Joe Bastardi repeats my argument

In a guest post at WUWT, meteorologist Joe Bastardi repeats the argument I made recently about how the recent changes in temperature and CO2 don't correlate and this shows that CO2 doesn't drive temperature, and hence temperature drives CO2. I showed this graph as evidence:

Bastardi shows this one, which is very similar:

Note that Bastardi has added a big blue arrow to show that temperatures have been going down the last 15 years.

Great minds think alike! (Though I wish Bastardi would have given me due credit).

Bastardi's excellent guest post is a follow up of an interview on Fox News. It is compulsory watching!

Monckton in NZ TV

Here is great interview in New Zealand television with the Lord Monckton. He expresses his lack of confidence about the peer review process (in science, not in economics where it is reliable). He also explains that professor John Abraham is about to face a libel charge due to the lies he has been spreading about the good Lord. The Climate Scum supports the good Lord in his effort to go to court. Such measures are sadly necessary to ensure an open and civil debate about the climate fraud. John Abraham, in his puerile efforts to discredit Monckton, is clearly out to intimidate all independent thinkers and lovers of free markets.

We also support the efforts of John Coleman and 30,000 scientist to sue Al Gore.

As a bonus, here is philosopher of science and radio host Glenn Beck revealing Al'Gore's plans to become a dictator and explaining how science funding works.

Salby demolishes AGW theory

From that excellent blog Climate Etc, I have learned about a new paradigm-shifting scientific article by climate professor Murry Salby from Macquarie University. Well, strictly speaking it is a pod cast from a talk Salby gave at a policy forum of the Sydney Institute, so we cannot see Salby's graphs and other data, but nevertheless, it is important enough to warrant a discussion. Heck, the less data the more to discuss!

The Earth’s carbon cycle is not a topic on which I have any expertise. Therefore, I instead give you carbon cycle expert Andrew Bolt's summary of Salby's results:

Salby’s argument is that the usual evidence given for the rise in CO2 being man-made is mistaken. It’s usually taken to be the fact that as carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere increase, the 1 per cent of CO2 that’s the heavier carbon isotope ratio c13 declines in proportion. Plants, which produced our coal and oil, prefer the lighter c12 isotope. Hence, it must be our gasses that caused this relative decline.
But that conclusion holds true only if there are no other sources of c12 increases which are not human caused. Salby says there are – the huge increases in carbon dioxide concentrations caused by such things as spells of warming and El Ninos, which cause concentration levels to increase independently of human emissions. He suggests that its warmth which tends to produce more CO2, rather than vice versa – which, incidentally is the story of the past recoveries from ice ages.

Wow.

Wohohow!

Yippiyayayayay!

Wobedobedoboo!

If Salby’s analysis holds up, this could revolutionize AGW science. And I see no reason why it shouldn't hold up. It is sufficiently important that we should start talking about these issues. We can certainly do that without any graphs and other data. That just makes the discussion so much more open-minded and skeptical!

In the unlikely event that Salby turns out to be wrong, I can always write a post about that. If I can find the time.

Here are a couple of points we can discuss:

• Is it temperature that is driving CO2, and not the other way around?
• Does this mean that human CO2 emissions are insignificant? That they neither influence the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere (or elsewhere) nor the temperature?
• Will the Team ever admit that they faked the hockey stick? Will there ever be reconciliation between skeptics and fraudsters? How long time should Michael Mann from Penn State serve in the State Pen?
• Why is Al Gore buying seaside real estate?

Here is some of my favorite data. As can be seen from this graph, CO2 and temperature are uncorrelated, and hence CO2 cannot drive temperature. This is an argument we skeptics always have made, and now we have been vindicated.

This graph on the other hand shows how well temperature and CO2 correlate. This is evidence that temperature is driving CO2.

Of course, the alarmists will try everything to wreck Salby's argument. For your benefit, this is how they can be countered. Think of the atmosphere as a bank account, and carbon dioxide as money.

The alarmist says: we know that human activities emit carbon dioxide. Yes, even more carbon dioxide than the increase in the atmosphere.

