To the Editor
Climate Conversation
28th March 2016
Desperately poor people focus on feeding their family and have no spare energy to support secondary concerns such as the environment.
Destitute societies also see large families as free labour and old-age insurance. Thus poverty inevitably produces growing populations and environmental degradation. Continue Reading →
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For 225 months there was no warming to speak of, then in February the latest giant El Nino kicked in and the world went mad. Continue Reading →
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My apologies. There were distractions while I was writing this post that caused a silly error: I mistook the author of the post I wanted to report on. Richard Cumming alerted me to it (thanks, RC) and the references are now corrected. Insertions shown by green highlighting.
The trickery has been going on for years. First, an alarmist paper will describe details of a hitherto unknown peril of man-made global warming. The media picks it up and circulates it for months. Then, maybe years later, once our selfish ruin of the environment is established, a rebuttal comes out, showing the peril is against the laws of physics.
But does the rebuttal get the fanfare of trumpets that greets the warmy paper? Not likely. Continue Reading →
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To the Editor
Climate Conversation
24th Month 2016
Texas blizzards recently killed 47,000 cattle — cold kills.
Wild animals and nomadic herders know this and move to avoid the cold.
Reindeer follow the sun — they spend summers grazing on the treeless tundra, but when the snows start they head south into the protective forests. Continue Reading →
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UN climate chief Christiana Figueres has stepped down. Climate Depot has an excellent summary of reaction and Figuere’s record on climate.
Christiana Figueres, anti-democratic, cold-hearted.
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To the Editor
Climate Conversation
15th February 2016
If governments truly believed that man’s production of carbon dioxide causes dangerous global warming, they would ban the use of motor cars, motor trucks, tractors, motor homes, motor bikes, motor mowers, motor launches and petrol-driven chain saws. These all pump out the two dreaded greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide and water vapour. Horses, bullocks, wagons, bicycles, scythes, row-boats and axes are the true green tools. All were good enough for our pioneers. Continue Reading →
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The Herald reports the second-largest lake in Bolivia has evaporated.
Lake Poopo was officially declared evaporated last month. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people have lost their livelihoods and gone. Continue Reading →
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A paper on US temperature adjustments was published in Geophysical Research Letters on February 5. Download full text here, (pdf, 1.5MB). The University of York has information about the paper including handy links to data.
The paper examines and offers improvements to adjustments to the continental US surface temperature record. The abstract is easy to read and understand:
Numerous inhomogeneities including station moves, instrument changes, and time of observation changes in the US Historical Climatological Network (USHCN) complicate the assessment of long-term temperature trends. Detection and correction of inhomogeneities in raw temperature records have been undertaken by NOAA and other groups using automated pair-wise neighbour comparison approaches, but these have proven controversial due to the large trend impact of homogenization in the United States. The new US Climate Reference Network (USCRN) provides a homogeneous set of surface temperature observations that can serve as an effective empirical test of adjustments to raw USHCN stations. By comparing nearby pairs of USHCN and USCRN stations, we find that adjustments make both trends and monthly anomalies from USHCN stations much more similar to those of neighbouring USCRN stations for the period 2004-2015 when the networks overlap. These results improve our confidence in the reliability of homogenized surface temperature records.
Slate’s response is straight out of the “I told you so” playbook but they haven’t actually read the paper. Continue Reading →
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The indomitable, indefatigable, never-say-die UK Met Office (under the spell of the IPCC) predicts that warming is set to “continue”, even though there’s been no global warming to speak of for about 25 years. Wonderful. In fact, the entire UAH satellite dataset from December 1978 to November 2015 (37 years) shows global warming at a yawn-inducing rate of just 1.14°C per century, well within natural variability. Stupendous. Continue Reading →
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So called “climate science” is not science. Science is a process typically involving controlled experiments to isolate a single variable in an effort to get the best answer to a specific question. Continue Reading →
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Here’s a place to keep all this together. It’s an important issue tissue of lies, since the warmists are making a great deal of it and I’m sure a lot of otherwise well-informed people have gained quite the wrong impression from the lies put about by scientists like Gavin Schmidt and Mike Mann that the temperature has been rising for years. Continue Reading →
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Most readers will have heard by now that Bob Carter passed away in Townsville last night, following a severe heart attack last Friday. Our thoughts go to his family at this unutterably sad time. Continue Reading →
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— by Viv Forbes, Chairman of Carbon Sense
7th January 2016
Hurrah! We all agree to be friends!
