The Zero Carbon Bill analysis – 6

Essay 6: Big emissions reduction bang for every buck

Reducing emissions is expensive. Every dollar spent on climate change mitigation is a dollar unavailable for health or housing or poverty; waste is unacceptable. New Zealand’s new Commission must recognise that where emissions occur is irrelevant and stick with the “global peaking” aim.

Continue Reading →

Visits: 105

The Zero Carbon Bill analysis – 5

Essay 5: Cuckoo Shaw lays 1.5°C egg in cosy Paris nest

The Paris treaty ratified by New Zealand says: “We’ll keep the temperature increase to 2°C, never mind about trying for 1.5°C.” But Shaw says: “Yeah, nah. Never mind about 2°C, we’ll shoot for 1.5°C, the lower the better, right? Lead the world. How hard can it be?”

Continue Reading →

Visits: 68

The Zero Carbon Bill analysis – 4

New paper kills the Zero Carbon Bill dead

Nuclear power has moved on since Fukushima — now Gen III and IV, small, self-regulating, cannot melt down, put them virtually anywhere. Available in various sizes that last from 3 to 20 years or more. If it fails, truck in another one. Cheaper than coal, more efficient and safer than ever. Come on, Greenies, why resist it? Afraid we might survive your climate crisis?

Essay 4: Climate scare could be gone by 2030

The Hon Barry Brill’s fourth essay (pdf, 302 KB) of these eleven on the Zero Carbon Bill examines the Government’s economic modelling, which tells us increasing New Zealand’s net emissions target from 50% to 100% by 2050 will cost us $200–$300 billion over 30 or more years of ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat.’ Continue Reading →

Visits: 112

The Zero Carbon Bill analysis – 3

Essay 3: Climate-wise, we are the champions!

The third (pdf, 240 KB) of these eleven essays by the Hon Barry Brill on the Zero Carbon Bill has a look at the vanity factor, asking:

Who is the current gold medallist in the climate policy stakes?

From Copenhagen in 2009 to Paris in 2015 we did our best to hog the limelight by taking a lead. Now the Green Party strives to legislate for carbon neutrality by 2050 to gain the prize. But that’s all about ego—what are the facts? Continue Reading →

Visits: 153

The Zero Carbon Bill analysis – 2

Essay 2: 2050, costs vs benefits

The second (pdf, 267 KB) of these eleven essays by the Hon Barry Brill on the Zero Carbon Bill has a look at what it will cost us and what we will get in return. Barry asks the fundamental question:

Is such a near-term target worth the price?

The sacrifices in eliminating carbon emissions by 2050 will be far more painful than some undetectable heat, and far off, as it’s 30 years away. Admittedly this is a long time for government planning—usually tuned to about five years at a time—but it’s a savagely short time to create total disruption in our commercial, industrial, agricultural and other spheres—and then attempt to smooth it over. Continue Reading →

Visits: 145

The Zero Carbon Bill

Essay 1: The Zero Carbon Bill

Barry Brill has given us these eleven essays on the Zero Carbon Bill. Do sample these enjoyable pieces for yourself, with their crisp writing and clear logic. It’s illuminating to absorb Barry’s analysis of the origins of the Bill, its aims, strategies, substantial flaws, and his oh-so-pragmatic strategy to align the Bill with our international obligations without exposing our lower classes to the egregious fanaticism of the coalition’s Green climate dogma.

Barry’s first essay (pdf, 185 KB) opens with the startling news that the Bill is

not only the most expensive (by orders of magnitude) but might also be the most dangerous piece of government legislation ever placed before New Zealand’s House of Representatives. (– emphasis added)

Continue Reading →

Visits: 186

Todd Muller must abandon Shaw’s treacherous Zero Carbon folly

Todd Muller supports a socialist wrecker — is that wise?

Some National Party strategists think Todd Muller can hardly say he supports the Zero Carbon Act then do nothing about it. Sooner or later you must accept that National has agreed to the Zero Carbon Bill as a matter of policy and therefore has to show some acceptance of its obligations.

But the implied condition of support for any proposal is that the assumptions behind it remain true. If it emerges that the basis of a policy is wrong, it then becomes the height of reason to withdraw your support. The new honourable path is to abandon it.

