The Train Set - Bill Whittle's Afterburner

An interersting piece on the "love of theory" and what evils it can lead to:



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Eric Raymond: Eight Warning Signs of Junk Science

The next time you hear some claim about science, say something like carbon dioxide generated by human activity is causing the climate to change, you might want to refer back to this handy list of ways to spot when you are being presented with junk science put together by Eric Raymond:

• Science by press release.
• Rhetoric that mixes science with the tropes of eschatological panic.
• Rhetoric that mixes science with the tropes of moral panic.
• Consignment of failed predictions to the memory hole.
• Over-reliance on computer models replete with bugger factors that aren’t causally justified.
• If a ‘scientific’ theory seems tailor-made for the needs of politicians or advocacy organizations, it probably has been.
• Past purveyers of junk science do not change their spots.
• Refusal to make primary data sets available for inspection.

These are good points to rmember, especially in the wake of the latest data-dump of emails among the pedlars of the great AGW/climate change scare, dubbed Climategate 2.0.

Detailed version of the list at the link. Read the whole thing.

(via Samizdata)

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The Failure of Al Gore - Part Three

Walter Russell Mead has a third essay up about the failure of Al Gore and the Climate Change movement, "Singing the Climate Blues." Mead attributes Gore's failure mainly to his worldview, which is stuck somewhere in the past and his inability, like many of his ilk, to see the world as it is and adapt.  A sample:

The trouble and even the tragedy of Al Gore is that he comes at the tail end of this tradition; he is a living example of what you get when a worldview outlives its time. He presses the old buttons and turns the old cranks, but the machine isn’t running any more. The priests dance around the altar, the priestess chews the sacred herbs, but the god no longer speaks. Like President Obama watching a universal healthcare program that he thought would secure his place in history turn into an electoral albatross and a policy meltdown, Al Gore thought that in the climate issue he had picked a winning horse. Judging from his Rolling Stone essay he has no idea why the climate movement failed, and no clue at all about how he could re-think the issue.

Read the whole thing, of course. Links to parts one and two are here.

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The Global Warming Counterargument...

....from Ray spencer and Bill Whittle.



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The Failure of Al Gore and the Green Movement

I haven't blogged about the global warming/climate change debate in quite a while as I was getting rather exhausted with the subject and others are doing a much better job of shining light on the subject. One such is Walter Russell Mead who has written  a pair of essays on Al Gore and the Green movement, the failure of their argument for a Global Green Carbon Treaty and why the whole enterprise was and is destined to fail. Part One is here and Part Deux is here. Of course you should read both essays but here is a sample from Part Deux:

Mr. Gore’s work up to and including his latest Rolling Stone essay has taken a demagogic rather than intellectual approach. His method of arguing is to trumpet the science of climate change and to make ad hominem arguments against its opponents. The science is clear, it is settled, and the opposition against it is funded by people with an economic stake in denial. I am right about the science and my opponents are a bunch of evil opportunists in it only for the money.

That is Mr. Gore’s position, and it is his entire position. He says nothing about the feasibility of the proposed GGCT or its cost effectiveness. That, presumably, we must take on faith. There is nothing to discuss about policy. It is essentially the cry of Chicken Little: “The sky is falling and we must run and tell the king.”

Thus speaketh Al Gore: the world is burning down and so you must immediately follow my plan for fixing what’s wrong. He does not discuss whether his plan is feasible; to anyone who objects to the ponderous, unwieldy Rube Goldberg style green treaty agenda, Gore simply bellows: “What’s the matter you soul-dead, hired flack of the evil oil companies, don’t you believe in Science?”

Al Gore’s logic is exactly like the genealogy of the man who boasted that his line of descent went all the way back to Julius Caesar — with only two gaps. Gore’s ironclad argument has only two gaps: he presents no evidence that the GGCT is either feasible (that it would be efficacious if put into practice and that it can in fact be put into practice in a reasonable time frame) or economical (that it is the cheapest and most effective means of reaching the goal, and that the cost of the fix is less than the cost of the problem).

This is the method of the global green movement as shaped by Al Gore: an ever-crescendoing invocation of blizzards, droughts, locusts and floods aims to stampede the populace into embracing one of the most dubious and unworkable policy prescriptions ever presented to the public eye.

