Climate Conversation Group

UN “scientists” are taking desperate risks with their reputations, attempting to cover up their deceptions about a climatic peril that doesn’t exist.

Some scientists at the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) have become desperate to cover up their hamfisted deceptions aimed at generating support for their hypothesis that mankind is causing the Earth to catastrophically heat up. In their desperation they’re still misleading the public, but also abandoning science and, incredibly, telling actual lies about the climate.

This makes for particularly dangerous implications for public policy. We need to be on our guard.

That this is going on is so easy to discover (but not through the mainstream media) that one cannot help but speculate whether our local journalists either have very strong reason to be sympathetic to these activist scientists or are even actually in league with them. Read more… »

The nuclear-powered USS Skate at an ice-free North Pole in 1959. (Click to go to the Real Science list of newspaper articles.)

Australis posted this link to Steven Goddard’s Real Science list of newspaper articles for us here in comments. I highly recommend it.

Whenever anyone – anyone at all – becomes anxious over apparently excessive melting of Arctic sea ice, this long list of previous such meltings will demonstrate that Nature can cope with it and bounce back from it.

Whenever anyone tries to alarm others with the modern, allegedly excessive, melting of Arctic sea ice, this long list of historical events will stop them in their tracks and prevent alarm.

It’s what we might call proof that modern sea ice melting is not unprecedented, despite the efforts made by the likes of Greenpeace to make us believe that it is.

Speaking of Greenpeace

For example, in August 2009, Greenpeace were caught in a lie. Read more… »

Andrew Revkin – Dr Who?

Warmist internecine strife has never really appeared on my radar, but now it’s actually spoiling the image. How encouraging it is to my sceptical heart to hear leading warmists brawling in their little playground. They express perfect hatred for each other.

Are they frustrated that their warmist preferences for scientific conclusions and policy recommendations are becoming as last season’s fashions? Does it sting their vanity that they can do nothing to halt the loss of face that now disfigures their darling beliefs in global warming?

Does the sudden, inexorable and widespread use of the terms “scam”, “myths” and “fallacies” associated with “climate change” drive them insane with rage? We can but hope. Read more… »

The finger of God, which Man approaches so closely. Do they ever meet?

OH, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!

from The Ballad of East and West
by Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936)

Toward a conversation

A reader of the Climate Conversation, Matt Flaherty, has made some intelligent and generous comments after taking yours truly to task for issuing a partially misleading press release last December.

Those comments deserve proper consideration in this separate post, for Matt raises the superb subject of what we ought to call each other in the climate debate. I’d like us to have a go at resolving this.

It would be especially interesting to hear from the ‘pro-AGW’ readers who have commented here lately, like the perspicacious Keith Hunter, David Winter, Matt Flaherty of course, and any others who have been just lurking until now. How would you like to be characterised, if at all?

For simplicity, there are two sides: the ‘warmists’ and the ‘deniers’; those on the one hand compelled to believe that mankind is destroying the planet and those on the other hand who cannot believe it. Read more… »

The other day in the Herald, Mr Chris Barton took up the topic of global warming in an article headed “Climate debate adrift on rising tide of lunacy“.

With hardly a mention of the subject, Barton gets stuck into those who question the orthodox view of the subject. He tries various techniques to get the opposition to shut up; in fact, he tries everything except actually, well, listening to them.

He gets a bit confused, too. At one point he says, of the “madness” of the climate change debate, “there is a lot of it about”. But later he’s forgotten that and, trying to mis-characterise the strength of the opposition, he says “Like the rest of the world we have a small but very vocal group spreading their stupidity”.

He picks up on a typographical error by a correspondent and makes merry with the new word as though it represents a marvellous new insight. But it’s just old-fashioned stupidity.

This is a professional journalist who ought to support a vigorous debate for the good of the community, but instead he’s thinking up dirty tricks to silence a well-informed, well-meaning opposition. I’m ashamed of him.

If he wants to be taken seriously, he can address these questions: Why are global mean atmospheric temperatures falling as carbon dioxide rises? Why is the heat content of the oceans falling as carbon dioxide rises? What is the evidence that the temperature increases of the late 20th century were caused by carbon dioxide? What is the evidence that increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide will result in dangerously higher temperatures? Is he happy to bring our productive systems into disarray and ruin our lovely environment with noisy, ugly windmills on the basis of climate models that are known to be wrong and without performing any cost-benefit analysis?

If Barton actually observes the climate and its history he will quickly discover for himself why we’re so doubtful that anything dangerous is about to happen. Perhaps then he will hear the shrill voices of alarm as we hear them: as dogs barking and fleas biting but nothing of consequence.

What else can be said to him? I tried this the next day: Read more… »