that in the lexicon of false reasoning ? An Argumentum ad something or other ?
30
Do you mean the opposite of appeal to authority , like he’s wrong about that so he must be wrong about everything else . Argumentum ad Not Very Cundiam.
10
It is known as Argument by False Analogy. I have no idea what the latin phrase for that might be.
00
Dominos ad nauseum…….WHACK!
00
Sorry, I didn’t take “Lefty Loo’s” poll so I can’t take this one either. It would create a statistical nightmare where results would have to be adjusted etc. ……….
20
Gosh, strike me down with a feather duster, but have some Ozzies been watching too much US TV and lost their dry rebel touch along with their SOH?
What happened? Surely you can’t blame it all on Juliar and the ABC.
At least Turney laughed and laughed and laughed but wasn’t he a Pom?
Getting ready for red-thumbs;
5,4,3,2,1
20
Tourney is an Aussie/pom crossbreed brought up as an Antipodean. You’re not evading responsibility for him that easily!
30
Evidently this one is addressed to Aussie
00
Tourney is an Aussie/pom crossbreed brought up as an Antipodean. You’re not evading responsibility for him that easily!
00
And the contrary view addressed to the terre des pommes. You’ve cover both hemispheres.
00
handjive –
haven’t looked into rod sims, but i’m still on the case of CSIRO & the Dragon, cos it’s way over the top:
11 Jan: Today.com: Laura T. Coffey: Girl, 7, asks scientists for a dragon, gets standing job offer
The letter (complete with a drawing) proved to be such a hit at the agency that smitten scientists tailor-made a titanium dragon for Sophie. They also told her they’d love to have her join their team when she’s old enough, so long as she manages to “stay curious.”…
In an email message to TODAY.com, Hill (Vanessa Hill, a spokeswoman for CSIRO) said she took the time to respond to Sophie as thoughtfully as she did because she wanted to “encourage her imagination.”
“We get a lot of enquiries, but the letter was so polite and hopeful I really couldn’t ignore it,” Hill explained. “We do a lot of great research, but it struck me that it’s really all too mainstream. An apology was in order for our lack of dragon research. I wanted to be encouraging and, like we are in all things, scientific.”…
http://www.today.com/moms/girl-7-asks-scientists-dragon-gets-standing-job-offer-2D11900130
10 Jan: Australia: Lara Lauth: Hollywood director wants dragon insight from Eatons Hill seven-year-old Sophie Lester
In response the CSIRO issued a formal apology for their slow progress in the field of dragon research and development, and her inspiring tale made the home pages of both Australian and US media websites.
That’s where the director of 2010 box-office smash hit How to Train Your Dragon director Chris Sanders heard about Sophie, Mrs Lester said…
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/hollywood-director-wants-dragon-insight-from-eatons-hill-sevenyearold-sophie-lester/story-e6frg6n6-1226799146658
CSIRO News Blog: Here be 3D printed dragons
Posted: January 10, 2014 | Author: Vanessa Hill
It was featured on TIME, Huffington Post, The Independent, Yahoo, Breakfast TV, the list goes on. People contacted us offering to help, financial institutions tweeted their support and DreamWorks Studios phoned (seriously), saying they knew how to train dragons and wanted to speak with Sophie. The dreams of one little girl went viral…
http://csironewsblog.com/2014/01/10/here-be-3d-printed-dragons/
LinkedIn: Vanessa Hill – Social Media Advisor at CSIRO
University of New South Wales
Bachelor of Science (Psychology) 2004 – 2008
Member: Australian Science Communicators
http://au.linkedin.com/in/nessyhill
00
would also like to know how come abc has not reported in their national news, the following:
soundcloud 666 abc canberra:
Tony Fleming, director of the Australian Antarctic Division tells Louise Maher the AAD wasn’t linked to the Australasian Antarctic Expedition despite an implication by the expedition head that he had an “official stamp of approval”…
Tony Fleming says the AAD will make efforts to recover the cost of the rescue which set back their own missions…
http://soundcloud.com/666abccanberra/australian-antarctic-division
facebook 666 abc canberra:
In Louise Maher’s interview this morning with Australian Antarctic Division director Tony Fleming claimed he’d been misrepresented by the leader of the failed scientific expedition that spent over a week stuck in ice before being rescued…
https://www.facebook.com/666canberra/posts/10152117050904817
only the Australian carried the Anthony Bergin quote about this not being an official Australian Antarctic Division expedition, & none are carrying the Tony Fleming story. the media is a joke.
