I received the following in one of my e-mail Inboxes, which, as you can imagine, I was tempted to completely ignore.
To be honest, I’m baffled why this fellow thinks I’m the right person to answer a bunch of Global Warming denier arguments that have had endless rebuttals already.
My advice to Climate Change sceptics everywhere : read the Climate Change Science before asking overly sceptical questions, then you won’t need to ask them.
Oh, you know the Press. It’s “statistically significant” to claim that they are always trying to set light to a story and make a conflagration of enormous preposterous proportions.
They’ve been at it again this weekend. You know, just when I thought we might have crawled our way through the burning embers of Climategate’s hellish hatred and made it out to the true sunshine of love and admiration for Phil Jones, back bounce the Daily Maul and the Daily Terrorgraph with apparent “misinterpretations of the facts”.
Take any subject you like, terrorism, bird flu, street crime, elder abuse, credit fraud, political corruption, and the BBC will give you a serious, in-depth and highly concerned feature article with professional photographs and solid headlines.
Everything, that is, apart from Global Warming.
Why is Climate Change so unscary for the BBC ?
Every other problem in the known universe is worthy of gravitas and graveyard intonation, but not Climate Change Science and the implications it has as risk to life, health, wealth and general contentment.
What could be going wrong ? Why the non-long faces when it comes to the most serious risks facing mankind since the Black Death ?
Why does Global Warming get “relativist” treatment when everything else gets the full shadowy-figure-in-a-cloak-with-a-scythe ?
It’s hard not to adore the man : all that blond hair and buffoonery, concealing a fairly intelligent personality, although he does have an unfortunate taste in Deputy Mayors :-
https://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jun/22/boris-deputy-resigns
I would like to bring before the court of public opinion some evidence that indicates that the leadership at The Guardian newspaper could be said to have become partially intellectually bankrupt.
Specimen A
Simon Hoggart pronounces on Climate Change Science despite not knowing a thing about it. I do not understand how this piece of writing was published, as it contains a number of inaccuracies.
https://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2010/feb/06/climate-change-simon-hoggarts-week
Phil Jones, we are a small, but growing, group, who just want you to know that we love you, respect you, and we think you should not only keep your job, but be awarded an honour for bravery in the face of a huge and nasty smear campaign.
Pay no attention to The Guardian newspaper. They just want to sell more newspapers, and they’ve worked out that giving off an insouciant whiff of Climate Change scepticism is edgy and popular, so they’re playing the field. It’s a dubious game in my view.
Don’t listen to George Monbiot either. He called for your resignation not once, but twice, adding to your woes. He really shouldn’t have. He should have had more respect for your mental condition. He’s been most unfair.
The “liberal” Media trying to take the high moral ground on Science is fine if they know what they’re talking about; but for journalists to mete judgement on scientists is not valid, when the journalists have no clue as to the context in which scientists are forced to work, and no proper appreciation of what the Science means.
[qt:https://www.tangentfilms.com/SternPoznan.mp4 https://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Graphics/ContractionAndConvergence.jpg 480 240]
After the accusations and counter-accusations of the attribution of blame, can we at least start moving on from who was responsible for the failure to obtain a global treaty at the United Nations Climate Change UNFCCC conference in Copenhagen in December 2009 ?
None of us have a complete awareness of the ideas and thoughts of others. International negotiations are bound to be limited by lack of knowledge and understanding, clashes of personality and conflicts of national, social and corporate interests.
It is important, however, to try to comprehend the starting points, the foundational ideology, of those we are attempting to negotiate with.
Here it is very important to keep our feet on the floor and our ears to the walls. Why exactly, did the AOSIS, the Small Island States bloc reject the Copenhagen Accord ? Why did the elite group of nations that signed the Copenhagen Accord dismiss the AOSIS and their demands for 350 ppm atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (CO2). Why was China so resistant to the Copenhagen Accord ? Could it have anything do to with their fears of economic loss ?
Now’s the right time to talk about gardening. Not just any old gardening, no. I mean food gardening, urban farming, home cropping, edible landscape-type gardening.
Now is the time to be thinking about enriching your soil for your next bumper harvest.
Get your resilience genes working !
https://www.londonwaste.co.uk/media/Compost%20Bag%20Leaflet_May09.pdf
OR
Get into Transition mode !
