Inside the Asylum

This time the nonsense isn't coming out of the CRU. Here's what is being claimed:

Climate change could increase the likelihood of civil war in sub-Saharan Africa by over 50 percent within the next two decades, according to a new study led by a team of researchers at University of California, Berkeley, and published in today's online issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

And they dare to give this the name "science" and to claim to be "researchers"? I disagree. I think that there's a 43.26% chance of increased civil war. Hey, why not? My number is more precise than theirs. They can only estimate, while I've got a hard number! Let me make another prediction: there is 100% chance of continued nonsense like this appearing in apparently respectable academic publications so long as their theme is global warming alarmism. This is the kind of crap that gets published in peer-reviewed journals? Yes, I definitely see why Professor "Hockey-stick" Mann only wants people to try to criticize his work using such publications.

Then there's this:

In a provocative new study, a University of Utah scientist argues that rising carbon dioxide emissions - the major cause of global warming - cannot be stabilized unless the world's economy collapses or society builds the equivalent of one new nuclear power plant each day.

Naturally, it's based on yet another type of modeling. Let's be honest guys. It's not research when you create a model based on incomplete data combined with a lack of understanding of how the world's climate works (since no one understands it). You might as well pull the numbers out of your rear end. You'd save yourselves a lot of time and everyone else a lot of money. Besides which, the "rising carbon dioxide emissions" that everyone likes to blame ... There's a problem with that too... but as I said before, no one is going to pay attention to the study (which is not based on models but actual data) that shows that in fact carbon dioxide levels have been remaining constant despite increased emissions.

New data show that the balance between the airborne and the absorbed fraction of carbon dioxide has stayed approximately constant since 1850, despite emissions of carbon dioxide having risen from about 2 billion tons a year in 1850 to 35 billion tons a year now.

It doesn't fit the narrative.

It makes you want to cry that people can make up all this voodoo nonsense (sorry, make "future projections" based on "models") and be taken seriously. Somehow the human race is still addicted to its soothsayers.

I've had fun continuing to do my own searches through the hacked emails from the CRU global warming alarmism institute.
I found a few gems. For example, there's the occasion where Phil Jones writes in an email:

Think I've managed to persuade UEA to ignore all further FOIA requests if the people have anything to do with Climate Audit.

In other words, "I've managed to persuade the University of East Anglia to ignore all Freedom of Information Act requests from people who have anything to do with an organization that is asking inconvenient questions. I'd hazard a guess that this actually constitutes an illegal act, as I doubt very much that the FOI Act allows a university to ignore requests based on the identity of the person making the request. Whether the illegality is the responsibility of the university, of the person who persuaded them to behave illegally, or both, is a question of law. Later, there's another email from Phil Jones:

You can delete this attachment if you want. Keep this quiet also, but this is the person who is putting in FOI requests for all emails Keith and Tim have written and received re Ch 6 of AR4. We think we've found a way around this.

Yeah, they're really acting like people with nothing to hide. Open scientific debate based upon the evidence. Hoorah!

A recent survey in Britain concludes:

Only 41 percent accept as an established scientific fact that global warming is taking place and is largely man-made. Almost a third, or 32 percent, believe that the link is not yet proved; eight percent say it is environmentalist propaganda to blame man and 15 percent believe the world is not warming.

The leaks from the CRU could not have had any impact on this survey, because it happened too recently. Now that the global warmenists involved with the CRU have been exposed for the unscientific unobjective snake-oil merchants that they are, I somehow doubt that these figures are going to move in a direction that Greenpeace would approve of. Anyone care to bet against the likelihood that the figure for those "who blame environmentalist propaganda" is going to rise? Let's face it, even given the possibility that man made global warming really is a problem, are the interests of humanity really best served by concealing the data and trying to suppress opposing view points? Those with the strongest argument are usually least afraid of public debate. If they really believe in their cause, let them argue it without lies, without concealment, and with honest public debate. If they don't (and their conduct certainly gives the impression that even they don't believe their arguments will stand up to careful scrutiny), then let them resign in shame from their publicly funded positions. Since most of the public doesn't understand the science, they instead judge the issues using things they do understand ... and they understand the difference between the behavior of fraudsters, and those with a good case. The warmenist "scientists" are harming the very cause they claim to believe in. That makes them either enemies of mother Gaia, or con men, or both.

