Climate Conversation Group

Gore: Global warming skeptics are this generation’s racists

One day climate change skeptics will be seen in the same negative light as racists, or so says former Vice President Al Gore.

“My generation asked old people, ‘Explain to me again why it is okay to discriminate against people because their skin color is different?’ And when they couldn’t really answer that question with integrity, the change really started.”

The former vice president recalled how society succeeded in marginalizing racists and said climate change skeptics must be defeated in the same manner.

To apply this reasoning to global warming is wicked. Listen carefully, Al, for your fallacy is strong. Read more… »

I started preparing this last August, when the NZ Climate Science Coalition published its audit of NIWA’s review of the official NZ temperature record. The topic is important to me, so now, embarrassed, I tidy it up because it’ll do more good being posted in the wild than sitting on my hard drive. – Richard Treadgold

Errors in the new 7SS

The shocking breakthrough in our audit is that NIWA didn’t use the adjustment method they said they would use. Barry Brill, chairman of the Coalition, released an overview entitled New Zealand Unaffected by Global Warming (pdf, 1.3 MB). The discovery that the country hasn’t experienced global warming is another startling finding. In Chapter 8, on page 24, he identifies nine criticisms of NIWA’s newest 7SS. These multiple defects destroy the credibility of the 7SS as a source of the NZTR. Read more… »

Denier, denier, pants on fire

Deniers claim debate is ‘over’ because they can’t win it

Constant practise of scepticism is the root of good science

Hot Topic have been reviling our good friend and climate warrior Bryan Leyland for his opinion piece published recently. Not to mention several other sceptical climate articles by other people which they cannot tolerate. In the process Gareth Renowden and his gang spill the beans on their evidence—they don’t have any.

Because, pressed for some evidence of catastrophic man-made warming of our planet, they don’t reveal any. Renowden, Dappledwater and the rest of the fourth-formers threaten that evidence not only exists but increases beyond doubt, yet they still refuse to disclose it.

They also make unsubstantiated allegations of impropriety or even falsehood against Bryan.

Their arguments always seemed fact-poor and this proves it. Again and again they ignore reasonable requests for supporting information or peer-reviewed papers and resort instead to attacking the questioner. Read more… »

A headline caught my eye today. It was a case of over-sensitivity caused by too many hits on the same nerve – the climate change nerve, but it illustrated the masterful social engineering that went on 20 years ago. The headline was from the Mother Nature Network:

Climate change gives gardeners new options

Curious, I thought, it’s probably about shifting climate zones, and it was.

The US Department of Agriculture has updated its Plant Hardiness Zone Map. It lets you know what plants or crops will thrive in your area and what won’t. Because of the slight late-twentieth century warming, those areas have changed a bit. Read more… »

Big things influence little things. Little things hardly at all influence big things.

Please bear this in mind when the topic of climate comes up. Let me elaborate.

In the fourth form, little boys do not push big fat boys around and taunt them with “who’s a mummy’s boy, then?” The big fat boys pick on the little boys instead. It just seems more natural.

Among animals, rats don’t eat live caribou, lizards leave lions alone and hamsters don’t munch bears.

Any animal meeting a tiger fears for tomorrow, and an animal near enough to a lion to distinguish its nose hairs wishes it couldn’t, unless it’s an elephant or cape buffalo.

You see which way this goes, don’t you? Little gives way to big. Big overpowers little. It’s a rule of nature. No way can the mouse clamp its ferocious jaws around the neck of the antelope. Read more… »

The following article was just published in none other than the Wall Street Journal, signed by the 16 scientists listed at the end of the article. The mood towards catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) is surely in some upheaval. It’s wonderful to hear the disgraceful treatment of Chris de Freitas described in sympathetic terms, and the scandalous behaviour of the warmist clique towards him condemned. No doubt those enthusiastic world-savers would love to hide their dirty deeds and save their skins, but one day Salinger (the ring-leader in attacking de Freitas as both editor and academic), Jones and Schmidt, with others who have long flouted scientific courtesy, will reap the consequences of the odious conduct they have sown. Ignorant people might be expected to deny free speech to those who disagree with them, but climatology is alone in science in its disgraceful tolerance of conspiracy to prevent scientific critics being published. It’s a further scandal that the IPCC, while paying mere lip-service to solid science, does nothing to clean it up, even after severe criticism in August last year of its processes and attitudes by the InterAcademy Council (representing national academies of science such as the Royal Society) on behalf of the UN and the IPCC itself. It is left to us to preserve memory of their shameful practices, and we’ll do that despite attempts by our local climate deniers to bully local newspapers into silencing us.