Continue Reading →

Visits: 3

Shattering analysis of Shaw’s nil carbon dreams

Nobody really knows how much it would cost us to attempt to meet James Shaw’s Zero Carbon prescription, as it would take 30 years and there is much about it that is yet unknown.

But the Zero Carbon Bill’s own accompanying Regulatory Impact Statement (RIS) admits that it’s impossible to identify any quantifiable benefits at all, and following Barry Brill’s outstanding examination of the Bill Continue Reading →

Visits: 243

Zero Carbon meeting — science loses

Consultation or propaganda?

I attended the public meeting on the Zero Carbon Bill in Tauranga last Monday. A team from the Ministry for the Environment (MfE) presented details as part of public consultation on the bill. About 80 people (mostly old ones) turned up, but the Environment Minister, the Hon James Shaw, though expected, did not turn up. Continue Reading →

Visits: 498

Monckton on the real carbon agenda

Monckton poster

Agenda 21

After 21 years, Agenda 21 is still not a household word, but it should be. For we should know our enemy.

It is a tribute to the UN’s polished propaganda machine that relatively few have heard of Agenda 21, yet we all know its other name: “sustainability.” Which is to see only the camouflage and not the beast within; the gentle mouth of murmured counsel, not the crafty scheming that destroys dissent.

For, widely disseminated since it was spawned by social-engineering do-gooders in 1992, Agenda 21 has both the power and the intention to destroy the basic freedoms that we in the well-ordered western democracies naively presume are as fundamental to us as eating or breathing. We fondly imagine that where there are human beings there is freedom. But while freedom is indeed fundamental, loss of freedom occurs routinely wherever human life is devalued.

Only those who still possess freedom are at any risk of losing it. So listen up. Continue Reading →

Visits: 204

Shaw’s parade of climate fiction draws official review

State Services Commissioner to review MfE performance

The Labour-Green Coalition Government published the discussion document Our Climate Your Say (“the Consultation Document”) in 2018 to pave the way for the Zero Carbon Bill that received Royal assent on 13 November, 2019. Robin Grieve, of Whangarei, studied the document and was disturbed to discover scientific errors, political bias and propaganda. He raised his complaints with Vicky Robertson, Secretary for the Environment. She replied but didn’t take her department’s ethical breaches seriously.

When it comes to accuracy, political neutrality and inspiring the nation to save the planet, just how badly must a public servant behave to earn a manager’s rebuke? By normal standards, addressing the parade of fiction in the Zero Carbon campaign should never have waited on a complaint from outside the organisation. It should have been dealt with firmly in-house.

Robin escalated the matter to the State Services Commissioner, Peter Hughes, who has instigated an investigation of the Consultation Document with reference to state services integrity, ethics and standards. Continue Reading →

Visits: 7

Climate zealots infiltrate our public service

THIS must be stopped

Around the world, climate sceptics increasingly challenge governments over policies to change the weather. From furious French Yellow Vest protests against climate policy, soaring petrol taxes, education reform and a raft of other issues to Canadian provinces’ increasingly tough resistance to Justin Trudeau’s aggressive carbon pricing, Australian political opposition, frank climate rebellion among EU members and with numerous nations renouncing climate commitments, sceptics around the globe have grown truculent as never before. Continue Reading →

Visits: 115

Yes, it IS hard to believe there’s no evidence — so ask the IPCC yourself

Email addresses below

The influence of mankind on climate is trivially true and numerically insignificant. – Dr Richard Lindzen

It’s true. They have no proof.

So you say the science is settled, you trust 97% of climate scientists and you call me a denier. It’s hardly surprising and I sympathise with that view—we’ve been badgered over it for years.

But all we sceptics do is ask you, “What’s the evidence?” There’s no denial in that, so what’s your answer? If the science really is settled, what evidence is it based on? There’s been a tide of global warming propaganda for the last few decades, so if there was any proof we are causing dangerous warming, do you think they’d let us forget it? The fact that we don’t know what it is shows they don’t have any proof. Continue Reading →

Visits: 518

Coalition comments

Insights from the
NZ Climate Science Coalition

‘Zero Carbon will need tough supervisors’

‘We’ll pick the apparatchiks before we tackle the Bill’

See this:

https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/deadline-approaching-climate-change-commission-nominations

James Shaw is making the gross presumption that his loony Zero Carbon Bill will pass, by calling for nominations to a Climate Change Commission BEFORE the proposed legislation establishing that commission has even started its Second Reading.
Continue Reading →

Visits: 73

OPEN LETTER to West Coast Regional Council

Let us understand!

