Open Thread 5

From STATS blog: climate scientists think Al Gore is more accurate than the mainstream media.

Could someone write up the curriculum for the Enver Hoxha school of political science and climatology? I understand that these are conflated in many denialist minds, I'd just like to see the course catalogue for a program that a) is entirely political, b) claims to be a physical science, c) is about a topic that anyone can understand except the practitioners. After all, that's what we're being asked to believe about climatology, from climate inactivists.

I'll start:
C/PS 100. Introduction to climatology.
This course, using basic Stalinist and Maoist theory, explains how to subvert capitalism and market forces, and lead to enlightened rule by climatalogists. Comrades from physics, economics, and biology will present examples on overthrowing Christian ideals under the code phrase of 'Enlightenment'.
Stewart

That reminds me... I was having fun on Wikiality.com with course names like "Politics 101: We Hate America" and "Communications 201: How to Work the Media Fear Engine". Couldn't be bothered to write out any syllabus summaries though.

Would love to get some comments from the Lancetphiles at Deltoid on this sleazy switcheroo.

As I said on Crooked Timber:

Friends, be not Å¿o hard on our Honored Guest, David Kane. For, he doth endeavor to learn humbly from us all, even whilst he tries to Å¿hew that he is the greatest, and that we are all utterly wrong.

Would love to get some comments from the Lancetphiles at Deltoid on this sleazy switcheroo.

hundreds of thousands of iraqis have died.

AND David Kane is NOT given full credit for a minor correction of a minor error in a minor article.

guess which one is more important?!?

Is it true that Gore cast the deciding vote to encourage funding for ethanol additives? Did he know at that time that food will be converted for this use? Haven't dug into this piece yet.

sod,

The issue is not credit for me. The issue is sending a wrong letter to NJ, then posting it on your webpage, (all OK since we all make mistakes) and then correcting it on the page without telling any one. That's called, well, lying.

Whether or not then deleting everything and hoping no one notices is a major or minor sin, I'll leave to you.

What sort of post do you think Tim would write if, say, John Lott did the same?

What sort of post would David Kane write if Spagat did something like that?

RK:

Is it true that Gore cast the deciding vote to encourage funding for ethanol additives?

Short answer: no.

Long answer: a very long "no".

/me fixes link

Don Aitkin, Ockham's razor: A challenge to global warming orthodoxies - part one

Not happy Don

Don Aitkin dixit:

Some twenty years ago the Western world began to worry about a phenomenon called 'global warming'.

Yeah, this guy is an expert on history, but not on the history of science.

Jeepers, the faux libertarians at Catallaxy really hate me. Apparently, [I'm a creationist](http://catallaxyfiles.com/?p=3554&cp=1#comment-92461) because I reported on the STATS survey of climate scientists.

"Is it true that Gore cast the deciding vote to encourage funding for ethanol additives? Did he know at that time that food will be converted for this use?"

Well let's see.

Gore left office in January 2001.

Current ethanol subsidies are the result of a 2005 energy bill - enacted when both Houses of Congress had a Republican majority and signed into law by a Republican President.

Furthermore, there are at least five different factors contributing to high food prices - drought in Australia and South Asia; higher fertiliser and fuel prices; rising demand for grain to feed livestock in China and India; cuts to agricultural subsidies in the developed world and ethanol subsides.

Ethanol subsidies are probably the least significant of these.

So by denialist standards I'd say "Al Gore murders brown babies" is rock-solid.

By the way, who exactly are these guys, and why are they mentioning my blog entry? (Not that I don't like that...)

Although I knew it would mess with my head, I wandered over to Catallaxy after Tim's comment at 14.

Now I wish I hadn't! And to think that I was gobsmacked by the brain-contortions of our own pet trolls...

Here's a precise for those wiser than I, who might want to think a little more before jumping into that swamp...

It's the Green's fault that there is an impending energy crisis.

It's the Green's fault that we can't develop alternatives to fossil fuels.

Environmentalists are therefore mass-murderers (a dash of DDT anyone?).

Women, and especially pregnant women, should not be seen in significant government ministries.

Tim Lambert is running a Marxist propaganda site(?!)

VSU is Bad, almost Ruined the Country, and those Lazy Students should all find part-time jobs so that they can join private sports clubs.

And a quote from an erstwhile troll on these pages, JC:

Here's my prediction for what it is worth. Oil will be back below 100 bucks a barrel by next year and we'll have oil at 60 bucks a barrel beyond.

