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November 2010

It's Unofficial! Brisbane's coolest Spring ever.

Ron House    November 30, 2010

For the first time ever in Brisbane's climate record, the city has had an entire Spring season without a single temperature over 30C. Brisbane temperature records go back to around 1900.

It is now the last day of Spring and the temperature hit 26.8C at 3p.m. Now it is 5p.m. and the temperature has fallen to 24.7C. Although the final day of Spring has some seven hours to go, short of a volcano erupting in the Brisbane River, a new cold record has been set. September + October + November 2010: zero days above 30C.

By way of comparison, in October 2009 there were four days above 30C. In November 2009 there were 13 days above 30C, for a total of 17 days in all, or over a quarter of days of those months. Four of these exceeded 34C. Sorry, no September 2009 data: for some reason known best only to themselves, Australia's Bureau of Meteorology website doesn't have any daily data that ancient, being, apparently, unable to pop down to the local Harvey Norman and spring $100 for a new terabyte disc drive. Whether the September 2009 data is censored, deleted, or stored on floppies will remain one of those inscrutable cosmic mysteries.

But good news! They have a new "high-quality" data set suitable, they say, for climate change research. Here's a sample, the "Annual Maximum Temperature" for Brisbane Aero - presumably the airport. Maybe someone can enlighten me what these numbers are meant to be, because they certainly aren't Brisbane maximum temperatures which, as any Brisbanite knows, go infallibly way into the 30s every summer:

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A Request for the Science of AGW Alarmism

Ron House    November 29, 2010

An incisive comment posted by peter_dtm in answer to a typically naive GW piece at the Telegraph:

Comment by peter_dtm:

Another ecofascist telling us what they know we believe

and as wrong as they always are.

how to put this in a way you can understand - bearing in mind that there are MILLIONS of people (including scientists; engineers; financiers and even some politicians) who do not BELIEVE in CAGW. If you trouble yourself to read the blogs like WUWT and other assorted 'denialist' sites you would discover a vast range of thoughts - and very little belief. And lots of demands for being shown the SCIENCE behind the hypothesis.

I believe that most people consider the ecofacists to be the ones in denial.

  1. The climate changes
  2. It always has
  3. Man affects the climate
  4. CO2 and other gases stop the earth freezing
  5. CO2 and other gases stop the earth overheating
  6. The atmosphere (and therefore the climate) is a complex system.
  7. If you build a model with parameter x as a key variable; than varying parameter x will change the model as this is what the model is designed to do.
  8. The climate is so complex we do not have even a first order approximation of how it works.
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Pascal's Wager

Ron House    November 17, 2010

I recently came upon a poster in an email list, who recommended that we adopt Pascal's Wager. I can't quote the passage that moved me to write, due to the posting rules for the list in question, but the summary is that we must choose whether or not to believe in god. If we disbelieve and there is a god, we are held responsible for disbelieving; but if there is no god, we get no punishment or reward whatever we believed; so, the argument goes, it is better to wager that there is a god.

IMHO, Pascal's wager is a very, very poor argument. Consider: Suppose the real god is actually someone who hates the Christian/Moslem/Baha'i/you-name-it conception of god. He actually punishes with the most fearsome vengeance those who believe in that god, but doesn't care much if you don't believe in him.

If you think that is unlikely, here is a more likely version: God cares whether one assesses the evidence to the best of one's ability, and follows the path of intellectual honesty. He is highly offended by people who believe simply in the hope of getting a reward. Such a god will clearly punish those who choose belief from being convinced by Pascal's wager.

Or perhaps God rewards people for the good they do relative to the motivation they had for doing it - He rewards believers very little, because they expect payment (heaven) for doing good, but He rewards atheists a lot, because they did good without any expectation of payback.

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Evil ideologies - Delingpole speaks out

Ron House    November 13, 2010

James Delingpole "gets it":

“Environmentalism” is but one strategically significant theatre in a much greater ideological war being waged across the world. It’s the same one Toby Young is fighting over education; the same one the likes of Rod Liddle, Andrew Gilligan, Nick Cohen and Mark Steyn are fighting over political Islam; the same one Melanie Phillips is fighting over Israel; the same one Douglas Murray is fighting on pretty much everything.  And its ultimate outcome is at least as important as those of the ones we fought in 1914-1918 and 1939-1945. At stake is exactly the same thing the Greek alliance fought for when Western Civilisation was born at Salamis in 480 BC; the same thing we citizens of the West have been fighting for ever since: the right to forge our own destinies as free men and women, rather than remain infantilised, oppressed and enslaved as vassals of a tyrant state.

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Alarmist SpamBot loose on Twitter

Ron House    November 7, 2010

From CFACT:

Alarmist spammer unleashes Twitterbot to stifle climate debate 

An Australian software developer grew tired of debating climate realists on Twitter so he created spambot to wear down his opponents. The bot responds to anyone who expresses skepticism about man-made global warming by posting one of hundreds of canned replies in an attempt to frustrate skeptics.

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