WITH COPIES TO

    • Minister for the Environment, Hon James Shaw, Whaleoil, Newstalk ZB, ODT, NZ Herald, Stuff

LETTER

Mr Andrew Robb
Chairman
West Coast Regional Council

30 January 2019

Dear Andrew,

The Climate Conversation Group admires your council’s decision—which has gained widespread attention—not to support the Zero Carbon Bill until the science of the underlying theory of man-made global warming has been clearly explained and properly proven.
Continue Reading →

Visits: 952

Heroic NZ emission cuts versus Chinese colossus

Here’s a harsh dose of reality for the NZ Productivity Commission in attempting to convert us to a “low-emissions” economy. The map shows China’s plans to expand their links with the world in a colossal project that will triple China’s emissions. Their gas discharges already eclipse ours by 250 times so our reductions will be absurdly futile in stemming man-made global warming. The climate won’t notice, but our poor will suffer, while China’s poor rise into the middle class. What do we think we’re doing, cutting back — even banning oil exploration — when we ought to be boosting the economy at full speed?

My friend Dr Mike Kelly kindly sent me a copy of his latest analysis of New Zealand climate policy that he’s just submitted to the New Zealand Productivity Commission in response to its draft report on moving to a Low-emissions economy, which many would describe instead as disabling our productive capacity. Dr Kelly’s unflinching engineer’s eye assesses our Government’s putative policy responses to the climate perils forecast by skittish warmsters and it makes for thoughtful reading.

The New Silk Road

His central message is a revelation: whatever emissions we record over the next 20 years, China’s will be a thousand times larger. In fact, the emissions expected just from their One Belt, One Road, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) are destined to overwhelm all other human emissions for twenty and more years. Continue Reading →

Visits: 797

National to the rescue of climate and the RMA

A few days ago, Christopher Luxon announced the first part of National’s new Electrify NZ policy, explaining:

Electrify NZ will help double the amount of renewable energy available and put New Zealand on track to reach its climate change goals.

The Labour government’s Maorification agenda simultaneously shreds our freedom while the Net Zero agenda tears the heart out of our national treasury. Continue Reading →

Visits: 165

The shining climate crisis

Excerpted from Climate catastrophe? Follow the money ($),
by Amy Brooke in The Spectator of 1 April.

Because of the importance of the claim that CO2 has the potential to cause considerable damage to the planet we all share, it is little wonder that the media, knowing that peddling disaster sells newspapers, constantly invoke doomsday scenarios. But what happens when the mainstream media have become so corrupt that they want no debate at all about whether such claims are actually true?

Continue Reading →

Visits: 119

Stampede of the Green lemmings

Viv resides in Queensland and, though blessed with wonderfully broad insight on most things, he’s naturally drawn to matters with a strong Australian component. Consequently I decline many of his good articles for the lack of a Kiwi connection. However, on the so-called renewable energy bandwagon, or the Zero Carbon movement, New Zealand are as far up the creek as Australia is, so learning what’s happening over there and how they think and fare can only help.

Feel free to pass this on

24th February 2022

No country on Earth relies entirely on wind and solar energy, but Australian politicians aim to achieve this miracle. They are leaders in the Stampede of the Green Lemmings. Continue Reading →

Visits: 332

Kiwi saboteur Ardern

Jacinda Ardern 'very frustrated

Newspapers

This is an adopted article.

from the spectator.com.au

Amy Brooke
6-8 minutes

For New Zealand’s Prime Minster to be talking such nonsense – in fact, such a complete untruth as ‘bold action on climate change is a matter of life and death’ – is more than ominous. Her obvious preference for calling urgency on endorsing the recent recommendations of the Climate Change Commission is completely unacceptable. Its unbalanced findings verge on the fanatical and it is high time Ardern is called to account for the fear-mongering she is spreading and for promoting policies which would in fact basically destroy our economy. Continue Reading →

Visits: 472

Letters to the Editor

Mother Nature’s mighty batteries

quill pen

25th April 2021

The World Climate Conference is spreading a Green Virus – they must be gagged for our safety.

