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“Climate denial and the abuse of peer review“
Can someone get Stephan Lewandowsky his medication? His new marketing message is that “deniers” don’t do peer review papers. There’s a curious case of acute-peer-review-blindness (APRB) occurring. It doesn’t matter that there are literally thousands of pages of skeptical information on the web, quoting hundreds of peer reviewed papers, by people far more qualified than a cognitive-psychologist, yet he won’t even admit they exist.
…most climate deniers avoid scrutiny by sidestepping the peer-review process that is fundamental to science, instead posting their material in the internet or writing books.
Dear Stephan, deny this: 900 papers that support skeptics. What is it about these hundreds of papers published in Nature, Science, GRL, PNAS, and Journal of Climate that you find impossible to acknowledge? (And do tell Stephan, if people need to publish peer reviewed material before they venture an opinion on climate science online, how many peer reviewed articles on climate science have you produced?)
Obviously, the real deniers are the people who deny the hundreds of papers with empirical evidence that show the hockey stick is wrong, the world was warmer, the climate changes, and the models are flawed.
9 out of […]
Here in Australia we are in a eerie twilight world: it’s obvious skepticism is thriving, and plain that those pushing the carbon tax are desperate. Yet this is a train-wreck in action.
The current government popularity is as sunk as sunk can be. On a daily basis, commentators ask how long Gillard will survive, or how the Labor Party could be doomed or posit yet another explanation for “the downfall”. “Change or Die” says party elder, John Faulkner. Yet paradoxically, it is just because the government is so desperate that it can’t “afford” to bury the dead-lemon policy called the Carbon Tax. A weak government is a dangerous one.
It’s like a barking mad virus has run amok
Two weeks from now, the Greens get control of our Senate (possibly for six years), but the House of Representatives is as knife-edge dysfunctional as ever. With legislative seats so closely tied, we’re left with three so-called independents who — in theory — might be talked into voting against the Carbon Tax. In practice, it’s virtually an impossibility. On the day that Tony Abbott delivered his searing budget reply, Windsor was seen to sympathetically put his arm around Gillard’s back and […]
Yes, we all wish we didn’t need to protest, but it’s a small price to pay for living in one of the best nations on Earth. If we don’t stop this slide now, corruption and inefficiency grow stronger, and we will all be poorer in every sense of the word.
We don’t have to have a carbon tax. We don’t have to work for part of every day in order to prepare Australia for a threat that the evidence suggests is a non-event, and that most nations are not taking seriously.
Melbourne – Sunday June 19th !! 12:30 NOW
UPDATE: Bolt has this listed as “a rally against the carbon dioxide tax tomorrow outside Melbourne’s Parliament House at 12.30pm. Advertised speakers include the Nationals’ Barnaby Joyce and the Liberals’ Sophie Mirabella.”
1 pm outside Victorian Parliament, (see Facebook)
NSW CENTRAL COAST — REVOLTING CO2 TAX
Sunday, June 26, 1:00pm – 2:30pm,
Gosford Waterfront Dane Drive (next to the Gosford Swimming Pool)
Note: Rally date confirmed Sunday 26 June. Venue is still being finalised with Council and will be published as soon as possible. Volunteers please email Darren [email protected]
June 18th, 2011 | Tags: Protests | Category: AGW socio-political, Politics |  Print This Post | |
The trenches in the climate war tonight have coalesced at Lynas’s blog and at Judith Curry’s. (I did say yesterday it was shaping up to be a Judith-Curry-moment didn’t I?)
The Greenpeace-gate moment is making waves.
It’s in the news: David Derbyshire, Daily Mail, Oliver Wright, The Independent, Lorene Gunter, National Post, (h/t GWPF Benny Peiser)
Stefan Singer, Director for Energy Policy at WWF, has waded into the comments on Lynas’s formerly-quiet site. Bob Ward is also still at it. (Lynas is asking who exactly Bob Ward is — answer, a PR man for the Grantham Institute). Meanwhile the IPCC staff are rushing to reply to questions as written up by Andy Revkin.
The signs are excellent. As Lynas says:
If the ‘deniers’ are the only ones standing up for the integrity of the scientific process, and the independence of the IPCC, then I too am a ‘denier’. Indeed, McIntyre and I have formed an unlikely double-act, posing a series of questions – together with the New York Times’s Andy Revkin – to the IPCC report’s lead author Professor Ottmar Edenhofer, to which he has yet to respond.