... As I mentioned in another post recently I recall a similar conversation on a talkback radio program several years ago where '100 bucks' could have been replaced in that instance by $60, and '60 bucks' replaced by $30. Alas for that commentator his prediction was completely wrong, and I shall be waiting eagerly to see if JC's ability at prophecy is any better. My best guess at this point though is that JC must be living in Cloud Cuckoo Land if he thinks that oil will ever settle back to $60/barrel. Not unless we remove a significant part of the 21st century demand for oil that comes from Asia...

Oh, and 'saturation nuclear' will provide the world with cheap energy, according to GMB, who seems to be living in a Cloud Cuckoo Land too. Although it's a little different from JC's, judging by their lockings of horns.

Another corker - 97% of the planet's surface is hiding energy resources that apparently occur at the same abundance as the 3% we have scratched at to date. Deep seas and ice cover aside, some of my geophysics/geology friends will be a little confronted by this!

Oh, and finally - they're a right bunch of potty-mouths. This is surely confirmation of their collectively razor-sharp intellectual prowess.

I don't think that Tim need worry too much about what these folk think of him, even if they were able to hold correct impressions in the first place.

"Another corker - 97% of the planet's surface is hiding energy resources that apparently occur at the same abundance as the 3% we have scratched at to date. Deep seas and ice cover aside, some of my geophysics/geology friends will be a little confronted by this!"

This'd be the bastardised urban legend version of Gold's deep hot biosphere/hydrocarbon abiogenesis theory. The one that says there's massive amounts of hydrocarbons to be found in areas of igneous rock.

Funny how hundreds of years of mining and drilling in igneous rock for other purposes have managed to consistently miss this cornucopia.

Actually,

Deep enhanced hot rock geothermal has the potential to supply all of humanity's foreseeable energy needs for millenia.

First pressure testing of first commercial demonstration project is now in progress. In Oz, of all places.

Google Habañero 3

"The issue is not credit for me. The issue is sending a wrong letter to NJ, then posting it on your webpage, "

Coming from you, David, nobody cares. The debate turned nasty because of people like you trying to discredit the Lancet papers any way you could. The real issue, as sod says, is whether hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died. The first Lancet paper implied (Garfield spelled it out) that a mid-range estimate for the violent death toll was 57,000 by Sept 2004--they were subjected to widespread vilification. The recent paper in the NEJM gave a virtually identical estimate for the same period and yet the Lancet critics can't bring themselves to admit that yes, it appears that Lancet1 was apparently right in claiming that the death toll was much higher than reported at the time and the critics were wrong.

As for the violent death toll now--is it in the low hundreds of thousands or above one million? Nobody knows. But it's clearly much higher than the IBC count.

Ian, I am not comparing Republican or Democrat involvement in the ethanol issue. It is an illustration that half-baked ideas, though initially a moral slam-dunk don't necessarily pan out that way; and in fact could have the opposite effect. We should keep that in mind before starting head-long into any so called AGW mitigation/adaptation effort. Gore's involvement just adds to the irony here.

The iterative backpedalling beginneth...

At #19 - good point LB. There is indeed a delicious irony there!

Sadly, I don't think this is what the Catallaxy crowd are barracking for...

In the latest development (?) in the Listener vs. Hot Topic saga: what do I see, but Pamela Stirling squirming and waffling when she's being interviewed by Mediawatch...

Thought I would share an interesting article on Dr. William Gray....
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5736103.html

Tasmaniacs may be interested in this:

"Climate change science and the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) processes

Professor Nathan Bindoff

(UTAS School of Mathematics and Physics, CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research)

Professor Bindoff has been the coordinating lead author for the ocean chapter in the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (Working Group 1). With his colleagues he has documented some of the first evidence for changes in the climate change signals in the Indian, North Pacific, South Pacific and Southern Ocean's and shown some of the first evidence of changes in the Earth's hydrological cycle.

Professor Bindoff has published more than 52 scientific papers and 30 reports and has lead 9 Oceanographic voyages on the Aurora Australis in the Southern Ocean.

This lecture is part of the Unit International Environmental Law & Policy but is open to students and staff of UTAS and interested members of the public.

WHEN: Monday 5 May 10-10.50 am
WHERE: Law School LT 2
ALL WELCOME

Tim,

I've been wondering if it might actually be useful to have a sticky thread or a link on Deltoid's front page dedicated to posting notices such as the one in #26 above? I do realise that such might metamorphose into a clumsy behemoth of random event postings, but...