In Transition 1.0 from Transition Towns on Vimeo.
I was warned. And it’s true. BP are so protective of their company image that they live in denial. I should know. I’ve been inside the belly of the beast and spoken to one of their head sustainability honchos. Who had a total disconnect about the risks of Fossil Fuel depletion.
“Oil and gas will remain the mainstay of the “Energy mix”. We’ve said that publicly…”
So they’re telling the world what to believe, are they ?
There is an unelected, shadowy organisation in the United Kingdom; a cultish community of thousands, and their minions, that plots to dictate the leadership of the whole world, starting with the minds of the central Government.
You’ll see them at work in the run-up to the General Election, possibly suspicious figures masquerading as angels of light in brightly coloured costumes and carrying jokey banners; meddling in democracy at every level – leafletting, holding meetings, putting posters in their front windows and holding consciousness-raising green-fests in their local Town Halls.
I think I might start using a new term : “Climate Obstructers”, people who make lots of challenges to the IPCC consensus, who have what seems to me to be an agenda to obstruct the course of Climate Change Science.
In his latest Web Log post, James Delingpole attracts attention to a “magisterial report” from Joseph D’Aleo (of web log ICECAP) and Anthony Watts (of web log WattsUpWithThat), which is actually a crock of shambolic fripperies, in my view :-
https://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100024023/global-warming-is-it-even-happening/
“Global Warming: is it even happening?”
I think the group of artists proposing that Letterkenny, County Donegal, should be twinned with Mars, may have got their Climate Change facts a little twisted :-
https://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/foyle_and_west/8473116.stm
“Irish island twinned with Mars in climate change stunt : An island in County Donegal is to be twinned with Mars in order to raise awareness of climate change. A community near Letterkenny will be linked with an island outcrop on the Red planet. The unusual move was suggested by a group of artists asked by Donegal County Council to explore art’s role in addressing issues of global warming. The Council’s Public Arts Manager, Terri Duffy, said it would act as an “attention-grabbing wake-up call”. “I know it’s a bit ‘out there’ but it is taking a very serious look at the relationship of art and climate change. Some people feel the earth is becoming more Mars like due to the effects of global warming…”
Mars is rather cold, owing to the fact that it doesn’t really have much of an atmosphere and so doesn’t have the benefit of much in terms of the Greenhouse Effect :-
The Daily Telegraph has done its usual editorial flip-floppy, fence-sitting nonsense : publishing a pretty decent article about the last decade being the hottest ever and using the photograph of a chica in a bathing suit to accompany it. Talk about gratuitous sexism ! (Yes, let’s talk about sexism in the Media, shall we ?) :-
How are we expected to take The Daily Telegraph seriously ?
Yawn. Yet another anti-Science web log page floats into my field of vision. It’s so…boring, trying to keep up with the Global Warming Deniers. I can barely keep awake. Here’s an example of the trite, and frankly, petulant genre :-
Actually, don’t bother reading it. It’s a waste of column inches.
If only the Climate Change Sceptics would just go away and let us get on with the gargantuan task of revitalising the Energy industry around sustainable technologies.
The NASA GISS Blob Chart has just been completed to finish off 2009, and it’s red, raw and angry. Don’t see any yellow in 2009, just orange and red. Getting kind of hot lately, isn’t it ?
The Blob Chart is…the best communications tool since the telephone, by the way. So simple. So visual. So colourful. So unambiguous.
Sheepishly creeping in late, (well I got lost, right, because my Google Map was on the wrong scale without the street names, OK ?), I attended my second Copenhagen de-briefing meeting of the year, with strong signals of properly functioning democracy all the way through.
I learned a lot more about the poor state of international negotiations, how disadvantaged peoples and nation groups were not heard, how the official news feeds were edited, how attempts to communicate from the public assembly at the Klimaforum into the Bella Center using video streaming were met with empty delegate seats, how the elite negotiating teams from the industrialised world failed to collect enough support for their position, how people got left queueing in the freezing cold…
by Jo Abbess
3 December 2009
One Hot Year
1998 was a very hot year. Worldwide, the land and sea surface temperatures spiked sharply upwards. Scientists said it was supposed to get hot, but not this hot. Yet by the year 2000, things had cooled back down again. In fact, they were a little cooler than 1995. [1] The detailed analysis made it seem like a murder mystery – who killed the heat ? What happened to Global Warming ?