What Mark Lynas wrote is apropos — and pointedly […]
What were they thinking? Greenpeace and the IPCC are both bleeding credibility over this one. The silly thing is, if they weren’t so arrogant, they could have hidden this so easily. The obvious conclusion is they are not even trying.
Steve McIntyre discovered that a lead-author on an IPCC report was also a Greenpeace employee, and worse, he reviewed his own work. A recent IPCC report claimed we could get 80% of the world’s energy from renewables was thus founded not on a selective peer reviewed paper written by independent scientists, and not even on a shonky economic “study” issued by a big-government-loving-university, but, gasp, on a Greenpeace sponsored wish-list for world peace. Hello?
The IPCC issued a press release (May 9th) though as usual, with no details or sources at the time. They got the media headlines, then quietly “backed” it up a month later with a 1000 page report they figure no one will read. Certainly, they must be a little surprised that within two days of quietly releasing the tome, it is spreading like fire across the blogosphere, and some of it’s deepest secrets are already out of the bag.
Let’s be clear about this, Greenpeace […]
Apart from conferences organized by the Heartland Foundation I don’t recall a skeptic dominated professional conference or science association convention. Skeptics have spoken at many conferences before, but this time the skeptical speakers vastly outnumbered the fans of the IPCC, ten to one. This was an event where — by the sounds of it — it would have been uncool to be an unskeptical scientist (as indeed it ought to be). No prizes for guessing which branch of science could no longer be held down by political correctness.
It’s a sign of the times, the phase shift is coming.
Tom Harris gives a great summary in the Financial Post:
Climate Isn’t Up for Debate
Anyone not already familiar with the stance of geologists towards the global warming scare would have been shocked by the conference at the University of Ottawa at the end of May. In contrast to most environmental science meetings, climate skepticism was widespread among the thousand geoscientists from Canada, the United States and other countries who took part in GAC-MAC 2011 (the Joint Annual Meeting of the Geological Association of Canada, the Mineralogical Association of Canada, the Society of Economic Geologists […]
Qassiarsuk: This is the site of the Viking settlement of 972 and unlike much of Greenland, offers relatively sheltered grazing land for sheep. Photo: John McLean. (Click to see more images of Greenland).
For the first time temperatures over the last 5,600 years have been reassembled from the inhabited area of Greenland. (Other estimates were from ice-cores that are far inland.)
William D’Andrea, the paper’s first author says: “.. we can say there is a definite cooling trend in the region right before the Norse disappear.”
8.2 out of 10 based on 5 ratings […]
The precautionary principle is exposed again for the insidious mindless posturing that it is.
Biofuel policies push more people into poverty as food prices rise and the poor are forced to spend more of their income on food. In a study published in Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Indur Goklany calculated the additional mortality burden of biofuels policies and found that nearly 200,000 people died in 2010 alone, because of efforts to use biofuels to reduce CO2 emissions.
Bad Government is a killer.
“Could Biofuel Policies Increase Death and Disease in Developing Countries?
Goklany (2011) estimated that the increase in the poverty headcount due to higher biofuel production between 2010 and 2004 implies 192,000 additional deaths and 6.7 million additional lost DALYs in 2010 alone.
He compared this death tally to the WHO figures for deaths attributed to global warming and finds that the biofuels policies are more deadly. (And he is not including any increase in poverty due to other anti-global warming practices).
1. Biofuel policies are retarding humanity’s age-old battle against poverty.
2. Since according to the World Health Organization’s latest estimates, 141,000 deaths and 5.4 million lost DALYs in 2004 could be attributed to global […]
Ladies and Gentlemen this is the front line trench of modern science. If climate science is so important, and there is no time to waste, why does the system try so hard to discourage dissent (because they don’t want to find the truth, only the “correct” answer)?
This paper by Lindzen and Choi was submitted and rejected by GRL in 2009, then rejected twice more by PNAS. (And in part because it needed to meet impossible standards. In the end, it was supposed to include “the kitchen sink” but fit into a sandwich bag — see below). The paper could have been out for discussion in 2009, and while it has improved upon revision, was it worth the two year wait? Those gains could have been made in two months (or two weeks) online.
Even the reviewers understand how significant these results would be if they are right. One admits the new paper shows the models don’t match the observations.