And from Part One on Gore's rank hypocrisy:

But you cannot be a leading environmentalist who hopes to lead the general public into a long and difficult struggle for sacrifice and fundamental change if your own conduct is so flagrantly inconsistent with the green gospel you profess. If the heart of your message is that the peril of climate change is so imminent and so overwhelming that the entire political and social system of the world must change, now, you cannot fly on private jets. You cannot own multiple mansions. You cannot even become enormously rich investing in companies that will profit if the policies you advocate are put into place.

It is not enough to buy carbon offsets (aka “indulgences”) with your vast wealth, not enough to power your luxurious mansions with exotic low impact energy sources the average person could not afford, not enough to argue that you only needed the jet so that you could promote your earth-saving film.

You are asking billions of people, the overwhelming majority of whom lack many of the basic life amenities you take for granted, people who can’t afford Whole Foods environmentalism, to slash their meager living standards. You may well be right, and those changes may be necessary — the more shame on you that with your superior insight and knowledge you refuse to live a modest life. There’s a gospel hymn some people in Tennessee still sing that makes the point: “You can’t be a beacon if your light don’t shine.”

 

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Ross McKitrick and Earth Hour

One of the leading debunkers of the whole anthropogenic global warming (or is it climate change now?) religion, Ross McKitrick was asked what he thought about Earth Hour, the annual event where everyone is supposed to turn off the lights and sit in the dark so they can feel good about "doing something" for "the Earth." This year it will fall on March 26. Here is part of what he had to say about it:

I abhor Earth Hour. Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity. Giving women the freedom to work outside the home depended on the availability of electrical appliances that free up time from domestic chores. Getting children out of menial labour and into schools depended on the same thing, as well as the ability to provide safe indoor lighting for reading. Development and provision of modern health care without electricity is absolutely impossible. The expansion of our food supply, and the promotion of hygiene and nutrition, depended on being able to irrigate fields, cook and refrigerate foods, and have a steady indoor supply of hot water. Many of the world's poor suffer brutal environmental conditions in their own homes because of the necessity of cooking over indoor fires that burn twigs and dung. This causes local deforestation and the proliferation of smoke- and parasite-related lung diseases. Anyone who wants to see local conditions improve in the third world should realize the importance of access to cheap electricity from fossil-fuel based power generating stations. After all, that's how the west developed.

The whole mentality around Earth Hour demonizes electricity. I cannot do that, instead I celebrate it and all that it has provided for humanity. Earth Hour celebrates ignorance, poverty and backwardness. By repudiating the greatest engine of liberation it becomes an hour devoted to anti-humanism. It encourages the sanctimonious gesture of turning off trivial appliances for a trivial amount of time, in deference to some ill-defined abstraction called “the Earth,” all the while hypocritically retaining the real benefits of continuous, reliable electricity. People who see virtue in doing without electricity should shut off their fridge, stove, microwave, computer, water heater, lights, TV and all other appliances for a month, not an hour. And pop down to the cardiac unit at the hospital and shut the power off there too.

You can read the whole thing here. I, for one, will be turning on an extra incandescent light or two to celebrate modern civilization.

Update 3/25/11: Welcome visitors, about 120 in the last couple of hours. For a look at what energy poverty looks like in reality, go and watch this video. I linked it a few months back from this post, which you might also want to read..

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COP-16 Climate Change Delegates Sign Petition to Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide

The oh so scientifically literate believers in global warming have just proved that they'll believe nearly anything that comes packaged in the right kind of scientific sounding jargon.  At the UN sponsored COP 16 (confluence of Parties) conference being held in Cancun, Mexico this week, a group of students who are members of CFACT (Center For A Constructive Tomorrow) created a mock petition advocating a ban on dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO). You may know it better by its chemical formula shorthand, H₂O. Conference delegates were apparently quite eager to sign it. Yes, these geniuses really did sign a petition to ban water.

The CFACT students also circulated a mock petition to encourage the UN to damage the US by imposing tariffs intended to lower US GDP by 6% over ten years unless it signs a treaty on global warming. Again, it sounds as if everyone asked was eager to sign.

It wasn't all mischief though The CFACT group also organized a little tour to the other side of Cancun, to see what living with energy poverty was really like.  Hopefully, rubbing a few smug, sanctimonious noses in that reality will make a few of them question their cause.

Read them all (and there's a Penn & Teller video at the first link)

James Inhofe Calls for Investigation of Al Gore In Wake of Climategate

PJTV has posted an interview with Senator James Inhofe. Twelve minutes well spent.

