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By Jo Nova
This week’s UN witchcraft is that a half a degree of global warming will kill babies and pregnant women, give us your money.
The UN COP29 meeting starting Nov 11th, fights for relevance in the shadow of the US Election, like a suckerfish under an aircraft carrier.
The latest confected attempt to get attention is to guilt trip the West — telling us that women and babies will die if we don’t install enough solar panels. This is despite humans being mammals which evolved to cope with the heat and the cold. We live a more closeted, protected existence than any time in the last million years. Not many people give birth in caves these days. Indeed we’re a species that inhabits towns with monthly temperatures that vary by 90 degrees Celsius and we are supposed to panic about another half a degree?
The truth is that being cold, poor and hungry increases stillbirths just as much as any heatwave, and the thing that saves babies on a hot day is an air-conditioner. The answer to all four killers thus, is cheap electricity and fossil fuels.
One day history students will study how the UN uses […]
By Jo Nova
Finally, 15 years and a trillion dollars too late, George Monbiot says what skeptics have been saying all along. Nearly every single carbon reduction scheme is a useless make-work machination that creates the illusion that the government is doing something. He calls it “perceptionware”.
A new paper was released in Science pointing out that in the last 25 years, barely 4% of climate policies in 41 countries have made any real difference. And by “real difference” we mean reducing a useful fertilizer, so it’s a good thing that 96% of the ploys failed, but a tragedy that a thousand billion dollars was stolen from decent people.
In any case, finally Monbiot sees the tip of the iceberg of grift and graft, but doesn’t realize his own role in it, doesn’t realize the same failures of journalists like him also failed the science world where 96% of papers have achieved nothing they set out to do as well — like predicting the climate. Climate science has been spinning its wheels, creating perceptionware and failing to figure out the climate for fifty years, but George hasn’t noticed.
Monbiot hasn’t even taken the obvious leap: Where were the Greens, […]
Rejoice Australia. The Star of Mann has crosseth The line of Capricorn. The great Prof has flown 10,000 miles to tell us “Australia is on fire”. Something only thirty million people knew already, including every Australian and the five million New Zealanders who can smell the smoke too.
According to Michael Mann, his plane causes bushfires, and he had to fly all the way to a nation on fire to tell them that.
Australia, your country is burning – dangerous climate change is here with you now
Michael Mann, The Guardian
Sadly, everything he knows about the Australian climate comes from a Midnight oil song:
When we mine for coal, like the controversial planned Adani coalmine, which would more than double Australia’s coal-based carbon emissions, we are literally mining away at our blue skies. The Adani coalmine could rightly be renamed the Blue Sky mine.
In Australia, beds are burning. …
Now we know why those models keep failing.
As he goes on to explain:
The songs of Peter Garrett and Midnight Oil I first enjoyed decades ago have taken on a whole new meaning for me now. They seem disturbingly […]
Who needs interviews when you know all the answers?
Greg Jericho, of The Guardian, can explain why the government is in “denial” and spends 15 odd paragraphs doing psychoanalysis of himself.
Has he met a skeptic? Not likely.
This government is not even pretending to act on climate change any more
Perhaps somewhat surprisingly I have a degree of sympathy for members of the public who are climate change deniers. I have this sympathy because I was once one of them. …doing my level best to deny it was happening. Because it scared the bejeezus out of me.
… so I understand why people choose to believe those who say climate change is not the issue, that the issue is power prices and thus we need to fire up the coal furnaces.
Denial is a very easy way out of guilt that your lifestyle is leaving your children and grandchildren an awful legacy. Denial is a good way to throw away concerns that you might have to actually wear a cost – either through lifestyle changes or monetary loss.
It is a scary thing to hear talk of the impacts […]
It’s panic stations over at Believer Central. They are losing their grip on the media. And 2015 was a bumper year for Climate Scares – the hottest ever year, the giant Paris Junket, The El Nino, The Pope! (The Pope?) Despite all that, the media spent less time on the climate. It doesn’t get any better than 2015 for the Global Worriers — there is no higher level of panic. But the free propaganda machine is slowing…
Lookout, climate denial is on the rise (don’t ask about the error bars):
…
Dana Nuccitelli, The Guardian
During the most important year for climate news, TV coverage fell
A report by Media Matters for America reveals that the media are failing to inform the American public on the most important issue of our time.
Media Matters for America has published a report detailing US broadcast news coverage of climate change in 2015, and their findings are stunning.
Stunning eh? Or not.
Dana might be knocked over, but I see ABC down 20, Fox up 20, and some “other stuff”. It’s not really much of a trend. The thing that really bugs Dana seems to […]
Ooh. Here’s a bit of a backdown. Skeptics must be getting to The Guardian. Smile.
