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Great Headlines in Science:
“Climate crisis could make humans shrink in size, says fossil expert”
Where science is just like a movie set
It’s another great moment in science leaving beleaguered teenagers wondering if their kids will be shorter than them. Perhaps if they can buy an EV, they wonder, Johnny will be as tall as his dad?
Or maybe the journalist could have said “in five million years” because that’s the kind of time-frame this scientist is talking in:
Nicola Davis, The Guardian
The climate crisis may lead the human race to shrink in size, as mammals with smaller frames appear better able to deal with rising global temperatures, a leading fossil expert has said.
Let’s make that “in five million years without air-conditioning”. Because the whole story applies to humans living au naturel, like Eocene Horsies did.
Prof Steve Brusatte, a palaeontologist at the University of Edinburgh, suggested that the way in which other mammals have previously responded to periods of climate change could offer an insight into humans’ future.
He likened the potential plight of people as similar to that […]
It’s a cult: Another Woke Dilemma
Should women in childbirth be warned that their anesthetic might heat the climate a hundred years from now? You know, toss it around, will I or won’t I? On the one hand, there’s hours of what some consider the worst pain they’ll ever feel, or there are other pain-killers which might not be as safe (but it’s only a baby right?). On the other hand, it’s possible that when their baby turns eighty the world might be 0.000 degrees cooler thanks to Mum? You Go Girl!
Frankly, if they wait to ask this in the labor ward – it’s far too late. Women need to hear this on the phone while booking their first appointment. That way they can run, don’t walk, run and find a real doctor — one that looks at data — not the ones scoring points in a science fashion contest.
Is nitrous oxide a climate risk?
Elios Visontay, The Guardian
A report in Australasian Anaesthesia notes that while nitrous oxide – known as laughing gas when used as an anaesthetic – is an effective method of pain relief during labour, the gas represents 7% […]
It’s the usual apocalyptic headline, hyped from a press release smoked out of a Nature paper, which was pumped from a climate model:
“Climate change already causing storm levels only expected in 2080”
An Israeli study published on Thursday found that climate change is already causing a “considerable intensification” of winter storms in the Southern Hemisphere to a level not anticipated until 2080.
It’s bleak I tell you:
“New data reveals climate change might be more rapid than predicted”
In the new study, Chemke and his team compared climate model simulations with current storm observations. Their discovery was bleak: It became clear that storm intensification over recent decades has already reached levels projected to occur in the year 2080.
Yet again we see true mastery of confirmation bias at work: When the climate models underestimate things it means doom is coming faster. When they overestimate things, it means the equipment is faulty. What would 28 million radiosondes know?
There must be 1,000 permutations of climatoid factors that could be measured across regions of the Earth, but Lo — there has been an intensification of Winter Mid-Latitude Storms in the Southern Hemisphere! Not summer storms, spring storms, […]
A postmodern coal-powered Cockatoo is larger, meaner and nastier than any bird photographed in the paleolithic. | Photo by Photoholgic on Unsplash
It’s a new horror to scare the kiddies:
Animals ‘shape-shifting’ as climate warms: study
Paris: Some animals are “shape-shifting” and have developed bigger tails, beaks and ears to regulate their body temperatures as the planet warms, according to a new study.
The Australian parrot, for example, had shown an average 4-10 per cent increase in the size of its bill since 1871 and the authors said this positively correlated with the summer temperature each year.
For one, do bird-bills cool birds? For two, how many parrot bills were measured in 1871 in Australia and do we think we would know if their bills got 10% bigger? For three, there is no “Australian parrot”, there are 56 different species. And fourthly, even if they had got bigger, and we could measure that, which we probably can’t, how do we know it’s not due to “something else” that changed in the last 150 years, like all the orchards, crops, trees and other things we planted? According to some botanists, there are more foreign plants […]
Current Witchdoctor Warning: Severe levels of Voodoo likely on all channels
Climate Fear Week is Here.
Your car exhaust causes bushfires, your roast beef leads to droughts and the wrong lightglobes could flood the nation.
Hurry, hurry, it’s your absolute last last-chance after the last last-chance to save the world. According to an unaudited, unaccountable UN committee, It’s Code Red for Humanity! Rush and install Solar Special Protection Shields on your home today to be sure no one inside is at higher risk of Malaria, Asthma, Obesity, Eco-depression, and to save Nemo from feeling reckless. (Why haven’t you done that already, you evil reef killer?)
Despite installing more renewables than any nation per capita on Earth, Australia is failing to cleanse the Earth of pollution. Likewise the USA and UK which have both reduced actual carbon emissions by more than nearly everyone else are only leaders when they vote for socialists. Too many windmills are never enough! (Don’t mention the eagles or the whales, but praise the Sharks, for they are the sacred spirit of Virtue Signalling.)
