anti-science

Christopher Monckton of Brenchley draws our attention to another highly-paid individual in a position of trust who had taken the easy way out when called upon to stand up for principles.

In the U.S. we have had a number of attacks in which police have been murdered in the course of their duty. Whether there was a good reason for the anger of the murderer, there was no justification for this response. But my point is this: We still see American police out on the street doing their duty, even though doing so might cost them their lives.

But there is no such edifying example from Professor John Butterworth, "the useless bureaucrat in charge of the College’s department of Physics and Astronomy", as Monckton calls him. Faced with protests about some colleagues running a seminar on climate change - but one (HORROR!) at which a skeptical eye would be cast upon the mainstream viewpoint - the cowardly Butterworth asked the organiser to cancel his booking.

Compare: Ordinary police continue to risk their actual rives to do their job; but Butterworth, in a much more privileged and responsible position, cannot even risk some criticism.

Both butterworth and the entire UCL have trashed their reputations over this.

There is a more general point to be made here.

Over at WUWT someone made a comment:

NZ Willy February 21, 2016 at 10:18 am

This is just the climate equivalent of astronomy’s “dark matter”. The technique is, when evidence refutes your theory, don’t change the theory, but instead announce a new kind of phenomenon — previously unheard of and scientifically unmodelled — and nest it into your theory and proclaim that it makes your theory even stronger! My BS meter is broken now from overloading.

Agreed. Background radiation too flat? The universe suddenly inflated for no reason to flatten it out. Galaxies spin too fast? Must be dark matter. Universe receding too quickly? Must be dark energy. What are these things? How do they fit into the standard particle model (itself a massive parameter-fixing exercise)? No idea. But guess what! IT’S TRUE! There was inflation, there’s dark matter, dark energy! Aren’t cosmologists wonderful! /sarc

NOAA's climate.gov PR effort is designed to deceive us, but it would be nice if they would at least try to do so by twisting the truth, rather than tell outright porkies. On the page https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/global-warming-frequently-asked-questions under "What is the 'greenhouse effect'?" we find this audacious display of dishonesty:

While it's not a perfect analogy, some say the atmosphere works like a greenhouse. The sun's rays (shortwave energy) enter a greenhouse through its glass ceiling and walls to warm the interior. The glass makes it hard for the heat (longwave energy) to escape, and heat builds up inside the greenhouse until the heat can escape fast enough.

Certain naturally occurring gases in Earth's atmosphere have a similar warming effect on the surface. This warming is referred to as the "greenhouse effect," and the gases that trap heat are called "greenhouse gases." The most important greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere are water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and ozone. Earth's surface must warm to an average of about 59°F (with present-day concentrations) until enough energy can be emitted by greenhouse gases and escape to space to balance the energy being absorbed from the Sun.

Though these important greenhouse gases occur naturally in the atmosphere in varying concentrations, human activities are directly and indirectly increasing their abundance. In addition, other greenhouse gases not normally found in nature are being added to the atmosphere. The net result is to intensify Earth's greenhouse effect, causing Earth's surface to warm.

Let's pull it apart in detail:

Dear oh dear! All those naive newborns who trust "climate scientists"! Wake up and smell the scandal. Case in point, Wattsupwiththat carries a report today from the University of Wisconsin-Madison of a new study that can't avoid the fact that the models and the data are now in clear, unambiguous contradiction. From the report:

“We have been building models and there are now robust contradictions,” says Liu, a professor in the UW-Madison Center for Climatic Research. “Data from observation says global cooling. The physical model says it has to be warming.”

A real scientist, of course, would conclude that, things having been checked and rechecked (see definition of "robust"), the models are wrong. And since the models are the only evidence for the catastrophic global warming theory, which is already in serious disagreement with reality, that the theory is wrong too. But what do the authors of this "study" conclude?

The University of Queensland has sent an extraordinary letter to a researcher who wrote a paper exposing the bad research in the Cook et al "97% consensus" nonsense paper about climate change.

The researcher is Brandon Shollenberger, whose website is at http://hiizuru.wordpress.com. In their letter UQ not only threaten legal action if Shollenberger publishes research based on the data, they also threaten legal action if he reveals the content of the letter itself to anyone! This is beyond disgraceful. It would be bad enough from a commercial enterprise, but coming from a publicly funded institution whose every output is paid for by the taxpayer, it beggars belief.

UQ, you have received my last ever alumni donation! You have become trash, beneath contempt. I am ashamed to hold degrees awarded by you.

