[71] News from Absurdistan - You Can Put Lipstick on a Pig, But in the End, It Is Still a Pig

Liberty depends on the most sincere efforts to approach truth, for if truth is not held in esteem, any nonsense can take its place. And the power hungry love to put the chains of nonsense on us, to scare us into submission.

Serious science can be so entertaining. Click on the post's header for the original article and the pfd download of this most readable conspectus. From the Heartland Institute (an incredibly rich source of enlightening studies):The Twenty Three (and Growing) Smoking Guns of Global Warming, Publication Date: November 19, 2007

Abstract: This essay is about looking at the science and findings of the climate scientists from a scientific perspective, not as a meteorologist or climatologist. This essay applies unbiased eyes to the science of global warming and simply asks, 1) do the findings and data support the conclusion and 2) does the conclusion pass the stink test?

As an analyst and optometrist, I read a lot of drug research and financial reports, had lunch with many sales reps, and it was my job to filter out which drug was the best or which mutual fund justified their hype. I soon learned that you can put lipstick on a pig, but in the end, it is still a pig.

If the conclusions aren’t supported by sound research and statistics, you are most like going to get burned in the end, and waste or lose a lot of money, or worse, someone could get hurt. I also learned that products that had claims and conclusions supported by solid statistics and studies were the best ones to choose.

So before you read this essay, I ask you to forget everything you have learned about global warming. Imagine that you are a science teacher and a student just handed you a research project. Your job is to review the study with unbiased eyes, and grade the project based upon how sound the science is supporting the conclusion.

[69] News from Absurdistan - The Tip of the Iceberg ... and the Full Picture

The global warming alarmists are at it again, shrieking about “ice melt at the Poles.”

“The relentless grip of the Arctic Ocean that defied man for centuries is melting away,” warned Doug Struck in the Washington Post. “The sea ice reaches only half as far as it did 50 years ago. In the summer of 2006, it shrank to a record low. This summer, the ice pulled back even more, by an area nearly the size of Alaska.”

NASA’s James Hansen keeps claiming that CO2 is “pushing the climate past its tipping point.”

British banks are sending “volunteers” to the Arctic to see for themselves the loss of sea ice, and to view the “endangered” polar bears—whose numbers have tripled in recent years.
Ho hum. Just another day at the scare factory.

Point one: We’ve known for 20 years about the earth’s moderate, natural 1,500-year climate cycle, which we discovered in the Greenland and Antarctic ice cores. The ice shows seven previous global warmings in the past 12,000 years. Two of these—8,000 years ago and 5,000 years ago—were, for many centuries, substantially warmer than today. The Greenland and Antarctic ice caps didn’t melt.

Point two: This can’t be global warming. 1) The Arctic was also warm in the 1920s; the Russians say it happens every 70 years or so. 2) The Antarctic Ice is now at a modern high. The Antarctic has been cooling since the 1960s, according to Peter Doran’s 2002 paper in Nature. Thanks to warming’s additional snowfall, the East Antarctic ice cap is currently gaining about 45 billion tons of ice per year.

Neels Reeh of the University of Denmark says that another 1 degree C of warming would melt enough Greenland ice to raise sea levels perhaps half an inch per year—but added ice in the Antarctic would lower sea level almost that much. The net increase has been six inches per century, and it isn’t expected to change.

Why not? Cliff Ollier, well-known geoscientist from the University of Western Australia, writes to say that Hansen is just a climate modeler who doesn’t understand either ice caps or their melting. He thinks the whole ice cap melting thing is a figment of the climate modelers’ computerized imaginations, conjured up to ensure that we’re properly frightened of global warming. Otherwise, the grant money might dry up.

If the media only reported facts, who would be frightened about sea levels rising at the current rate of six inches per century? Who’d be frightened by the earth warming just two-tenths of a degree C over the past 70- years?

Ice caps don’t melt from the surface down, they melt only at the edges. Once the edges are melted, further ice loss depends on the uphill weight of the ice built up over previous centuries. The ice flows—reluctantly because it’s so cold—on the warmer ice at its base, with the upper, brittle ice carried downhill by its own weight. When a chunk of ice reaches the edge of the cap it falls off—and the AP writes a news story. That’s neither melting nor collapse.

The Greenland ice cap is 2–3 kilometers deep and much of its ice lies inside a basin that won’t slide off. Its undisturbed ice dates back at least 105,000 years. The temperatures over the ice are well below freezing, at about -30 degrees C in the north, and -20 degrees C in the south.

The Antarctic ice cores date back more than 760,000 years, in the coldest place on earth. The lowest recorded temperature was -89 C at Vostok in 1983. The highest Vostok temperature taken was -19 C in 1992—still far below freezing.

By the way, even the southernmost polar bear population is doing fine in the Davis Strait, with higher numbers and some of the largest bears yet seen.

From CGFI (click on the header to read the full original article.

[64] News from Absurdistan - Never Miss a Good Chance to Shut Up...

...those dedicated to establishing the frontier of knowledge that as yet comes closest to the truth, while inconveniently at odds with the position taken by those with the resources to manipulate the actual picture. This is what the nobel-prize winning Al Gore and his co-awardee, the IPCC panel, have been doing all along.