We answer: There are many people who deposit and withdraw money from the account. If the balance of the account goes up, how could be possibly tell that is was because a certain person made a deposit? Especially if we don't know how much each person deposits and withdraws? It is completely impossible. Same thing about carbon dioxide. There are many processes that add to or remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

But, says the alarmist, where does the human carbon dioxide go? Does it just disappear?

We reply: Haven't you heard about taxes? Money disappearing nobody knows whereto? It is the same thing with carbon dioxide.

But, argues the alarmist: Where does the added carbon in the atmosphere come from then? It is also increasing in the oceans and the biosphere.

We reply: Economic growth. Capitalism and free markets generate more money. Same thing with carbon dioxide.

But, grovels the alarmist, if a temperature increase of less than one degree C increases CO2 from 280 to 380 ppm, then the CO2 concentration during ice ages (around 6 degrees colder than now) must have been negative. That is impossible!

We reply: there is noting strange about negative numbers. Have you ever heard about debts? The kind of thing that your reckless liberal over-spending policies are causing all the time? Same thing with carbon dioxide. During the ice ages, there was a carbon dioxide debt. That's why there were not trees growing on the ice. Trees need carbon dioxide.

That should make the alarmists shut up, one can hope. Unfortunately, they don't really understand economy, so they may not get it after all.

Arctic Sea Ice Recovery

The Arctic sea ice extent is now above what it was in the corresponding period in 2007 according to NSIDC. This means 4 years of a steady Arctic sea ice increase! The doomsayers are proven wrong as always. No need to worry about the polar bears!

The blue line shows the Arctic sea ice extent for 2011 (May-August) and the dashed line for 2007. By comparing 2011 to the year with the lowest extent (2007), NSIDC tries to give the impression that this year is very low as well. The black line is the average for 19971979-2000, and the grey area is two standard deviations. They have been included to give the impression that there is some kind of "normal" Arctic sea ice extent, and that 2011 and 2007 is well below that extent. What NSIDC is doing is called cherry picking: they pick the data that support their thesis and discard the rest. Being an experienced data analysician, I can easily see through such ruses. 

NSIDC get their money from federal agencies, and of course they want to keep the cash flowing even when the ice is not melting.

Wood mashes Mashey

In Chronicle of Higher Education, NAS president Peter Wood (picture) delivers a devastating critique of the warmistas in two articles: Bottling Up Global Warming Skepticism and Climate Thuggery. NAS, you may think, National Academy of Sciences, isn't that those people who white washed the hockey stick? Do not fear, this is a different NAS with far more credibility: National Association of Scholars.

In the first piece, NAS president Wood writes about the american showman P T Barnum, who got rich from freak shows and a museum with mermaids and other fake curiosities. That constitutes a truly devastating critique of the state of climate science; a merciless blow that the peddlers of climate apocalypse never will recover from. Once you get compared to P T Barnum (or Hitler) it is game over!

One alarmist who has much in common with P T Barnum is John Mashey. I wrote about Mashey's shameless attacks against Edward Wegman, the worlds best statistician, last autumn. In his piece, Woods writes:

But let’s put aside these vacant thoughts and turn to some serious news. Science reports that retired computer scientist Dr. John Mashey is attempting to patch the tattered reputation of “hide the decline” Michael Mann, the climate scientist whose famous “hockey stick” chart shows exponentially increasing global temperatures in the near term. Mashey has been, as he puts it, “trying to take the offense” against global warming skeptics by flyspecking their publications. “You hope they make a mistake,” he says, and when they do, he pounces with demands that journals retract whole articles. Some journals indeed have. As Science puts it, “His critics say Mashey is more interested in destroying his foes than in debating the issues.” Professor Mann is extolling his efforts at “exploring the underbelly of climate denial.”

Trying to find errors is your opponents' publication: what kind of low life would sink so low? Mashey has shown his true colors (green, red, brown), and the innocent Wegman is now under investigation for plagiarism. We skeptics would never do anything so mean. We are honorable people! Remember Climategate!

