Good news, according to The Guardian Stephan Lewandowsky is doing Reddit/Science Ask Me Anything session (finished for today, but back again tomorrow).
Richard Tol asked Stephan Lewandowsky how he felt about data. Stephan Lewandowsky replied with exactly the right answer, saying it’s crucial, and “I release all relevant data immediately”. Then Barry Woods quoted the Vice Chancellor of UWA refusing to provide Lewandowsky’s data (after many requests). Apparently it is UWA practice not to release data, no matter how many times researchers politely enquire. How unfortunate for Stephan to have worked at such a backward institution?
Strangely, Barry Woods comment disappeared completely. (Lucky there’s a screen-shot.)
There must be something wrong with the server at Reddit, surely? Nonetheless Stephan Lewandowsky is passionate about data, I’m sure he will fix this as soon as possible in the morning. (Actually he is probably emailing Stephen McIntyre this minute). It could all be solved so quickly.
Of course, it is too late for him to call the Vice Chancellor, so it may take til lunch time tomorrow to change UWA’s data hiding practice.
We look forward to advancing cognitive science with open data too Professor Lewandowsky.
-Jo
—————————————————————————————————————–
The Reddit Comments
Please elaborate on the importance of reproducibility of research, including the availability of data and background data to other researchers if not the public, and on the importance of instilling this attitude in our PhD students.
StephanLewandowsky Professor of Cognitive Science
Crucially important. That’s why I release all relevant data immediately upon publication. I also have now begun to preregister my experiments, which i consider to be an exciting new development in the social sciences. I am also now increasingly relying on Bayesian statistics for similar reasons. Finally, I have rarely published anything without knowing that it has replicated (e.g. my two recent papers on conspiratorial thinking and the denial of science).
Barry Woods:
In this case will you be providing the data that was requested for – NASA faked the Moon Landing, therefore [climayte science] is a hoax, Lewandowsky et al, Psychological Science
The Vice Chancellor of UWA has refused to release it.
From: Paul Johnson
Sent: Friday, March 28, 2014 8:08 AM
To: Barry Woods
Cc: Murray Maybery ; Kimberley Heitman
Subject: request for access to dataMr B. Woods
Dear Mr Woods,
I refer to your emails of the 11th and 25th March directed to Professor Maybery, which repeat a request you made by email dated the 5th September 2013 to Professor Lewandowsky (copied to numerous recipients) in which you request access to Professor Lewandowsky’s data for the purpose of submitting a comment to the Journal of Psychological Science.
It is not the University’s practice to accede to such requests.
Yours faithfully,
Professor Paul Johnson,
Vice-Chancellor
Do you regret Paul Johnson’s statement.
I wish to submit a comment to the journal with respect to a factual error in the paper’s methodology. The Raw survey data, is required (should it contain referring domain information) to establish who exactly is right or wrong.
Tee Hee!
Don’t do as I do but do as I say.
Anyway, now his Retracted Fury paper is done and dusted he is probably pretty busy devising a survey to establish the level of reckless pescatorial ideation due to climate change.
180
graphicconception
What is “pescatorial ideation”? Sounds fishy to me.
130
@Alan Bates
Got it in one!
http://joannenova.com.au/2014/04/look-out-climate-change-makes-fish-reckless/
100
Does “preregistering” his experiments mean the data will be faked even before it is requested from non-existent people?
280
No, it means that he will give the Vice Chancellor of UWA plenty of notice so that a legal order to suppress data can be put in place to avoid proper scrutiny by ‘deniers’.
DANGER Will Robinson, DANGER…
261
dfbaskwill,
I think your comment is too strong. I do not know if it was a considered response based on your detailed investigations, or a throw away line. The former of these approaches is more valued by most people.
56
“preregister”…
You preregister your results before you start your research, then you just look for evidence that supports your pre-registered results.
Sometimes you really have too look, really hard, – I mean really hard, to find the supporting evidence – that’s real hard work right there.
It’s all the rage where Stephan Lewandowsky comes from.
150
“It’s all the rage where Stephan Lewandowsky comes from.”
Perhaps the Summary for Policy Makers is the first document, followed by the research to support it. In which case who’s to say if those final ‘late night meetings’ weren’t just a few night’s out on the tiles?
20
In Lewandowsky’s case, preregistering [appears to mean] describing meticulously beforehand what you propose to do, gaining ethical clearance to proceed on the basis of that description, and then doing something else entirely.
80
Lewandowsky wasn’t quite exactly right though. He said: “I release all relevant data immediately”. What he doesn’t consider relevant, he doesn’t release. That includes the answers to questions he asked, (on Iraq e.g.) but didn’t report on, and the source of his respondents. THe answeres to the Iraq question would probably ‘almoqst certainly) change the profiles of conspiracy theorists. But he doesn’t want us to know that.
220
Lewandowsky is a [snip we don’t do unsubstantiated insults thanks. Jo]
110
We can save money on paying for psychologists to write papers, I have automated the process 🙂
http://eric.worrall.name/kant.cgi
210
You can be a very scary person! 🙂
30
From one of the auto generated papers:-
“What we have alone been able to show is that, even as this relates to the thing in itself, the Deniersphere, with the sole exception of the banana peel of certainty, stand in need to the ideation of scientific reason, and our deviant squiggles exclude the possibility of global warming. Our intepretations, as I have shown elsewhere, can never, as a whole, furnish a true and demonstrated science, because, like environmental protection, they prove the validity of hobbit like principles, by means of analysis.”
Just felt I had to share 🙂
80
Can we have an automated beautician and hack journalist to provide scientific peer review for the generated papers? Just to make them legitimate, you know – because peer review is the minimum bar an argument must clear in order to partake in the debate.
50
Lewandowsky says
I have looked at the both the papers – the blog survey and the less known US study published late last year. In the latter I got a surprise. There is no evidence for his claim if you look at belief in conspiracies independent of politics (e.g. New World Order) or science (e.g. on secondary smoking). My conclusion is
Unlike Lewandowsky, I am quite open to considering a counter-argument. Until such time I conclude that the “conspiracist ideation” hypothesis is falsified by the data.
http://manicbeancounter.com/2014/04/10/conspiracist-ideation-falsified/
291
I know I’ve said this before. But don’t hold your breath while waiting for the data. I’ve been told that occasional inhaling alternating with exhaling is good for ones health. And we wouldn’t want to lose anyone, even in spite of the fact that exhaling adds more polluting CO2 to the atmosphere.
82
If you noticed that I have a hard time getting serious about much of the climate change “debate” it’s because they’ve become the next best thing to a good stand-up comedian. They could replace every famous nightclub performer and a lot of the not so famous with ease. And there are enough of them to go around too.
How much better can it get? No better unless they were to suddenly wake up and realize they’re out on a limb so far they probably can’t get back with their reputations and their jobs intact. Which of course, is why they continue telling jokes. At least they can get paid for that (unfortunately).
90
Lew caught out telling a fib, that’s definitely a case for ideated recursive fury.
90
Maybe it’s not really Stephan’s fault.
I think he may have started out analysing the psychopathology of the KkK (Krazy klimate Kuckoo) brigade and got drawn into their bizarre worldview.
The Stockholm Syndrome is familiar to all psychologists as a condition where the victims of manipulative miscreants are seduced by relentless applications of ‘carrot and stick’ to take on the values of their tormentors.
Stephan should be more pitied than despised.
He clearly is a victim of a most virulent form of this affliction- SkS (Stockholm klimate Sydrome)
70
Yes it is Stephan’s fault.
Lew seems to have enjoyed 20 years of UWA, putting out ‘papers’ of greater or lesser significance – I suggest the latter since I had never heard of him until he joined the SkS crew.
He is an academic [snip].
150
No, he’s a cynical opportunist
And his deliberately-sought notoriety is constantly well-fed with all this continuing hubbub
70
The chick chick bang girl of social science?
50
Chick chick bang – that story still has me in fits of hysterics.
21
I recall she became a celebrity, briefly, too!