Science needs free and open criticism, and competing theories. If Lindzen’s analysis is revolutionary, but potential wrong, is it so bad to publish those results? He is one of the most eminent researchers in the […]
The Australian 2011 Monckton Tour
A Carbon Tax will
BANKRUPT AUSTRALIA
THE SCIENCE DOES NOT JUSTIFY IT
Viscount Christopher Monckton will explain why. Dr David Evans and Jo Nova will accompany him in Sydney and Newcastle
5.5 out of 10 based on 4 ratings […]
The Greens are a community oriented party, and often ask for feedback. Indeed they’ve been searching for feedback on their emissions trading plan for over two years on their blog.
“Do you support the Greens’ plan on emissions trading?”
Their blog visitors were giving them a clear message. Of 2268 voters, 80% didn’t like their plan.
Even though this poll started on May 4th, 2009, within 2 hours of the link being posted here, a dreadful accident must have occurred and the page disappeared to a 403 error. It wasn’t just lost from Sarah Hanson-Young’s blog, it also disappeared from Bob Brown’s blog, and Adam Bandt’s blog. (It had taken them many blog-page-years to amass those results, which says something about traffic stats of the Greens blog.)
To help them I’ve saved a screen capture, with the results.
The long running successful poll has mysteriously been taken over by what looks like a feral cat.
…
4.9 out of 10 based on 7 ratings […]
TODAY June 7th 2011: Phenomenal eruption on the sun (see the bottom of the post for more info).
Apparently previous studies of the sun-climate connection looked at the equatorial polar magnetic field which produces sun spots, but they did not consider the polar magnetic component of the solar dynamo. The polar fields are less strong than the equatorial fields, but it is claimed that the total magnetic fluxes of both fields are comparable. With proxy data they derive an empirical relation between tropospherical temperatures and solar equatorial and polar magnetic fields. The polar field could contribute about 30% as much as the equatorial field.
The paper, published in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics focused on the period 1844-1960 (but extended at least one graph back to 1600) and finds our current warming period is not that different from earlier episodes and that the increase in solar activity in the last 400 years explains the warming, without any need to invoke a man-made enhanced greenhouse hypothesis.
7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings […]
Wait for it, some death threat emails have been released. Number eight is positively sinister with intent (shield your children):
Now several of the abusive emails have been published on a blog by environmental writer Graham Readfearn, after the scientists agreed to release the poison pen letters.
Number Eight:
“If we see you continue, we will get extremely organised and precise against you. We will not do so if you rightfully argue against our points from a science view. But we will if you choose to stray into attacks on us as people or as a movement. The institution and funders that support you will find the attention concerning.”
God forbid, imagine a member of the public imploring a scientist to argue with science instead of slurs. Well I’ll be!
How chilling does it get?
7.5 out of 10 based on 4 ratings […]
Guest Post by Speedy
“Speedy” in comments on this site has done a better than excellent job of satirizing the satirists (Clarke and Dawe), so I’m reposting one of his comments here for those who missed it. See the bottom of the post for the background on the duo he is satirizing and a youtube of them. Speedy has very much captured their style.
Bryan Dawe, ABC
If the ABC was relevant, Part 32.
(The Repairman)
(SCENE: Front door of BRYAN’s home. Door bell rings. BRYAN answers door. It is JOHN.)
John: G’day. I’m here about the climate.
Bryan: What climate?
John: Your climate. Our climate. THE climate. I’m here to fix it.
Bryan: What’s wrong with it?
John: It’s buggered. Absolutely buggered.
Bryan: No it isn’t. I was using it this morning.
John: What for?
Bryan: For drying the washing out the back.
John: Spoken like a true layperson! What you have just witnessed was not the working of an healthy climate, but a clear manifestation of catastrophic global warming! Scientists warn that if current trends continue, […]
Matt and Janet Thompson
They came from the USA expecting to get a fair go. They broke no law, ran a profitable business, spoke out as skeptics and now stand to lose everything.
It’s not one law for all anymore, it’s 33 subclauses on your license because you’re not politically correct. It’s sudden changes to regulatory conditions that cost a family business millions. Bureaucrats can break a popular profitable business. What has happened to The Thompsons is something I didn’t think was possible in Australia. I thought we elected the people who make the rules. I thought our media would cover a scandal. How naive of me.
A Federal Court judge has just ruled that these Family Farmers can’t even sue the Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC) of Western Australia even though their license conditions were suddenly changed for no measureable, auditable reason. The decision is not good news, but Matt and Janet are not giving up. They will appeal the decision.
We can’t let Western Civilization be engulfed by bureaucratic fiefdoms. Matt and Janet could have taken the easier road and given up but they’re determined not to be beaten by the system, and if […]
Either there are a lot more skeptics than believers, or the skeptics are more likely to be on the net.