If Al Gore (see end of post) were to take his own stance seriously (restrict freedom of speech of those who appear factually wrong), he should shut himself up. By flat earthers he refers to people who got their facts wrong, and he is one of them - in a big way. A British judge last month ruled that copies of his documentary An Inconvenient Truth could be distributed in schools only if they were accompanied by a disclaimer listing the film’s factual errors; for more on Gore's tall tales and the broader picture from the point of view of this blog:

See my former posts:

[1] General Commentary - The Abuse of Environmental Concern
[13] News from Absurdistan - The Sun Queen of Germany
[37] News from Absurdistan - Once Respected Institutions...
[41] News from Absirdistan - The Art of Turning Figments of Peril into...
[46] News from Absurdistan - Global Scaring
[48] News from Absurdistan - The Global Warming Swindle

Freedom of expression has not been "invented" to protect the views one holds, the point of it is to protect the views one does not endorse.

It is the Internet, i.e. free intellectual competition on an unprecedented scale, that gives us all a chance to become aware of and debunk the perilous nonsense that people like Al Gore are trying to capitalise on.

Al Gore assumes the posture of arbiter of truth, posing unashamedly as the great inquisitor who arrogates to himself the right to decide who is or is not telling the truth and accordingly will be allowed to express their views, to what extent and for how long. Al Gore is a power maniac - and a dogmatic democrat (like most of us and therefore very popular) - incapable of grasping that science is not conducted by majority vote, that science does not have ultimate truth to offer but only hypotheses that take a contestable form (I predict that x if y), are to be constantly put to the severest tests and therefore always run the risk of being superseded (as the hitherto best effort to approximate the truthful picture) by improved conjectures that stand up more successfully to efforts at corroboration.

Especially in a politicised atmosphere, it is not unlikely that the best attempts at defending verisimilitude - the best approximation to truth - will not draw the largest number of supporters and perhaps be a bitterly lonesome or even dangerous pursuit.

When the Nazis boasted that the community of non-Jewish German scientists formed a consensus of disagreement vis-à-vis Einstein's physics, Einstein said: all he required to accept refutation was just one man, who would falsify his theories. Of course, Einstein was a genuine scientist who was careful to state his theoretical predictions in such a way that they could be falsified, and he would have been happy to go on searching for truth on a new basis of evidence if he were to be proven wrong.

By contrast, as a dogmatic democrat Gore resorts to the crude logic of those believing in democracy as in a fetish: If 51% of the population decide to kill the remaining 49% - that is a good and legitimate decision.

Broad sections of the population are thoughtless enough to believe in this pattern of validation, and politicians relish the populace's gullibility underlying this primitive and totalitarian practice of democratic "verification".

Poor Old Gore, not content that media coverage has been massively biased in favour of his lies, he wants to shore up his regrettable advantage by restricting the freedom of expression of dissenting voices.

This is the way the great narratives of contemporary Western politics go: We are so right (read: in command of the instruments shaping public opinion), say their proponents, it just stands to reason to make dissenters shut up ( see the war on "terrorism", see the war on "climate change", as if the climate had any other business than changing.)

Manipulators like Gore are frighteningly successful, notwithstanding growing insight into the untruthfulness of their contentions.

We are already well into spending billions, interfering with the way people are allowed to conduct themselves and distorting the economy - all based on demonstrably erroneous assumptions:

CO2 is quite simply irrelevant to global warming (which in itself is unproblematic, and if anything: rather a gift to us, though it may unfortunately already be on the wane).

Gore's central thesis is the reverse of what the best evidence suggests: global warming is causing higher levels of CO2, not the other way around, as Gore wrongly claims.

Even if we maintained Gore's mistaken assumption about CO2 causing global warming, we should recognise that man-made CO2 is so negligible compared to other sources of CO2 (vulcanos, rotting vegetation and oceanic vapour) as to make efforts at reducing anthropogenic emissions irrelevant.

The detrimental greenhouse effect specified and predicted by hundreds of computer models is not borne out by empirical evidence, while there are indications that a cooling has taken place in the relevant strata of the atmosphere rather than the disingenuously hyped dramatic warming.

In a word: there are simply no grounds to be alarmed the way we are, and by extension, it is ludicrous to take "precautionary" action as we do.

Yet, politics and the public consensus continue to be firmly based on Al Gore's assumption of a "flat earth".

NBC's Meredith Viera asked Gore, "You know, you share the prize with scientists from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And one of those scientists, John Christy, wrote an op-ed last Thursday in the Wall Street Journal in which he criticized your dire predictions about the impact of global warming. He wrote, 'I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see.'"

Gore immediately responded, "Well, he's an outlier. He no longer belongs to the IPCC. And he is way outside the scientific consensus."

Gore then attacked the news media directly, saying that "part of the challenge the news media has had in covering this story is the old habit of taking the 'on the one hand, on the other hand' approach. There are still people who believe that the earth is flat. But when you're reporting on a story like the one you're covering today, where you have people all around the world, you don't search out for someone who still believes the earth is flat and give them equal time."