10
RoyFOMR I appreciate your kind heart but:
NO! NO WAY! NOT EVER!
110
For the scientific method to work, replication by others is necessary, not the reinforcement of your own ‘results’. Plus, ALL results of experiments should be reported, including the ones that do not agree with your conclusions, with explanations as to why they disagreed and/or were discarded.
70
Asking [Lewandowsky] for data or anything else related to reality is recursive foolery.
52
Nice [implant] Jo, beats the full [snip]. But it was sooo spot on!
OK, lesson learnt.
22
I think mikemUK you are suggesting that the more accurate spelling of his name is [snip]
The below is probably quite relevant in this case.
From Brainy Quotes
“What kills a skunk is the publicity it gives itself”.
Abraham Lincoln
40
UWA appears to be breaking the law as well as the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research to which UWA claims to adhere states that 2.5.2 Research data should be made available for use by other researchers unless this is prevented by ethical, privacy or confidentiality matters.
It seems highly doubtful to me that it is indeed the “University’s practice” to refuse access to data to other researchers. Such a practice, if generally applied, would be a flagrant violation of the Australian Code of Conduct and would surely have come to light before now. But whether the refusal of data to other researchers is the general “practice” of the University or merely applied opportunistically in this particular case, it is a violation of the Australian Code of Conduct for Responsible Research and the “practice” should cease.
From http://climateaudit.org/2014/03/30/uwa-vice-chancellor-johnson-circles-the-wagons
70
Yes but data has a factual basis. [If] you go to the effort of making stuff up why the hell should you release it? (without royalties)
20
The following are some of the science orientasted heaqdlines from Jhe last month since mid March on Jo’s blog.
Now if you have a read of Pierre Gosselin’s NoTricksZone blog and it’s latest headline there is a growing need that what passes for science these days needs a major cleaning out of Science’s Augean Stables [ and here ] if science is to retain some semblance of respect and standing in the community and thereby maintain it’s community and public financial support.
From NTZ;
Has The Broader Institution Of Science Been Overun By Greedy, Swindling Crackpots?
Jo’s headline science orientated posts since mid March;
____________________
*Ask Stephan Lewandowsky anything, except “please can I have that data”
*Look out! Climate change makes fish reckless
*IPCC ambit demands tithe of 10% of everything
*Three Frontiers editors resign in protest over Lewandowsky’s Recursive Fury retraction
*Mapping the Skeptical Blogosphere
*New Lewandowsky study finds Uncertainty Monster under his bed, will cost billions
*Journal admits Lewandowsky paper retracted because it failed. Twice!
*Debunking every IPCC climate prophesy of war, pestilence, famine, drought, impacts in one line
*Climate Change could make humans extinct says “expert”
*Dennis Jensen MP — Calls for audit on the BOM and CSIRO data
*Prof Richard Tol wants his name removed from “exaggerated” IPCC report
*cience buried in bureaucracy and corruption: Office of Research Integrity director quits in disgust
*Nick Cohen “deniers have won” — gets startlingly close to the truth
*APS reconsiders its position on climate — Scientific storm on the way?
*Global anxiety? Scared of maths? Could that explain why some people are innumerate about the climate?
_________________________________________
A few years ago in a phone conversation with an old friend who I taught to fly gliders in the mid to late 1960’s and who through his combined gliding and agronomy skills was offered a job with the CSIRO in the 1967 drought to become a cloud seeding / rain making apprentice in the CSIRO of the times.
He then went on to get a doctorate and become head of Tasmania’s Hydro rain making division for many years.
In that phone conversation he told me he was very glad to have got his doctorate in the late 1970’s under the old school scientists who were then on the point of retiring.
His opinion of the newer scientists that were rising to prominence in the CSIRO in the early 1980’s was to put not too fine a point on it, somewhat scathing.
It seems that somewhere around the end of the 1970’s and into the 1980’s the prestige and deep respect of the public for science garnered by those old scientists who did science, not because of the pay and prestige but because science is all that they wanted to do even from school age, became subordinated to a new class of entrants to science who did so BECAUSE of the prestige and respect and status conferred on scientists of any sort by the public at large.
In short a lot of opportunists started to enter science not to do anything radical in science but rather they saw science as a nice easy, very prestigious, now well payed life style where if you worked the system right, you didn’t really have to do much except conform to climb the academic ladder.
Thats probably seems like a slur on the still many very good and dedicated scientists out there who really do want to do science as it should be done but who from many reports are also very frustrated and even angry at the way so much that now passes for science is a straight out abuse of the whole scientific method and of the public’s diminishing respect for science and therefore of science as a profession.
And Jo’s headline posts [ and WUWT, Bishop Hill, Climate audit, NTZ , Pielke JR, The Reference Frame and etc ] from the recent past gives very considerable weight to that view on modern science as it is supposedly being practiced today.; ie; Science is starting to publicly stink as well as costing the public a good sized fortune for the absolutely incomprehensible; easily countered , incoherent rubbish that today passes as science in an increasing number of science disciplines.
241
ROM, I wonder how much of this is due to the demise of our technical schools in the 80-90’s and the subsequent dumbing down of HSC? This then had a knock on effect of forcing more and more into Uni’s who just didn’t want to be there.
I watched as a trainee teacher how the teacher unions, the bastions of the Socialist Left in this country, deemed manual labor to be somehow a lesser pursuit and killed off the technical schools, forcing everyone into tertiary study. The exam based HSC became the assignment based VCE. In doing so they sentenced this country to a shortage of basic tradespeople, not to mention the damage they did to a generation of kids who would have benefited from a trade. Instead those kids got sent off to Uni’s and TAFE colleges where they either failed or picked up fairly useless degrees.
180
Brendan
April 15, 2014 at 12:55 pm
Brendan
As one of those old school believers in allowing kids to choose their own way in life and trying to provide the means by which they will want to achieve something for themselves in the fields they are genuinely interested in I am with you on the deliberate closing and demise of the trade schools.
I think you are spot on with your analysis of the past situation but I think there is a rethink on this going on at present.
Some are cut out to be the academic types.
Some, a few would be and are excellent researchers in their own right
Some become bureacrats and opinions are best not mentioned there.
Some are very skilled with their hands even if their formal schooling was not of an apparent high standard .
Some, a few are excellent teachers.
Some are born farmers and I wasn’t one of them but lived in a culture that said the eldest son came home to work on the farm.
Some are borne to be political leaders. Some just work at it and generally become political ladder climbers of very doubtful ethics and morality
And so it goes with any sample of humanity.
One of my teachers tried desperately hard to get me to keep going to school and then to go onto physics in University which interested me but there was no support from my parents for that as university was a bridge to far for their thinking at that stage in their lives. Their attitude changed later with one of my other brothers who did make it to university and got his degree in agronomy and finished up with the UN and Tanzanian refugee resettlement program for some 4 years in the early / mid 1970’s
.
I left school at 15 years old and was harvesting alone at 16 using an old ground drive HST header with extension steering, ie steering the tractor from the header with a long steering shaft attached to the no cabin tractor’s steering wheel [ old farmers will know exactly what I am talking about and probably shudder at the thought ! ] no hydraulics, open air, flies although the conditions got a bit rough for the flies around mid arvo with the heat and dust and noise plus a half inch covering of dust and dirt on the canvas water bag which was our day’s drinking water.
But that was life in those days some 60 years ago now for me.
So I feel for those kids and young people who get shanghaied into a job or profession they are not really suited to or interested / committed to as a major interest in their lives.
It’s happening in reverse today where the off spring of the academically trained feel they have to do an academic training with a superior job to follow to that of the jobs of the sub level humans below the professional class who use their hands and brains to create and build something of use to humanity.
Such a job to most of those academically trained second or third generation off spring of academics is a sub standard level of achievement in this reverse and superior to the common man academic psychology.
Tradies , good tradies are the hard guys and gals to find these days.