Here is a portion of Brandon's blog post about the UQ intimidation letter:

As you read the following, please ask yourself why, if this "scientific theory" is so scientific and so well confirmed, all we ever get from its proponents are ratbag acts like the following. Why can't they win by simply convincing us with the weight of evidence? Instead it is pulling down the integrity of the once-respected institutions of society. like universities and governments.

The story is in this email from Gordon Fulks:

Hello Everyone,

In theory at least Oregon State University (OSU) seems to be a bastion of academic freedom, diversity, and tolerance. A wide range of ideas are openly discussed. The most viable rise to the top and the least viable fade away. But it is all a fairy tale, because OSU operates under a politically correct regimen that dictates what is acceptable to say and what is not. Transgressors who dare to be different are eventually weeded out so that the campus maintains its ideological purity.

OSU is not yet as swift or efficient as the Soviet system when Joseph Stalin was trying to quash dissent among biologists who refused to go along with Trofim Lysenko. If warnings to compromise their integrity were not followed, Stalin simply had biologists shot. That quickly thinned the ranks of all biologists and persuaded the remaining ones to comply with Stalin’s wishes. Of course, it also destroyed Soviet biology, because Lysenko was pedaling nonsense. And Russian biology has never recovered.

We learned over the weekend that chemist Nickolas Drapela, PhD has been summarily fired from his position as a “Senior Instructor” in the Department of Chemistry. The department chairman Richard Carter told him that he was fired but would not provide any reason. Subsequent attempts to extract a reason from the OSU administration have been stonewalled. Drapela appears to have been highly competent and well-liked by his students. Some have even taken up the fight to have him reinstated.

The New York Times published a 'map' of 'organised climate change denial', which is supposed to be 'winning' because of the deep pockets and superior organisation of the hidden movers and shakers in the fossil fuel industry. As I showed before, the Australian fossil fuel industry alone is funding the climate alarmists to the tune of a billion dollars. I would be very much surprised if Andrew C. Revkin, author of the latest piece of work at NYT, can identify even a tenth of that much money spent worldwide on the skeptic side of the argument. In other words, pot - kettle - black.

But in the comments, this neat summary of the whole scare appeared:

Piers Corbin is the UK weather man who correctly forecasted this year's horrendous winter in the UK, whilst the official MET office simply added one more 'warm' failed prediction to their long list of embarrassments. He has had some incisive thoughts on the phenomenon of climate change as a bad religion, while his success where others have failed gives him the credibility to say it. From the linked article:

The really disturbing thing is the Warmists (aka Climate Changers) are totally arrogant, deluded and self righteous; and have become a dangerous cult that propagates falsity and anti-science.

I think what we have is a kind of warmist religious cult which doesn't exactly have a cult leader (like various past cults in the 70s and 80s, or Stalin or Hitler or Mao) - although Monbiot would make quite a good 'little Stalin' and James Lovelock probably believes he is 'it' - but in the same way as a cult the followers turn reality on its head to justify their ends.

Their ends in this case being reducing CO2 and various often very seriously misguided somehow linked do-gooding projects taken from a sort of a la carte menu of whatever you like ranging from using old tin cans (no prob but I don't need a religion to do that), burning food (biofuels), Carbon trading and so on to paying Chinese ex peasants to build prayer wheel avenues (wind farms) on our lands and seas at our expense.

As reported on CFACT, attendees to the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Cancun, Mexico were fooled into signing a petition to ban water.

And, Oh Yes, also to reduce the U.S. GDP by 6%.

I have been asked, do I really think there is something 'religious' about all this. And my answer is Yes. But unlike many climate realists, I do not think this is limited to a few nutty eco-religionists. The "eco" part of it is just a subset - a big subset right now, for sure, but just a subset - of a malign influence in human affairs that goes back at least as far as the French revolution.

The idea, in a nutshell, is that "There must be a group to hate". From Robespierre to Marx, to Lenin and Stalin, to modern feminism and racial identity theory, this key, evil idea is resurrected after each failure and produces a new round of misery and death, but in the resurrection it comes with a new 'talking point'. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, economic and class warfare was exposed for the hateful nonsense it is, and freedom-loving people insisting on democracy and the right to own property. So the 'believers' quietly ceased talking economics and concentrated on their other irons in the fire: the evils of the male half of humanity, and on the evils of whites as compared with everyone else on Earth. Meanwhile they had dreamed up a new one: evil human industrial activity harming all the other living creatures.

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.