The Climategate Scandal So Far

I haven't posted much on the Climategate/Climaquiddick AGW scandal lateley, mainly because absorbing all the revelations is sort of like trying to drink from a firehose. There's just so much of it and other people are doing a great job of exposing the facts. Charlie Martin is one of them and he has a great summary of the still unfolding scandal over at Pajamas Media, so I'll point you over there for the latest summation of the Great Global Warming Meltdown. One point I want to draw out though is this one:

It is, of course, purely a coincidence that this market, which simply doesn’t exist without the legal requirement that companies reduce carbon emissions, is closely connected with the politically connected people who are pushing for carbon restrictions by law and treaty.

Read it all.

Frozen Wasteland - A New Offering from the Minnesotans for Global Warming

The Minnesotans for Global Warming add to their hit parade. I suggest that if you are drinking anything you put it down now.



Take that, Al Gore!  The Minnesotan's other greatest hits are here and here.

An Excellent Point About Government Versus Private Sector Accountability

Over at Samizdata, Johnathan Pearce makes the following distinction between government and the private sector regarding the consequences of failure:

Toyota is recalling thousands of motor vehicles around the world to deal with certain problems, such as possible brake failures. The story was the lead item on the BBC TV news today, not surprisingly, given the large number of people who now drive Toyota cars. On one level, this issue is being billed as a terrible embarrassment for the Japanese company, but to an extent I find the comprehensive recall of the cars to be a pretty good example, in fact, of how private businesses with a huge brand-name investment have to act when their products have a problem. Can you imagine, say, a government department doing such a massive "recall" of a failed policy? With private business, the penalties for failure are bankruptcy. For government, the consequence of a mess is often more of the same, only with more lumps of taxpayers' money. To put it more technically, there is little in the way of a negative feedback loop when governments are involved.

As an aside, and yes, I know this may seem a bit mean-spirited, but I cannot help reflect that the problems of the Prius cars add to what has been a terrible time for the Green/AGW alarmists. The Prius is very much the car that guilt-ridden, Greenie types like to drive. As the snows continue to fall, who wants to drive one of those machines right now? And in any event, they are just pig-ugly. Time to fire up the Aston Martin, Carruthers.

Another Fine Musical Offering from the Minnesotans for Global Warming

From the guys who brought you the smash hit "Hide the Decline" comes this new offering:

(h/t, Bob)

American Thinker - The Intellectual Dishonesty of the Democrats

There's a good essay by Lauri B. Regan over at the American Thinker on the Democrat's inetellctual dishonesty. Of course you should read the whole piece but here's the conclusion:

As my colleague asked Al Gore, "How's that global warming working out for you," it would have been nice to hear Gore respond, "I don't know." But there is no money for politicians -- or con-artists -- who admit that they just don't know. There are no earmarks and windfalls being sent to the intellectually honest people with the moral character to admit that they don't have all of the answers, but that they are going to gather all the facts first before drawing conclusions which will affect generations of individuals, vast portions of the economy, and individual rights previously safeguarded in a Constitution being usurped before our eyes.

More Evidence of Fraudulent "Science" in the AGW Debate

Powerline has some fairly lengthy excerpts from an editorial by Fred Singer of the Science and Environmental Policy Project. The man-made climate change fraud didn't start with Climategate. That just finally exposed it for all the world to see.  It's an interesting read but what it all boils down to is this:

So the Kyoto protocol was based on fictitious science, exaggerated or fabricated outright for political purposes. The same Professor Santer who hijacked the Second Assessment Report figures prominently in Climategate. Many of his emails were disclosed by the East Anglia whistleblower; among other things, they show Santer resisting all efforts by independent scientists to obtain information, through Freedom of Information Act requests, about the statistical manipulations that Santer applies to raw climate data to "prove" the existence of anthropogenic global warming

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Fraud: it is the one constant in the history of the global warming hysteria movement.

Carbon Dioxide Fraction of Atmosphere Not Rising, May Not Have Risen for 160 Years

Further undermining the case for AGW is research done by Wolfgang Knorr at the University of Bristol that seems to show that the concentration of CO₂ in Earth's atmosphere may not have increased over the last 160 years, or even in the last 50, as it is either absorbed by the oceans or by plant life.

Most of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activity does not remain in the atmosphere, but is instead absorbed by the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems. In fact, only about 45 percent of emitted carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere.

