Tony Abbott’s Address on AGW

Hon. Tony Abbott, in an address to the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London, said (inter alia):

Since the Global Financial Crisis, at least in the West, growth has been slow, wages stagnant, opportunities limited, and economic and cultural disruption unprecedented.  Within countries and between them, old pecking orders are changing.  Civilizational self-doubt is everywhere; we believe in everyone but ourselves; and everything is taken seriously except that which used to be.
Just a few years ago, history was supposed to have ended in the triumph of the Western liberal order.  Yet far from becoming universal, Western values are less and less accepted even in the West itself.  We still more or less accept that every human being is born with innate dignity; with rights, certainly, but we’re less sure about the corresponding duties.
We still accept the golden rule of human conduct: to treat others as we would have them treat us—or to use the Gospel formula to “love your neighbour as you love yourself”—but we’re running on empty.
In Britain and Australia, scarcely 50% describe themselves as Christian, down from 90% a generation back.  For decades, we’ve been losing our religious faith but we’re fast losing our religious knowledge too.  We’re less a post-Christian society than a non-Christian, or even an anti-Christian one.  It hasn’t left us less susceptible to dogma, though, because we still need things to believe in and causes to fight for; it’s just that believers can now be found for almost anything and everything.
Climate change is by no means the sole or even the most significant symptom of the changing interests and values of the West.  Still, only societies with high levels of cultural amnesia—that have forgotten the scriptures about man created “in the image and likeness of God” and charged with “subduing the earth and all its creatures”—could have made such a religion out of it.
There’s no certain way to regain cultural self-confidence.  The heart of any recovery, though, has to be an honest facing of facts and an insistence upon intellectual rigour.  […]
Beware the pronouncement, “the science is settled”.  It’s the spirit of the Inquisition, the thought-police down the ages.  Almost as bad is the claim that “99% of scientists believe” as if scientific truth [were] determined by votes rather than facts.
There are laws of physics; there are objective facts; there are moral and ethical truths.  But there is almost nothing important where no further enquiry is needed.  What the “science is settled” brigade want is to close down investigation by equating questioning with superstition.  It’s an aspect of the wider weakening of the Western mind which poses such dangers to the world’s future.  […]
Contrary to the breathless assertions that climate change is behind every weather event, in Australia, the floods are not bigger, the bushfires are not worse, the droughts are not deeper or longer, and the cyclones are not more severe than they were in the 1800s.  Sometimes, they do more damage but that’s because there’s more to destroy, not because their intensity has increased.  More than one hundred years of photography at Manly Beach in my electorate does not suggest that sea levels have risen despite frequent reports from climate alarmists that this is imminent.
It may be that a tipping point will be reached soon and that the world might start to warm rapidly but so far reality has stubbornly refused to conform to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s computer modelling.  Even the high-priests of climate change now seem to concede that there was a pause in warming between the 1990s and 2014.
So far, though, there’s no concession that their models might require revision even though unadjusted data suggests that the 1930s were actually the warmest decade in the United States and that temperatures in Australia have only increased by 0.3º over the past century, not the one degree usually claimed.
The growing evidence that records have been adjusted, that the impact of urban heat islands has been downplayed, and that data sets have been slanted in order to fit the theory of dangerous anthropogenic global warming does not make it false; but it should produce much caution about basing drastic action upon it.
Then there’s the evidence that higher concentrations of carbon dioxide (which is a plant food after all) are actually greening the planet and helping to lift agricultural yields.  In most countries, far more people die in cold snaps than in heat waves, so a gradual lift in global temperatures, especially if it [be] accompanied by more prosperity and more capacity to adapt to change, might even be beneficial.
In what might be described as Ridley’s paradox, after the distinguished British commentator: at least so far, it’s climate change policy that’s doing harm; climate change itself is probably doing good; or at least, more good than harm.
Australia, for instance, has the world’s largest readily available supplies of coal, gas and uranium, yet thanks to a decade of policy based more on green ideology than common sense, we can’t be sure of keeping the lights on this summer; and, in the policy-induced shift from having the world’s lowest power prices to amongst the highest, our manufacturing industry has lost its one, big comparative economic advantage.  […]
As a badge of environmental virtue, the South Australian state Labor government had been boasting that, on average, almost 50% of its power was wind-generated—although at any moment it could vary from almost zero to almost 100%.  It had even ostentatiously blown up its one coal-fired power station.
In September last year, though, the wind blew so hard that the turbines had to shut down—and the inter-connector with Victoria and its reliable coal-fired power failed too.  For twenty-four hours, there was a State-wide blackout.  For nearly two million people, the lights were off, cash registers didn’t work, traffic lights went down, lifts stopped, and patients were sent home from hospitals.
Throughout last summer, there were further blackouts and brownouts across eastern Australia requiring hundreds of millions in repairs to the plant of energy-intensive industries.  Despite this, in a display of virtue signalling, to flaunt its environmental credentials (and to boost prices for its other coal-fired plants), last March the French-government part-owned multinational, Engie, closed down the giant Hazelwood coal-fired station that had supplied a quarter of Victoria’s power.
The Australian Energy Market Operator is now sufficiently alarmed to have just issued an official warning of further blackouts this summer in Victoria and South Australia and severe medium term power shortfalls.  But in yet more virtue-signalling, energy giant AGL is still threatening to close the massive Liddell coal-fired power station in NSW and replace it with a subsidised solar farm and a much smaller gas-fired power station relying on gas supplies that don’t currently exist.
Were it not rational behaviour based on irrational government policy, this deliberate elimination of an essential service could only be described as a form of economic self-harm.