No Need to Panic About Global Warming

A candidate for public office in any contemporary democracy may have to consider what, if anything, to do about “global warming.” Candidates should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed.

This is an adopted article.

In September, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, a supporter of President Obama in the last election, publicly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) with a letter that begins: “I did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS policy] statement: ‘The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.’ In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?” Read more… »

Barry Brill points out the warmists don’t seem pleased at the recent good news about climate sensitivity (a new paper says it’s not going to warm catastrophically). Could it be because the warmists cry only crocodile tears about the forecast disaster and they’re actually looking forward to it? (It lets them control us.) – Richard Treadgold

– by Barry Brill, Chairman of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition

Whether the future level of Anthropogenic Global Warming is dangerous or catastrophic or merely interesting turns entirely on how “sensitive” the climate is to carbon dioxide emissions.

The key sensitivity measure is the increase in temperature resulting from a doubling of the CO2 atmospheric concentration of 280ppm that is said to have existed in pre-industrial times.

Laboratory experiments have shown that sensitivity should be about 1°C before feedbacks – but the net impact of positive and negative feedbacks is the subject of incessant debate. Sceptics generally say negatives (especially clouds) are dominant so that the final outcome falls back to about 0.4°C. The majority view is that positives (especially water vapour) drive the outcome up to 3-4°C, while some catastrophists see runaway warming up to 6°C or above.

There is no consensus.

The science is not settled. The debate is not over. Read more… »

No investigation was ordered, no scientific survey was done, no public debate was held, there was no waiting around for the results of a Royal Commission of Inquiry and there were certainly no tiresome disputes over the interpretations of any actual experiments.

The Framework Convention on Climate Change written by these geniuses bypassed all that inconvenient and unnecessary process. They weren’t going to ask for proof for something so important as determining the welfare of mankind, because it was obvious what had to be done. They cut to the chase. So the Convention begins:

“… human activities have been substantially increasing the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, … these increases enhance the natural greenhouse effect, and … this will result on average in an additional warming of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere and may adversely affect natural ecosystems and humankind”

Otherwise, we could say: in the beginning was a scientific inquiry. Read more… »

In July last year the NZ Climate Science Coalition published an independent analysis of NIWA’s reconstruction of our national temperature record (NZTR) entitled New Zealand – Unaffected by Global Warming.

It’s the only independent analysis carried out on the reconstruction (nobody else has bothered). As far as I know, nobody much has even read the report. So we need to tease out some of the details and start talking about them. They’re a bit startling, considering the diet of alarm we’ve been getting from the news media for the last twenty years.

What would Kiwis do if they knew the facts of the country’s temperature record? Would they demand the government ditch the ETS because there’s no reason for it? Would they march on Parliament?

Because one of the insights from our expert analysis is that there’s been neither unprecedented warming nor strong recent warming in New Zealand, despite claims of both from the alarmists. Read more… »

The four Marines seen in a video that purports to show them urinating on dead bodies in Afghanistan have been identified and will face charges soon, a senior military official told Fox News.

… the Marine Corps has appointed a three-star general to decide what disciplinary action to take against the four Marine snipers.

These soldiers are trained to kill people whom their officers inform them are their “enemies”. Now, I’m really only guessing, but I would say it takes more hatred than love to kill your enemies. So at some point during either their training, their deployment or a specific mission, the men must spontaneously generate, or their officers must carefully invoke in them a considerable strength of hatred towards those they are about to harm. Without it, the killing probably could not take place.

It presents a confused picture. Read more… »

Lord Turnbull, former Cabinet Secretary and head of the Civil Service from 2002 to 2005.

From the GWPF come these remarks by Lord Turnbull to the House of Lords on January 12th, two days ago.

House of Lords: That this House takes note of the Government’s green agenda: My Lords, in a short debate, I will concentrate my remarks on one issue only, the governance of the science, as this is vital for the credibility of the thinking upon which the Government’s policies are based.

In a debate in December 2009 on a report by the Committee on Climate Change, I said:

“Below the surface there are serious questions about the foundations on which it has been constructed”.—[Official Report, 8/12/09; col. 1051.]

