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Andre Jute
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A GUIDE TO GLOBAL WARMING FOR THOSE EDUCATED IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LIFE by Andre Jute
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by Andre Jute
Part 2
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The upshot of all these years of effort, all this money, all this time, all this publicity, all this waste, is that "global warming" is merely a matter of faith with "scientists" and bureaucrats with their noses shamelessly in the public trough. The models are a joke, the thousands of biased studies have proven nothing except that history is resistant to revision, and only the committed faihful can now fail to understand that the IPCC is political body which tells political lies to hang on to power and funding; absolutely nothing to do with honest science. The "consensus" maintained by intimidation is breaking down.
The IPCC and all its scientists have failed to prove that there is global warming: The entire 20th century is cooler than the Medieval Warm Period. The last decade of the 20th century is cooler than centuries on end in the Medieval Warm Period.
The IPCC and all its scientists have failed to prove that CO2 -- either natural or manmade -- drives global warming: At a time of increasing CO2 output from coal during the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, there was the Little Ice Age for a couple of centuries.
The IPCC and all its scientists have disgraced themselves by trying dishonesty to throw the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, which are historical and scientific truths, into the dustbin of their bizarre ambition to prove a mirage.
Copyright 2009, 2011 Andre Jute
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I've already told you, Sierra, I'm not interested in chasing around after your conspiracy-theory reading.
If you have a valid point to make about a reasoned article I went to considerable trouble to write and present comprehensibly -- I'm tempted to say, even to you -- make your point. But to answer me with one crappy line referring me to yet another boring Murdoch-bashing is simply insulting.
I did make my point. My point was to show you what had just come through my Twitter feed -- something I thought would be of interest to you because you are so passionate about the topic.
Lots of food for thought here. Science, by definition, is theoretical, and something which is 'proved' one week may be disproved the next. I recall about a year ago seeing photos of the ozone layer, whether taken from space or from Earth I cannot recall. In essence it showed that ozone holes are not as we may picture them as a hole through which one can see space, but more like a dimple hole one may dig in the earth. There is a cyclical and positional thinning and expanding of the layer. What it all means is likely anyone's (hopefully educated) guess.
This reminds me of the controversy over issues such as the use of microwave ovens or aspartame. There are conflicting reports from both sides. Everything these days seems to cause cancer, but not much is definitively proven, so I blithely go on using my microwave ~ any kind of heating, whether on the stove or in any kind of oven would appear to diminish the benefit of most foods ~ and if I drink soda at all I prefer not to have the calories; don't want the budda belly that brings all kinds of health problems after all.
It cannot hurt, however, for Earthlings to be aware of the damages we may be causing to our planet. Perhaps the biggest issue of all is having the resources to feed our exponentially growing population...
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And for that, guess what is the best thing, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? Yup. Global warming means bigger crops.
Ha ha ha, Andre, I just erupted into the biggest laugh I've had all day!So, as it's mid-afternoon and sunny (NO global (or any other geographical measure)warming here this summer), I shall take my Kindle and grin out for a walk and park myself on a bench at the beach and laugh at the loonies. Ciao for now.
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That's a wonderful opening for a story, Andre. Write it.
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I've little time to devote to the debate in general at the moment and will be coming back to it, probably on the other one.
For now, I agree with everything you have written here. For me, global warming is not about the science but more about the wanton destruction and the fear that everythone holds (well those who think alike)...what of the future if we don't secure the present?
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It is not done to mention that the water is freezing. We Irish are the biggest mealymouthers in the world. When it is pissing don't admit it is raining, we say, "Begorrah, it's a soft day."
Once on the beach down there, my hillwalking group came upon a lady sunbathing naked and when we were out of her earshot I corpsed. "Now that," I said to a Ginger Mary, whom we'd all roundly abused for exhibitionism on a dangerous mountain about a month before, when she raced ahead of all the experienced climbers, "defines exhibitionism, when you sunbathe naked even when you're covered in goosebumps." Several of the guys claimed they didn't notice the goosebumps...
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But the precautionary principle, as public policy costing trillions, is an altogether different matter. It is for instance declared IPCC policy advice to governments that what the IPCC decides are environmental necessities should not be questioned. That's Stalinism (or, closer to home, Mugabeism!) under another guise. It gets worse. It is also official UN policy that IPCC advice on the environment not be subject to cost-benefit analysis. In short there is no control; it's totally out of hand.