There are many things you can do to play your part to make the weather nicer for our grandchildren, or at least reinforce […]
Biblical doom coming says prophesy
Limbourg Bros, Folio 108: Hell. circa 1416.
A new report by a “Breakthrough” think tank has arrived to leave no stone, or cliche, unturned in scaring the kiddies. Whole thesauruses have been ransacked: the threat is existential, lethal, and not survivable. The End Days include choas, collapsing ecosystems, with devastating wildfires. “Nuclear War is possible”. (Yes, just like it was in 1962 when CO2 was 317 perfect ppm.). Will zero emissions bring World Peace? Why not. It can solve everything else.
The Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration is run by two men from Melbourne who apparently long for the little ice age. To get back there they take the climate models that don’t work and amplify their worst guesses into an apocalypse. They pluck the most ominous quotes they can find to create a sense that the IPCC are just another bunch of bureaucrats hiding the awful truth. As if Big-government is on the side of skeptics.
It’s not about observational evidence so much as quote-mining. If a professor once said something ominous, suggestive of oppression or of censorship, that’s grist for the carbon-mill. Naturally, they focus on Arctic Sea Ice since it’s […]
Al Gore is here in Australia to train 1,0o0 useful idiots on Unscience, neolithic reasoning and witchcraft. The man with no climate science expertise, and a huge vested interest is being paid by taxpayers to train people to chant “consensus” and pretend that wind and solar can stop storms and hold back the tide. These obedient fools help to destroy any conversation about science by reciting anti-science bumperstickers like “the science is settled”, “gravity is real” and “tobacco, tobacco, tobacco”. Because, hey, the tobacco industry funded merchants of doubt, and they were wrong, so therefore Ergo Prompter Upchuck, all government scientists are right on Everything, All Of The Time, and you are an idiot denier.
Repeat after me: There were no storms in 1703. Droughts didn’t exist. It wasnt hotter, colder, deadlier and more extreme for most of human history and 20 times as many people didn’t die of cold.
Global Bullies Unite and ask Anna Palaszczuk for money. Suffer the Queensland taxpayer. The Labor Party in Queensland should pay this money back, it’s an advertising expense.
Fittingly, The Gore effect strikes again. Snow fell in Queensland. (The last time it fell was 2015.)
Alan Jones asks why the Queensland […]
Octopuses survived the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs, but look set to go blind thanks to coal fired power and your car.
Octopuses may go blind from climate change, study warns
…
Plastic pollution and climate change may be significantly altering the level of oxygen on our planet. Now, a new study dives into the impact it could have on marine life, including squids, crabs and octopuses – blindness.
The study, published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, highlights how important oxygen is to sight and retinal activity for certain marine larvae. Tiny declines in oxygen levels result in significant vision impairment, including almost total blindness in certain species.
“Using in vivo electroretinogram recordings, we show that there is a decrease in retinal sensitivity to light in marine invertebrates when exposed to reduced oxygen availability,” the study’s abstract reads. “We found a 60-100 [percent] reduction in retinal responses in the larvae of cephalopods and crustaceans…
Or more specifically: Octopuses will go blind if they are suddenly dumped in tanks with reduced oxygen…
To test the theory, the animals were put in reduced oxygen environments for approximately 30 minutes.
Time to […]
Is it April 1st in London?
The BBC is reporting that academics from University College London have discovered that the Little Ice Age was not caused by the record low solar activity of the Maunder Minima, instead it was due to the colonization of the Americas. Thanks mostly to measles and small pox the death toll was so enormous that about 9% of the global population died, supposedly leaving empty farmlands. These were swiftly covered in forests causing a deadly fall in CO2 which cooled the world.
This is an Apocryphal story that virtue signals in so many ways. A kind of triple-point scrabble maneuver combining climate, race, war, forests and imperial colonization in the one story.
The Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas caused the Little Ice Age
Colonisation of the Americas at the end of the 15th Century killed so many people, it disturbed Earth’s climate.
That’s the conclusion of scientists from University College London, UK.
The team says the disruption that followed European settlement led to a huge swathe of abandoned agricultural land being reclaimed by fast-growing trees and other vegetation.
This pulled down enough carbon […]
After thirty years of Green-Blob disaster porn, there are casualties.
Climate change [propaganda] takes a toll on our minds
Psychologist Susie Burke tells the story of a woman who came to her for counselling after having her first child. Not because she was suffering from post-natal depression, but because she was “struggling with the enormity of what she had done.” She felt she had brought her child into a “world she knew was going to be a lot harsher and a lot less safe,” Burke told DW.
“She came to me when she was overwhelmed by this distress; questioning whether she had done the right thing. The fear she had for his future was really huge.”