20
26 mins: 6 Jan: BBC Discovery: The Return to Mawson’s Antarctica – Part Four
10mins in: Tracey Rogers: this stuff is massive & everywhere, we’re in a sea of multi-year-ice, which is unusual for Antarctica, which is why we’re here in this region. it’s so iced up. ….it’s probably changed the environment here.
Luck-Baker: u work a lot in the west where there has been warming, i guess something else is going on here.
Tracey Rogers: that’s exactly right. that’s why we really wanted to come to this region. we talk about global warming, really climate change. u get some areas of warming, & some areas are experiencing different things. the trend in west antarctic sea ice is receding, but here it’s growing.
this is something completely different. it’s another example how the system is changing, it was not like this before. the system’s responding in different places differently; in some areas u r seeing flooding, in some u r seeing cyclones, here u r seeing this multi-multi-year ice.
Greg Mortimer: it is an extraordinary event etc etc. cough ball. cataclysmic event…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p01nrh3l/Discovery_The_Return_To_Mawsons_Antarctica_Part_Four/
UNSW School of Biological, Earth & Environmental Sciences: Tracey Rogers
Associate Professor Tracey Rogers:
Field of Research:
Predator-prey interactions, communication, Antarctic wildlife.
Reseach & Current Projects:
The common thread of my rather diverse research is the attempt to understand how mammals respond to change.
How has the recent warming off the Western Antarctic influenced the predator guild (changing food webs, morphological changes)…
http://www.bees.unsw.edu.au/tracey-rogers
00
I disagree with Mark Steyn…they should have eaten the BBC reporter first, then the Guardian reporters.
30
ABC says: Officials in Tonga have confirmed the first death from Severe Tropical Cyclone Ian
Not a single mention of the words “warming”, “climate”, “temperature”, or “extreme”.
Their article yesterday “West Australian heatwave closes national parks, dams as temperatures head toward 44C in Perth” recycled the “2013 hottest year on record” claim, but did not mention “global warming” or “climate change” even once.
Have the ABC started a new year’s resolution or something??
Surely too good to last.
00
The “you have never been wrong” question presents irresistible temptation.
20
Nice thing happened last night.
I was at a music gig, and these hippies wanted to a “no coal” sign behind the band as they were setting up, .. the band were young guys 20’s I’d say.
Anyway the lead singer looked these fools in the face . pointed to the lights, then the audio gear and said…
“See those lights, see that gear.. its all powered by coal fired electricity…..
….. so p***-off and go crawl up someone else’s a***, you f******* idiot. ”
THE CROWD CHEERED LIKE CRAZY !!!
130
AndyG55, are you sure the lead singer wasn’t Tony From OZ?
Oh ya I see it now “guys in their 20’s”…….
Sorry Tony I couldn’t resist 🙂
10
The generation, now in their mid-teens to early twenties, have grown up with the Global Warming/Climate Change meme, as they have grown up with Social Media.
I have two Goddaughters* in that bracket, and they will not have a bar of advertising, “People only advertise lame stuff”, or global warming/climate change, “It’s just made up, by people who want to control everything”.
Social media acts like an ongoing poll of majority opinion, and majority opinion turns out to be very rational. It is the wisdom of crowds — automated.
* I am actually learning from them. They have raised cynicism to new heights.
30
wanted to hang a …
10
Hey guys. I just wanted to let you know I’ve closed the survey.