“Marry, this is miching mallecho; it means mischief”

Illuminating Mischief

Turnbull’s light-bulb ban
was, I say, emblematic
of the statist man.

His awarmist views
suggest that Turnbull’s present
restraint is a ruse.

Awarmists can’t be
rational, logical or
prudent* fiscally.

* earlier, at Catallaxy Files, I posted this comment:

As I have suggested elsewhere it it impossible to be an awarmist and a fiscal conservative at the same time.  To believe in the pseudo-scientific conjecture of AGW a person has to reject logic and science in favour of immoderate irrationality; to support the supposed solutions to the non-existent problem of global warming—which involve massive spending, increased taxes and illiberal statist controls—believers perforce deny personal liberty and freedoms in general; such a person cannot reasonably be expected to consider other issues logically, scientifically or prudently.

The egomaniacal, amoral and seemingly psychopathic Turnbull is evidently more dangerous than Rudd and Gillard combined.

“Don’t Overestimate Threats,” Shriek Scaremongers

In “Don’t overestimate Islamic State threat: Malcolm Turnbull” David Wroe (of the seditiously scaremongering, awarmist SMH) reports the soothing words of Hon. Malcolm Turnbull, the former federal Minister for the Environment and Water Resources:

The threat posed by the Islamic State terror group should not be overstated, and critics of new national security measures should not be denounced, Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull has said.

The threat posed by the Islamic State terror group, judging only by its murderous acts and not by its quite minatory pronouncements, is great; the threat posed by a very slight increase of average temperatures around the world, in contrast, is extremely slight.  When Malcom Turnbull was Minister for the Environment and Water Resources, however, he banned incandescent light-bulbs in Australia, “in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions”, and because of his deep but groundless fear that their extremely slight contribution to supposed global warming would doom us all:

“A normal light bulb is too hot to hold—that heat is wasted* and globally represents millions of tonnes of CO₂ that needn’t have been emitted into the atmosphere if we had used more efficient forms of lighting.”

On his own department’s projections (at the time), his banning of incandescent light bulbs was expected to reduce Australia’s total output of allegedly threatening “emissions”—i.e. beneficent CO₂, essential for life—by as much as 0.1%.
So, a real, murderous regime trying to impose a barbaric caliphate—meh; a fantasy of doom predicated on a pseudo-scientific conjecture insisting that the world’s climate might warm by as much as half a degree—run for the hills after destroying industry!

The man is a nincompoop.

* in cold weather, in many homes, the heat from internal incandescent light bulbs was not wasted: it helped warm living spaces.

ad Kalendas Graecas

The First of September
 
It is not Spring yet
despite silly date-watchers
who say so.  I bet

the awarmist set
will grab any suppos’d rise
in warmth it can get.

We should never let
lying, self-serving scammers
persuade us to fret:

whether dry or wet,
raisin’ fears—and fees!—on change
is their raison d’être.

“Where’s the Wascally Warming?”

A transcript of the Climate Council’s search for hidden global warming.