Some polls you may want to take part in (which are registering around 3 out 4 votes for skeptics).
The Greens are running scared.
7 out of 10 based on 7 ratings […]
My sympathies go out to anyone who lives in fear for their life, no matter what their beliefs are about a certain climate theory. I soundly condemn death threats.
Though, as it happens, such a thing is completely out of character for any skeptic I know.
After 50,000 comments on my site, violent thoughts are exceedingly rare, from skeptics anyway. Only a few [skeptics] have even issued vague allusions wishing ill-health on someone. (And these were made not by regulars, but by anonymous “hotmail” commenters; real skeptics, or poseurs perhaps?)
Indeed, the team that makes naked death threats publicly has always been the pro-carbon-tax fans. Think of Greenpeace “we know where you live…“. Think of 10:10, “we will blow up your children”. Joe Romm encourages the idea that skeptics will be strangled in their beds. A blogger at TPM pondered when it would be acceptable to execute climate deniers. Richard Glover, suggests forcibly tattooing skeptics opinions on their bodies’ (though wisely thinks maybe it’s a bit too Nazi creepy). Willis Eschenbach came up with a list of hate-related behavior. There is plenty to pick from.
So when the Canberra Times claims skeptics have been threatening climate scientists, I am, not […]
Australia (orange line second from the bottom) has a lower energy intensity of use than many countries (see below for more information). On this graph. Japan is the lowest. The world average is the dark purple line. China is so high it is off the scale.
It’s part of the spin game that almost every statistic is spun-into-oblivion, and here, thanks to Mike Wilson, is the analysis of why “per capita” statistics are meaningless.
Ross Garnaut (and dozens of others) claim Australia has a high emissions intensity of energy use. Yet Mike Wilson shows below that Australia’s energy intensity is not just declining, it’s below the world average, and below Canada, South Africa, China and the US.
The Garnaut Review:
“Relative to other OECD countries, Australia’s high emissions are mainly the result of the high emissions intensity of energy use, rather than the high energy intensity of the economy or exceptionally high per capita income. Transport emissions are not dissimilar to those of other developed countries. Australia’s per capita agricultural emissions are among the highest in the world, especially because of the large numbers of sheep and cattle.
The high emissions intensity of energy […]
L-NP (59%) HAS ITS BIGGEST RECORDED LEAD EVER OVER THE ALP (41%) MAJORITY OF AUSTRALIANS (53%) DO NOT WANT THE CARBON TAX
The latest telephone Morgan Poll conducted over the last three nights, May 31 — June 2, 2011, shows the L-NP (59%) with its biggest winning lead over the ALP (41%) since the Morgan Poll began recording Two-Party preferred results in early 1993.
A clear majority of Australian electors (53%, down 1% since March 2011) oppose the Gillard Government’s plan to introduce a carbon tax, 37% (down 1%) support the proposed carbon tax and 10% (up 2%) can’t say.
Although most oppose the carbon tax Australians are concerned about Global Warming. When asked for their view of Global Warming most Australians (50%, down 4% since January 2010) say that ‘If we don’t act now it will be too late’ and a further 15% (up 3%) say ‘It is already too late,’ only 32% (up 1%) believe that ‘Concerns are exaggerated,’ and 3% (unchanged) can’t say.
7.5 out of 10 based on 4 ratings […]
Let’s say “Yes” to real science, the way it’s meant to be, science that relies on measurements from things like thermometers, ice cores, and satellites. Real science is about observations of the real deal, not “simulations” on a computer. 28 million weather balloons, 6000 boreholes, 3000 ocean buoys, and 30 years of satellites tell us that rising CO2 is not much to worry about.
Let say “Yes” to helping the environment by looking at real problems instead of fake ones. Let’s do practical things to stop our soil being eroded, to save our flora and fauna, and to stop real pollutants like soot, ozone and sulfur dioxide. We all know that a tax won’t solve salinity, or change the weather.
Lets say “Yes” to using our tax money wisely. Who are we kidding? Solar panels, windmills and funny light globes are not going to stop droughts, floods and nasty storms. Why put more money into the hands of people who’ve spent around 4 billion dollars putting Chinese solar panels on roofs, and pink batts in houses. We can’t control the weather and we can’t export second hand solar panels. Let’s say NO to pork barrelling, and pink-batts-that-kill, and solar […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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