The response rate far exceeded anything I imagined, with the survey receiving approximately 5,800 responses in 24 hours. That’s more data than I could possibly need, and I’m closing the survey so I can begin writing about the results. I hope to have material to post come Monday, but don’t hold me to that. As entertaining as this project is, there are other fun things I might want to do on my weekend.
Thanks to everyone who participated. You guys rock!
60
An there was me thinking the :-
“Sorry this survey has now been closed.”
was all part test, what with being on the subject of a demented psychologist an all.
20
Congratulations Brandon Shollenberger.
I seem to recall the orginal didn’t get anywhere near that number from the Pro-supporters. Interesting…..
30
Awwww…. I missed the survey.
00
Isn’t believing in UFOs like believing in the Missing Hot Spot ?
20
Joe,
If that question is directed to me then the answer is, I don’t believe in UFOs. They aren’t an article of faith. 🙂
I do believe people, including myself, see things in the air that they don’r recognize and don’t understand.
20
No Roy. It was aimed rather at those indulging in statistical gymnastics to ‘prove’ the existence of an as yet unidentified HotSpot. Doesn’t the Hotspot need consciousness to keep hiding in the noise without getting caught ? Wishful thinking, albeit Peer Reviewed wishful thinking perhaps.
How to prove the non-existence of something that you cannt, until it proves otherwise.
That’s why we keep believing in the Loch Ness Monster.
20
The Loch Ness Monster does exist, and can be easily identified by any observer who has consumed the requisite amount of Malt Whisky.
It is a well known fact.
30
Alcohol does have un uncanny ability for helping one to see things from another perspective. I sometimes look back on realisations I’ve come to whilst under its influence and that would never have occurred without it.
And it us well known that reality is only an illusion caused by lack of alcohol.
30
I have another update. Given the short window the survey ran for, a number of people may not have got a chance to participate. As such, I’ve opened a second survey identical to the first. Anyone is welcome to take it.
http://kwiksurveys.com/s.asp?sid=h1wq2yej0dhjgs4284520
I’m going to write about the results from the first survey for now, but I may include results from the copy in the future. Even if I don’t, at least you’ll be able to try the survey for yourself!
10
At any rate, Brandon, you have made a valuable contribution to the weekend gaiety of the sceptic blogosphere. I salute you.
40
it didn’t take a “climate scientist” to work this out!
9 Jan: BBC: Jonathan Amos: Emperor penguins beat ice cliffs to breed
Satellite images show colonies moving their locations in years when the thin sea ice on which they habitually breed forms late or is absent.
Scientists report the observations in the online journal Plos One.
They reveal the birds travelling long distances to find alternative sites.
These are further in towards the coast, up on the ice shelves – the thick slabs of glacier ice that jut out over the ocean…
Co-author Barbara Wienecke from the ***Australian Antarctic Division said: “These new findings are an important step forward in helping us understand what the future may hold for these animals. However, we cannot assume that this behaviour is widespread in other penguin populations.
“The ability of these four colonies to relocate to a different environment – from sea ice to ice shelf – in order to cope with local circumstances, was totally unexpected…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25655664
***glad to see Barbara Wienecke from the Australian Antarctic Division is a Co-Author of the new report!
at WUWT i posted the following comment the other day:
“sounds like these “ICONIC” penguins didn’t leave a forwarding address”
from 5:55 in: Wilson on less penguins because there’s 70km of fast ice between where Mawson sailed in and where the sea is today. but as climate warms…etc etc:
Luck-Baker: climate change & the many ways it’s impacting the Antarctic’s animal & ecosystems.. is the underlying research question for all the biologists on the Expedition:
30 Dec: BBC Discovery – The Return to Mawson’s Antarctica – Part Three – BBC News
Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker
Ornithologist Kerry-Jayne Wilson discovers that an ***iconic breeding colony of Adelie penguins at Cape Denison, the rocky area where Douglas Mawson built his expedition hut, has depleted numbers as the fast ice has grown.