In his well-appointed office, the very silly Prof. Tim Flannery is becoming more and more frustrated.

Prof. Tim Flannery:  Warming? I know you’re somewhere, Global Warming; please stop hiding.  Warming?  Where are you?  All right, warming, we’ve had our fun, but it’s time to stop hiding now.  Are you there?  Look, I’ve had enough of this, so I’m going now.  [He walks to his door noisily.]  This is the sound of my leaving.  Yes, I’m heading out the door right now.  [He slams the door.]  Okay, everyone’s gone now.  You can come out now.  HEY!  Look, it’s no use pretending you’re not here because I know you exist—or, more to the point, I’ve been telling anyone who might send me a bob or two that you exist.  [He whistles.]  Here, Warming!  Warming?  COME ON, WARMING!  WARMING, COME OUT RIGHT NOW OR I’LL GET MIGHTY ANGRY WITH YOU!  Oh, please stop hiding.  Are you in the thermosphere?  Are you concealed by those pesky, democratic ants?  Are you, perhaps, under— [he lifts his couch] THIS COUCH?  Are you in my wallet?  No.  Are you there at all, Global Warming?  Please, I know you’re here somewhere!  Answer me!

Prof. Will Steffen:  [from behind an armchair]  I’m in the deep oceans!

Prof. Tim Flannery:  Warming? I knew you existed!  Hey, wait a bit; you sounded just a little like my fellow propagandist of climate doom, Will Steffen.  Was that you, Will?

Prof. Will Steffen:  [giggling]  Not at all!

Prof. Tim Flannery:  So it really is you, Global Warming? Proof at last!  Hang on, if you’re hiding in the deep oceans I shouldn’t be able to hear you—  [Flannery sees Steffen crouching behind the chair.]  What?  Professor, I have better things to do than play games; I’m going away!  [Flannery stomps to the door, slams it shut without leaving, tiptoes over to his desk, and crouches down under it.]

Prof. Will Steffen:  [rising slowly]  Oh, I so wanted to find Global Warming too.  I hope that I didn’t hurt Tim’s feelings; not that it matters, of course, because, frankly, he’s a bit of a loony cove.  I do wonder where Global Warming is sequestered or secreted or lying low.  Hallo?  Global Warming, it’s no use hiding because I can see you!  Come out, come out, wherever you are!  Can you hear me?  Are you in this room, Global Warming? 

Prof. Tim Flannery:  [giggling]  No!  I’m not!
Prof. Will Steffen:  Oh, darn; I’ll have to look somewhere else then.  [Steffen exits.]

UPDATE (16 October):  meanwhile, throughout the land, followers of the two silly but greedy professors have gullibly accepted those duplicitous propagandists’ pseudo-scientific, fallacious, self-serving arguments, and foolishly expect to rely on giant-whirligigs for their power in the future:

Cui Bono

The Global Warming Scam Continues 

Hot days in summer!
Storms, and cold nights in winter!
Such strange times indeed.

“Unprecedented!”
yell the followers of the
global warming creed

despite the lack of
warming.  Wherefore, then, do their
rotten scams proceed? 

Cicero’s words help:
who benefits, and whither
do the profits lead?

Certainly, one thing
never changes: the sooth of
the awarmists’ greed.

UPDATE I (13 February):

“Settled Science”

“It’s settled science!”
shouted awarmists (and just
a few years ago),

“nasty deniers
refuse to believe warming
must lead to less snow!”

That “settled science”
remains their shrill cry, but now
they insist that no 

warming was what they’d
predicted, and “climate change”
has led to more snow.

Their “settled science”
means that—wet, dry, cold or hot—
whenever winds blow,
 
or ease, they come from
evil carbon preventing
any status quo.

UPDATE II (4 April):  never willing to miss an opportunity to act hysterically, awarmists have been upset, yet again, by a newspaper column from English author James Delingpole; many people have deplored the conclusion to his piece by on-line comments such as this one:

Delingpole muses about judges issuing death sentences.

Really? He wrote this:

The climate alarmist industry has some very tough questions to answer:  preferably in the defendant’s dock in a court of law, before a judge wearing a black cap.

An industry, not any one person, he imagines in the dock.  Now, English judges wear black caps on various solemn occasions—such as in the presence of the Sovereign—but not when issuing a death sentence because there is no longer any possibility of their issuing a death sentence in Britain.  So, where does he “muse about judges issuing death sentences”?

