Climategate II: Three Different Responses

The Telegraph’s Christopher Booker, in “Is the global warming scare the greatest delusion in history?”, rightly explains that the modern, awarmist cult of CAGW is suicidally irrational:

While our Government remains trapped in its green dreamworld, similar horror stories pile up on every side, from that UBS report on the astronomically costly fiasco of the EU’s carbon-trading scheme, to our own Government’s “carbon floor price”, in effect a tax on CO₂ emissions rising yearly from 2013. This alone will eventually be enough to double the cost of our electricity, and drive a further swathe of what remains of UK industry abroad, because we are the only country in the world to have devised something so idiotic.

All this madness ultimately rests on a blind faith in the threat of man-made global warming, which no one has done more to promote than the scientists whose private emails were again last week leaked onto the internet.

It is still not generally appreciated that the significance of these Climategate emails is that their authors, such as Michael Mann, are no ordinary scientists: they are a little group of fanatical insiders who have, for years, done more than anyone else to drive the warming scare, through their influence at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  And what is most striking about the picture that emerges from these emails is just how questionable the work of these men appears.

We see how they torture the evidence to support their theory—even to the point where some of them seem to lose faith in the story they are trying to tell.  And we also see how rattled they were as soon as their work was challenged by expert outsiders such as Steve McIntyre, the mathematician who exposed the methods used to create Mann’s “hockey stick” temperature graph, which the IPCC had made Exhibit A for their theory.

Again and again we see them trying to defend the indefensible, giving vent to wild personal abuse of the enemies of what they call their “cause”, and stopping at nothing to keep their critics’ evidence out of IPCC reports and scientific journals, and prevent dissenting views from getting media attention.

This is no longer science worthy of the name.

The Australian, in an editorial, titled “Rational approach on climate” explains that the paper still accepts—without bothering to explain why it accepts—the completely discredited awarmist, alleged consensus—without realising that consensus is not science—whilst “stringently” analysing those bogus claims:

This newspaper always supports a rational approach to climate science, accepting the scientific consensus that carbon dioxide emissions are warming the planet, and supporting market mechanisms to reduce emissions—while favouring stringent analysis of alarmist claims.

The Age, in denial that CAGW has been completely discredited, and taking a little time out from trying to scare its few remaining readers that the world must be doomed, and soon to be destroyed by more or fewer droughts and floods, more or fewer storms, and the loss of the last remaining wild herds of lovely unicorns, chooses to rely, in “Climatologist speaks out after new leak”, on the self-interested analysis of Prof. Phil Jones, a corrupt, incompetent scamming pseudo-scientist who (inter alia) fails to understand basic statistical methods:

The British climatologist ensnared in a major new email leak has taken his case to the public, arguing that he and his colleagues' comments have again been taken out of context.

UPDATE I:  see Shub Niggurath’s “Climategate II: Contradictions and Hypocrisy”.

UPDATE II:  in comments at Bishop Hill, Richard Drake provides useful definitions:

a) To take an email in context – to ignore it.

b) To take an email fully in its context – never to have heard of it.

c) To take an email out of context – to read it.

d) To take an email grossly and willfully out of context – to tell someone else about it.

UPDATE III (18 December):  see Cristopher Booker’s “The BBC’s myth makers serve up a double helping of propaganda”.

Awarmists Deny the Failure of Their Fraud

Prof. Bob Carter, in The Age, writes “An Inconvenient Fallacy”:

Now, just last week, we discover that the new Chief Scientist, Ian Chubb, believes too that “scientific consensus … provides the best guidance we have for decisions that are informed and rational”, and that “the science is in on climate change”.
Wrong on both counts.  Where a scientific issue is involved, the best way to approach the formulation of public policy is not to base it on a contrived consensus of self-interested parties, nor to “ask the UN”, but to pay attention to the facts and keep an open mind.
Since 2007, then, the government’s chosen climate communicators have failed to confront the real climate change issue (which is natural climate hazard).  Second, and as opinion polls clearly show, they have failed to convince the public that a global warming crisis exists, or that a carbon dioxide tax will have any beneficial influence on future climate.  Labor's woe-is-me moment has clearly arrived.
Climate Change Minister Greg Combet announced the government’s solution on June 16.  It is to spend $12 million on “informing” the electorate about the need for a carbon dioxide tax.
It is certainly true that voters need to understand better the most important facts relevant to allegedly dangerous, human-related global warming.  So let us list the five most salient facts the minister might try to communicate in his advertisements.
Fact 1.  A mild warming of about 0.5 degrees C. (well within previous natural temperature variations) occurred between 1979 and 1998, and has been followed by slight global cooling over the past 10 years.  Ergo, dangerous global warming is not occurring.
Fact 2.  Between 2001 and 2010 global average temperature decreased by 0.05 degrees, over the same time that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels increased by 5%.  Ergo, carbon dioxide emissions are not driving dangerous warming.
Fact 3.  Atmospheric carbon dioxide is beneficial.  In increasing quantity it causes mild though diminishing warming (useful at a time of a quiet sun and likely near-future planetary cooling) and acts as a valuable plant fertiliser.  Extra carbon dioxide helps to shrink the Sahara Desert, green the planet and feed the world.  Ergo, carbon dioxide is neither a pollutant nor dangerous, but an environmental benefit.
Fact 4.  Closing down the whole Australian industrial economy might result in the prevention of about 0.02 degrees of warming. Reducing emissions by 5% by 2020 (the government's target) will avert an even smaller warming of about 0.002 degrees.  Ergo, cutting Australian emissions will make no measurable difference to global climate.
Fact 5.  For an assumed tax rate of $25 a tonne of carbon dioxide, the costs passed down to an average family of four will exceed $2,000 a year.
So the cost-benefit equation is this:  “Your family pays more than $2,000 a year in extra tax in return for a possible cooling of the globe by two one-thousandths of a degree”.  Remember, too, that [Prof. Ross] Garnaut’s recommendation is that the tax rate should be increased at 4% a year, which would result in a cost doubling in less than 20 years.
In the light of these facts, little wonder the government’s four horsemen of the climate apocalypse have been unable to convince the public of the desirability of carbon dioxide taxation.  Labor has indeed tried hard and valiantly, but it is time to admit failure and to adopt an alternative policy.
Voters now recognise that in the absence of an international agreement no action that Australia takes can “stop global warming”.   But natural climate hazard in Australia is so dangerous that nonetheless a need remains for a politically feasible, environmentally sensible and cost-effective climate policy.  That policy should be to prepare for and adapt to all climatic hazards, as and when they occur and whatever their cause.

See also Tim Blair:

A couple of comments from government climate change adviser Ross Garnaut and government chief scientist Ian Chubb last week hint at the irritation felt by those on the climate change panic team, many of whom are beginning to lash out in angry and amusing ways.

This is entirely understandable.  After all, it must be frustrating when you wade into a public debate armed only with the combined forces of the federal government, the United Nations, the European Union, thousands of activist groups, the vast majority of the media and general elite opinion worldwide, only to find your concerns broadly rejected.

UPDATE (28 June):  As of Tuesday morning, The Age still refers to Prof. Carter as a “climate change denialist”.

Grattan’s Disdain

The toadying Michelle Grattan, in “Once-burnt public goes cold on price for carbon”, bemoans the growing opposition to a carbon dioxide tax:

The globe may be warming, but the political climate for moving Australia to a lower emission economy seems colder by the day.  This week’s Age/Nielsen poll had support for a carbon price at 34%, a fall from 46% in February.  [...]

Gillard can take heart from this week’s Essential Research poll in which only 39% supported a carbon price, but this rose to 51% when compensation was mentioned.  [So, bribery works, and the PM should be gladdened thereby.]

But Gillard would be very lucky to get that sort of bounce.  Once the compensation details are released, fresh attacks will come.  Many people will be overcompensated but some will partially or fully miss out.  Even though this is perfectly reasonable, there will be screams.

It is perfectly reasonable to overcompensate some people, and to neglect others altogether, with funds raised by taxing efficient power generation, predicated on the ridiculous notion that a beneficent and essential trace gas is a pollutant!  What, we may well wonder, would this journalist consider unreasonable?  Notice the haughty, dismissive disdain for ordinary people’s pain; countless jobs could be terminated, the economy might be wrecked beyond repair and, for many, the daily costs of living may become unaffordable, but though lives be ruined, Michelle Grattan casually slights the likely and understandable protests as well as the anguish of suffering as “screams”, the unsympathetic, sycophantic cunt.

Disconnection between Climate Change & Reality

Terry McCrann, in his Herald Sun column*, writes, “When the wind doesn’t blow … which is nearly all the time”:

Eric Beecher’s Crikey, new media’s effort to make old media shock jocks look like voices of calm and reason, got it exactly and so deliciously right yesterday.
“There’s a bizarre disconnection between the climate change debate in Australia and reality,” was the email’s plaintive opening sentence.
Quite.  Collective warmenists like Crikey and its ‘intellectual’ peer The Age demonstrate the truth of that sentence every day—persistently, stridently and so totally unknowingly in their pompous condescending inanity.
If men are from Mars and women from Venus, generally speaking, then the Crikey people and their fellow warmenists are from a dark planet way outside our or indeed any solar system.
The first, biggest and all-encompassing disconnect from reality is their demand for a “price on carbon [sic] to tackle global warming”.  […]
Crikey & The Age & co. are the ones disconnected from reality.  […]
You want to see a disconnect from reality?  Look at the blithe belief of people like Crikey and The Age that we can close down our coal-fired plants and we’ll get the electricity from ‘something else’.[†]
Here’s another reality from which the debate has been very deliberately ‘disconnected’.
Analysis [by Tom Quirk] shows the carbon tax will have to be at least $50 a tonne, not the $20 a tonne soothingly and deceptively promoted by Combet, to begin to force a shift from coal to that ‘something else’.  Principally gas.
Try connecting that with the ‘reality’ of the higher prices you face for everything.
The reality is that there is one big difference between the carbon tax and the GST.  The carbon tax will force up the price of EVERYTHING—including health, education and fresh food excluded from the GST.
This is the reality that needs to be disconnected from the rubbish and outright lies spun by Combet, Gillard and their obliging mouthpieces at Crikey and The Age.