http://24allnews.com/discovery-the-return-to-mawsons-antarctica-part-three-bbc-news/
29 Dec: Guardian: Antarctic expedition: still icebound – what happens next is anyone’s guess
Like explorer Douglas Mawson 100 years ago, Alok Jha and the expedition he joined face a long wait to be rescued
Ornithologist Kerry-Jayne Wilson counted the populations of Adélie penguins. She found what she had feared – numbers in decline – and something worse: bodies of dead chicks littering the rookeries and many eggs not being properly incubated…
http://www.theguardian.com/world/antarctica-live/2013/dec/29/antarctica-expedition-ice-wait-rescue
the “Turney Exhibition” was working so hard – with the help of BBC, Guardian et al – to make Antarctic penguins a new CAGW icon; hopefully, they will now throw their penguin research overboard before they get back to Hobart.
00
5 Jan: NYT: Suzanne Daley: Spain’s Solar Pullback Threatens Pocketbooks
So when the government passed a law offering attractive rates for solar energy — and guaranteed them for the next 25 years — he (Justo Cruz Rodriguez) mortgaged his house, his father’s house and even his workshop to install half a dozen rows of solar panels in his father’s garden, with the idea of selling his excess electricity.
“It seemed so safe,” he said recently. “It was a government guarantee.”
But the Spanish government has changed its mind. It plans to pay less, a lot less. Under legislation that goes into effect this year, it will drop its per-kilowatt-hour payment system altogether and effectively impose retroactive cuts in payments. It also plans to make solar power producers pay a charge on electricity they generate and use themselves, a measure that angry protesters have named the “sun tax.”…
“If we did nothing, the only two alternatives would either be bankruptcy of the system or an increase of the price to consumers of more than 40 percent,” said Jose Manuel Soria, the minister for industry, energy and tourism, defending the government plans shortly after they were announced last summer…
Several large investors have decided to take Spain to the World Bank’s arbitration agency, the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes…
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/06/world/europe/spains-solar-pullback-threatens-pocketbooks.html?ref=science&_r=2
00
desperation on the cusp of madness:
11 Jan: Guardian: Fiona Harvey: David Cameron right to link floods and global warming, say climate scientists
Myles Allen and Peter Stott say prime minister right to make connection between recent weather and global warming
Myles Allen of Oxford University and Peter Stott of the Met Office said on Friday that the prime minister was right to make such a connection, and that increasing levels of climate change would have substantial impacts on rainfall…
Stott said that efforts to make the attribution of extreme events to the effects of climate change were now a major focus of the Met Office’s climate change research, which involves world-leading scientists and super-computers crunching vast quantities of past and present weather data…
Allen called for more scientific effort to be put into exploring the link between human-caused climate change and extreme weather. He said that it could be possible in future to make a case for the attribution of extreme weather events to climate change, if computer data can be more closely analysed.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jan/10/david-cameron-floods-global-warming-climate-scientists
10 Jan: Smithsonian Smart News: Colin Schultz: The Cold Snap Wasn’t Actually That Extreme, Global Warming Has Just Made Us Wimpy
The recent cold snap wouldn’t have been so unusual in the past
Seth Borenstein, the Associated Press’ science reporter, has had enough of our whining. Meteorologists are annoyed with us, too, he says, especially those of us who, either snarkily or seriously, whined: “Where’s our global warming nowwww?”
The cold snap that gripped the nation, says Borenstein, wasn’t even that cold. It’s just that, thanks to climate change, we’re now so used to above-average temperatures that one little blip of a return to what used to be known as “winter” has us all riled up…
And, anyway, it’s about to warm up. New York’s looking at temperatures in the 50s on Saturday; Toronto could have a balmy winter high of 43 degrees F.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/cold-snap-wasnt-actually-extreme-global-warming-has-just-made-us-wimps-180949322/
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9 Jan: SMH: Mary Voice: Don’t shoot the climate change messenger
(Mary Voice is a climatologist and lecturer and was formerly head of the National Climate Centre at the Bureau of Meteorology.)
There are many opinions, floating around the blogosphere and newspaper opinion pieces, that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change lacks integrity and accountability. If this was true to any significant degree, it would be very serious for public policy.