In the second piece, NAS president Wood documents how the warmists try to silence dissenting voices and cover up scientific facts that undermine their position:

Mann himself has deployed nuisance lawsuits in a similar fashion. He has sued Tim Ball—a Canadian global-warming skeptic, an environmentalist, and former professor of geography—for libel for writing that Mann “should be in the State Pen, not Penn State,” for his role in Climategate. Mann also threatened a lawsuit against Minnesotans for Global Warming for a satiric YouTube video titled “Hide the Decline.”

Indeed. Instead of engaging in a scientific debate with Ball and Minnesotans for Global Warming, Mann just goes ahead and sues them. But that is because he cannot counter their rock-solid arguments. By thus attacking his strongest critics, Mann tries to make everybody else afraid and thereby he prevents an open and informed scientific debate. "Makin' up data the old hard way. Fudgin' the numbers day by day. Hiding the snow and the cold and a downward line. Hide the decline (hide the decline)." That video was so funny! And scientific! "Oh Climategate I think you have sealed your fate. I hope you do a lot of time, cuz what you did was such a crime."


Mashey and co-thug Coleman try to retaliate in a piece of their own in CHI:

Although we see this elsewhere and ignore it, we were surprised to find articles and comments by Wood in CHE that could be considered libelous. We value the academy for open discussion and seeking truth. We both take academic misconduct seriously and have filed formal, detailed misconduct complaints. Wood’s use of phrases like “tattered reputation,” “statistical trickery and suppression of discrepant data,” “Barnum-esque hokum,” and “academic dishonesty” are not things that credible people publish without showing expertise and evidence. As Christopher Hitchens has so accurately stated: “That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” Much of what Wood writes falls under the category of assertion without evidence, counter to the principles of scholarly discourse.

This is utterly ridiculous and without any merit what-so-ever! Why would NAS president Wood want to libel anybody? He is not taking sides in the climate debate. He describes his honorable intentions as follows:

Is anthropogenic global warming (AGW) a valid scientific theory? Is it well supported by the empirical data or is it mostly an artifact of computer modeling? I don’t have answers to these questions. I stand, rather, on the side of those who favor rigorous scientific inquiry, transparency, and openness. I am not a climate scientist, but neither do I cede the whole matter of answering such questions to the designated experts. Good science doesn’t limit itself to the views of narrow-cast specialists. Valid observations, corrective criticism, competing hypotheses, and rigorous testing can and often do arise from other sources.

Manufactured indices and other units

In the video above, Rush Limbaugh critisizes the use of the so-called "heat index", which inflates temperatures by adding the imagined effect of relative humidity. If the relative humidity is high, the heat index is higher than the actual temperature, and if it is low then is lower than the actual temperature. Rush says:

They’re playing games with us on this heat wave, again. Even Drudge, drudge getting sucked in here. Gonna be a 116 in Washington. No, it’s not. It’s going to be a 100, maybe 99. The heat index, manufactured by the government, they tell you what it feels like when you add the humidity in there.

By using the heat index, the government tries to make us believe that it is warmer than it actually is. The heat index is essentially a form of psy op, indendent to scare people so they will not oppose the new world governance.

But the heat index is not the only unit manufactured by the government. There are also these:

• Temperature anomaly - the word anomaly is chosen by the government to make us think that there is something wrong, even unnatural, with the temperature changing, but the temperature has always changed. What would be an anomaly is the temperature being static, never changing. 
• Degrees Kalvin - this you get by adding 273.15 to the temperature in degrees Celsius. For instance, 293 degrees Kalvin sounds incredibly hot, but in reality it is only 20 degrees Celsius. One understands that "Kalvin" is nonsense when one observes that its name is derived from a comic book character!
• Arctic sea ice volume - as we all know, water expands when it freezes. That's why ice floats. By calculating the ice volume, and not the corresponding water volume which would be the correct thing to do, the amount of ice is exaggerated. And this means that any decline in Artic sea ice volume also is exaggerated! Horror, horror, the Arctic is melting! Well, acutally it is not.
• Parts per million - for measuring the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. The fraction of CO2 is currently 0.000391, which is a very small number. However, by using parts per million, one can make it appear to be much much bigger: 391 parts per million. 391 is a large number, and when you then read "million", it appears even larger. "Million" is usually associated with large quantities.
• Permille - this is not strictly related to the climate, but to another issue where the government wants to interfere in our lives: alcohol and driving. If you, purely hypothetically, have lets say 4 permille alcohol in your blood when driving home after enjoying a couple of beers in the local gasthaus, what that really means is that the fraction of alcohol is a measly 0.004. Yes, that's right: there are three zeroes in front of that 4. Of course, the police will not listen to that when one tried to explain it to them. Bloody Gestapo! And they don't like being called Gestapo, I can tell you! What the heck is the problem with calling them Gestapo? It actually means "Secret State Police". Now, they sure are police, and they belong to the state. That is 2 out of 3. Ok, they may not be so secret, but that's nothing to get upset about, is it? And what if I was holding up an image of a Swastika while saying it? Does that somehow imply that I was calling those officers Nazis? What poppycock! No, they are just trying to suppress my freedom!