*  The version of the column in the Daily Telegraph is truncated; it ends with:  “Analysis by Quirk shows the carbon tax will have to be at least $50 a tonne, not the $20 a tonne promoted by Greg Combet, to begin to force a shift from coal to other sources.”  The editors of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph reckon that its readers are more easily vexed, perhaps, by offensive but accurate terminology (such as “deceptively” and “rubbish” and “outright lies”) than the readers of Melbourne’s Herald Sun are.

†  See also  “A lot of hot air: Wind farms ‘working at just 21% of capacity’”, by David Derbyshire:  “Britain’s wind farms produce far less electricity than their supporters claim – and cannot be relied upon to keep the lights on, a study from a conservation charity showed yesterday.”

UPDATE—from comments:  Official report says, “Wind-farms are totally useless.”

Doubts Grow

Three recent stories (collected by GWPF) demonstrate that doubts are growing that climate-change will doom us all very soon.

At Gallup, “Water Issues Worry Americans Most, Global Warming Least”, by Lydia Saad:

At least three in four Americans surveyed in Gallup’s 2011 Environment poll say they worry a great deal or a fair amount about contamination of soil and water by toxic waste, pollution of rivers, lakes, and reservoirs, pollution of drinking water, and the maintenance of the nation’s supply of fresh water for household needs.  [...]

The poll was conducted March 3-6, prior to the emergence of an earthquake- and tsunami-generated nuclear crisis in Japan that has raised Americans’ own concerns about nuclear power.

The current levels of public concern about various environmental problems are essentially unchanged from 2010.  However, Americans are less worried today than they were 10 years ago about all eight issues Gallup measured in 2001.  The decline over the past decade spans a period when the public often expressed surging concern about terrorism, the Iraq war, gas prices, and the economy.

In The Ecologist, “Only a quarter of UK population concerned about climate change”, by William McLennan:

Twice as many people in India and Japan rank climate change as one of the most important environmental issues, highlighting the challenge facing UK policymakers and climatologists.

Only a quarter of Britons believe climate change is one of the most important environmental issues facing the UK today, according to a survey conducted by Ipsos MORI and released to The Ecologist this week.

Ambivalence in the UK is in sharp contrast to Asian countries like India, South Korea and Japan where 50% of those polled consider climate change to be one of the most important environmental issues.

The MORI poll involved more than 18,000 people across the world, who were asked to choose the three most important environmental issues facing their country.  Of the 24 countries surveyed, the UK was among the least concerned about climate change, with energy security, waste disposal and overpopulation listed as the most pressing environmental issues.  Other European countries showed similar results to UK, with people in Germany and Sweden principally concerned with sources of future energy supplies.

At the BBC, Climate scepticism ‘on the rise’, BBC poll shows:

The number of British people who are sceptical about climate change is rising, a poll for BBC News suggests.

The Populus poll of 1,001 adults found 25% did not think global warming was happening, an increase of 10% since a similar poll was conducted in November.

The percentage of respondents who said climate change was a reality had fallen from 83% in November to 75% this month.

And only 26% of those asked believed climate change was happening and “now established as largely man-made”.

The findings are based on interviews carried out on 3-4 February.

In November 2009, a similar poll by Populus—commissioned by The Times—showed that 41% agreed that climate change was happening and it was largely the result of human activities.  [...]
Of the 75% of respondents who agreed that climate change was happening, one-in-three people felt that the potential consequences of living in a warming world had been exaggerated, up from one-in-five people in November.

Evidently, governments and environmentalist organisations need to spend even more money and other resources to convince sceptical people that the pseudo-scientific, doomday cult of looming-catastrophic-anthropogenic-global-warming really does require developed countries to wreck their economies and to ruin the lives of their citizens.

UPDATE:  see Anthony Watts, on the shocking news, “Democrats and Republicans increasingly divided over global warming”, and “Americans believe climate change is occurring, but disagree on why”, at WUWT.

UPDATE II:  see Michelle Grattan, of The Age, “Once-burnt public goes cold on price for carbon”.
UPDATE III (8 May, 2011):  see Robert Matthews, of The National, “The more famous the expert, the worse his predictions”.
UPDATE IV (10 May, 2011):  see Mike Haseler’s Scottish Sceptic, “Global warming is dead in the MSM”; and see Russell Cook’s “The ’96-to-present smear of skeptic scientists”.