Then again it may be of sufficient interest to the Deltoid readers all around the world to warrant a link that is easily found, if it posts information on seminars and such that are related to Deltoid threads.

Just a thought.

The "Heartland 500" fiasco was a blow to the inactivist crapmill, but being a tenacious crapmill, it's now making up for its failure... by propagating another talking point! Here's one sighting from the Jennifer Marohasy blog.

So here's my plan: I'm going to ask Marohasy, Watts, etc. why they're being silent on the Heartland 500. I'll ask whether they've been intimidated by the Great Worldwide Bolshevist Inquisition into keeping quiet on Heartland's list. I'll ask whether they're starting to sell out to the Treasonous Forces of the Left and Al Bore Gore.

If anyone would like to help me in this (after all, I'm just one person, and I'm not sure I know about all the inactivist blogs out there), or if anyone has better ideas, please feel free!

(cross-posted from DeSmogBlog)

There's a new climate model which predicts little or no warming over the next decade.

I'm sure the skeptics will be all over it, claiming it validates their views.

Never mind that most of them have been claiming that global climate models are innately unreliable and that the data sets the models employ are unreliable. All that was back when they didn't like the results the models gave.

I wonder if they also endorse the models prediction of rising temperatures from 2020?

I'm also waiting for the first skeptic to claim this model has been falsified to cover up the truth about global cooling.

Sorry, forgot the link:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7376301.stm

Ian Gould:

Brian D, Stoat, and James Annan have already started talking about Keenlyside et al.'s "model".

As far as an alternative to "inactivist blogosphere" I'm in a quandary - do flat-Earthers typically depict the Earth as a disc or as a square?

I think the Biblical variety incline to the square because of Scriptural references to the four corners of the Earth.

Ian, all that it highlights is that we just don't know enough to predict decadal or centennial climate patterns based on non-historical data. To make drastic politico-economical decisions based on them is foolhardy.

No, R.K., it highlights that you inactivists are full of junk.

Ian Gould:

I'm in a quandary - do flat-Earthers typically depict the Earth as a disc or as a square?

Perhaps we should take both theories into account.

Bi: Don't forget Joe Romm, who probably managed the clearest layman explanation I've been able to find on it. (And please, take what I say with a grain of salt, I'm decidedly an amateur at this, unlike Annan, Connolley or Romm.)

Interesting link, Brian.

Can't wait to see how (if) Keenlyside is further 'reinterpreted' by the trolls here...

Exempli gratia, HPJr's incisive statistical acumen should be able to demonstrate how grievously wrong Keenlyside et al are, and all with his very versatile t-test methodology.

R.K.:

all that it highlights is that we just don't know enough to predict decadal or centennial climate patterns based on non-historical data. To make drastic politico-economical decisions based on them is foolhardy.

i.e. our worries are over. Burn away folks.

R.K.

Over here I very briefly mentioned the example of introduced weeds, where despite repeated warnings by biologists, inaction has in many cases resulted in severe environmental degradation.

Fisheries are another example - in spite of consistent warnings for decades by scientists, governments around the world are hammering global fisheries to extinction, with the 'economically foolhardly' option of caution being thrown to the ocean winds. Think cod - this was a tragedy watched unfold with much forewarning, and still the governments and vested interested pretended surprise.

There has been evidence, and warnings, given about Peak Oil for decades (again), but it's only now that we're facing rising fuel costs that serious thought seems to be finally being given to what to do about it. (As an aside, I only fill up once a month, as I like to use public transport where I can - a month ago I paid 129.9 Aussie cents/litre; today 169.9 cents/litre...)

Quite simply, if we always wait for the conclusive evidence to smack us in the chops, we're always going to be too late to do anything about the problem. The evidence for AGW is already solid, your wishing otherwise aside, and quite likely we're already building up a debt that is going to seriously hurt future generations, and many ecosystems.

The trouble is, the folk who hold us back in every one of these instances of inaction are never the ones who are held to account; never the ones to pay the cost.

Your imagined economic hardship of moving to non-fossil fuels is merely the mirage of a gnat compared with the economic, humanitarian and environmental legacy we're clocking up for the future.

Oo oo, I think I was just hysterical!

Brian D:

Wow... so the graphs actually show 10-year averages? Now I'm totally confused.