Academics of various stripes and talents or otherwise seem to be a dime a dozen and can be found in large swarms in some city locations. Swarms as in what else do they do but swarm in large numbers around some very fruitful tax payer funded latest research created fear inducing scare
100
ROM,,
I would be happier if you restricted your comments more generally to climate work.. There is much good science being done in many other fields, some of it rather brilliantly designed and executed. There are some good examples in an area with a little overlap with climate work, if you study the careful science behind the current CERN experiments on nucleation, Kirkby et al.
There are many scientists conducting quality science. I often use an indirect measure of quality, being the treatment of overall experimental error. Trash papers seldom have plausible error envelopes.
My concern is the hijacking of some education, as by proposals to use sustainabily as a major cross thread for the use of examples from all fields of education.
Generally, I really enjoy the excitement and benefits of new science discoveries. I have little doubt that good science wil endure.
40
Geoff Sherrington
April 15, 2014 at 4:27 pm
Geoff
A very valid point and I agree wholeheartedly that there is some darn good research work and science being done in various universities and in some science disciplines, agriculture amongst them.
But the fact is that the internet in particular has opened the eyes to a very wide range of incompetent and fraudulent science and scams.
And a lot of this information on the scams and fraudulent papers is coming from within science itself .
You have to ask why a site such as” Retraction Watch” which only seems to have content from a couple of science disciplines but has a fair volume of frauds and retractions from even those few science disciplines can even exist if science is across the board is on the level.
Science is done by people, ordinary every day people who happened to choose a science discipline as the income earning pursuit they will follow. And with any group of people you will find your good guys and gals, your mediocracies and job fillers, your publicity and status chasers, your incompetents and your straight out in it for themselves to the max possible and the hell with laws, rules and etc if they think they can get away with it.
No different in any way than any other group of people trying to both make a living and a fortune all at the same time. In fact science is somewhat worse in this regard as today there is an enormous pool of public money available to scientists of every stripe if they know how to work the system.
And when there is such a pool of public money is being distributed with almost no apparent accountability other than how it was spent let alone providing results of a worth while character such as exists in most publicly funded science then you will find an abundance of scammers and fraudsters all in it for their cut. And it is the fraudsters and scammers in science who get the most moola.
The good scientists as we see in climate science are deliberately shut out of the access to decent funding and try to do science on a shoe string.
Unless pressure is applied by the people, the tax payers, thats us, who are funding science to a very large levels these days, science will just drift along until it becomes a total disgrace and the good guys and gals who are doing genuine good science will lose heart and drop out for something better in life.
So it is really up to science to expel it’s scammer, fraudsters and s and incompetents.
Unfortunately we are seeing just the opposite where whole bunches of scientists rush into a huddle and circle the wagons against critiscm when one of their number who has been shown to have committed fraud and scamming gets caught out and the case is publicised.
We have the situation where the supposedly great science organisations like the Royal Society and the American Advancement of Science and similar science bodies who claim to represent all the best in science and who claim to sit at the pinnacle of science actually defends and protects science miscreants within it’s membership and ranks instead of promoting and policing virtuosity and adherence to the spirit of science and the truth that is a supposedly a fundamental aspect of science of every type and discipline.
As a long time lurker on Climate Audit, Judith Curry, Jo’s and other science orientated blogs I have become quite disillusioned on the virtuosity of most of science and the NTZ post referred to in my above post just reinforces the feeling that what we are seeing in Climate Science is very wide spread in a number of other science disciplines as well.
James Lovelock who has gone quite some way towards recanting on his climate doomsday predictions of some years ago and who invented the instrument for measuring Ozone levels in the whole atmosphere in the 1970’s is quoted as saying that during the Ozone Hole affair of the late 1980’s up to 80% of the plethora of papers on the subject had either fraudulent, made up or altered data in them.
So not much has altered in science or perhaps it is even worse today as those pseudo scientists know that they can just about get anything through the sacred and basically useless peer review system and / or get a whole raft of publicity in the science ignorant and status acquiescing media who will print anything from anybody regardless of accuracy or the truth of the claims from whoever claims to be a scientist of some sort.
Yep,headline science claims gets lots of publicity but today often within hours it is torn to shreds by the increasingly science sophisticated internet lay persons whose interests have been piqued by the problems of science, problems which only science itself can solve by expelling a vast number of incompetent and fraudulent science practitioners.
If 80% of today’s scientists were disenfranchised and only the guys and gals who actually produced verifiable results were funded, in other words “capitilise” science where like industry and the ordinary guy and gal in the street who gets paid AFTER producing the product, scientists could overcome most of their problems by only providing a stipend to scientists and then when the results are in, verified and validated and gone over, the funding would be granted in full.
If they want to do some research, they, like everybody else in our capitalistic society can back themselves and their intellect and skills, go to the financiers and get a loan to be repaid when the results come in and the funding, public or otherwise is provided on the basis of the results of their research.
You would lose 80% of your “scientists’ but the ones remaining and prepared to put their intellect on the line would be the ones you really want to keep for they would give us science like we have only seen in the half century prior to and just after WW2 when the greatest and most beneficial science ever to mankind was created and done.
And it was all done, not with vast amounts of public funding but by a few individuals, some of whom were self supporting or just made do with the income from other jobs [ Einstein and he was only one of quite a few ] and who had little but their intellect to create those immense advances in science of every type that have had such an impact on our civilisation.
91
Assuming that the opening statement has any merit, it may or may not but let’s assume it does, so what? The rubbish that emerges from Australian universities of the twenty first century makes their abolition reasonable or complete privatisation (land excepted) urgent. End all taxpayer funding of these monstrous outfits.
60
Thank you.
+++
John R T
10
Just to give a twist to this science / university saga;
This morning’s Australian [ Wed 16th April ] has a couple of items both from the “Higher Education” section that are relevant to my posts above on University science graduates and university graduates generally.
The first headline;
Demand system sees science graduate glut
So we have a whole bunch of would be scientists who are in there because the money and incentives were too good to miss
For most, excepting a genuine few, not because they ever wanted to become genuine scientists but the oppurtunity to get a prestigious profession’s letters after your name for the minimum of effort and money was too good to miss.
And that smells of trouble further down the line for future science in Australia.
The second headline also from the Higher Education section of The Australian is indicative of the superiority type psychology of University academia that instills the belief that because you have some letters after your name you are somehow much superior to the common man, the engineers , the brickies, waiters, plumbers and sewage maintenance guys, road workers and etc, all those people who make and keep the wheels of society and civilisation running smoothly and for which most of us never even bother to think about.
Civilisation grew and developed for some 12,000 years without university graduates but it relied primarily on the humble but highly skilled craftsmen and women to develop and lift mankind up the long road to our present level of civilisation.
And it was the highly skilled, often self trained engineers of old, not scientists, who invented, tested often at the cost of lives,, developed and built the machines and technology that gave us the great British Industrial Revolution of some 300 years ago and which we are still basing the development of our civilisation on and which our entire present development and societal wealth is created and based.
Graduate ‘egos’ test employers, say CEOs
Some time ago on another forum there were a couple of laboratory managers participating. They said that it was common that they would have to instruct and literally train university graduates in the most basic of laboratory procedures like, one example, not putting acid containers into the alkaline cabinet and vice versa.
Academic training can be an excellent introduction to life in the work force so long as the graduates are made very aware that they still are only at the beginning of their skills and knowledge they will acquire over their lifetimes.
And that their role and position in the work force is no more and no less important and than any of the other hundreds of professions and trades that make up the vast interweaving of skills, few of which are dispensable, that are essential to keeping our society, our cities, our mines, our industries and farms and our civilisation fully functioning.
Unfortunately it appears that the universities are now creating a self indulgent elitist generation of graduates who assume they are somehow superior to the rest of the populace and they have come to expect that with those all important letters after their name they will be greeted with kowtowing and bended knee.
11
The problem is much worse in australia than overseas due to our ridiculous short sited funding system. Researchers spend most of the time chasing grants, a system which naturally favours anyone who is prepared to bend the rules or tow the political line.
20
He’s supposedly back answering questions though nothing new has appeared. I’ve tried referring him to the question again and hopefully won’t get moderated immediately. I really fail to see how the questions fall outside the comment rules for the subreddit.