Complete decarbonisation

Over the subsequent two years my concerns have increased rather than been assuaged.

This is an adopted article.

The governing narrative for our climate change framework can be summarised as follows. Read more… »

We’ll get that data fixed up in no time. – NOAA  technicians   philosophers   thinkers  strategists

From American Thinker via C3.

This came up a few days before Christmas. I didn’t get to it then but it needs airing. The surface temperature series of GISS and HadCrut are scarcely worth the disk drives they’re stored on. No wonder the records show warming.

It’s a joke. The shocking truth is that the oldest readings have been cranked way down and later readings artificially lifted to give a false impression of warming. That seems familiar — now where have I read that before…

NOAA changes old temperature records every month. This is a new climate sport in which we imagined Kiwis led the world. But the Yanks have more stamina. They don’t just do it once, they keep on doing it. The data-altering champions in NOAA and NASA put the climate scientists in NIWA to shame. Read more… »

Luxury accommodation in the Maldives near the sea. Expensive to stay in and to construct. In the opinion of their President, soon to be destroyed by rising seas. But is he to be believed?

Hot Air carries good comment on the Maldives’ latest efforts to extort money from wealthy westerners, prompted by President Mohammed Nasheed’s urging of Australia to get ready to receive them. Fat chance.

Straight after he made his appeal, Nasheed went to a ceremony to mark the building of a new airport. Which was strange if he believes it will soon be drowned under flooding seas. Read more… »

Hand-in-hand with the IPCC theory that we’re dangerously changing the climate go many inaccuracies, distortions and outright lies supporting its stupendously false diagnosis, ruinously expensive remedies and tyrannical administration.

The distortions have wormed their way into thousands of places, both public and private, open and secret, taking our taxes and governing us in ways we’re already forgetting, even if we knew when they began. Will we ever be rid of them?

For to destroy each of the distortions, you need time and patience to find references to, references against and develop a refutation. Then you wait for people to hear about it and agree with you. It’s slow work.

Here’s one of the lies: mankind is ruining a perfectly good climate which never changed before we came along. Read more… »

There has been no significant global surface warming this century, yet experts say that temperatures rose during the first decade, becoming seriously hot. Hotter than ever before, in fact. For example:

January 21, 2010:

Past Decade Warmest on Record, NASA Data Shows

The decade ending in 2009 was the warmest on record, new surface temperature figures released Thursday by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration show.

The agency also found that 2009 was the second warmest year since 1880, when modern temperature measurement began. The warmest year was 2005. The other hottest recorded years have all occurred since 1998, NASA said.

James E. Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said that global temperatures varied because of changes in ocean heating and cooling cycles. “When we average temperature over 5 or 10 years to minimize that variability,” said Dr. Hansen, one of the world’s leading climatologists, “we find global warming is continuing unabated.”

But the only thing continuing “unabated” is the linear trend line — it’s still going up, and its slope hasn’t changed. “It’s all right. Only the data show a decline.” Read more… »

It has taken me a while to follow up on this letter I sent to Gavin Schmidt on 5 March, 2010. It will come as no surprise to anyone that he hasn’t deigned to answer my email. However, as it expresses succinctly some of the main defences against the “denier” appellation I’ll put it up for comment.

Dear Dr Schmidt,

I’m disappointed to hear you quoted (below) apparently referring to climate “sceptics” as “nutters”.

For it is not mental instability that requires me to want evidence of AGW. It is not insanity to want someone to describe in simple words, without taking too long, without referring me to the hundreds of unfriendly pages of the AR4, the evidence for AGW.

Not, note, evidence for the greenhouse effect, which is indisputable. Read more… »

David Archer, contributor at Real Climate, gives much reassurance today about the dangers of methane clathrates. Interesting article, with lots of things I hadn’t heard of. Nice of him, too, to put our minds at rest.

I wonder why he didn’t explain all this long before now, about ten years ago or more? Why he let all the wild, alarming speculation continue in the world’s press and in the blogs for quite so long. Why he let us worry for so long. Why, especially, he now calls us “friend” (see the end).

He says the ocean hydrates are “mostly so deep in the sediment column that it would take thousands of years for anthropogenic warming to reach them.” Well, that’s a good piece of sense, David; thanks for bringing it up. I’m sure some of us have said so already, but good of you to confirm it. Read more… »