The Biden-Boris green virus which infects most of the west has become a danger to Australia. PM Morrison has promised to sink a billion dollars in “hydrogen, CCUS (carbon capture use or storage), batteries and critical minerals” — to achieve “net zero”.

NONE of these green dreams will produce one light-bulb of new energy — they  will actually require massive inputs of energy and cash. Continue Reading →

Visits: 109

National security needs eclectic view

Your nation’s security faces a wide range of threats: tanks, planes, storms, climate change and pandemics. But cast your net even wider. Dr Kelly applies engineering discipline in his scrutiny of UK national disaster policy. With lessons for all nations.

Published by permission. First published in The Critic July/August 2020

Warming not the only threat

The vast sums spent in the UK and globally on climate change mitigation have never been subject to a rigorous cost-benefit analysis. To date they have had no measurable impact on the climate, let alone climate change and have thus been a colossal waste of money. Recent events have shown us that climate change is just one of many challenges facing our world today, so it is sensible to ask for every pound spent on climate change, how much money should be set aside to prepare us for other threats: Carrington events (solar electromagnetic storms), pandemics, global financial collapse, volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis and more? What is the appropriate level of global insurance, and where is the insurance for poorer countries? Continue Reading →

Visits: 25

Brill’s dissection of ZCB finds good meat and rotten

James Shaw

Our dim-witted commander.

In 1994, the authors of Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies coined the phrase “big hairy audacious goal” (BHAG, pronounced BEE-hag) to describe an organisation’s vision statement.

Barry Brill, Chairman of the NZ Climate Science Coalition and Bay of Islands lawyer, uses the term to describe the Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill (ZCB).

NOTE: After this, I’ll post Barry’s eleven essays that form the backbone of his written submission. They’re must-read masterpieces distinctly capable of guiding us safely through the eating of what everyone interested in climate policy sees as a rat, as it doesn’t go far enough for anyone. I watched many videos of submissions to the Committee, and a surprisingly large number of people want to impose far stronger restrictions on their fellow citizens than the Bill would. Of course, those sceptics who question the very idea of a dangerous human influence would not restrict individual freedom at all. So the process suggests numerous futures, since proposing we change the weather invites diverse responses.

Continue Reading →

Visits: 131

Ideology + methane needlessly threatens farm livelihoods

These emissions figures are well over ten years old. You’d think by now, for such a topical matter, the Royal Society might have found the 2017 data. Oh, and the MfE claiming agriculture produces nearly half our emissions is a scandal driven only by ideology. They should start pretending they are non-partisan: reduce methane’s atmospheric lifetime to a more realistic five or six years, remove its demented GWP of 28 times carbon dioxide’s and finally acknowledge that the country is a net carbon sink.1

refer The NZ Farmers Weekly – 22 July, 2019

The Government say farmers should pay for emissions from 2025—just six years away—so long as we devise a means of calculating those emissions.

To get their taxes altered, to reflect changes on the farm, farmers will have to provide evidence like invoices and receipts to prove their animal emissions have gone down.

But they’re having to prove they reduce what cannot be proved causes harm.

Because, which is extremely odd, the government has not produced evidence to show the emissions alter the weather, or that there’s a “climate emergency”. That can’t be fair.

The government will say (because they’ve told us before), “we listen to the IPCC.” But to that we say, “We did exactly that too, we examined what they said, and they have no evidence.”

The situation couldn’t be more pig-ignorant if you threw chicken bones on the ground and claimed to know the future. Continue Reading →

Visits: 154

The war on meat

“the anti-meat message risks destroying the very environment it claims to be protecting”

• Guest post •

— by Barry Brill, Chairman of the NZ Climate Science Coalition

Meat — farming animals for food is undeniably good for the environment (click to enlarge; DROOL).