50
I think you might have been edited out as well.
10
The religious fervor of warmists never ceases to amaze me. To them, a peer reviewed paper is a religious fatwa, the IPCC assessment report is holy writ and the summary for policy makers is a catechism. Everything is taken on faith and anyone who dares to question the received wisdom is excommunicated and branded a heretic.
It is as if the word why is not in their vocabulary. Why it never occurs to warmists to ask for the raw data to confirm their faith is beyond comprehension. Perhaps they are afraid that if the results cannot be duplicated perhaps their entire fantasy world will come crashing down upon them?
If the science is so settled why don’t they release their data and silence the skeptics? You can actually adhere to the scientific method as well and get a “twofor!” Instead, we get Phil Jones writing, “Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”
Then of course their is the Captain Courageous of the Climate Cabal, Michael Mann, who not only refuses to disclose his data, but steadfastly avoids sharing the stage in any forum with a skeptic. If that is taking the moral high ground I would hate to see what lies in the valley below!
And now comes Lewendowsky! Apparently, he thinks he can disappear comments as easily as the CRU can “lose” their raw data!
How convenient it is to be a warmists! You do not have to produce your data and you champion a theory that can not be falsified. And, if a problem arises that threatens to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs you either move the goal posts or invent
excusescauses to explain the lack of warming that can not be verified (e.g. saying that the warming is hiding in the oceans based upon a temperature increase that is so infinitesimal that it falls well within the error bars.)If the science is so settled then why not produce the smoking gun? I think it is because the warmists fingerprints are on it and it was the murder weapon used to kill the holy grail of science, the truth!
190
some pieces sure to upset Lewandowky. unsurprisingly, no MSM carrying the Pt Carbon EU story so far:
EU states split on urgency of carbon market reform, presidency says
LONDON, April 14 (Reuters) – European nations are divided on whether to agree carbon market reforms ahead of setting 2030 emission goals, an official at the Greek EU presidency said on Monday, a division that threatens a Brussels goal to agree sweeping changes by next year…
https://www.pointcarbon.com/news/reutersnews/1.4846555
14 April: Guardian: Lenore Taylor: Coal will be a main energy source for ‘decades and decades’, says Greg Hunt
Environment minister says advances in carbon capture will be key to Australia’s emissions cuts in his response to IPCC report
Coal will be a predominant energy source for “decades and decades” to come, but with “drastically” reduced greenhouse emissions owing to technological advancement, the environment minister, Greg Hunt, has predicted as he responds to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change…
“Coal will be used for decades and decades more … but what I do think will change is the emissions from it and that is the critical thing,” he told Sky news, describing “highly prospective” technology being developed by Csiro.
“What I think will happen is this … we will be able to use coal and gas in a dramatically more efficient way, with dramatically lower emissions … that will happen over the coming decade as we make real progress, including cleaning up our brown coal power stations, with drying gasification and capturing, not for storage … but capture and reuse,” Hunt said.
He nominated the three “great sources” for emission reductions for Australia as “the land sector, energy efficiency and cleaning up power stations.”
The government will release a white paper on its Direct Action plan in the next few weeks…
The IPCC report, prepared by more than 1,250 experts from around the world, found that limiting the global temperature increase to 2C above pre-industrial levels would require a tripling or quadrupling of low-carbon energy by 2050.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/apr/14/coal-will-be-a-main-energy-source-for-decades-and-decades-says-greg-hunt
14 April: Bloomberg: Post-Fukushima Japan Chooses Coal Over Renewable Energy
By Chisaki Watanabe and Masumi Suga
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is pushing Japan’s coal industry to expand sales at home and abroad, undermining hopes among environmentalists that he’d use the Fukushima nuclear accident to switch the nation to renewables…
In many ways, utilities are already ahead of policy makers. With nuclear reactors idled for safety checks, Japan’s 10 power companies consumed 5.66 million metric tons of coal in January, a record for the month and 12 percent more than a year ago, according to industry figures…
Japan’s appetite for coal mirrors trends in Europe and the U.S., where the push for cheaper electricity is undermining rules limiting fossil fuel emissions and supporting cleaner energy. In the U.S., a frigid winter boosted natural gas prices, providing catalyst for utilities to extend the lives of dirtier coal plants. Germany, Spain and Britain are slashing subsidies for renewables to rein in the cost of electricity…
WWF: “Japan basically needs to recognize an increase in coal use is a serious issue for climate change. The country needs to push for reduction of carbon dioxide.” …
“It’s crucial to have diverse energy sources for a country like Japan, which relies on imports for all energy,” said Akira Yasui, an official in charge of coal policy at the Ministry of the Economy, Trade and Industry. “Our basic stance is to use coal while caring for the environment as much as possible. Coal is economical and stable in supply.” …
More Coal
Tokyo Electric, better known as Tepco, has other plans to use more coal for the stations that serve 29 million customers around the nation’s capital…
“The plan represents nothing but anachronism,” said Mie Asaoka, head of the Kiko Network, a Kyoto, Japan-based environmental organization.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-13/post-fukushima-japan-chooses-coal-over-renewable-energy.html
30
This is off topic I know, but interesting nonetheless.
Wind Power Plant proposals invariably state that the plant has a 25 year lifespan. Now that they have been in operation for some time, what is being found is that not many actual towers at a wind plant are actually making half that time.
Probably the main failure point here is now being found as the Gearbox.
Now, calling it a gearbox is over simplifying it. They are in the main CSD’s (Constant Speed Devices) and comparing a CSD to a gearbox is like comparing a Benz automatic transmission with the gear set on the back of a pushbike. CSD’s are incredibly complex.
Now look at the image of a typical wind tower nacelle shown at this link.
The CSD is shown here at position 8, between the huge propeller and the actual generator itself, so while the blades gently rotate at a seemingly small speed, the generator revolves at generating speed, (anything up to) a constant speed of 3000RPM here in Australia, depending on the design and components for that type of tower.
What they are finding now is that the CSD has become the main point of failure for wind towers. The average lifespan is between 5 and 13 years depending on the manufacturer. The article linked to below mentions this:
Now, it’s not like you can put one of these in your backpack, climb the ladder inside the tower and then work in the confined space of the nacelle to replace. They are enormously heavy, and require a large crane to lift up to the nacelle where the workers sit in that cramped place to replace it, and for Offshore wind plants, then cranes are out of the question. All this is enormously costly, and enormously time consuming.
So, if you have a wind plant with (say like Musselroe with its 56 towers) a large number of towers, you can multiply that by tower number by between 3 and 5 times the mentioned cost per failure just for replacement of those gearboxes over the projected 25 year plant life.
The wind may be free, but everything else is expensive, enormously expensive.
Tony.
Source
130
Tony,
I am not the least bit surprised.
I have thought for a long time that the gearbox would be a likely failure point and that the 25 year life span was nothing but wishful thinking.
I suppose that the costs will simply be passed onto the consumers – i.e. us.
30
Hi Tony, The CSD indeed is a complex arrangement ,first used on aircraft jet engines to drive three phase synchronous alternators on coupled bus bars on multi engine aircraft.
They are very inefficient at converting horse power into useful work, a bit like squeezing soap as a propulsion system. Thus they work hard to not only maintain prefect RPM
but must also be accurate enough to align the phases, or all hell breaks loose. These CSD gadgets have been around since the 1950’s fairly reliable on aircraft but aviation stuff is made to a very high standard.Also aircraft do not do 24/7 for 25 years, the wind turbine makers would be a little less restricted in their manufacturing quality.
The only reliable wind turbines would be DC and good for remote locations, simple and easy to repair, coupled CSD alternators by the thousands are a madness.
30
I might have got out of my investment in Pacific Hydro (wind farm constructor and operator) at a good (15 years ago). Actually they were taken over so I did not have to make a decision
10
is CAGW gatekeeper, Andrew Revkin, informing his readers that nuclear & fracking are endorsed in the latest IPCC Report?
not a chance. not a single mention. CHECK THE NEWSMAP CHART TO SEE HOW INTERESTED THE PUBLIC IS IN ANYTHING IPCC:
13 April – Nations’ Handling of New Climate Report Presages Divisions in Treaty Effort
(CHART CAPTION: A chart of trending news stories on April 13, 2014, from the website Newsmap.jp. News of the new climate report is the green block at the bottom right.)