(You can also view the original Carbon Sense newsletter in your browser.)
Many climate sceptics are celebrating that “nothing in the Paris deal is legally binding.” They should look deeper. They have suffered a huge political defeat. Continue Reading →
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Though untruth be widely believed, it will never be true. Since open-minded people can be too busy to research complex climate issues, the CCG helps by presenting reliable fact and comment with links to sources. We strive to understand the ill-conceived global warming campaign, describe it accurately yet memorably, expose distortions that poison the policy debate, give easily assimilable descriptions of climate’s complexity and provide perspective. Continue Reading →
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The Dominion Post recently chastised the Chief Ombudsman, Dame Beverley Wakem, for her poor performance.
It is truly extraordinary to hear her scolding journalists as “rottweilers on heat” and warning them not to annoy “innately conservative” officials who might then become “gun-shy”. These statements are what you would expect from a bad-tempered bureaucrat, not an ombudsman.
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This report from a New Zealand youth delegation at COP-21 gives significant insight into the real drivers of this dangerous anthropogenic global warming (DAGW) nonsense, especially as seen by the young.
Many of our youth unschooled in reason by watchful family or teachers are being systematically indoctrinated both to expect a cataclysmic future and to distrust science. Cataclysmic expectations are created by endless descriptions of it; distrust of science is efficiently created by refusing to teach it. It is a campaign of exceptional lunacy shot through with avarice. Continue Reading →
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CO2 model: colourless, odourless gas vital to life.
The carbon dioxide molecule itself reveals that what activists call a “carbon footprint” is a fallacy.
For 30 years our emissions of carbon dioxide have been reviled for the dangerous warming CO2 is believed to exert on the climate. Activists abbreviate its name to “carbon”, call it pollution and claim to calculate “carbon footprints” for all manner of activities, products and lifestyles. They say these carbon footprints will cause environmental destruction through global warming in the far future. Continue Reading →
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Doesn’t matter about global warming/climate change, does it, when our neighbours are being hideously butchered? Firing on the innocent or setting bombs among them in the name of God or any other is barbarous.
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From The Nation today. I don’t endorse everything in their article, but the information about the sun recalls what was once widely accepted but is lately strangely disregarded: the sun powerfully controls the climate. Continue Reading →
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This today from Barry Brill, who saw it on Scoop.
Law student sues climate minister over poor emissions targets
A 24-year-old Hamilton woman is suing the Government over its emissions reduction targets, saying they do not go far enough to tackle climate change. Continue Reading →
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The Marxstream news media have always been champions of every passing totalitarian fad, however murderous. Hitler only got away with the slaughter of six million Jews because the Western news media fawned upon him and demanded appeasement almost until the first shots were fired in the Second World War. Likewise, the totalitarian Press fawned upon Communism, even as it killed 100 million in the 20th century alone, to such an extent that some papers could scarcely bring themselves to cheer when the Berlin Wall was torn down. Continue Reading →
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This today from the *co-leader of the Green Party:
Kia ora Richard,
This National Government is letting us down. Yesterday they did it again.