Recently Instapundit linked to an article in which the author discussed just exactly how habitable is the earth. The author argued:

to a space probe searching for somewhere that our kind of life can thrive, a truly random sampling of the Earth's surface (distributed over both time and area) would probably result in the conclusion that the planet is uninhabitable

Following on from that, I now see a new article over at Science News that argues that:

stars that are just right to support life might be dimmer and longer-lived than the sun... The “Goldilocks stars” with just the right conditions might be K-type stars, or orange dwarfs, Guinan says. These stars put out less near-ultraviolet energy than sunlike stars, are less likely to flare up than M dwarf stars, and have a habitable zone far enough away that planets in that zone are unlikely to be tidally locked. K-type stars also live five to six times longer than the sun, giving life more time to develop, Guinan’s team reasons. They’re also more common than suns, making up about 15 percent of the stars in the galaxy.

I guess that means that there chances of finding life around another star are higher than previously thought? After all, if our planet and sun are not the ideal locations to support life, but they nevertheless do, then it seems reasonable to infer that it isn't as hard for life to emerge and thrive as previously thought. Relating to this is yet another new study that moves us a significant step closer to understanding how RNA (the probable precursor to DNA) could come to be formed from the building blocks of life.

A key question in the origin of biological molecules like RNA and DNA is how they first came together billions of years ago from simple precursors. Now, in a study appearing in this week's Journal of Biological Chemistry, researchers in Italy have reconstructed one of the earliest evolutionary steps yet: generating long chains of RNA from individual subunits using nothing but warm water.

This of course leads us back to the Fermi Paradox. If life is out there, why isn't it all over the sky? The proverbial aliens should have colonized the galaxy by now. The latest issue of National Geographic has a fascinating story called Worlds Apart but unfortunately the online version doesn't seem to have the most interesting illustration. It's called Searching Space, and it shows the scale of our current feeble attempts to identify planets around other stars. The picture shows most of the Milky Way, and (to scale) a tiny box representing 400 light years with Earth at the center, which represents the area where most planets have been discovered. It also shows the scale of the new Kepler satellite's extended search of up to 6000 light years, which still looks very small on the scale of things. I guess you could say that we live out in the countryside, and we've been standing on our front porch looking around, wondering why we can't see any other people. Now we've bought a pair of binoculars, and we've just begun to have a more thorough look. I don't think we could say we've even yet reached the point (in this metaphor) where we can even be bothered to climb up on the roof to get a better view. I think it might be a little early to say we looked, and there's no one out there.

Thanks to Lentz for pointing out this Polar Bear video. It's from "Planestupid.com" who appear to be a bunch of typical global warming scare-mongers trying to tell us that plane travel is bad (even as they jet off to Copenhagen to try to generate more money-making hysteria) ... but they've produced a priceless gem that really just goes to show that the people who made the video are indeed just plain stupid.

As one person commented over at Youtube,

So if the planet warms itself more it will rain polar bears? Sweet! I want me a rug and a polar bear jacket!

Yep, apparently polar bears will fall from the sky and crush your car if you fly in a plane. Personally I blame the the PBSG (Polar Bear Specialist Group). I kid you not ... there really is such a group, and they meet on a regular basis despite all of the plane travel involved.

The 15th meeting of the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG), hosted by the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, was held at the Greenland Representation in Copenhagen Denmark , June 29-July 3, 2009. The Polar Bear Specialist Group is composed of researchers and managers representing each of the five circumpolar nations that signed the International Agreement for the Conservation of Polar Bears of 1973. Since the late 1960s, the members of PBSG have met every 3 to 5 years

At their last meeting there were 21 specialists present. If that's an average, and they've met 15 times, they've managed to kill 315 polar bears so far. Or something. Actually, if they could arrange to meet in some starving area of Africa, they could solve world hunger. I imagine all of that bear meat would save a good many villagers in times of drought.
[Update] Here are a bunch more funny bear youtube clips. Enjoy.

Mann's comments (previous post) about only trusting arguments published in peer-reviewed studies are put into their proper context by yet more revelations pouring out of the leaked data from CRU. There's a clear pattern of "fixing" the peer-reviews, by attacking publications and editors that dare to allow skeptics to have a voice. There's also evidence of ensuring that critical papers go to reviewers who could be "relied upon" to give the "right" feedback to it. Yes, the fix is in.
Let's take a look at a sample (use the link in the last post to find the full versions for yourself. No more MSM gate-keepers to keep you away from the real data, and now (finally) no more global warming charlatans masquerading as scientists hiding their data and biases:

Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers.(1047388489)
Tom Wigley says that von Storch is partly to blame for sceptic papers getting published at Climate Research... Says they should tell publisher that the journal is being used for misinformation. Says that whether this is true or not doesn't matter. Says they need to get editorial board to resign. Says they need to get rid of von Storch too. (1051190249)
Mann discusses tactics for screening and delaying postings at Real Climate.(1139521913)
Reaction to McIntyre's 2005 paper in GRL. Mann has challenged GRL editor-in-chief over the publication. Mann is concerned about the connections of the paper's editor James Saiers with U Virginia [does he mean Pat Michaels?]. Tom Wigley says that if Saiers is a sceptic they should go through official GRL channels to get him ousted. (1106322460) [Note to readers - Saiers was subsequently ousted]
Later on Mann refers to the leak at GRL being plugged.(1132094873)
Jones says he and Kevin will keep some papers out of the next IPCC report.(1089318616)
Tom Wigley tells Mann that a figure Schmidt put together to refute Monckton is deceptive and that the match it shows of instrumental to model predictions is a fluke. Says there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model output by authors and IPCC.(1255553034)
Grant Foster putting together a critical comment on a sceptic paper. Asks for help for names of possible reviewers. Jones replies with a list of people, telling Foster they know what to say about the paper and the comment without any prompting.(1249503274)
Briffa discusses an sceptic article review with Ed Cook. Says that confidentially he needs to put together a case to reject it (1054756929)
Jones tells Mann that he is sending station data. Says that if McIntyre requests it under FoI he will delete it rather than hand it over. Says he will hide behind data protection laws. Says Rutherford screwed up big time by creating an FTP directory for Osborn. Says Wigley worried he will have to release his model code. Also discuss AR4 draft. Mann says paleoclimate chapter will be contentious but that the author team has the right personalities to deal with sceptics.(1107454306)

That's the great thing about the internet. We no longer have to depend on the gate-keepers to decide what information we're going to be told. Instead, you can go here and search through the hacked emails etc. yourself. So I had a go with a few key word searches. I found an email exchange between journalist Robert Matthews, the science correspondent with The Sunday Telegraph, and Professor Michael E. Mann. Matthews' email is polite and reasonable.

I'm putting together a piece on global warming, and I'll be making reference to your paper in Geophysical Research Letters with Prof Jones on "Global surface temperatures over the past two millennia"...

He describes some criticisms that were made about the paper (including an internet link), and then asks

I'd be very interested to include your rebuttals to these arguments in the piece I'm doing. I must admit to being confused by why proxy data should be compared to instrumental data for the last part of the data-set. Shouldn't the comparison be a consistent one throughout ? With many thanks for your patience with this.

Sounds perfectly reasonable, doesn't it? So, let's look at Professor Mann's response:

An objective reading of our manuscript would readily reveal that the comments you refer to are scurrilous. These comments have not been made by scientists in the peer-reviewed literature, but rather, on a website that, according to published accounts, is run by individuals sponsored by ExxonMobile corportation, hardly an objective source of information.

It's typical warmenist nonsense, and not at all the response of a scientist interested in objectivity. This part of the email starts with an attack without any attempt to actual establish anything ("it's obvious I'm right and people who attack me are idiots" doesn't classify as a reasoned response). Then there's a typical attack based on authority ("the criticism wasn't made by a cardinal of the church, and is therefore not worth considering") and goes on to another typical tactic, to belittle the criticism based on the fact that it is associated with oil money. ("The critics are funded by demons, and therefore we don't need to address their specific points.") Mann continues:

Owing to pressures on my time, I will not be able to respond to any further inquiries from you. Given your extremely poor past record of reporting on climate change issues, however, I will leave you with some final words. Professional journalists I am used to dealing with do not rely upon un-peer-reviewed claims off internet sites for their sources of information. They rely instead on peer-reviewed scientific research, and mainstream, rather than fringe, scientific opinion.

You're bad, you're unprofessional, and I'm not going to speak with you anymore. Nah nah nah. Not listening. Maybe if you started listening only to people who agree with me you might be worth talking to, but as long as you consort with heathens, get lost.

Yes. I do agree with Professor Michael E. Mann on one major point. It's not a good idea to trust people who show that they are not objective about things. Let's have a look at his website at Penn State. You'll see rapidly that all his work and funding depend on a belief in anthropogenic global warming. In short, without it, he'd be out of a job. Oh yeah ... he's also the guy behind the infamous and now thoroughly debunked hockey stick graph that Al Gore relied on for his movie. The graph that could only recently be proven to be nonsense because of determined efforts to keep the original data set hidden from critical inspection. Once that data finally did become available, it was shown that the hockey stick was created by cherry-picking the data to get the desired result. Oh yes ... I do agree with Professor Mann. Don't trust non-objective sources. As another British journalist wrote,

We “Global Warming Deniers” are often accused of ignoring the weight of scientific opinion. Well if the “science” on which they base their theories is as shoddy as Mann’s Hockey Stick, is it any wonder we think they’re talking cobblers?