For most of this century, we have been bombarded by news articles preaching that vegetarians now have a corner on ‘food morality’ and that meat-eating is to be banished in a more environmentally-conscious future.  The notion is that God never intended the human race to be omnivores and that our ancestors just took a wrong turning back there on the savannah. Continue Reading →

Visits: 398

Complaint over TVNZ inaccuracy, imbalance on oil & gas ban

The Complaints Committee,
Television New Zealand
One News, 12 April: Oil & Gas Exploration Ban

Both news readers in this programme claimed that the purpose of the Government’s ban on new offshore exploration for oil and gas was to cut New Zealand’s greenhouse emissions and was necessary because New Zealand signed up to the Paris Climate Agreement. Continue Reading →

Visits: 780

On climate nightmares, daft sea level predictions and reason

Climate nightmare

The story of dangerous anthropogenic global warming is painted as a delicate jigsaw. Diverse enigmatic elements mysteriously combine through uncaring human activity to destroy the planet, preventing which is called “the greatest challenge of our generation.”

At root, however, the story is simple; it’s painted as complex to baffle us. At root, our constant carbon dioxide emissions increasingly heat the atmosphere. But we observe that carbon dioxide does not keep heating the atmosphere, which is demonstrably not warming very much and, debunking the warmsters story, this is the coldest period in the last 65 million years, and for the last 420,000 years, natural temperature changes controlled CO2 levels. There has never been runaway warming.

Continue Reading →

Visits: 1156

GWPF Newsletter 6 Nov 2017

Open in your browser  

GWPF Newsletter 06/11/17

Climate Sceptics Are Winning The Debate

Ipsos MORI:

British Public Increasingly Unconcerned About Climate Change

Ipsos MORI say that they’ve found a steady decline on concern about climate change since 2005, from 82% to 60%, something they describe as a “worrying trend”. —Climate Scepticism, 1 November 2017

 

Just in time for Polar Bear Week, the Global Warming Policy Foundation has published a new resource for cooling the polar bear spin. A paper by zoologist Dr Susan Crockford sets out the truth about the long-term improvement in the conservation status of polar bears. As global leaders meet in Bonn for COP23 (6–17 November 2017), it’s time to celebrate the proven resilience of polar bears to their ever-changing Arctic environment. —Global Warming Policy Foundation, 6 November 2017

Continue Reading →

Visits: 404

Letters to the Editor

Climate alarmists turn back the clock

quill pen

To the Editor
Climate Conversation

6th January 2015

Three centuries ago, the world ran on green power. Wood was used for heating and cooking, charcoal for smelting and smithing, wind or water-power for pumps, mills and ships, and whale oil for lamps. People and soldiers walked or rode horses, and millions of horses and oxen pulled ploughs, wagons, coaches and artillery.

But smoke from open fires choked cities, forests were stripped of trees, most of the crops went to feed draft animals, and streets were littered with horse manure. For many people, life was “nasty, brutish and short” (Thomas Hobbes).

Then the steam engine was developed and later the internal combustion engine, electricity and refrigeration. Green power was replaced by coal and oil. Carbon energy powered factories, mills, pumps, ships, trains and smelters; and cars, trucks and tractors replaced the work-horses. The result was a green revolution—forests began to regrow and vast areas of crop-land used for horse feed were released to produce food for humans. Poverty declined and population soared. Continue Reading →

Visits: 89

Our money just blowing in the wind turbines

• Guest post •

Wind energy produces costly, intermittent, unpredictable electricity. But Government subsidies and mandates have encouraged a massive gamble on wind investments in Australia — over $7 billion has already been spent and another $30 billion is proposed. This expenditure is justified by the claim that by using wind energy there will be less carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere which will help to prevent dangerous global warming.

Incredibly, this claim is not supported by any credible cost-benefit analysis Continue Reading →

Visits: 88

The boring climate

Why you won’t see headlines as climate science enters the doldrums

Posted on November 4, 2013, at Watts Up With That

Guest post by Dr. Robert G. Brown, Physics Department of Duke University (elevated from a comment on a WUWT thread: RSS Reaches Santer’s 17 Years).

This (17 years) is a non-event, just as 15 and 16 years were non-events. Non-events do not make headlines. Other non-events of the year are one of the fewest numbers of tornadoes (especially when corrected for under-reporting in the radar-free past) in at least the recent past (if not the remote past), the lowest number of Atlantic hurricanes since I was 2 years old (I’m 58), the continuation of the longest stretch in recorded history without a category 3 or higher hurricane making landfall in the US (in fact, I don’t recall there being a category 3 hurricane in the North Atlantic this year, although one of the ones that spun out far from land might have gotten there for a few hours). Continue Reading →

Visits: 199

Sun sets on solar subsidies

Tesla with solar power umbrella

In the days of Queen Victoria they could say truthfully: “the sun never sets on the British Empire.”

