You have all seen those GISS graphs of global warming. Anthony Watt checked the raw data on which they are based.
The cooked data shows warming, the raw data shows cooling. Of course this does not mean the data is necessarily fraudulent – but the adjustments are largely guesswork, so when they compile these graphs, they are merely guessing that the earth has warmed.
Archive for the ‘global warming’ Category
No warming trend in raw surface temperature data
Monday, December 15th, 2008The Hockey Stick Graph
Wednesday, August 13th, 2008Bishop Hill explains the Hockey Stick Graph. It is an exceedingly long and complicated story, even in his simplified version, but the short of it is: The global warmerists lied.
US Chamber of commerce protests junk science
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008The second national climate assessment predicts that the United States will “very likely” experience rising sea levels and increasing droughts, heat waves, intense storms and resulting illness and premature death over the next century as climate change intensifies.
But, as is the usual practice with climate “science” , the report fails to make available the evidence that supposedly leads to this conclusion, a gross and flagrant violation of normal and proper scientific practice.
And so, the US Chamber of Commerce, not academia, not any scientific body, has demanded that normal scientific standards be upheld.
Global warming is not science
Thursday, July 31st, 2008Science is based on experiment and evidence. The motto of the royal society was “Nullius in verba”, which means “Take no one’s word for it”. This motto was reinterpreted to accommodate the “evidence” for global warming. Most science journals have condition of publication that authors must comply with any reasonable request by other researchers for materials, methods, or data necessary to verify the conclusion of the article, which condition has not yet been enforced against the global warmers.
Not Science
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008Recently the CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization) dressed itself in the robes of high holy science, and portentously announced that the wrath of Gaea was upon us. Other scientists asked for the details of the evidence, but alas, the highly scientific scientists of the CSIRO found themselves sadly unable to provide the evidence.
Vote Cthulhu for US president
Saturday, July 12th, 2008Or if not Cthulhu, Obama.
When I started writing this, McCain had the the most violently anticapitalist program of any presidential candidate, his cap and trade policy.
Obama, having started out at lunatic left in the primaries, is heading rightwards at high speed, and his “cap and trade” policy had become a mere pigovian carbon tax, making him considerably less anti capitalist than McCain.
McCain, finding himself outflanked, quietly dropped his cap and trade program altogether, bringing him to the right of Obama again, forcing me to rewrite.
The primaries produced two presidential candidates, one alarmingly anti capitalist and left wing, the other alarmingly anti capitalist, even more left wing, and anti american on top of it. I found it hard to believe that ordinary Americans would vote for either one of them.
It looks like they came to the same conclusion, because they both proceeded to head rightwards at high speeds.
But why vote for the lesser evil? Vote Cthulhu
Predicted … observed
Monday, June 30th, 2008In 1988 the warmists issued their first prophecy of doom. Repent of your sins against Gaia, abandon the industrial civilization that allows us to feed far too many people, or the wrath of Gaia will manifest in massive global warming, with the wrath setting in around the year 2000.
The Blackboard checks on how that prediction went
In 2001 they issued a new prophecy of doom, this time with the wrath of Gaia setting in rather more slowly. When the warmists tell you that observed climate change is occurring in accord their revelations, what they actually mean is that they are adjusting their revelations to accord with observations.
Roots of the energy crisis
Monday, June 16th, 2008The energy crisis happened because of optimistic projections – that gas to liquid and coal to liquid would not be needed until the technology had been improved and the cost brought down, that the dramatic growth in China and India could be accommodated by rapidly expanding conventional oil production.
The political elite, unable to introduce a carbon tax because it would directly and visibly hurt people, proceeded to block coal and oil developments, thus invisibly and directly hurting people. The plan to develop America’s vast shale oil reserves was shot down a few weeks ago by the Democrats. At the same time, various oil states suffered partial, and in the case of Nigeria, near total collapse, making it difficult to extract oil without employing old fashioned imperial methods which are politically unthinkable in this day and age.