Oh look ... a whole bunch of new hidden data has just been made public. To borrow Mann's term, I wonder how much more global warming alarmism is going to be shown to be scurrilous.

This story is all over the web now. The University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, or CRU, is one of the most influential climate research organisations in the world, having produced the datasets that many other researchers rely on for their own research. Their research has been under fire for a decade or more with client change critics requesting access to their raw data and the methods used to produce the published data sets. To date the CRU has successfully stonewalled and refused to satisfy these requests.

A few days ago someone hacked into one of their servers, copied a large quantity of data, including e-mail, and then dumped 61MB onto the web. The e-mails are damning.

So the 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory - a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science. I’ve been adding some of the most astonishing in updates below - emails suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. If it is as it now seems, never again will “peer review” be used to shout down sceptics.

Today (Sunday November 15) marks a record for 2009, with 242 days in the year without a sunspot. In the last week, 2009 moved from 6th place to 4th place in recorded history for the number of days within a year without a sunspot. 1933's record (240 spotless days) and 1954's (241 days) now move a place down in the rankings. Only 1913 (311 days), 2008 (266), and 1912 (253) beat the current year. It's hard to predict the future, but there are still 46 days remaining in 2009, meaning there is no chance that the current year can reach first spot, but if just over half of the remaining days should be spotless, then 2009 can match or exceed the record for 2008. Unless activity really picks up, it seems very likely that 2009 will at least make it to 3rd place.

Just thought you might like to know.

There's been a new study of CO2 levels in the earth's atmosphere. This one is different from most climate change studies, because:

The strength of the new study, published online in Geophysical Research Letters, is that it rests solely on measurements and statistical data, including historical records extracted from Antarctic ice, and does not rely on computations with complex climate models.

And what did it conclude?

New data show that the balance between the airborne and the absorbed fraction of carbon dioxide has stayed approximately constant since 1850, despite emissions of carbon dioxide having risen from about 2 billion tons a year in 1850 to 35 billion tons a year now. This suggests that terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans have a much greater capacity to absorb CO2 than had been previously expected. The results run contrary to a significant body of recent research which expects that the capacity of terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans to absorb CO2 should start to diminish as CO2 emissions increase, letting greenhouse gas levels skyrocket. Dr Wolfgang Knorr at the University of Bristol found that in fact the trend in the airborne fraction since 1850 has only been 0.7 ± 1.4% per decade, which is essentially zero.

Don't expect this to be headline news around the world. There's no panic value and no money to be made out of it. Nothing to see here. Move along, move along. You see we have models to tell us to panic, and to tell us to introduce new taxes to make energy more expensive, and to make climate change billionaires like Al Gore richer still.

It's one of those memes of global catastrophe that everyone seems to have heard of. The poor bees are all dying. At last we have some common sense on the subject in the New Scientist magazine. The short version: bees have declined in some regions, but have significantly increased in others, and anyway, even if bees went extinct it wouldn't cause a global meltdown of agriculture. It's time to stop worrying and learn to love the bomb. Or something.

This seems to summarize the Obama Regime pretty well:

"This should not be a partisan issue," Obama said, urging bipartisan answers on a day largely devoted to raising campaign money for fellow Democrats. "The closer we get, the harder the opposition will fight."

Earlier in the story, there are some other priceless and almost cliche Obamantics:

President Barack Obama said Friday that opponents of his energy bill are disputing the evidence of global warming in a cynical ploy to undermine efforts to curb pollution and steer the nation to greener energy sources. Obama said some opponents "make cynical claims that contradict the overwhelming scientific evidence when it comes to climate change — claims whose only purpose is to defeat or delay the change that we know is necessary."

Firstly there are those vague nay-saying "opponents" ... he loves to use straw-men and nameless critics who he can then attack ... even if they don't actually exist. This time he's even more transparent than normal. Let's have the look at his straw-man position: opponents love pollution and hate things that are good for the environment. They oppose him because they are cynical, and they want to oppose necessary change. Oh, and don't forget the "scientific evidence" ... that is overwhelming despite the fact there hasn't been any global warming for a decade. Yes, I can feel the urge to go out and hug a chimney on a coal fired power plant, I want to swim in polluted waters, I want to dance in noxious gas clouds ... I love pollution because I'm cynical. I get off on opposing necessary changes. What other reason could I have for opposing the Dear Leader?