Justin Gillis’s news story from Berlin on the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the one on the world’s options for limiting global warming — tells you all you need to know about the familiar contents. The chart of trending news in the United States above tells you all you need to know about how much people are tuning in. (Click to learn more about how Newsmap works.)…
[Insert, 3:52 p.m. | Eric Holthaus has posted an excellent summary of the economic points made in the report at Slate.]…
There’s an important back story — on how the final two days of negotiations between the report authors and government officials reflect global divisions that will only intensify as the world’s rich and developing countries wrangle over a new climate treaty that is supposed to emerge in late 2015.
Under rules created when the climate panel was established in 1988, governments have to approve the final summary for policy makers word by word and unanimously…
(FROM GILLIS ARTICLE) Some developing countries insisted on stripping charts from the report’s executive summary that could be read as requiring greater effort from them, while rich countries — including the United States — struck out language implying that they needed to write big checks to the developing countries…
(FROM AP’s KARL RITTER ARTICLE) Some developing countries objected and wanted the graphs to follow the example of U.N. climate talks and use just two categories – developed and developing – according to three participants who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the IPCC session was closed to the public…
Another snag: oil-rich Saudi Arabia objected to text saying emissions need to go down by 40 percent to 70 percent by 2050 for the world to stay below 2 degrees C (3.6 F) of warming, participants told AP. One participant said the Saudis were concerned that putting down such a range was “policy-prescriptive,” even though it reflects what the science says…
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/13/nations-handling-of-new-climate-report-presages-divisions-in-treaty-effort/?_php=true&_type=blogs&module=BlogPost-Title&version=Blog%20Main&contentCollection=Climate%20Change&action=Click&pgtype=Blogs®ion=Body&_r=0
10 April: Revkin: I just gave a talk at TEDx Portland — a daylong event focused on various interpretations of the word “perfect.”
I was hardly perfect, but hopefully conveyed my core conclusion: that in our variegation and imperfection, we humans — with motivation and sustained work — are perfectly suited for surviving, and perhaps thriving, in a consequential, complicated century and changing climate.
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/12/we-are-perfect-with-an-asterisk/?module=BlogPost-Title&version=Blog Main&contentCollection=Sustainability&action=Click&pgtype=Blogs®ion=Body
10
Of Topic, but brilliant list of Big Oil funding of Man Made Global Warming Alarmists at Zerohedge.
30
Stephan has waaaaaay too much time on his hands.
Having glanced through his um…. paper… I was just gobsmacked that anyone would even waste their time writing this nonsense.
I have never subscribed to the “conspiracy theories” around climates science, to me its a side show. You wont see me commenting on “Agenda 21” or anything like that. Conspiracy theories are for the alarmists to accuse the skeptics of to my way of thinking, not the other way around.
Frankly I don’t give most alarmist commentators, science based or otherwise the credit of being able to organise anything as complex as a conspiracy, they battle to just collect and collate a sensible set of data to argue their points, let alone hold secret meetings to somehow align the data with a cogent argument. When you have Milne saying “we are creating a warmer wetter world” and Flannery saying “there will be no more meaningful rainfall” its pretty obvious they don’t even sing from the same stupid hymn sheet.
Finally people like Lewandowsky and Cook are just jesters dancing about trying to get attention at court in the hope someone in the nobility will flick them a silver coin. Neither are remotely qualified to comment on anything related to climate science so they skirt the margins looking for anything to latch their pathetic degrees onto. Psychology is at best a pseudo science in itself and is being rapidly recognised as such.
http://debunkingdenialism.com/2013/07/23/the-criminal-profiling-deception/
Lewandowsky’s paper basically seeks to make criminal profile type observations of skeptics. Poorly defined outcomes approached with half baked methodologies resulting in nonsense with references. Nice job Stephan.
100
I am glad that I did not bother to read it then.
Agree with what you say about Lewandowsky and Cook.
Is there a conspiracy? Well there might be within the administration of the IPCC. See Donna Laframboise at “No Fracking consensus”. These guys have money (ours) and motivation, and the means to corrupt their own institution and other scientific institutions. All in a noble cause.
20
Safety, seriously, do you mean to say that you consider A21 to be a conspiracy theory?
00
LOL. LOL. LOL.
***Readfearn avoids any mention whatsoever of NUCLEAR or FRACKING, yet quotes IPCC’s Ottmar Edenhofer, the very guy who personally endorsed nuclear in the few MSM reports that exist! as for the rest of his piece, it’s even sillier than all the previous stuff he’s been paid to write?
14 April: Guardian: Graham Readfearn: Is it un-Australian to be driving on with fossil fuel expansion plans?
As the IPCC warns greenhouse gas emissions need to be cut quickly, an Australian court decides that stopping a mega coal mine won’t cut emissions
About five years back, I was crawling in Brisbane traffic behind one of the city’s ubiquitous white utility vehicles on my way to an anonymous city centre office to sit my Australian citizenship test.
Stuck to the back of this ute was a large anti-immigration sticker, peeling on one corner, declaring “Fuck off, we’re full,” to all literate observers.
This, from a citizen of a nation first forcibly grabbed and then reshaped by immigrants, struck me as a statement that was as lacking in compassion for and consideration as it was loaded with sheer existential dumbness…
***Now before you double-check, you haven’t stumbled onto an Aussie culture blog in a place where you might have been expecting me rambling on about the latest United Nations climate change report….
Ottmar Edenhofer, a co-chair of the IPCC group that produced the report, said: “There is a clear message from science: To avoid dangerous interference with the climate system, we need to move away from business as usual.”…
We are driving a ute at reckless speed towards a risk-laden future with a rear bumper sticker telling the climate literate world what we think of them.
Is that un-Australian?
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2014/apr/14/ipcc-report-climate-change-queensland-alpha-coal-mine-liability
READFEARN OBVIOUSLY HID THE IPCC REPORT’S ENDORSEMENT OF NUCLEAR & FRACKING TO MITIGATE CAGW FROM HIS READERS, and the following comments show why:
SilverHead: Just one question for you then, Mr Readfern : if it was a no-emissions nuclear energy generation plant being proposed for the same site, would you still be agin it?
20reeds: Fantasy. There is no such entity as a no-emissions nuclear plant – the fuel has to be mined, processed and transported i.e. massive emissions, else the plant sits as a useless piece of industrial stupidity, in which case it might then be regarded as a no-emissions plant. Dr Helen Caldicot will fill you in on the remaining killer externalities of this dangerous technology.
Do I take it that you are a supporter of nuclear and therefore would be an advocate for nuclear waste disposal in third world nations or would you accept it in say a storage facility in your neighbourhood? Be honest now and tell us the truth!!
Brakingishard: ‘Straya, the mined and fracked country.
We ‘used’ to have a voice.
We’re so fracked.
20
a single bland mention of nuclear, no mention of natural gas or fracking:
14 April: Business Spectator: Hugh Outhred: Lessons and options from an IPCC inquisition
(Hugh Outhred is a senior visiting fellow at the School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications, University of New South Wales)
The IPCC Fifth Assessment Report Working Group 3 Summary for Policymakers, released yesterday, contains many important messages, including the following (some of which have been paraphrased for clarity):…
“…They are characterised by more rapid improvements of energy efficiency, a tripling to nearly a quadrupling of the share of zero‐ and low‐carbon energy supply from renewables, nuclear energy and fossil energy with carbon dioxide capture and storage, or bioenergy with CCS, or BECCS, by the year 2050 (p.15)”….
http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2014/4/14/policy-politics/lessons-and-options-ipcc-inquisition
(4 comments, 13 nuclears)
9-minute video on above page, Future of Energy, (wind turbine depicted) brought to you by Siemens.
no sign yet of any Tristan Edis coverage.