But it does set on Australia, every single day. Even the green power engineers in Parliament must have noticed that the sun also sets on all those solar panels that their mandates and subsidies have plastered onto Australian roofs.

Solar energy is most intense on the equator but weakens towards the poles. It disappears when the sun sets or cloud obscures the sun. For just six hours or so per day during summer, in a clear tropical desert area, solar energy is reasonably reliable and collectible, although always very dilute. But at times of peak demand, about 6.30pm in winter, solar panels contribute nothing to electricity supply. Continue Reading →

Visits: 219

No evidence no reason for complacency

Chris de Freitas is a proper scientist with a wonderful sense of humour — just wait until you see his conclusion! His articles are easy to read and I always read them.


Regrettably, the Herald has turned comments off, but that’s why blogs exist — leave your comments here where influential people will see them!


Newspapers

This is an adopted article.

Chris de Freitas: Science proves alarmist global warming claims nothing but hot air

Several aspects of Jim Salinger’s op-ed “Climate hurtling towards a hothouse Earth” Herald 24/5/13 are quite misleading. It is true most climate scientists would agree that rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to fossil fuel use could affect global climate. The basic physics is there to support this view. But there is no evidence that the putative change would be large or damaging. Output from computer models is not evidence unless model performance has been validated. So far, it has not. Continue Reading →

Visits: 127

Chief sceptics explain everything about climate denial

h/t – Mike Jowsey

E.M. Smith, known in blogworld as Chiefio, replied at Jo Nova to Paul Bain’s response to Jo’s letter critical of Bain’s Nature “paper” on climate scepticism, which uses the deplorable term “deniers”.

Here is Jo’s delicious letter to Bain, wherein she takes a rational machete to tangled thickets of climate denial and produces an irrefutable exculpation of climate sceptics:

——————–
Dear Dr Paul Bain,

Right now, it’s almost my life’s work to communicate the empirical evidence on anthropogenic climate change.

I can help you with your research on deniers. I have studied the mental condition of denial most carefully. There is a simple key to converting the convictions of people in this debate, and I have seen it work hundreds of times. Indeed, my own convictions that lasted 17 years were turned around in a few days. I can help you. It would be much simpler than you think. Continue Reading →

Visits: 541

Booker: Global warming greatest delusion in history?

This damning article from Christopher Booker is best appreciated in the whole — I redact none of it. May our leaders notice it.
Now, to be sure, there’s no sign here of the extreme obsession with global warming that marks the UK government. Thus, there is no local concern with the excesses the UK displays over reducing their carbon footprint.
However, we do exhibit a singular desire to lead the world in defeating the efficiency of our world-leading industry and agriculture.
So we object! This analysis from Mr Booker elucidates some of the excellent reasons why we object.

Is the global warming scare the greatest delusion in history?

First published by The Telegraph
7:00PM GMT 26 Nov 2011

The scare over man-made global warming is not only the scientific scandal of our generation, but a suicidal flight from reality.

Newspapers

This is an adopted article.

To grasp the almost suicidal state of unreality our Government has been driven into by the obsession with global warming, it is necessary to put together the two sides to an overall picture – each vividly highlighted by events of recent days.

On one hand there is the utterly lamentable state of the science which underpins it all, illuminated yet again by “Climategate 2.0”, the latest release of emails between the leading scientists who for years have been at the heart of the warming scare (which I return to below). On the other hand, we see the damage done by the political consequences of this scare, which will directly impinge, in various ways, on all our lives.

It is hard to know where to begin, after a week which opened with The Sunday Telegraph’s exclusive on a blast of realism from Prince Philip Continue Reading →

Visits: 69

Ridley warms heretical hearts

Everyone loves well-crafted prose, even when the author of it opposes their point of view. So it is with Matt Ridley, well-known author of The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, in less than a week earning nearly 9000 Google hits on his “Scientific heresy” address to the Royal Society of the Arts in Edinburgh on 31 October, posted at Bishop Hill. Even alarmist Gareth Renowden appreciates Ridley’s wordcraft before scorning his so-called climate science.

