Tag: climate change

A quote to ponder …

Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects…The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.

What is going on here, has McGee switched sides?

Just as a diversion, Britain’s Met Office has had a little difficulty answering a question or six raised in the House in question time. For a long and slightly technical read … Bishop Hill. The simplified version is <HERE> but you lose the thrill of the chase.

I went to Sunday school a couple of times and if we were good, or it was our birthday we were given a text. It would be a snippet from the bible, of enormous significance, printed on a small card or piece of paper. You were encouraged to ponder on it and learn it. The fortune cooky/christmas cracker model of scholarship. Well the text at the head of this post was shamelessly filched from Watts Up With That, the author was Peter Gwyne, it was taken from Newsweek, April 28, 1975, lamenting the failure of governments to prepare for global cooling, yes cooling …

Climate models …

Wikipedia …

In particle physics, antimatter is material composed of antiparticles, which have the same mass as particles of ordinary matter but have opposite charge and quantum spin. Antiparticles bind with each other to form antimatter in the same way that normal particles bind to form normal matter. For example, a positron (the antiparticle of the electron, with symbol e+) and an antiproton (symbol p) can form an antihydrogen atom. Furthermore, mixing matter and antimatter can lead to the annihilation of both, in the same way that mixing antiparticles and particles does, thus giving rise to high-energy photons (gamma rays) or other particle–antiparticle pairs. The end result of antimatter meeting matter is a release of energy proportional to the mass as the mass-energy equivalence equation, E=mc2 shows.

Well obviously.

But wait, what about anti-information?

Lovely day …

Melbourne is enjoying an Indian Summer, or at least a few days of one. I’ve just walked the dog along the beach, clear sky, no wind, calm sea and a top of about 25 degrees. Beautiful.

Or very alarming depending on your point of view, although it’s often said that if you don’t like Melbourne’s weather just hang around for a while.

Whilst not exclusively the province of old women, the weather does seem to hold a special interest for them, you often hear them discussing it. That is very interesting because old women are often witches. The Malleus Maleficarum(Latin for “Hammer of the Witches“) is a treatise on the prosecution of witches, written in 1486 and published the following year. It admits that men can also be witches but malificarum is the feminine form of the noun.

Outside certain backward parts of the world, witches are rarely prosecuted these days but it was big business in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The trials spread throughout Europe and Scandinavia and were conducted by Catholics and Protestants, in both ecclesiastical and secular courts. The victims were disproportionately women, especially the poor and the widowed.

That period coincides with the Little Ice Age. Clearly no coincidence because as the Malleus tells us in a chapter titled “How they Raise and Stir up Hailstorms and Tempests, and Cause Lightning to Blast both Men and Beasts” witches can control the weather. The chapter concludes with “Therefore it is reasonable to conclude that, just as easily as they raise hailstorms, so can they cause lightning and storms at sea; and so no doubt at all remains on these points.” Even then, the science was settled.

The end of the Little Ice Age can best be explained by a modern theory. The burning of all those witches released a great deal of carbon dioxide.

 

Consensus …

When the truth of an issue is easily knowable one would expect consensus to be at a high level. When an issue is complex, observations difficult to interpret and the conclusion untestable one would not expect consensus to reach 97%.

Entire industries face extinction as the world’s governments seek to impose trillions of dollars of taxes on carbon emissions. The New York Times’s Thomas Friedman approvingly writes that Australian politicians—not to mention public figures through the world—now risk “political suicide” if they deny climate change. But if carbon dioxide turns out not to be the boogey-man that climate scientists have made it out to be, tens of trillions will be wasted in unneeded remediation. Much of the world—billions of humans—will endure a severely diminished quality of life with nothing to show for it.

Click the link to read an interesting essay by BRUMBERG and BRUMBERG.

Cool …

With each passing year, it is becoming increasingly clear that global warming is not a scientific theory subject to empirical falsification, but a political ideology that has to be fiercely defended against any challenge. It is ironic that skeptics are called “deniers” when every fact that would tend to falsify global warming is immediately explained away by an industry of denial.

David Deming is a geophysicist and a professor at the University of Oklahoma, the argument leading up to the conclusion above is worth a read <HERE>.

Plus ça change …

… plus c’est la même chose.

An update to The never ending story. Rupert Wyndham impressed me with his warnings of thermageddon from the past but today I stumbled on a little collection posted by Tim Blair in 2009. I’ll post the link below but I think it far more fun to take the last item first.

All quotes are from The New York Times …

• 2005: “Another melancholy gathering of climate scientists presented evidence this month that the Antarctic ice shelf is melting – a prospect difficult to imagine a decade ago.”

The emphasis, I confess, is mine. A decade earlier would have been 1995. Now a journey back in time with Tim and the New York Times  …

• 1881: “This past Winter, both inside and outside the Arctic circle, appears to have been unusually mild. The ice is very light and rapidly melting …”

• 1932: “NEXT GREAT DELUGE FORECAST BY SCIENCE; Melting Polar Ice Caps to Raise the Level of Seas and Flood the Continents”

• 1934: “New Evidence Supports Geology’s View That the Arctic Is Growing Warmer”

• 1937: “Continued warm weather at the Pole, melting snow and ice.”

• 1954: “The particular point of inquiry concerns whether the ice is melting at such a rate as to imperil low-lying coastal areas through raising the level of the sea in the near future.”

• 1957: “U.S. Arctic Station Melting”

• 1958: “At present, the Arctic ice pack is melting away fast. Some estimates say that it is 40 per cent thinner and 12 per cent smaller than it was fifteen years [ago].”

• 1959: “Will the Arctic Ocean soon be free of ice?”

• 1971: “STUDY SAYS MAN ALTERS CLIMATE; U.N. Report Links Melting of Polar Ice to His Activities”

• 1979: “A puzzling haze over the Arctic ice packs has been identified as a byproduct of air pollution, a finding that may support predictions of a disastrous melting of the earth’s ice caps.”

• 1982: “Because of global heating attributed to an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide from fuel burning, about 20,000 cubic miles of polar ice has melted in the past 40 years, apparently contributing to a rise in sea levels …”

• 1999: “Evidence continues to accumulate that the frozen world of the Arctic and sub-Arctic is thawing.”

• 2000: “The North Pole is melting. The thick ice that has for ages covered the Arctic Ocean at the pole has turned to water, recent visitors there reported yesterday.”

• 2002: “The melting of Greenland glaciers and Arctic Ocean sea ice this past summer reached levels not seen in decades, scientists reported today.”

• 2004: “There is an awful lot of Arctic and glacial ice melting.”