At the same time, it is of paramount importance not to shoot the messenger should that messenger be trying to let you know of something really important.
The climate change panel is a messenger of unwelcome news and, given our human natures, is a classic shooting target – one of the Everly Brothers [from the harmony rock duo] died last week of a smoking-related lung disease, and it reminds me how tempting it was a few decades ago to discount [shoot] the medical research messengers who warned us of the risks of cigarette smoking…
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/dont-shoot-the-climate-change-messenger-20140108-30hgj.html
8 Jan: Forbes: James Taylor: Embarrassed Global Warming Alarmists Sink To Comedic Lows With ‘Polar Vortex’ Excuse
Of course, if global warming alarmists really had predicted that it would cause more frequent and severe cold outbreaks (via Mutant Polar Vortexes, Mutant Teenage Ninja Turtles, Yeti, or whatever), we should see such predictions all throughout the latest United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. The problem is, it’s not there. Nowhere. Nada. Nunca. Nein. Nyet…
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2014/01/08/embarrassed-global-warming-alarmists-sink-to-comedic-lows-with-polar-vortex-excuse/
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“Polar vortex” – my R’s! How stupid does the AGW story have to get before people wake up?
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is Abby talking about Australia or somewhere else? note she doesn’t give a link for the “nuclear reactor” wildfire story?
10 Jan: Common Dreams: Abby Zimet: Dear Climate Change Deniers, Meet Australia’s Wildfire-Raging, Bat-Killing, Kangaroo-Fainting, iPad-Melting Heat Wave
Forget the Polar Vortex. Australia is very hot. Australia is so hot its Bureau of Meteorology issued a special statement documenting the “highly significant” heat wave, even worse than last year’s, with record-breaking 122 degree readings that necessitated adding new colors to its weather maps. It’s so hot a new website, Scorcher, has been set up to track the heat wave. And walls of wildfires deemed “catastrophic” are decimating the countryside, having already hit a nuclear research facility containing two reactors. And up to 100,000 bats have fallen dead from the sky, and parrots, kangaroos and other wildlife are collapsing and dying from the heat, and the country’s new conservative climate-change-denying prime minister has remained strangely mute despite a report following last summer’s then-record-breaking heat wave that conclusively linked it to climate change, and you are not advised to try to use your iPad or other electronics, which will likely die…
http://www.commondreams.org/further/2014/01/10-0
naturally, it’s mostly CAGW-followers commenting.
8 Jan: Ninemsn: Matthew Henry: Fire at Lucas Heights nuclear reactor
A fire that broke out in an electrical substation at the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor in Sydney in now under control.
At least two fire crews remain on the scene after what is believed to be an electrical fire broke out in a building at the rear of the complex…
ANSTO said the blaze is “not believed that it was linked to current weather conditions”…
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/national/2013/01/08/12/02/fire-at-lucas-heights-nuclear-reactor
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OT Pensioner lifts the lid on BBC’s six year cover up on political influence over Global Warming.
” The BBC began its long legal battle to keep details of the conference secret after an amateur climate blogger spotted a passing reference to it in an official report.”
You may have heard of this one already, one if their worst kept secrets
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2537886/BBCs-six-year-cover-secret-green-propaganda-training-executives.html
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[…] was published at the blogs Wattsupwiththat, JoanneNova and BishopHill blogs. The poll is still available to […]
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There’s more duplicity:
http://skience.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/lewandowsky/
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“But this obvious conclusion that those believing in global warming are very subjective and change their interpretation to fit their beliefs in sharp contrast to skeptics who tended to base their views only on the data and not what they were told the data showed, was not only omitted from the paper, but instead it was replaced with a conclusion very strongly suggesting the opposite.
As such not only does this paper show that members of the public who believe in global warming change their perception of the global temperature graph to fit what they believe it shows, but it is also strong evidence that at least some academics are so strongly influenced by their beliefs regarding global warming that (to put the best possible interpretation on their actions) they are “blinded” to obvious conclusion that do not fit their world-view.”
http://skience.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/lewandowsky/
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