Ridley’s given us an admirable piece of work on several levels. His writing is a pleasure to read, he gives good information and clearly sets out his thinking on a tour of the weaknesses in the current alarmist view of the global climate. In doing so he warms the cockles of sceptical hearts everywhere while enraging the alarmists with his “well-known sceptic tropes”. That’s the view according to Renowden. Poor things; claiming emptiness for Ridley’s contentions is a flaccid stand-in for a cogent rebuttal.

Ridley concludes that science “needs heretics” and one can appreciate the radical point that even heretics should be heard. But he leaves unstated his crucial implication that evidence elevates the climate “heretic” above all the cereologists, astrologers and eugenicists in history, while true heretics need no evidence.

Here’s his address, copied from Bishop Hill with appreciation and thanks. I also repost the document Mr Montford prepared, with its helpful diagrams (pdf, 1865KB).


Matt Ridley

Scientific heresy

by Matt Ridley

It is a great honour to be asked to deliver the Angus Millar lecture.

I have no idea whether Angus Millar ever saw himself as a heretic, but I have a soft spot for heresy. One of my ancestral relations, Nicholas Ridley* the Oxford martyr, was burned at the stake for heresy.

My topic today is scientific heresy. When are scientific heretics right and when are they mad? How do you tell the difference between science and pseudoscience?

Let us run through some issues, starting with the easy ones.

Astronomy is a science; astrology is a pseudoscience.

Evolution is science; creationism is pseudoscience.

Molecular biology is science; homeopathy is pseudoscience.

Vaccination is science; the MMR scare is pseudoscience.

Oxygen is science; phlogiston was pseudoscience.

Chemistry is science; alchemy was pseudoscience.

Are you with me so far? Continue Reading →

Visits: 188

Pyramid of fraud

Cheops pyramid

20th December 2010

One of the fastest growing industries in the world is based on a pyramid of frauds and its inevitable collapse will be worse than the sub-prime crash.

The Global Warming Industry is now fed by billions of dollars from western taxpayers and consumers. It is based on the unproven and now discredited claim that man’s production of carbon dioxide causes dangerous global warming.

The basic fraud is this:

There is no evidence that carbon dioxide controls world temperature – just a theory and the manipulated results from a handful of giant computer models that very few people have checked or understand. But there is clear evidence from historical records of atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature that carbon dioxide does not control temperature. Rather the reverse – as solar or volcanic heat warms the oceans, the waters expel carbon dioxide. Global warming causes an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, not the reverse. Continue Reading →

Visits: 392

Crisis in New Zealand climatology

MfE NZ climate impact map

First published at Quadrant, May 14, 2010
download pdf (73KB)

The warming that wasn’t

The official archivist of New Zealand’s climate records, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), offers top billing to its 147-year-old national mean temperature series (the “NIWA Seven-station Series” or NSS). This series shows that New Zealand experienced a twentieth-century warming trend of 0.92°C.

The official temperature record is wrong. The instrumental raw data correctly show that New Zealand average temperatures have remained remarkably steady at 12.6°C ±0.5°C for a century and a half. NIWA’s doctoring of that data is indefensible.

The NSS is the outcome of a subjective data series produced by a single Government scientist, whose work has never been peer-reviewed or subjected to proper quality checking. It was smuggled into the official archive without any formal process. It is undocumented and sans metadata, and it could not be defended in any court of law. Yet the full line-up of NIWA climate scientists has gone to extraordinary lengths to support this falsified warming and to fiercely attack its critics.

For nearly 15 years, the 20th-century warming trend of 0.92°C derived from the NSS has been at the centre of NIWA official advice to all tiers of New Zealand Government – Central, Regional and Local. It informs the NIWA climate model. It is used in sworn expert testimony in Environment Court hearings. Its dramatic graph graces the front page of NIWA’s printed brochures and its website. Continue Reading →

Visits: 347

IPCC’s ‘lack of skill’ — scientific malpractice?

Dr Roy Spencer

In a dramatic recent article on his blog, Clouds Dominate CO2 as a Climate Driver Since 2000, Roy Spencer sets out clear evidence for internally-forced changes in the climate system. An internal forcing is a feedback, as when a change in temperature causes some other change which itself also changes the temperature.