And the people running wild here have from beginning lied. For example, Sharon thinks I joke when I say the IPCC says global warming will be good for hungry people. It says so in every IPCC report. But those people have through four thick reports said one thing in the report, written by the scientists, and quite another in the executive summary for policymakers, which is what the newspapers quote. In short, the bureaucrats have consistently lied, and the proof is in their own publications. Did you know that in the first two IPCC reports, the scientists said plainly that there was no danger of global warming? The summary, written by the bureaucrats, said exactly the opposite. After that the official policy became "consensus" and the scientists were selected to be more "reliable". The IPCC also started including in their "scientific" reports as "science" the scare stories told by environmental pressure groups, all the while lying that they used and printed only peer-reviewed science.
It isn't just that there is no abnormal global warming. It is that there *cannot be* any global warming because we're just coming out of an ice age! In fact, statistically, and on ice-core evidence (far more reliable than a single tree on a Siberian slope, which is what Keith Briffa's IPCC report is based on!), slipping back into the grip of the ice age is much, much more likely than that we'll fry. On a geological timescale the ruling condition on earth is ice ages with only short warm interludes.
Brrr.
Andre, I didn't think you were joking. I just thought it was funny in a ludicrous way...
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by Andre Jute
Part 1
Global warming is probably the most expensive and least productive job creation scheme in the history of the world. It starts with human guilt, always a reliable tool for those who want to control our lives. In this case the guilt is about the ease conferred by the motor car. The control freaks made the motor car into a symbol of evil. A whole bureaucracy with attendant scientific establishments and political lobbies full of grimfaced activists sprang up to "control the emissions". Unfortunately for them, the emissions of cars and trucks were technically easy to control and in no time at all this entire 1960/70s version of the bureacratic-academic-pressure group complex had very little to do except twiddle its thumbs and go before Congress to ask for more money.
They needed a new crusade. This was "greenhouse gases", an enlargement of a nutty fringe concern about a hole in the ozone layer in the 1950/60s. The greenhouse gases are many and complex, but the bureacratic-academic-pressure group complex had no problem fixing on CO2 as the evil pinup of their next target. It isn't the most important greenhouse gas but what the hell, it was less risible to explain to people than that "cows farting out methane threaten our planet". Gradually this became a campaign against "global warming" driven by manmade CO2 emissions.
Soon the canonical faith took shape: CO2 always drove global warming but man -- oh, all that Christian guilt! -- was especially destructive. In what seemed like minutes academics who wanted to be on television were forecasting terrible storms, droughts, famines, a rolling apocalypse, all due to manmade CO2. This was so successful a tale that soon politicians felt they had to act, and the United Nations set up the richly funded and humongously staffed IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control. The IPCC was a glorious trough for all the snouts, including the littlest snouts, the scientists squealing around the ankles of the bureaucrats for handouts, called "research allocations". Every few years the IPCC issued an "Assessment", no less than a policy document for top politicians, presidents and prime ministers. Oh god, were the scientists ever in their heaven: they were driving worldwide policy!
The scientists were guided by the experienced bureaucrats, of course, and soon a system arose of "consensus", because to quibble in public would endanger the political equilibrium and thus the funding. Nobody noticed that "consensus" is by definition against the principles of science, or that the intimidation and persecution of critics of "global warming" that soon followed from "consensus" was deeply inimical to the skepticism so essential to the continued conduct of true science. If there was "consensus" -- if everyone was by definition in agreement with the aims of the organisation and thus with the findings -- there was no need for due diligence, for "peer reviewers" who didn't know the authors of any article, for review of source data, for review of statistical methods, in fact for any of that superstructure of hardnosed questioning which meets a paper in any other branch of science except only the climate and environmental sciences.
Never mind, nobody who mentioned these uncomfortable truths would long have a research grant, or a job, or any chance of being published, and thus promotion and career would be gone. The system had come a full circle. It was the richest closed shop on earth.
All this "science" about Global Warming (the capitals arrived by stealth) was applied to making a variety of forecasts of how humans were driving the planet to hell in a handbasket by CO2 emissions, which in turn would cause global warming. These computer models were trumpeted in the media as if they had perfect reality and scientific respectability, but in fact they were based on very poor statistics and had such a low level of confidence even from their creators, Joe Public took only a decade or two to catch on that they were silly toys, the pretentions of "scientists" and bureaucrats protected from reality and scrutiny by new doctrines that environmentalist policies should not be measure by any cost-benefit analysis, and that the precautionary principle overrode all common sense and certainly the absence of proof (of course it overrode the absence of proof: the precautionary principle was designed specifically to override the absence of proof). Enviromentalism was the new religion and no heresy was permitted.
A major test of a statistical model which presumes to predict the future is that it must, given a start date sometime in the past, accurately map the intervening known period. But none of the vaunted models of the future put forward by the IPCC as predictors of world temperature a century or two hence could map out the past reliably.