(Graham Readfearn, by the way, the consistently wrongheaded awarmist, naturally errs in his typically overwrought reaction to Delingpole, by opining, “black caps were only worn by judges when handing out death sentences.”)

Awarmist pseudo-scientists and their propagandising fellow travellers often advocate doing all sorts of harm—including having us tattooed or imprisoned or executed—to those who are slightly sceptical or rightly dismissive of their silly conjecture of AGW, but Delingpole is treated as if he issued a lethal fatwa merely for a trope.  The murderous awarmists, meanwhile, by increasing the costs of energy beyond affordability for many people are responsible for the real and not imagined deaths of thousands of unfortunate citizens in Britain alone.

UPDATE III (7 April):  in “An English class for trolls, professional offence-takers and climate activists”, Delingpole responds to those who mischievously misinterpreted his metaphor:

The last thing I would want is for Monbiot, Mann, Flannery, Jones, Hansen and the rest of the Climate rogues’ gallery to be granted the mercy of quick release.  Publicly humiliated?  Yes please.  Having all their crappy books remaindered?  Definitely.  Dragged away from their taxpayer funded troughs and their cushy sinecures, to be replaced by people who actually know what they're talking about?  For sure.  But hanging?  Hell no.  Hanging is far too good for such ineffable toerags. 
This isn’t to say that there isn’t a strong case for the myriad dodgy scientists-on-the-make, green activists, posturing and ignorant politicians, rent-seeking corporatists, UN apparatchiks, EU technocrats and hopelessly out-of-their-depth environment correspondents who talked up the global warming scare to be brought to account for the vast damage they have done to the global economy, for the people they have caused to die in fuel poverty, for the needless regulations they have inflicted on us, for the landscapes they have ravaged with wind farms, and so on.
Indeed, it would be nice to think one day that there would be a Climate Nuremberg.  But please note, all you slower trolls beneath the bridge, that when I say Climate Nuremberg I use the phrase metaphorically.  […] 
How do you hang an “industry”, I wonder.  How exactly do you put a rope round a dodgy computer model?  Or a £13.7 million UEA climate research grant?  Or an article in Guardian Environment pages called something like “How do you break it to your six-year old child that global warming is killing our planet and by the time he hits 21 the world will be a boiling soup of lava and dead puppies like on the Bedtime Stories advert”?
Seems to me that it’s quite an impossibility.  But there are others who don’t, clearly, for the day after the Australian article ran I was gobsmacked to read on Twitter that a small cabal of weapons-grade pillocks  from the further extremes of the eco loon movement had chosen to interpret this phrase as some kind of demand for “climate scientists” to be executed.  […]
(That’ll be another metaphor, btw.  I haven’t literally been smacked in the mouth).

It should surprise no-one when maleficent alarmists, who wilfully mislead the public and misinterpret data so regularly, deliberately, mala fide, and malevolently misread their critics.

UPDATE IV (8 April):  Peter FitzSimons, who is clearly a very foolish fellow, frets on Twitter:

In his article, “Not a shout but a Chinese whisper”, FitzSimons agonises:

Just supposing the best scientific brains are all but united in the view the planet faces a crippling phenomenon that will change life as we know it.  And just supposing that in response to this, Australia pioneered a scheme aimed at countering it.  You would think confirmation the scheme was actually working might be the occasion for national breast-beating, even some dancing in the streets?

His proof that “the best scientific brains” agree that our Earth faces doom?  He just asserts it (whilst arguing from authority and being inexcusably ignorant of one of our greatest physicists, Freeman Dyson).  FitzSimons’ proof that Australia’s “carbon” tax counters this alleged problem?  He merely asserts it.

UPDATE V (8 April):  see also Tim Blair’s “Unfair Fight”.

Are the Government’s Ministers Stupid?

Some Questions Answered

Are the government’s
ministers really stupid?
No, they are lying

in order to take
money from us and, they claim,
to stop us frying

from man-made global
warmth (though that very silly
conjecture’s dying

from an utter lack
of evidence—which doesn’t
stop the greens crying

that “carbon” must doom
the world).  Is weather worse?  No,
the gods are sighing.