00
Miller finds a neat way to avoid any mention whatsoever of IPCC’s nuclear or fracking endorsements:
14 April: SMH: Nick Miller: IPCC report summary censored by governments around the world
Berlin: A major climate report presented to the world was censored by the very governments who requested it, frustrating and angering some of its lead authors…
One report author joked that he felt like a “pawn” who had been sacrificed in a game. Several others told Fairfax the rancour was much greater than in previous IPCC meetings…
However several authors said that teams of negotiators sent in by governments had refused to accept controversial parts of the report for inclusion in the summary of policymakers. Their work only survives in the full, technical report, which will be read by far fewer people, and was not released to the media on Sunday.
Some of the economists and scientists involved even considered withdrawing their work entirely, so they could speak without having to toe the eventual IPCC line.
Fairfax was told that the co-chair of Working Group III, Professor Ottmar Edenhofer, is one of those aggrieved by changes. It is believed he may use “unadulterated” parts of the report, as well as the amended summary, in a presentation at Technical University in Berlin on Monday.
However he said that getting governments involved created “ownership” of the report’s conclusions, and “there’s nothing wrong with that as long as scientists have control over the full report”.
Economist Reyer Gerlagh, of Tilburg University in the Netherlands, was a co-ordinating lead author on a chapter of the report. He saw a lot of his work – exploring the link between economies and their carbon emissions – deleted from the summary over the last week.
“Some governments [said] we cannot write things that they forsee will immediately have consequences in international negotiations,” Professor Gerlagh said. “They cannot change the scientific findings. But they can say there are things that are not [appropriate] to be told at [the SPM] level.
“It left me depressed personally, initially … I am not paid for this work. I do most of this work on the weekend, in evenings and on holidays. My payment is not in money or time, my payment is that I believe I can contribute to society’s benefit by providing the information.
Despite this, Professor Gerlagh said he was not angry: “I can understand their point,” he said of the countries who asked for changes or deletions…
http://www.smh.com.au/world/ipcc-report-summary-censored-by-governments-around-the-world-20140414-zqugm.html
Arup manages this bizarre “imaginary” mention of nuclear; not a word about fracking:
13 April: SMH: Tom Arup: IPCC report a reminder it is not too late if we act now
Imagine for a moment that at next year’s UN climate negotiations in Paris a new global treaty to cut emissions is signed against the odds. It is modest, but a start…
Concerns about nuclear power ease, new plants are built…
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/ipcc-report-a-reminder-it-is-not-too-late-if-we-act-now-20140413-36lfe.html
couldn’t find any coverage on last nite’s 7.30 report or lateline. maybe tonite?
this is how the CAGW-infested MSM continues to protect the CAGW scam from scrutiny, or criticism, whether it’s about the science or the politics.
00
Check out the comments from Frontiers editor Henry Markram in their latest statement.
“The studied subjects were explicitly identified in the paper without their consent. It is well acknowledged and accepted that in order to protect a subject’s rights and avoid a potentially defamatory outcome, one must obtain the subject’s consent if they can be identified in a scientific paper. ”
“While the subjects and their statements were public, they did not give their consent to a public psychological diagnosis in a scientific study. Science cannot be abused to specifically label and point out individuals in the public domain.”
(see what he did there – he said Lewandowsky abused science).
In the comment thread below the article, he adds
“The authors of the retracted paper and their followers are doing the climate change crisis a tragic disservice by attacking people personally and saying that it is ethically ok to identify them in a scientific study. They made a monumental mistake, refused to fix it and that rightfully disqualified the study.”
“Does anyone really believe that a public lynching will help advance anything? Who comes off as the biggest nutter? Activism that abuses science as a weapon is just not helpful at a time of crisis.”
To describe this as ‘throwing Lewandowsky et al under a bus’ would be an understatement.
80
Ah Joanne! You missed your calling (well one of them). Your sarcasm is pure gold! I wish you had applied for the CBS late night show as your sense of humor far surpasses the idiot they chose.
Excellent narrative on a very funny subject. Only a loon like Lew could make a conspiracy out of simple data.
WAIT! What am I thinking of??? He learned from Mann and Jones! LOL
40
Apparently any question about UWA’s refusal to turn over the raw data is being promptly deleted from Lewandowsky’s thread.
Lewandowsky claims he “rarely” publishes anything without first making sure that the results have replicated. Well, the “Moon” manuscript (data collected in August-September 2010) was submitted to Psychological Science in May 2012, and the data collection for the “Role” paper (later published in PLOSOne) took place in June 2012.
Must have been one of those “rarelys.”
“Preregistration” is a procedure that is supposed to reduce or eliminate exploratory or post hoc uses of certain statistical techniques, by publicly stating all hypotheses to be tested and the plan for each statistical analysis. The concern being addressed is genuine.
Now let’s ask how Lewandowsky would have preregistered his hypotheses for “Moon.” Would he have included CYIraq or excluded it from his conspiracy theory questions? Would he have committed to including the item about the real reasons for going into Iraq in 2003 in his “latent variable” for “conspiracist’ thinking, or committed to excluding it? Would he have stated in advance exactly which terms would be included in his Structural Equation Model and which ones wouldn’t?
Although he didn’t ask the CYIraq question in the “Role” study, his use of Structural Equation Modeling in that article still looks pretty exploratory to me.
20
The huge shrieking weasel word in Lewandowsky’s response to Tol is the word “relevant”….
Release ALL data collected for a study, not just what Lew deems “relevant”….
ofc with confirmation bias, sloppy analysis, and/or outright dishonesty a researcher may continue to hide data, such as “meta-data”…. merely by claiming it is not “relevant” to outside observers.
Release ALL available data and let independent analysts determine what they judge to be relevant. Then. the genuine arguments can begin in a scientific spirit.
70
“the genuine arguments can begin in a scientific spirit”
And there in lies the problem. Led by the misguided leanings of the MSM, so called scientists associated with climate alarmism are emboldened to present half truths, confected models, hand picked data, incomplete observations and just down right dishonest findings. For almost every piece of information you want to name in this debate skeptic sites like Jo’s have added the few words or sentences from reports that the MSM and the alarmists left out. Those few words almost always utterly transform the nature of the findings and usually 180° from the alarmist claims.
The “spirit of science” in this field at least is all but dead and buried. The flawed notion that alarmists hold that they are acting in the “greater good” gives them personal licence to lie, cheat and steal at every turn and still stare down at the rest of us from ivory towers of self deluded moral infallibility.
Stephan has no conception of the scientific process or the scientific spirit, he blunders his way from controversy to controversy, desperately trying to appear relevant in a debate that is so far from his area of expertise (if you could call psychology an area of expertise)its like calling in a supermarket night fill worker to lead the mechanical rebuild of a formula one car.
As Col. Kurtz said “your an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill”, he could have been talking about Cook or Lewandowsky.
20
O/T
NSW Premier O’Farrell to resign.
. . .
It is time to have some sort of commission into our politicians.
If one was to look at KPI’s, one outstanding factor is the level of corruption, and the consistency.
Maybe we get what we deserve?
00
Yeah just heard that. Its interesting how we preach to Asian countries about corruption yet I have never felt we are any better. We just do a somewhat better job of institutionalising the graft to make it look like part of the system.
I do feel for Tony a bit, the list of “associates” with their hands in the till seems to grow everyday. The poor bugger is trying his best to get on with running the country and his pawns are letting him down at every turn.
00
This may or may not be anything, but in the rush to smear Barry O’Farrell, look at this.
Link to Lateline Segment with video
This was on last night’s Lateline, and shows the allegedly incriminating evidence of this bottle of Grange.
The implication is that this is somehow related to the influence things like this may lead to.
I want you to watch this short video and then pause it exactly the 2.18 mark.
It shows what is receipts for claims to be made, and the red headline piece made larger at centre screen is Breakfast with Barry O’Farrell.
However, now having paused the video at this point, look at the list behind this red headline.
Note what it says on the bottom of that list.