Willie Soon - no burden for tax payers

Greenpeace has produced a report about the esteemed climate scientist Willie Soon. Apparently, Soon has received money from ExxonMobil, the Southern Company, Mobil, Texaco, the American Petroleum Institute and the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. He is also associated with the Heartland Institute, the George C Marshall Institute, the Fraser Institute, Frontiers of Freedom, The Center for Science and Public Policy and the Science and Public Policy Institute. Oh, I'm sooo shocked. Not.

This time, the Greenpeace hippie-fascists have really shot themselves in their sandal-wearing feet. Who, besides a Nazi-hippie, would be stupid enough to think that all these corporations and institutes would give all this money to somebody who was incompetent? No, they fund only the very best. Successful corporations owe their success to being the best: they have the best managers, recruit the best people and make the best products. Did you really think that companies like Coca Cola, McDonald's and Microsoft would be so successful if they produced crap? And of course, they pay the best researchers, and that's Willie Soon, world leading expert on climate non-change and a number of other environmental issues such as the non-toxicity of mercury and the flourishing of polar bear populations. He has 23 papers in the Popular Technology list of "900+ Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skepticism of "Man-Made" Global Warming (AGW) Alarm".

It's only second-rate scientists like Hansen, Mann and Jones that need to crawl in the dust in front of Politruks and bureaucrats to be allowed to feed at the trough of tax-payers money. The public is largely unaware of how public research funding is done today, but I think it is time they heard the truth. The full, unvarnished and unpolished truth, no matter how distasteful it is. I have seen with my own eyes how one is supposed to write research proposals, and I can read between the lines. I'm not making things up: I'm only making inferences.
When you want to get money from a funding agency, you need to write a proposal and submit it to the agency. For instance, lets assume that I would like to get tax-payers money to investigate the medical effects of drinking beer. First, I would have to write what my objectives are: "I want to prove that beer is bad for your health." Next, you have to show that nobody else has done the same thing before: "Although a number of studies has investigate some of the health effects of beer, nobody has yet shown that it can hurt your brain." Then you need to explain your method: "I will let monkeys drink large quantities of beer and then let put them in a room with a typewriter - if they don't write Shakespeare's collected works, then it proves that beer makes you stupid." As I said before, I'm not making this stuff up: this is how you write a research proposal.

Finally, there is the most important part. The "Impact" section, where you are supposed to write how the politicians and bureaucrats can benefit from your research. Here, you can for instance write: "When I have proved that beer is bad for the brain, you can make a tax on beer" or "you can regulate the brewery industry" or "`you can forbid people to drink beer" or such things. What you write here will determine whether you get your funding or not. If you can e.g. justify taxes, you are on. On the other hand, if you promote freedom, liberty and free enterprise, you have as much a chance as a snowball in hell, inside a burning oven. Of course, the scientists know this, and they are all either just after the money so they can fill their cofferswith tax-payers' hard-earned money and go to expensive and luxurious conferences or they are communists, so they play along. Well, most of them do, but a few people with integrity such as Willie Soon refuses. Instead, Soon and those like him get money from independent sources, with no strings attached. They don't sell their souls to the politicians. These are the only scientists you should ever trust.

Do you think Galileo got funding from the pope to perform his seminal research on the spherical shape of the Earth? No, he was funded by private means, just like Willie Soon.