UPDATE I:

Some Questions Are Left Alone

Julia Gillard
it seems, was a lazy, inept lawyer
but she never shirked

shagging thick, married
men who could help her climb to
the top; and it worked:

she still can’t tell right
from wrong, but she’s now the one
who gets to decide

(for her compliant
press) whether she and her mates
told the truth or lied.


The Power of Exes

Doctor Emerson
can read the PM’s mind!  He
says her true recall

of facts from twenty
years ago, though imperfect,
fully explains all:

she did nothing wrong,
he shrieks (and hereon you may
put great reliance),

for always she was
only following orders
from wicked clients.

Try This Defence in Court

“I did nothing wrong,
and you can’t prove a thing; you
have my guarantees!”

asserts the PM;
and her crooked ex-leman,
Bruce Wilson, agrees.  

Try saying in court,

“I acted as clients bade,

and I charged no fees

and can remember

no crime; I’m innocent, as

everyone sees!”

Would the day come soon
when she appears in court and
makes similar pleas. 

UPDATE II:

Past and Present

Julia Gillard
is as duplicitous now
as she was back then;

as crooked as her
many lies, and as rotten
as her taste in men.

Was she, perhaps, a
conned, guiltless victim?  No, it’s
too hard to believe

she was innocent
or that she was ever quite
so “young and naïve”. 


Anyway, a Possible Explanation

With such a record
of incompetence why won’t
Gillard get the boot?

She’d have much dirt on
colleagues or, perhaps, she was
a really good root.

Incriminating
documents would persuade her
cronies to stay mute

and, of course, many 
lucripetous lackeys wish
to share in the loot. 

UPDATE III (7 April, 2013):

Yeah, Trashing Marriages Doesn’t Make the PM a Trasher*
 
Even though she’s wrecked
marriages, she’s no wrecker;
“she hasn’t the looks”!

Right, appearances
are all. Let’s spurn the old saws
of covers and books.

Likewise, we’ll suppose
Gillard’s cronies are honest:
they don’t seem like crooks.


Appeti Est Percipi†

The world is teeming

with unreason; we’re now in

the Age of Seeming:
 
from “climate change” to

the PM’s cleverness, true

believers believe:

no evidence will

change their set minds; it is as

if they are dreaming

that only they can

save the world, so facts are not

welcome; data grieve

them; they shut eyes and

ears to troublesome facts, and

feel it blaspheming

to mention what’s true.

Thus, Gillard’s toadies shout she

was young and naïve

when the thirty-two

year-old law-firm partner was

involved in scheming

to defraud and thieve.

Their reality is what

they want to perceive.

UPDATE III:  in response to public demand I removed a picture of the PM in favour of this:

*  originally posted as a comment at Catallaxy Files.
†  also originally posted, in a slightly different form, as a comment at Catallaxy Files.

Unfit to Lead

 “fingebant simul credebantque.”

—Cornelius Tacitus, Annales, V, 10.*

She Cannot Help Lying 

The PM’s trying
to speak the truth this once, but
she can’t help lying.

Her predecessor
would utter silly fictions
though his are lesser

because he’s rooted;
he tried to claw back power
but he was booted

to the back-bench.  Now
the PM wants to gain the
public’s trust, but how?

It is no surprise
that even her own people
don’t accept her lies.

Her revelation,
that the East Asia Summit
was Rudd’s creation

and the G-20
meeting was proposed by him?
Deception!  Plenty

more of her deceits
are yet to be exposed, but
“global warming” beats

all the rest.  That hoax
is still being extolled by
her as good for folks;

in truth, though, her sham
“climate-change” action is a
great, fraudulent scam.

Even in her bed
Gillard can’t lie straight; none can
trust a word she’s said.

We can’t believe her,
and need a poll to dislodge†
this arch-deceiver. 

She may be trying
to be nice about Rudd, but
she can’t help lying.

In the House of Representatives yesterday, our beloved but unprincipled, mendacious, untruthful, treacherous, devious, untrustworthy Prime Minister eulogised the man who, but days earlier, she had exposed as a treacherous, incompetent bully:

“The member for Griffith has served this nation as Minister for Foreign Affairs with distinction, following many of the initiatives in foreign policy that he entered into for this nation when Prime Minister.  Amongst those major achievements include the creation of the G-20—because of how important it was for our nation to be at the top table when the world came together to manage the global financial crisis—and include the work he did to see the creation of the East Asia Summit  [...].”