Now, if the inference is that breakfast with Barry O’Farrell is somehow associated with, well, whatever they claim it to be, then I just wonder what Lunch with Penny Wong might be.
Tony.
20
I dont have the bottle of Grange Jo Nova gave me, i hope no one comes looking for it because i have already drank it
Cheers……hic……..
00
At the risk of Godwin, Lewandowsky is to climate change as Goebels was to …
00
O/T again …
I was looking at this site:
EcoEarth.Info
Environmental Portal & Search Engine
Empowering the Environmental Sustainability Movement
~ ~ ~
More so it is a repository to search out the hypocrisy, lies & cognitive dissonance of a “believer in Global Warming”.
For example, the words “Tim Flannery”:
August 14, 2008
Australia: Tim Flannery says small engines are big polluters
Professor Flannery, the 2007 Australian of the Year and chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council, wrote that a lawn mower generated 40 times the emissions of a car, and two-stroke outboard engines were even worse.
Environmentalist Tim Flannery wrote to Environment Minister Peter Garrett last month, appealing for the Federal Government to fast-track the introduction of world-standard emissions regulations for small engines.
February 28, 2009
Australia: Tim Flannery, eco-science’s great campaigner
Tim Flannery kills the engine on his small white boat and lets it nudge up to a stony outcrop on the banks of the Hawkesbury River, on the northern fringes of Sydney. As the hull grinds softly against the bottom, the 53-year-old writer, explorer and climate campaigner clambers nimbly out to survey the scene.
. . .
So, if your bored, check out the EcoEarth search engine, as it certainly empowers any climate consensus rebel to highlight the insanity of ‘believers in Global Warming”.
I have a few more words & phrases to search …
There has to be some gold buried here.
00
Damn.
your– you’re00
Oh oh even the EPA cant find that gosh darn evidence
Well worth the read
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/barbara-hollingsworth/epa-concedes-we-can-t-produce-all-data-justifying-clean-air-rules
10
Having read the books by John Brignell, I cannot take the “science” of Epidemiology seriously. It seems to be on a par with “Phrenology”.
10
hmmmm? this Big Ideas program was due to be broadcast for the first time tonight at 8pm.
however, at 3am this morning, a different Big Ideas was announced prior to the news headlines, yet this is what was broadcast. no prizes for guessing this time around CAGW would be the cause of the extinction. absurd stuff throughout the program, including Robyn Williams asking if this extinction (“The Sixth Extinction”) will kill more life-forms than the pre-CAGW earlier ones. he asks this, even tho one of the guests has already stated, more than once from memory, that “more than 99% of all species that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct”! the whole thing is recorded at the Queensland Museum. note again that CAGW is not in the ABC summary:
AUDIO: ABC Big Ideas: Lost creatures Wednesday 16 April 2014 8:00PM
Is humankind driving mass extinction? Looking back in time, scientists believe the earth has experienced five mass extinctions of plants and animals. We can blame those on asteroids or volcanic eruptions but, this time round, will human action be entirely responsible for another mass extinction of plants and animals?
Robyn Williams
Presenter, The Science Show and In Converstion, Moderator
Panel:
Associate Professor Tamara Davis
Astrophysist, School of Mathematics and Physics, University of Queensland
Dr Patrick Moss
Senior Lecturer in Physical Geography, School of Geography Planning and Environmental Management, University of Queensland
Professor Greg Webb
Chair of Palaeontology and Stratigraphy, School of Earth Sciences, University of Queensland
Dr Gilbert Price
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Earth Sciences ,University of Queensland
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/lost-creatures-mass-extinction/5393948
National History Museum: Mass extinctions
More than 99% of all species that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct. The vast majority (over 95%) died out because they couldn’t compete successfully for food or other resources. Or they failed to adapt to changes in their local environment over tens or even hundreds of millions of years.
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/life/dinosaurs-other-extinct-creatures/mass-extinctions/
00
for the record, this is the program that should have been repeated at 3am this morning (& first broadcast at 8pm Monday evening):
15 April: ABC Big Ideas: History of Christianity
Tuesday 15 April 2014 8:05PM
Today on Big Ideas we’ll characterise God; meet mediaeval mystics; and hear why Christianity is the most intolerant faith in history. We’ll define our relationship with God; learn how purposeful forgetting applies particularly to women; and why the current sexual abuse crisis in the church in fact began in the 11th century. Church historian and author Diarmaid MacCulloch takes us through a history of Christianity – based on his recent book Silence: A Christian History.
Guests:
Diarmaid MacCulloch
Professor of the history of the church at the University of Oxford
Barney Zwartz
Former religion editor of The Age
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/history-of-christianity/5316408
that sure sounds like fun, ABC!
00
the switching of the programs does make me wonder if ABC pulled/were forced to pull the repeat of the Christianity program!
ABC’s Paul Barclay has already broadcast a previous one from the Qld Museum (see below), & the Robyn Williams “Lost Creatures” one was recorded 3rd April:
Queensland Museum: Lost Creatures: Big Questions
Paul Barclay asks our expert panel the Big Questions.
Get ready to tackle the big questions in this dino-sized Q&A series hosted by Queensland Museum and supported by ABC’s Radio National.
If you missed your chance to be part of the audience of Radio National’s Big Ideas program in the first discussion, you can still join us when the debates continue on 3 April with more provocative and thought-provoking discussions surrounding our ancient past including science and the media and extinction…
http://www.qm.qld.gov.au/Events+and+Exhibitions/Events+and+Activities/Lost+Creatures+Talks
this is the Paul Barclay moderated one – not bothering to listen, but the guests tell the story:
AUDIO: 18 March: ABC Big Ideas: Does The Media Help Or Hinder Science?
Guests:
Dr Susannah Eliott
CEO of the Australian Science Media Centre
Professor Suzanne Miller
CEO and Director of the Queensland Museum Network.
Dr Joel Gilmore
Science Communicator
Principal, Renewable and Climate Policy team at ROAM Consulting
Antony Funnell
journalist & broadcaster, ABC RN, Future Tense.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/does-the-media-help-or-hinder-science3f/5318416
00
On reddit the Dutiful `Dowsky says:
His approach seems to be that if you can medicalise global warming then you can pathologise climate skepticism.
As for his inference of sensitivity from past variability, that is not the only possible interpretation, and without him being specific about which past variances connote sensitivity it is such vague statement that it’s not even wrong. For example, the ice ages were caused by minor alterations in the eccentricity of Earth’s orbit from 0.016 to 0.045, and an axial tilt of just 2 degrees. They are very slight numbers indeed and are a sign of climate sensitivity, but sensitivity to average surface insolation, not to changes in GHGs.
The most frequently cited period in which an initial GHG spike led to warming is the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, where the evidence of the alleged cause is very thin on the ground, or as one Gavin Schmidt put it “much of this is speculative given the difficulty in working out what actually happened 55 million years ago”.
The paleoclimate evidence of the PETM has been interpreted to mean the sensitivity is more than 1.7 degrees per doubling. Does that mean the climate is sensitive?
The paleoclimate evidence of the Last Glacial Maximum has been interpreted to mean the sensitivity is less than 4.3 degrees per doubling. Does that mean the climate is insensitive?
Saying the earth is or isn’t sensitive is a meaningless statement, certainly worthy of a Lew paper.
00
Apologies , posted this on an old comment thread = likely dead in the water.
Off topic , but I need help ( not that sort of help smartass)
It looks like the Warmistas are praying for a large scale El Nino event to reestablish their CAGW psychosis.
Since the temperature of the globe is given as whatever value and that must include all of the oceans , surface areas and the atmosphere in general , what difference to a global temperature will an El Nino make?
If the El Nino distributes heat from the Pacific waters to the Atlantic waters =a reduction in pacific heat =increase in Atlantic heat , where is the increase in Global temperature?
There is not more heat ,energy has not been created so what is the fuss about?
Heat flows from hot to cold so apart from a small increase in evaporation and resultant precipitation what is and where is the glory in this much lauded event.