Yesterday, they stood up in Parliament and voted down my Fossil Fuels Divestment Bill. They said that they think the smart thing to do with our public funds is to invest it in fossil fuels instead of protecting our climate and our future. Continue Reading →
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A few weeks ago we put an offer on a nice big house in Te Puke. We’ll share it with our daughter, her partner and three children, and it couldn’t go through without selling our present house. It’s been a bit difficult keeping the house in pristine order as buyers streamed through at odd hours to inspect it but now an offer is about to go unconditional, which means we will move out in two weeks. But not into the new house until it is vacated, so our lives are still unpredictable. It’s frustrating having so little time to contribute to the blog and I apologise for apparently paying little attention to the flurry of climate activity ahead of Paris; well, not really climate activity but activity concerning the climate—the climate itself is no more chaotic than usual. Anyway, here’s a fresh open thread. I’m watching, and I’ll have something substantial for you soon. A special note to the fourteen thousand patient, unseen readers every month from all over the world: thank you very much for visiting.
The deal went unconditional late this afternoon. So, we’ve sold the house, hurrah! Two weeks to get out. Another adventure.
Late last Tuesday, we finally made our offer on the Te Puke house unconditional. So we have a house to go to! We just have to wait until the 8th of December to take possession. We are all such happy campers!
Just six days to go before the truck arrives here to take everything into storage.
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A Message from James M. Taylor, Vice President of External Relations at the Heartland Institute
One of the most important battles in the history of the global warming debate will be fought this December at a United Nations climate conference in Paris. The UN is attempting to impose binding carbon dioxide restrictions on the United States and transfer billions of dollars of climate “reparations” from the United States to nations like Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela. Continue Reading →
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This is brilliant and simple: attack climate activists when they trespass on forbidden areas.
I’ve just heard about this from Warwick Hughes. There’ll be more, by the sound of it. Malcom Roberts has laid a complaint with the Board of Professional Engineers of Queensland regarding academics giving professional engineering advice though they are not registered engineers. Continue Reading →
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Andy wrote a comment that reveals a darker side to a man who has become a household name in New Zealand. Continue Reading →
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Climate warmistas mouth off at us for the global warming we cause but universally, staunchly and ignorantly refuse to say how we cause it. It’s time this was stopped, and the only way to stop it is for us to keep asking for the evidence and complain fairly loudly each time we are ignored.
The warming experts paint endless scenarios of different amounts of warming in different decades up to a century from today, describing multifarious ills and tragedies that might befall various kinds of living things. Continue Reading →
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The Freedom Clock shows nearly 20 years without global warming
Christopher Monckton thoughtfully keeps us acquainted with some essential moving targets on the climate change range. One monthly chore he undertakes is to update the RSS global mean temperature at Watts Up With That and (the neat part) find out whether the pause has got longer. It usually has. This is from his latest post a week or so back. Continue Reading →
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Dr Doug Edmeades – smart scientist
When Dr Doug Edmeades, MNZM, (independent soil scientist, managing director of agKnowledge and perhaps the smartest scientist in the country) wrote recently in NZ Farmer about the theory that we are the major cause of climate change, he said: “On this subject I am a sceptic.”
He didn’t ridicule the theory or mock those who believe it. Rather, he carefully explained the reasons for his doubts that our activities are responsible. Continue Reading →
Visits: 271
Again, my apologies for non-attendance. Please use this for your interesting forays into politics, difficulties of the Christchurch rebuild and global economics. Otherwise the follow-the-thread police could slap fines on your host or (equally painful) throw the book at him.
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Sorry I’ve been all but absent.
We’ve put our house on the market, it’s all been a bit of a rush and we’ve been battling to fix a few things and make it look nice. First open home is this Sunday. The intention is to buy a house in Te Puke. Yes, that place a few kilometres from the coast recently hit by a small (practice?) Chilean tsunami and shortly thereafter by a 5-point-something quake.
Ah well, seemed a good idea at the time.
But seriously, we’re chasing grandchildren. Again. We moved to Waiuku only a year ago. I’m putty in their hands.