Part of the forensic evidence came from analysis of Mount Pinatubo. On 15th June 1991, it experienced massive volcanic eruption causing an enormous plume in the sky, easily visible from space. [2] [3] The sulphur dioxide in the plume deflected the sun’s heating rays from Earth, and temperatures on the ground plummeted around the world. Yet, despite this cooling effect, land and sea surface temperatures were back to normal by around 1995, just in time for the sizzle of 1998. [4]
It seemed likely that spikes and slumps were just natural cycles; the climate systems moving from one stable pattern to another. For years, big loops of wind will rotate in one direction, and weathermen know what the temperatures and rainfall will look like. And then the whole setup will flip and change, and temperatures, rainfall and winds will all be different. [5]
Research showed that the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) created drought weather conditions in 1997, causing massive forest fires in Indonesia that helped drive up worldwide temperatures in 1998. [6]
A “nuclear winter” from the occasional volcanic eruption, or a “fry up” from flip-flops in big climate circulations only have a short-term impact on global temperatures. [7] The Climate is always changing. There are ups, and there are downs, but no permanent changes. Don’t believe the spikes.
NASA GISS scientists have analysed their data and have found that 2009 was, on average, the second hottest on record.
The Times of London has developed what looks like a Climate Change Denier streak of late, reinforcing anti-Science propaganda currently in circulation.
Here they are with what I consider to be an unhelpful treatment of a story about Professor Stefan Rahmstorf :-
https://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6982299.ece
“From The Sunday Times : January 10, 2010 : Climate change experts clash over sea-rise ‘apocalypse’ : Critics say an influential prediction of a 6ft rise in sea levels is flawed : Jonathan Leake : Professor Stefan Rahmstorf : Climate science faces a new controversy after the Met Office denounced research from the Copenhagen summit which suggested that global warming could raise sea levels by 6ft by 2100. The research, published by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, created headline news during the United Nations summit on climate change in Denmark last month…”
It seems, sadly, that Richard Betts of the UK’s Met Office has fallen for the “Goldilocks Fallacy”. In attempting to dismiss what he sees as alarmist claims, yet prevent sceptics or deniers getting a toehold; trying to steer a safe, middle course on the truth of Global Warming in the Arctic, he appears to have misquoted the evidence :-
Fearmongering may not be the correct response to this patently serious change in the Arctic Sea Ice, in fact, social management should be avoided at all cost; but telling the truth should be paramount, even if that rocks boats.
According to James Hansen and the crew at NASA GISS, 2009 was the second warmest year ever. Yes, even though December 2009 was a bit nippy for some, the Arctic Oscillation couldn’t ruin a grand total of warm.
The satellites and cameras do not lie : glaciers in the Himalayas are melting, and the loss of any part of this “third pole” ice cover threatens the freshwater supply for billions.
This weekend’s Media clamour on the subject focuses on the trail of a mis-attribution of a claim regarding the complete meltdown of the mountain glaciers.
Just because somebody’s got their references wrong, doesn’t mean that the glaciers have magically not been melting after all.
Yes, the IPCC process has failed to pick up this prediction error. No, it doesn’t throw the whole of the IPCC reports into the trash can.
At the turn of every month, I check the websites of the agencies charged with collecting and analysing the available data on Global Warming, to find out what the latest position shows.
Some agencies update their online resources faster than others. For example, as of today, the Hadley Centre of the Meteorological Office has produced a summary of the Central England Temperature (HadCET, or CET) for both December 2009 and the whole of 2009 :-
https://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/cet_info_mean2009.html
And so has the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) – finally :-
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/?report=global&year=2009&month=13&submitted=Get+Report
Yesterday, I took part in the launch of an international video-conferencing platform, commissioned by the Bible Society, a faith organisation concerned about Climate Change.
The technology is collected together on a project website called Faith Climate Connect, and it is free to use by anybody :-
James Delingpole is so endearingly consistent in barking up the wrong tree, it’s sometimes easiest just to laugh along with his rambling, unscientific meanderings.
“‘AGW? I refute it THUS!”, he shouts out amusingly in his web log post of today :-
proving to me once and for all he could never be a statistician or a Police Officer, as he doesn’t know enough to detect an outright fabrication when he encounters one.