Look out for the new hotline (Can someone find this number?)
Burke is an Australian psychologist and academic who specializes in eco-psychology. She treats people suffering mental illness as a result of climate change, and also recently set up a free hotline called the “Climate Change Psychological Support Network,” where Australians can call a qualified psychologist to talk through their feelings about environmental change.
Look out for the handbook:
‘The Climate Change Empowerment Handbook’ is a handy […]
Forget the plight of snow skiers who won’t know what snow is — it’s cricket that will be hit hardest.
That’s why the sport must take notice of a report published by Climate Coalition, …
The document names cricket as the sport that will be hardest hit by climate change in England, stating that “wetter winters and more intense summer downpours are disrupting the game at every level”.
God forbid. This is a death spiral:
.. Glamorgan Head of Operations, Dan Cherry, …warned that climate change could “fundamentally change the game”.
“The less cricket we play, the fewer people will watch it, the less they will come to the ground and pay to enter, the less chance there is for young people to be inspired,” said Cherry.
This change, it seems, has already begun.
Wait til you see the evidence:
In international cricket, 27 percent of England’s home one-day internationals since 2000 have been played with reduced overs because of rain delays. The rate of rain-affected matches has more than doubled since 2011, with five percent of matches abandoned completely.
By crikey. That is a six year weather […]
Brought to you by the Theory That Can Never Be Wrong — what’s the opposite of hot? A hole!
Next time you are feeling cold you will know you are in a hole instead. Stop digging.
h/t Climate Depot
Snow-covered beaches? Chilly iguanas? They are part of a mysterious ‘hole’ in global warming
BY STUART LEAVENWORTH, February 15, 2018 05:00 AM
… “according to a scientific study published this month, the Southeast’s colder winter weather is part of an isolated trend, linked to a more wavy pattern in the jet stream that crosses North America. That dipping jet stream allows artic air to plunge into the Southeast. Scientists call this colder weather a “hole” in overall global warming, or a “warming hole.”
“What we are looking at is an anomaly,” said Jonathan M. Winter, an assistant professor of geography at Dartmouth College and the principle investigator in the study. “The Southeast is the exception to the rule.”
Coming soon, new discoveries will show that the Little Ice Age was not cold, just part of an isolated trend that happened all over the world.
This particular modern hole is happening over SE USA. Obviously […]
Gore’s a modern day soothsayer with powerpoint
Thanks to CFACT I was lucky enough to get to see Al Gore in Melbourne yesterday (and even luckier to see Climate Hustle the night before and meet some great people!). Gore wanted everyone to spread the word, but banned anyone recording him. (The staff actively patrolled for wayward cameras. We’d love to have helped share Gore’s message, but we would have been kicked out for doing so).
The intrepid Marc Morano even managed to meet Al in an inconvenient encounter:
Marc Morano kindly offered Al Gore a copy of Climate Hustle, (which might have helped him feel a lot better about the future). Gore refused to take it. Possibly, he’s not that interested in climate change.
What I saw was nearly a whole hour of primal weather-porn – gratuitous, non-stop, scenes from the apocalypse, glowing clouds boiled about incandescent forests, and giant drains in the sky emptied massive clouds in a flash. Glaciers crumbled before our eyes. Poor victims were stuck in boiling tar on hot roads, they crawled out of mud slides, and were dragged in spectacular rescues from cars being swallowed by turbulent floods. Biblical is the word.
Gullible, […]
I nearly headlined this: Climate grief group meets at someone’s house, Grist covers it. That’s pretty much all this program is. No one even counts to nine in this story.
Depressed about climate change? There’s a 9-step program for that.
Imagine Alcoholics Anonymous mixed with an environmental humanities course, and you’ll begin to get a sense of the “good grief” group started by Schmidt. Its goal is to help people cope with what’s been called “climate grief” — anxiety, sadness, depression, and other emotions provoked by awareness of the planet’s march toward a hotter,… future…
What she found was that feelings of sadness and anxiety, and even literal nightmares, were common. Last year, with the help of her partner, Aimee Reau, Schmidt developed a nine-step program for building resiliency loosely modeled on AA…
But this is big:
About a dozen people attend each session and 50 subscribe to its mailings.
If I get 12 people to my house, and have 12,000 subscribers, do you think Grist will write it up?
Perhaps they have some good results?
Perhaps not:
Schmidt, who now works as an outreach coordinator at the environmental group HEAL […]
All the sensible people have left the room.What’s left, double or nothing?
In the religion that is “climate change” all correlations point to the CO2 God. Bill McGuire is professor emeritus in geophysical and climate hazards at UCL and he hath written a book of imminent quakes, shakes and eruptions. Turn off your heater for it feeds the volcano.