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Beginning in the mid-1990s, mindful of their commitments to cut carbon emissions, Europe’s governments embarked on a prolonged drive to convert their car fleets from gasoline to diesel. With generous use of tax preferences, they succeeded. In the European Union as a whole, diesel vehicles now account for more than half of the market. In France, the first country to cross that threshold, diesel now accounts for roughly 80 percent of motor-fuel consumption. But the switch to diesel probably didn’t cut greenhouse gases. VW may have perpetrated one of the biggest frauds in corporate history. Europe’s clean-diesel strategy, which set the scene for that fraud, may be the most expensive mistake in the history of environmental policy. —Clive Crook, Bloomberg, 23 September 2015
hat tip: Global Warming Policy Foundation Continue Reading →
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Like alarmists everywhere ahead of Paris, Gareth “Running Man” Renowden flees honest inquiry. He’s happy to allow readers to make any wild predictions they like about global warming, but ask for details and he deletes your question. What’s he afraid of? Continue Reading →
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On the Helix Facebook page yesterday, Richard Betts writes about High-End Climate Impacts and Extremes.
He claims “the chances are that global warming will exceed the 2°C “guardrail” that the EU and UN aim to stay below,” and doesn’t disagree with alarmist interpretations of the scale and effects of man-made global warming, such as the possibility of 6°C warming. But “science” says little about our future climate. Continue Reading →
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Sir Tipene O’Regan.
from a National Business Review article of 1 September posted on Facebook:
“Sir Tipene rails against madness of Christchurch sea rise plan” by Chris Hutching
Resentment is growing among property owners in Christchurch and residents are organising themselves since the council announced it would tag 18,000 coastal properties with warnings of inundation from rising sea levels, severely depressing land values without good cause. Continue Reading →
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As a member of the NZ Climate Science Coalition, I am frequently privy to learned conversations. Occasionally I publish excerpts, suitably altered to preserve privacy. The conversation below emerged sedately over several weeks and expertly defines the fatal deficiencies in the believers’ case for alarm. It deserves a big audience. Continue Reading →
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The All Blacks had better watch those Aussies pretty closely tonight. They’re perfectly capable of scoring 60 in 90 minutes.
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Letter to Christchurch Press from David Beach, 4 Aug 2015. Click to enlarge.
David Beach sent a letter to the Christchurch Press published 4 August, 2015, which contains grievous errors. Whatever he intends by the use of the term ‘exponential’, we can only take it in its usual sense of increasing at a more and more rapid rate, or a rate expressed by a mathematical exponent. His salient point is this:
First, the 1m figure is absolutely the best case for sea level rise. The worst case (expressed by an expert team led by Dr Hansen) is 5m. Second, it does not stop at whatever figure turns out to be true, as it increases exponentially.
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Sheep.
— by Viv Forbes, Chairman of Carbon Sense
5th August 2015
Yesterday morning, before the frost had left the grass, I was sitting quietly beside my fashionably-green wood-burning heater reading the latest explanation in “The Green Gospel” on why the Arctic ice had not yet melted. Suddenly Flora burst into the room like an Arctic Blizzard with a look on her face that said I was in big trouble. Continue Reading →
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This loony scientist-turned-climate-activist is reckless with science and his unfounded claims of peril are a threat to public order. Even his followers cannot believe he really said the oceans will boil, but here is the evidence. Should you not believe my biased sceptical transcript, just read his lips.
At 1:55 (the link goes straight there) Hansen poses the question:
What is the runaway greenhouse effect?
Which he answers concisely and unambiguously:
That means once the planet gets warmer and warmer then the oceans begin to evaporate, and water vapour is a very strong greenhouse gas, even more powerful than carbon dioxide, so you can get to a situation where it just… the oceans will begin to boil and the planet becomes so hot that the ocean ends up in the atmosphere and that happened to Venus. That’s why Venus no longer has carbon in its surface. It’s atmosphere is made up of… basically of carbon dioxide because it had a runaway greenhouse effect.
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Manukau Institute of Technology, Otara. Look for the theatre. Click to enlarge.