A new electric car is about to hit the market in England. It's called the Lightning.
Here's how the company describes it:

Forget electric cars that compromise the driving experience.
For the sheer thrill of immediate, powerful acceleration and with a top speed capability of more than 130mph, the electric Lightning will be a difficult proposition to beat.
Car ............................................ 0-60mph .................. Power
Jaguar 5.0 V8 XK Coupe .................... 5.2 Secs .................. 380 bhp
Electric Lightning GT sub .................. 5.0 Secs .................. 500+ bhp

The bad news? It's going to cost about 120,000 pounds. Oh well.

I've heard it said before that the wars of the 21st Century will be fought over water, not oil. Let's hope this isn't a taste of things to come, as the Chinese attempt to deal with their massive water shortage in the north by diverting water from the south, which has got the Indians concerned it's going to divert water running off the Himalayas away from them ...
At the same time, even parts of southern China are facing drought, something that's pretty unusual.

Early snow fall in both USA and Europe is, of course, yet another piece of evidence for global warming. Don't ask me how, it just is. Belief in global warming requires all the faith of a major religion, so facts don't really come into it.

An autumn storm brought snow to parts of Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey, the earliest snow on record in some towns used to harsh winters.

Winter has made a sudden and unwelcome early arrival in Poland... Rain across the country's western regions is set turn into sleet and snow in central districts, while eastern and southern provinces are already struggling to cope with the first snowfalls of the season.

It's good for skiers:

snow falling to low levels in Austria over the next few days. Expect excellent skiing on the glaciers when visibility improves by the weekend

Unseasonably extended snow season in Australia, early snowfall in Europe ... what else can it be other than global warming?

This kind of proves the point made earlier: any news concerning there being more polar ice isn't newsworthy, such as the fact the Antarctic melt was the least ever recorded. On the other hand, a group of scientists with a vested interest in proving global warming announce a future projection that there'll be no Arctic ice in 10 years during the summer, and hey, what do you know, it's headline news around the world. Let's hammer home the point:

''With a larger part of the region now first-year ice, it is clearly more vulnerable,'' said Professor Peter Wadhams, part of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at the University of Cambridge, which analysed the data. ''The area is now more likely to become open water each summer, bringing forward the potential date when the summer sea ice will be completely gone.''

You see, the fact that something is "likely" and has "potential" is more newsworthy than something that is an actual, you know, fact. Panic mongering follows:

Martin Sommerkorn of the World Wildlife Fund said the Arctic sea holds a central position in earth's climate system. ''Such a loss of Arctic sea ice cover has recently been assessed to set in motion powerful climate feedbacks which will have an impact far beyond the Arctic,'' he said. ''This could lead to flooding affecting one-quarter of the world's population, substantial increases in greenhouse gas emissions from massive carbon pools and extreme … weather changes.''

You know ... one of those really accurate models (with a zero percent success rate in predicting future climatic activity) has shown there could be a powerful massive substantial extreme impact. Panic everyone! Oh, and don't forget to donate money to the WWF to avert this powerful massive substantial extreme emergency.

Oh, you don't believe me about the vested interests of the team announcing the findings? Aside from the obvious (continued research grants, riding the gravy train at Copenhagen, etc., and lots of juicy high profile media coverage), there's this:

Fresh off the ice! Pen Hadow and Ann Daniels available to speak at your event... Pen and Ann are established speakers on the international circuit with clients that have included M&S, BP, BA, IBM, Vodafone, NatWest and Bank of America

The website doesn't mention the speakers' fee ... so presumably they appeared for all these companies to speak gratis, out of the goodness of their hearts and a firm belief in the righteousness of their cause ... And if you believe that, I've got a second-hand car to sell you.

The ice isn't melting ... or at least, not as fast as usual. It must be Global Warming! As the blog World Climate Report asks,

Where are the headlines? Where are the press releases? Where is all the attention? The ice melt across during the Antarctic summer (October-January) of 2008-2009 was the lowest ever recorded in the satellite history.

A guess it's a kind of inconvenient truth.
(Via Tim Blair)

Global Warming continues to punish New Zealand with soaring temperatures. Or not:

Well over 100 cars remained stuck on the snow-covered Napier Taupo Road last night, and several hundred people spent a second night in makeshift accommodation after a heavy snowfall cut off State Highway 5. State Highway 1 between Taihape and Turangi was also closed because of the bad weather. A further 30 centimetres of snow was expected to fall in parts of the central North Island last night and today.