For example, when temperature rises, it may cause an increase in atmospheric water vapour; that water vapour may condense into clouds, which in turn, by reflecting the incoming sunlight back to space, may cause the temperature to drop.

Such a process might be termed a thermostat, a natural regulator, keeping the temperature within its natural bounds, much as it has done for half a billion years and more.

In our example, the forcing was a temperature increase and the feedback was a temperature decrease – a negative feedback, moving the temperature in the opposite direction from the forcing. A positive feedback would move the temperature in the same direction as the forcing.

To date, the IPCC assumes two vital things: that climate sensitivity is high and internal forcing (feedback) is positive.

I do not follow every detail that Dr Spencer describes, but, after challenging these two assumptions and showing them to be wrong, his conclusion pulls no punches.


 

Clouds Dominate CO2 as a Climate Driver Since 2000

Last year I posted an analysis of satellite observations of the 2007-08 global cooling event, showing evidence that it was due to a natural increase in low cloud cover. Here I will look at the bigger picture of how the satellite-observed variations in Earth’s radiative budget compare to those expected from increasing carbon dioxide. Is there something that we can say about the relative roles of nature versus humanity based upon the evidence?

What we will find is evidence consistent with natural cloud variations being the dominant source of climate variability since 2000. Continue Reading →

Visits: 77

Christopher Monckton — climate champion

Lord Monckton

A letter sent from: The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

1 January 2010
His Excellency Mr. Kevin Rudd,
Prime Minister, Commonwealth of Australia.

Prime Minister,

Climate change: proposed personal briefing

Your speech on 6 November 2009 to the Lowy Institute, in which you publicly expressed some concern at my approach to the climate question, has prompted several leading Australian citizens to invite me come on tour to explain myself in a series of lectures in Australia later this month. I am writing to offer personal briefings on why “global warming” is a non-problem to you and other party leaders during my visit. For convenience, I am copying this letter to them, and to the Press.

Your speech mentioned my remarks about the proposal for world “government” in the early drafts of what had been intended as a binding Copenhagen Treaty. These proposals were not, as you suggested, a “conspiracy theory” from the “far right” with “zero basis in evidence”. Your staff will find them in paragraphs 36-38 of the main text of Annex 1 to the 15 September draft of the Treaty. The word “government” appears twice at paragraph 38. After much adverse publicity in democratic countries, including Australia, the proposals were reluctantly dropped before Copenhagen.

You say I am one of “those who argue that any multilateral action is by definition evil”. On the contrary: my first question is whether any action at all is required, to which – as I shall demonstrate – the objective economic and scientific answer is No. Even if multilateral action were required, which it is not, national governments in the West are by tradition democratically elected. Therefore, a fortiori, transnational or global governments should also be made and unmade by voters at the ballot-box. The climate ought not to be used as a shoddy pretext for international bureaucratic-centralist dictatorship. We committed Europeans have had more than enough of that already with the unelected but all-powerful Kommissars of the hated EU, who make nine-tenths of our laws by decree (revealingly, they call them “Directives” or “Commission Regulations”). The Kommissars (that is the official German word for them) inflict their dictates upon us regardless of what the elected European or any other democratic Parliament says or wishes. Do we want a worldwide EU? No.

You say I am one of “those who argue that climate change does not represent a global market failure”. Yet it is only recently that opinion sufficient to constitute a market signal became apparent in the documents of the IPCC, which is, however, a political rather than a scientific entity. There has scarcely been time for a “market failure”. Besides, corporations are falling over themselves to cash in on the giant financial fraud against the little guy that carbon taxation and trading have already become in the goody-two-shoes EU – and will become in Australia if you get your way.

You say I was one of “those who argue that somehow the market will magically solve the problem”. Continue Reading →

Visits: 114

No more global warming?

It’s been repeated so often that by now we take it for granted. The world’s climate is warming up and is starting to produce bad consequences which will worsen.

We’re told sea levels are rising, icecaps are melting, glaciers are disappearing and storms are intensifying. Polar bears are at risk because the ice they know and love is shrinking, tropical diseases are about to spread everywhere and we’ll soon be growing coconuts in Bluff.

Get ready for shorter ski seasons and be very cautious about buying seaside property. Continue Reading →

Visits: 68