These models fell down at many points and for many reasons. But, most strikingly, all fell down badly at two historical points. They are called the Medieval Warm Period, when for several centuries it was much warmer than it has been ever since, including in the 20th century, and the Little Ice Age, when shortly after the reign of Elizabeth the First and for the period covering the rise of the Industrial Revolution, people skated annually on the Thames.
The IPCC case, built into its models, is that manmade CO2 drives global warming. But there was no exceptional CO2 emissions during the Medieval Warm Period when temperatures were substantially higher for centuries on end than they are today. And in the period that includes the start of the Industrial Revolution, with all that coal being burned and emitting CO2 like it was going out of fashion, instead of heat wave, we get a couple of centuries of freezing temperatures! Ouch! The models couldn't handle these "anomalies".
The Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age are troublesome only for CO2-centric models, indicating that the underlying assumption of the model -- manmade CO2 drives global warming -- is faulty. Other models, of sun activity for instance, have no problem following the historical reality closely. That should long since have told the IPCC and its retinue of favoured "scientists" that they were staring into an infinite void of their own making. But by now the snouts were too deep in the trough.
So now the useless forecasting models are given less public exposure. But they are not discarded. All those "climate scientists" don't start looking for useful work. By now Global Warming is not only an industry, it is a faith, with threats against "deniers" which sound appallingly like those of Muslim Mullahs against the Infidels.
So, instead of looking for useful work, all those "scientists" start looking for ways of "getting rid of" the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. If they could "lose" these inconvenient historical truths, then the temperatures of the 20th Century would no longer look modest by comparison to the Medieval Warm Period, and they would no longer have to explain how rising CO2 emissions "caused" the Little Ice Age. The ideal, to match the already announced IPCC scare story that the last decade of the 20th Century would be the hottest on record, was to recast past temperatures so that they were below the entire twentieth century and very much below the period 1990-2000. The result would look like a hockey-stick on its side, the hook pointing upwards. By now nobody (important -- those who did had their grants revoked) even asked whether it was scientific practice to cook the figures in order to support a bureaucratic idee fixe. The snouts were bolted into the trough: hundreds of millions in research grants for "global warming" were at stake.
The first "scientist" to succeed in making a hockey stick was Michael Mann. He re-analysed old tree ring samples with a new algorithm and new methods of data selection. No one pointed out that tree rings are very uncertain proxies for temperature, or that the particular trees he selected are the most unreliable temperature proxies. No one examined his algorithm. No one pointed out that Mann selected his data to deliver a hockey stick. Mann had saved the world -- or at least the IPCC and Global Warming: Mann had produced the Hockey Stick.
The IPCC immediately promoted Mann's deeply flawed study from a little local aberration in tree rings to a global rise in temperature over two millennia, most of the rise centred in the last decade of the twentieth century. It was "proof" that human CO2 emissions drove global temperature! Mann's hockey stick graph was the only one shown to presidents and prime ministers on which to base environmental policy costing trillions of taxpayers' money and shaping economies for decades to come because that sort of fundamental change is not easy to undo.
You might ask, what happened to the historical evidence of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. Why, the IPCC declared them Euro-centric phenomena. Self-styled "scientists" told this lie in public. Anyone asking whether these multi-century historical events happened in the rest of the world was suddenly treated as if he committed a form of racism ("Euro-centrism"). The IPCC and its "climate scientists" simply ignored a huge literature proving that the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age happened on every continent and in every ocean around the world at the same time. It was as if any paper which was published by anyone except one of the IPCC's accredited "climate scientists" not only wasn't true, but that it didn't exist, and more, had no right to exist.
It took the IPCC seven years to discover that Mann's Hockey Stick is a broken crutch. Neither they nor any of the "scientific reviewers" ever asked to see Mann's raw data, no one checked his algorithm, no one checked anything. But two tenacious Canadians, McIntyre and McKittrick (who should get the Nobel Prize for this service to mankind), with the help of the US Senate extracted the basic data from a reluctant Mann and tried to replicate his hockey stick. They found his algorithm so biased, it would generate hockey sticks from random noise... (That just about defines zero reliability!) They found his specially selected data heavily biased towards data with an inherent hockey stick shape. When they updated the samples Mann worked with by going to some of the same trees, they couldn't duplicate the hockey stick. The Mann article in which the IPCC put such faith stood revealed as a sham on every level.
Mann is discredited, but the IPCC still shows hockey-stick shaped graphs, adding a new wrinkle: it just cuts off graphs that are inconvenient in 1950, or whenever they start showing an "inappropriate" trend.
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Part 2 follows.
All parts Copyright 2009, 2011 Andre Jute