I wish I could end this by saying “so the solution is…”. But there just is not a solution. Energy is best produced in big, large scale projects. In a world of insecure property rights, where corporations are unpopular and disarmed, big projects are no longer feasible. The general world trend is any big project is going to be unworkable without a correspondingly big bunch of guys with guns who have the right, and feel they have the right, to do what it takes to protect that project. As I have said before, underground coal gasification followed by gas to liquids conversion is the technological solution, but that technological solution requires a political solution, and that political solution is nowhere on the horizon.
I wish I could end this by saying “so the solution is…”. But there just is not a solution. Energy is best produced in big, large scale projects. In a world of insecure property rights, where corporations are unpopular and disarmed, big projects are no longer feasible. The general world trend is any big project is going to be unworkable without a correspondingly big bunch of guys with guns who have the right, and feel they have the right, to do what it takes to protect that project. As I have said before, underground coal gasification followed by gas to liquids conversion is the technological solution, but that technological solution requires a political solution, and that political solution is nowhere on the horizon.
Rational Oil Prices
Friday, June 13th, 2008It seems that Arnold Kling has been in Afghan cave during the past six months. He does not seem to think that there has been any bad news on oil supply over the last six months.
The recent run-up in oil prices represents a similar puzzle. I think that it’s difficult to tell a story for the rise in crude prices for the last six months that is based on the rational digestion of news. Either six months ago folks were overly optimistic about long-term supply and demand conditions or now they are overly pessimistic about those conditions. I don’t think that what changed in the last six months was the ews about supply and demand.
I have been watching the news, and over the past few months it has been quite horrifying, particular with the Democrats and both major party presidential candidates shooting down Shell’s plan to develop shale oil, which pretty much guarantees extraordinarily high oil prices for at least the next two decades. Indeed, the political majority in most of the developed world seem to intend to block all carbon extraction.
Genocide and environmentalism
Sunday, May 11th, 2008Bryan Caplan writes
When someone says “There are too many Jews,” we suspect that he wants to kill Jews. Similarly, it turns out that at the root of Hitler’s propensity to kill people was his belief that there are too many people.
And if you’re tempted to say that Hitler proposed a barbaric solution for a real problem, take a look at how Germany actually did feed its population since 1945: increasing agricultural productivity and increasing exports. The two methods that Hitler dismissed out of hand transformed Germany into one of the richest nations in history.
Religions that command human sacrifice are good at providing power to their priesthood. Thus we see the first greenie famine being welcomed with delight by the true believers, much as they previously welcomed the return of malaria.
Environmentalists confidently state with immense confidence all sorts of “facts”, most of which are impossible to meaningfully test, some of which can be easily tested, and which test false – which test does not impair the confidence of the environmentalists in the slightest, just as the obviouse falsehood of the Christian doctrine of transubstantiation does not trouble those Christians who believe in it in the slightest.
Two obvious and extreme example are:
- the much repeated “fact” that we are in the middle of a vast mass extinction, that ten thousand species go extinct every year. Ask any greenie to name a species that has recently gone extinct. He will not be able to answer, and will be entirely untroubled by his inability to answer.
- the much repeated “fact” that the ice is melting, even though satellites show that the area of the world under ice has not changed significantly since satellites have been observing.
When environmentalist “scientists” report the disappearance of ice, they are not in fact reporting the disappearance of physical corporeal ice and snow, the stuff that causes your car to slide, and has to be shovelled off the path, the stuff that is apt to sink ships at sea. What they are really reporting is the disappearance of magic ice, the spirit of the ice, Gaia’s infusion of spirituality into a frozen wilderness that they contemplate from the comfort of Starbucks. Hence their total indifference to physical evidence. The holy ice, which is melted merely by man’s unholy gaze is disappearing, even though the merely physical ice continues to endanger shipping in pretty much the same places as it has for the last century or so.
Similarly when environmentalist “scientists” report that the polar bear is endangered, they are entirely indifferent to actual numbers of polar bears. Far from being endangered, polar bears, like deer, a pest and a hazard. Rather, because they raid garbage dumps, because they have become a pest and a hazard, the holy spirit of wild nature of which the holy bear is a manifestation, is in danger of going extinct.