An abstract of the research is here:

Several recent studies have highlighted the possibility that the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems have started loosing part of their ability to sequester a large proportion of the anthropogenic CO2 emissions. This is an important claim, because so far only about 40% of those emissions have stayed in the atmosphere, which has prevented additional climate change. This study re-examines the available atmospheric CO2 and emissions data including their uncertainties. It is shown that with those uncertainties, the trend in the airborne fraction since 1850 has been 0.7 ± 1.4% per decade, i.e. close to and not significantly different from zero. The analysis further shows that the statistical model of a constant airborne fraction agrees best with the available data if emissions from land use change are scaled down to 82% or less of their original estimates. Despite the predictions of coupled climate-carbon cycle models, no trend in the airborne fraction can be found.

Given this information, the proposed Cap and tax Trade legislation seems even more ill-adivsed than ever.

Caught Green-Handed: More on Climategate/Climaquiddick by Viscount Monckton

Lee Gerhard gave us the Cliffnotes version of the Climategate/ Climaquiddick scandal, now Lord Christopher Monckton gives us the long version, and it is an absolutely devastating indictment of all those involved. There is more than one person who ought to go to prison over this.

This is a coincidence but in the interests of disclosure, I took a course in Climatology as part of my degree program back around 1980 or 1981 (IIRC) and my professor for the course was none other than Raymond Bradley, co-author of the "hockey stick" paper with Michael Mann and Malcolm Hughes. Back then we were being warned of the soon-to-be-here Ice Age. This is a fact that only came to my attention recently as Mann tends to be the one that gets all the press whenever the hockey stick comes up.

(h/t to Frank)

A Reviewer of the Last Two IPCC Reports Lays Out What We Do, and Don't Know, About Climate Change

Via Powerline we have this bullet point summary of what we know about climate science, and what we don't. It is as compact as it is comprehensive, no small feat. It was written by one of the reviewers for the last two IPCC reports, geologist Lee Gerhard. This is what he has to say about the AGW true believers claims of support for the AGW position by thousands of scientists:

"I have been a reviewer of the last two IPCC reports, one of the several thousand scientists who purportedly are supporters of the IPCC view that humans control global temperature. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many of us try to bring better and more current science to the IPCC, but we usually fail. Recently we found out why. The whistleblower release of e-mails and files from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University has demonstrated scientific malfeasance and a sickening violation of scientific ethics."

Who are the climate change denialists now? Those who believe that man is the primary agent of climate change, that's who.

Read the whole thing.

EPA Declares CO2 a Pollutant

Today the Environmental Protection Agency declared a product of respiration, i.e., breathing, to be a dangerous pollutant. The carbon dioxide you exhale every time you take a breath is now subject to government regulation. I have a strong suspicion that the EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, has been unduly influenced by inhaling the methane gas fumes she (and a lot of the EnvironMental community) is breathing owing to having her head jammed so far up her own ass she can see daylight.

Just great.

Can You Say "Peer-Reviewed Studies?"

Mark Steyn certainly can. See just how many times in his weekly Orange County Register column.

"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" wondered Juvenal: Who watches the watchmen? But the beauty of the climate-change tree-ring circus is that you never need to ask "Who peer-reviews the peer-reviewers?" Mann peer-reviewed Jones, and Jones peer-reviewed Mann, and anyone who questioned their theories got exiled to the unwarmed wastes of Siberia. The "consensus" warm-mongers could have declared it only counts as "peer-reviewed" if it's published in Peer-Reviewed Studies published by Mann & Jones Publishing Inc. (Peermate of the Month: Al Gore, reclining naked, draped in dead polar bear fur, on a melting ice floe), and Ed Begley Jr. and "Andy" Revkin would still have wandered out, glassy-eyed, into the streets droning "Peer-reviewed studies. Cannot question. Peer-reviewed studies. The science is settled ... ."

Not sure I really needed that Al Gore visual but, as usual, Steyn makes the point (that it's peer-reviewed. Did we mention that already?) with humor. Read the whole thing.

CRUdgate - A Handy Guide to the Argument From Devil's Kitchen

At the Devil's Kitchen (Via Samizdata) we have this entertaining as well as informative series of flow charts, with explanations, on the current state of the AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming for those not as obsessed as I am with the whole thing) argument and Climategate/Climaquiddick and now CRUdgate. All great stuff. I urge you to go read the whole thing (click on the charts to embiggen).