Mocking skeptics and calling them deniers has somehow failed to win them over, so the Guardian is trying a slightly new tack. This time they pretend to be balanced, and post up a list of “Myths to explode” from both sides of the debate. But don’t bring the ear-muffs, or the ambulances — these bombs are pussy-foot puff balls. The air-drops on alarmist camps are so convoluted they manage to support The Big Fear Campaign even as they try (gently-bentley!) to reign in a few excesses of the believers — don’t mention human extinction, and do remember the world has been hotter before, right? On skeptical “myths”, nothing has changed but at least they’ve stopped the namecalling (Bravo!). But it’s hard for author Hannah Devlin — she even serves up a new myth to try to squash an old one. The rate of global warming is apparently “unprecedented”, as in one-degree-in-a-century has never ever happened before, not once. How likely is that we could know the rate of global temperature swings to a tenth of a degree back in the days of dinosaurs and at […]
In years to come when people wonder how so much money came to be wasted in a frivolous attempt to stop the storms, people will marvel at the failure of parts of the free press. The Guardian will rise above that pack, standing out as the one that dressed itself in the color of gullible.
There are more than 31,000 whistleblowers inside science, 9,000 with PhD’s, 2 with Nobel Physics prizes, and 3 men who walked on the moon. There are meteorologists who won prizes in Meteorology, and physicists who studied with the greats — and they’re warning that the science is not settled, but the journalists at The Guardian know better.
Instead of asking hard questions of both skeptics and believers, the writers saw the passion and energy of namecalling activists and were swept off their feet to join the march. Now they dish out their infinite wisdom on science, on national policy and finance. If only the rest of us could be as genius and kind as Alan Rusbridger, eh?
But what are the Guardian guarding these days? They want to silence skeptics, and push a committee consensus. It isn’t free speech, and it isn’t science. If there […]
UPDATE: The Who-wants-to-be-called-a-pariah argument has been wheeled out again in July 2015, see Forget the climate — Spend billions to stop Australia being called names like “Pariah” and “Denier”
According to the Guardian, Australia is almost a Climate Pariah TM, and owes the world an apology for voting to repeal the Carbon Tax.
What chilling effect, I wondered, did being a pariah have on international tourists?
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in July 2014 as the Carbon Tax was finally removed, tourists voted with their feet … and flocked to come. A record 573,100 visitors arrived in Australia from all over the world. Year on year tourism from May 2013 – May 2014 grew by 8%.
Pariah status it appears, may count for Guardian and NY Times columnists, but not so much for the rest of the world.
…
Josh Bornstein of The Guardian says Australia is seen as a dirty polluter. The Axis of Carbon!
“This is how the New York Times responded to the scrapping of the carbon price scheme:
9.2 out of 10 based on 102 ratings […]
What insight. ‘Tis prosaic — Nick Cohen in The Guardian packs more truth — runs tantalizingly close to a major insight, yet skates off, one single word short.
It’s projection on a rampage, and Cohen almost seems to realize it. Perhaps we can help him?
“The climate change deniers have won”
Where else, but The Guardian?
Yes, Mr Cohen, those whom you deliberately and with malice call “deniers” are winning. Incredibly, even though they have only 0.03% of the funds, none of the machinery or the institutions, the enmity of western governments, existential opposition from the $350 billion renewables industry, no support from the large global carbon trading market, and only scorn and derision from the entire UN, and yet they are winning with nothing but wits and facts.
“Scientists continue to warn us about global warming, but most of us have a vested interest in not wanting to think about it” Exactly! If you care about the environment you need to think. How serious is the problem of CO2? Here’s a handy list of topics that won’t tell us that answer: Any list of organizations, associations, committees. Any survey of keywords used in publications. Psychoanalysis, pop psychology, anonymous internet […]
The Guardian: Gleick apology over Heartland leak stirs ethics debate among climate scientists
Whoops. Suzanne Goldenberg unwittingly exposes how empty the Ethics Vault is in establishment climate science. Peter Gleick used a false identity to steal documents, and released them without permission and without an effort to redact private irrelevant details. So let’s ask climate scientists if stealing, deception and breaching privacy is OK. It’s a yes or no choice, is it a/ heroic, or b/ misguided? We’d hope a ten year old could get this one, but Goldenberg tells us that its thrown “the scientific community into tumult, with fierce debates…”. Oh.
The correct answer was not even on offer in the Guardian: c/probably criminal.
So when is stealing OK?
Other (scientists and activists) acknowledged Gleick’s wrongdoing, but said it should be viewed in the context of the work of Heartland and other entities devoted to spreading disinformation about science.
Here’s a face-meet-palm-moment: if Heartland is spreading misinformation on science then why not try explaining where their science is wrong, rather than just repeat this mindless, unsubstantiated claim?
As it happens, if Heartland wanted to spread “disinformation” it sure seems an odd strategy to go out of their way […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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