I see both sides of the CWGW fence being quite breathless over the matter,so I ask again , unless the basic tenants of physics are about to be breached what is the big deal?
00
I don’t know what it might do for the warmists but a good El Niño might provide the rain and snow California desperately needs right now.
So bring on El Niño. Trouble is, it’s probably too late now.
It’s bad enough that we’re being asked to reduce water use by 20%. That’s a real big problem.
00
A 20% reduction is a problem? Perhaps if people thought more about where they live–California is a state that is prone to drought and now uses a gazillion gallons for landscaping and agriculture, that might help. Get rid of the manacured lawns, stop growing water intensive agricultural plants and deal. Yes, your governor is an idiot and should have cut off all watering of lawns, including the celebrities and his own mansion, long, long ago and kept agriculture going for this year. Then, a change to less water intensive crops should be encouraged and those who chose not to will not get any help if the rains don’t come. While I am obviously not an eco-freak, human beings use water for really stupid things and cry and moan when it runs out. I live on a well–one damaged by an earthquake. I am fully aware of all my water usage and adjust accordingly. I water only the essential things in a drought–you know, like the last 10 or 12 years in Wyoming. I have no choice but to think about these things because I don’t have an “endless tap” like those in the city do. No, Roy, I have no sympathy for this.
10
I wasn’t looking for sympathy, Sheri. And I understand your position. Now, you come to my house and try to convince my wife that she shouldn’t water the lawn and her flowers, especially the roses that she has spent no end of attention maintaining for 17 years. 🙂
The real problem in California is that it’s probably the most desirable climate in the country to live in. So people have come here from everywhere. We’re well above 35 million population, most of which is in the part of the state with the least water and the driest climate. Water has been a contentious issue since before I was born. And the problem generates more friction than solutions. We import the stuff from hundreds of miles away through infrastructure that is vulnerable to earthquakes, is aging and not getting maintenance it needs and no one in California who can think is taking water for granted. We are following the traditions of our parents and grandparents in our use of water — I expect that to change. What I do not expect or want is to be denied water because we lack the will to use all the water we have or because we neglect to have the means of delivering it.
And the state of California can regain a lot of its lost credibility about water by doing several things.
1. Keep the distribution system up to the demand.
2. As you point out, follow its own advice and lead by example.
3. Fight that federal judge tooth and nail who decided that a 3 inch fish — a fish not even native to the Sacramento River delta – trumps a multi $billion agriculture industry and ordered the pumps shut down, turning much of the central valley into a wasteland, driving farmers and ranchers out of business and throwing an entire economy, not to mention the people who depended on it into a tail spin.
Lest anyone think I’m willing to let some species go extinct because I don’t care — you would be mistaken. But life requires compromises and trade-offs. And that 3rd item is one of those cases. So if anyone in Sacramento wants to be taken seriously about water then that is the biggest thing to do and keep doing until California wins. We should not be owned by one federal judge. The other two things count too.
We have a problem with water without a doubt. But we also have a big problem with its management, even in the best of years. This year was a drought like we haven’t seen for some time and everyone knows it. So we’ll cope with it. But whether good times or bad, we need wiser water management.
00
She can keep the roses, but grass has to go!
I agreed that mismanagement is a huge problem, as is the ESA. I’m torn with the ESA because it may be the only thing, short of no tax breaks, that finally shuts down the wind industry. They just listed the Lesser Prairie Chicken and the Sage Grouse is being closely watched. Yes, it also shuts down oil and gas, too. However, since I have little faith that there’s any politicians out there willing to shut down the wind industry (and in part Wyoming’s problems with wind are due to California and Colorado, so those “greens” also damage our state) the ESA may be the only way.
Water management is as important as energy management and can certainly be used against a population. There just does not seem to be much hope that anyone in politics will do anything other than make this worse. For a while, I thought maybe, but now, no I really don’t see any hope that politicians can be trusted to stick by their values. They drop them in an instant if they can more attention and more followers. So the water problem will go on. As for being owned by one judge–I keep wondering why conservatives stood by and let the courts be stacked by liberals. Ah, the messes we make for ourselves……
00
I can imagine that it would be a huge problem. I remember the UK going through a drought way back ,late 60,S?.The advice given ,which is not so dumb, was that everyone should put a brick in their toilet cisterns,which multiplied by the amount of people and flushing s per day
x million x y flushes , would save a huge amount of water.
Only other advice I could give is , “if its yellow ,let it mellow , if its brown ,flush it down”
Sheri ,the terminator does not live in the same time zone ,let alone the same planet, California will continue to have huge problems with infrastructure so long as the Govt. listens to Green advice instead of focusing on supply and demand problems.
PS stop growing Mary Jane, apparently the water cost is equivalent to at least 10% of water usage.
My sympathies hopefully an El Nino event will help , but reservoirs ,dams and a focus on wasted Mountain waters would help.
00
In the US, the government “put the brick” in the toilet for us with low flow toilets. What actually uses an incredible amount of water is a slow leak in toilet. I had my septic tile field flood from this. Replaced both toilets and all went back to working normally. Goverment also mandated lo-flo shower heads. They take such good care of us (/sarc).
00
And of course those low water usage toilets work so well that you may have to flush them twice, thereby negating much of the supposed benefit. Ain’t the government grand? 🙁
I finally did get two that do work the first time. It was quite a search to find the right design. But most are still a problem. Try almost any public restroom.
American Standard is the one if anyone is interested.
00
I have two made by Crane. They work quite well. Now, if you unrealistically think toilets should never clog, these will very occasionally fail, just as the higher volume ones did. I found the most interesting thing about low-flush toilets was the low water in city sewer lines that lead to a complete lack of sewage movement in pipes in some areas. Perhaps someone should have pointed out that things do occur after the toilet is flushed that may affect the outcome of toilet choices. 🙂
00
Sheri,
Good point.
So far I haven’t heard of such a problem locally though.
I do know that the slope of the local sewer under the street is probably not very great. Just from eyeballing the length of the street, knowing which way the water flows and being near the downstream end I can figure it’s no more than 25 feet down in front of my house. That’s not very steep if drainage from all the upstream homes is to be steep enough to work so the slope under the street can’t possibly be very great. But if there is going to be such a problem it hasn’t happened yet.
I can make that estimate after having to replace the sewer from my house to the curb. Seeing where it is when it comes out of the house and how far down it is at the curb is all you need. A near 6 foot man standing in the hole they had to dig at the curb disappeared when standing at the bottom. So I estimate the pipe is 8 feet down at that point plus another 3 feet for the fact that the yard slopes down to the sidewalk. The slope of the pipe is probably uniform. Project that on out to where the manhole covers are and you’ve a good estimate.
Interestingly they had to expose the old concrete pipe at only those two places, the house and the curb. Then they fed a steel cable through the pipe with a large bullet shaped piece at the upstream end, attached a flexible plastic pipe to that then used a pneumatic rig to pull that bullet and the replacement pipe attached to it through to the other end a foot or so at a time. You could stand in the yard and feel that bullet breaking the concrete pipe apart to make room for the replacement. The intruding tree roots hadn’t a chance.
Yankee ingenuity at its best.
00
I will remember American Standard. I usually have to flush multiple times. But I live in a water world over here, so I am not worried about it.
Government flushing standards are like Ford’s environment controls in the 70s. They made the rules absolute, thereby causing the heat to come on in Alaska in June.
00
I used to call Ford the Fraud Motor Company. To their credit they have cleaned up their attitude a lot since then. I still like my Toyota however.
00
I was referring to Gerald R. 😉
But the last Toyota I bought, I almost bought a Ford (they have cleaned up that much). If they had a stick in the area I was looking at, I would have. You can only get them special ordered on Toyotas now.
00
For those who are unfamiliar with /r/science/ they regularly delete anything that does not conform to pro catastrophic global warming hypothesis. There is another subreddit there that spawned as a result of this called /r/climateskeptics/. They excuse this by saying that any contrary comments are “derailing” the conversation. The subreddit is populated with sheep when it comes to climate witchcraft … woops I mean “science”.
00