This is a reminder to readers in and near Auckland about the free public lecture next Wednesday to address the problem of sceptical minds stubbornly clinging to questions about global warming. Since there can be, by our definition, no genuine scientific questions unanswered by our mainstream climate scientists, there must be something in the mind interfering with the acceptance of climate change.
Can sceptics help themselves or do we have to help them? Can they ever put their denial behind them? Victoria University has a highly-skilled psychologist who will dissect their anti-social behaviour. Continue Reading →
Visits: 283
Josh Gilbert, district chairman of the NSW Young Farmers (right) speaking to rural reporter Josh Becker (left). The belief that the climate is being dangerously changed by warming caused by human activities, though on careful examination unsupported by evidence, infiltrates remorselessly into all aspects of society. It will take some shifting when people wake up to it.
Climate change is back on the NSW Farmers Association agenda after a push from young farmers. Young Farmers triumphed over sceptics and complex meeting procedures to push climate change onto the agenda at the New South Wales Farmers Association annual conference. In a rejigged policy on climate, they emphasised the need to move away from fossil fuels and closer to renewables.
Source: Young farmers rewrite NSW Farmers climate change policy – ABC Rural (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) Continue Reading →
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Earth is 15 years from a “mini ice age” that will cause bitterly cold winters during which rivers freeze over, scientists have predicted. Continue Reading →
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The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition today issued a press release:
New Zealand may not have warmed at all in the past 100 years, according to a peer-reviewed paper published in the international science journal, Environmental Modeling & Assessment. The paper, A Reanalysis of Long-Term Surface Air Temperature Trends in New Zealand, by New Zealand authors Chris De Freitas, Bob Dedekind and Barry Brill, covering the period 1909-2009, shows an increase of 0.28+/-0.29 °C/century, compared with the current official NIWA seven-station series (7SS) showing an increase of nearly 1 °C/century. Continue Reading →
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Altmetric ranking for de Freitas et al in January. Current Altmetric ranking (click SCORE IN CONTEXT on SUMMARY tab then click a category for details). Click to enlarge.
I am delighted to report that A Reanalysis of Long-Term Surface Air Temperature Trends in New Zealand (de Freitas, Dedekind & Brill, 2014) is top-ranked by Altmetric.
Altmetric has tracked 20 articles from EMA, the journal our authors used, and our paper tops them all. More significantly, it ranks in the top 5% of all 3,671,975 articles ever tracked by Altmetric, and in the top 8% of 102,471 articles published around the same time. It’s an outstanding result. Continue Reading →
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Wahoo! It looks really low (though it should be nil), but how much will it cost?
The government has announced a new climate change target that aims to reduce New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions to 30% below 2005 levels by 2020 and a review this year of the existing Emissions Trade Scheme as part of its policy mix to meet the new targets.
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This headline says mere scepticism means denying that climate changes—not that you have legitimate, unanswered questions over the models, the mechanisms or the means. Morons.
Still, New Zealand has one of the highest rates of climate change scepticism in the developed world. A wonderful finding. Continue Reading →
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Lots of people have stopped listening to climate science, which observes no warming for 20 years. They are now being exhorted to stop listening to ‘climate deniers’.
US EPA chief Gina McCarthy is spouting insidious totalitarian doctrine hidden beneath a pretended admiration of democracy and camouflaged by appeals to the good of the majority. So she prepares the ground for legal restraints against honest free speech, and someone must point it out. Continue Reading →
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The Herald says today “climate science says extremes of all weather events are a consequence of global warming.”
But climate science does not say that. The notion is ludicrous; it represents reality as much as a boiled plastic egg represents breakfast. Continue Reading →
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Further to Are you a scientist?:
Someone the other day was telling me I shouldn’t have criticised the VUW lecture on the basis of a brochure—she said I should wait to hear the lecture first. She made a good point, but she knows nothing (because the TV news never mentions it) of the unbelievable saga of flawed “climate” papers presenting patronising descriptions of the inadequate mindset of climate sceptics. Continue Reading →
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