Let us read from Climate-Psalm-101:
Global warming may not only be causing more destructive hurricanes, it could also be shaking the ground beneath our feet
Be very afraid little bunny:
… it does not stretch the imagination to appreciate that a warmer atmosphere promotes greater melting of the polar ice caps, thereby raising sea levels and increasing the risk of coastal flooding. But, more extraordinarily, the thin layer of gases that hosts the weather and fosters global warming really does interact with the solid Earth – the so-called geosphere — in such a way as to make climate change an even bigger threat.
Thus and verily will the continental plates dance to the tune of the magical CO2.
Pagan civilization found the Dog Star caused flooding in the Nile. So […]
Only higher education could produce something this silly.
The University of Sussex gets the credit for a paper that argues that countries that are committed to nuclear energy are progressing slower towards the holy grail of meeting “climate targets”. This discovery coincidentally comes exactly as the UK Hinkley Point “hangs in the balance”. What were the odds?
The Newspeak starts in the headline — what’s a “climate target”. My personal climate target is to move into the tropics each winter, but the EU climate target is not about reducing temperatures over Spain, but about “more windmills”. The climate target of the EU has apparently got nothing much to do with the climate:
…the EU’s 2020 Strategy — to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 20%, increase the share of renewable energy to at least 20% of consumption, and achieve energy savings of 20% or more by 2020…
They cluster countries in to 3 groups and discover that the countries that plan to maintain or expand nuclear energy (eg Bulgaria, Hungary and the UK) are not cutting emissions as fast as countries that have no nukes (Denmark, Ireland, and Norway).
Could it be, I wonder, because […]
Those who believe the Glorious Climate Models (GCMs) are in trouble. Many of them have spent their entire careers soaking in dire predictions, but things are falling apart — (or rather, not falling apart) — the models don’t work, the public doesn’t care, the media are not that interested, and skeptics keep winning Bloggies awards. Spare a thought for them. It’s tough out there for unskeptical people. Children still know what snow is.
Things are unravelling in believer-land and there is pain. They are witnessing “the wholesale destruction of the planet”, or perhaps the death of a hypothesis, which is nearly as bad.
Truthout, where no conspiracy is too grand, and skeptical scientists are bastards
The headline reads:
“Mourning Our Planet: Climate Scientists Share Their Grieving Process”
The 3,000 word extravaganza of psychological pain is published by an NGO aptly called Truthout (think, “LightsOut”?)
“Climate science researchers, scientists, journalists and activists have all been struggling with grief around what we are witnessing.”
There’s an angry professor calling other scientists who disagree “greedy, lying bastards” and talking of backing “you plutocrats, denialists, fossil-fuel hacks “ against the wall. Another professor blames ACD for the driving cause of her […]
I sense much gnashing of teeth. There seems to be nothing a reasonable social-science communicator can do. If they write like conservative scientists, the public don’t worry enough, if they load on the fear and guilt, people turn off. They can hammer the anti-science notion of consensus, which seems to work a treat in inept five minute surveys, but “the consensus” has been all over the press, in school, and in documentaries, yet (wail and weep) the polls of public alarm are still sliding! The media is even less interested. (See Figure 1 below).
There plots the rise and fall of climate in the media. (Figure 1 in this paper).
For the last few years the media have tried showing a lot more high-gloss posters of floods, cyclones and cracked earth, and that is not working either. It doesn’t seem to matter if we show disasters-away with stoic Sudanese or disasters-at-home with suffering suburban mortgagees, the public disengage.
Here Nerlich and Jaspal use “visual thematic analysis” (a technical word for looking at pictures and saying things about them) and publish a paper in a journal with the unlikely title “Science As Culture“.
It appears the social science communicators have […]
The ABC tv program Catalyst was quite special last Thursday. Was that a science report, or an advertorial?
Brisbane was recording temperatures with modern Stevenson Screens in 1890, as were some other stations, but the BOM often ignores these long records.
Forget gloom and doom it’s “kinder” climate now
The ABC team have shifted gear. They heard they should stop being all gloom and doom (it’s climate fatigue you know) and make it simple. So they did, and everything was delivered in a cheesy canter, like an episode of Playschool. Smile everyone! Floods will increase, but we won’t hammer you with ominous music, instead we’ll show Jonica-the-presenter cleaning the floor of her very own home, joking about the pesky trickle in the living room (To paraphrase: It’s flooded again — can you believe?).
Dr Jonica Newby reckons things have changed since she bought her house. It’s simply unthinkable that the climate now is not exactly the same at her house as it was when she first moved in — way back in the historic year of… 2000. (Gosh, eh? I wonder why the BOM don’t publish a paper on it?) Now our national debate is reduced to presenters, not […]
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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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