The first meeting of the G-20 was held on 15 and 16 December, 1999 in Berlin.  The G-20 was proposed by former Canadian Finance Minister Paul Martin; see “Eight is not enough at summit”, by Thomas Axworthy, in The Star of 8 June, 2007:

Canada was once at the forefront of creating international institutions and Paul Martin has continued that tradition by advocating a G-20.  [The former German chancellor, Helmut] Schmidt, the 89-year-old Schmidt has now added his weighty voice to this call.

The first East Asia Summit was held on 14 December, 2005 in Kuala Lumpur.

Kevin Rudd served as Minister for Foreign Affairs from 14 September, 2010 to 22 February, 2012.  He had no hand in creating the G-20, and he did not help establish the East Asia Summit of foreign ministers.

Veritas Vos Liberabit

I don’t care what side 

of politics you’re on, but
they are wrong who lied.

We’ve all heard enough
phony spin.  We cannot trust
those who fake their stuff.

It’s simple:  when you
have to lie, then your claims must
be perforce untrue.

Honest folk delight
in speaking truth—it’s clear-cut;
facts are ever right.

*  “they feigned and at once believed [referring to the rumoured return of Drusus, the son of Germanicus].”

As soon as unwise
folk fabricate fictions they
believe their own lies.

†  The official residence of the Australian Prime Minister in Canberra is “The Lodge”.

UPDATE (1 March):  see “The PM Lied”.

Another Miscellany

See “Opinion Disguised as Science”, by Donna Laframboise, at No Frakking Consensus:

Not for one moment does anyone think it is the role of a handwriting expert to decide whether the accused is guilty. That is the job of the judge and the jury—after listening to a variety of experts, some of whom will no doubt contradict (and cast doubt on) each other’s opinions.

Although the pathologist who performed the autopsy may have private views about an accused murderer’s guilt or innocence we all understand that it would be inappropriate for that medical professional to voice those views within the courtroom—and doubly inappropriate to do so outside of it.

Yet when it comes to climate, everything gets turned on its head.  People with a narrow specialty (in water resources, for example) nevertheless regard themselves as full-fledged “climate experts.”  Taking on the role of judge and jury, they imagine that an understanding of their small piece of the puzzle translates into firm knowledge of the far more complicated big-picture.  They proclaim that multiple lines of evidence all point to the same conclusion—even though they themselves don’t possess the expertise to evaluate the merits of these other lines of evidence.

Also at No Frakking Consensus, see Peter Gleick—Then and Now.

See “Fakegate: Global Warmists Try to Hide the Decline”, by Robert Tracinski, at Skeptic’s Corner:

Fakegate shows us, with the precision of a scientific experiment, several key truths about the global warming movement.  It shows that most warmists, both the scientists and the journalists, will embrace any claim that seems to bolster their cause, without bothering to check the facts or subject them to rigorous investigation.  (Anthony Watts notes how few journalists bothered to contact him before reporting the claims about him that are made in the fake memo.)  And it shows us that warmists like Gleick have no compunction about falsifying information to promote their agenda, and that many other warmists are willing to serve as accomplices after the fact, excusing Gleick's fraud on the grounds that he was acting in a “noble cause.”  It shows us that “hide the decline” dishonesty is a deeply ingrained part of the corporate culture of the global warming movement.
Gleick wasn’t just an obscure, rogue operator in the climate debate.  Before his exposure, his stock in trade was lecturing on “scientific integrity,” and until a few days ago he was the chairman of the American Geophysical Union's Task Force on Scientific Ethics.  So this scandal goes to the very top of the global warming establishment, and it compels honest observers to ask:  if the warmists were willing to deceive us on this, what else have they been deceiving us about?
Between Climategate and Fakegate, the warmist establishment now has zero credibility, and we must call all of their claims into question.

See “Climate-Change Alarmism: Fuelled by Fantasy”, by Ben Pile, at Spiked Online: 

What concerns this sceptic when it comes to that kind of climate alarmism and the bizarre politics it produces, is the possibility that all too often stories precede science.  There is a widespread idea that there are actual and robust measurements of polar bear populations, the extent of glaciers, the rate of sea-level rise, and the extent of polar sea ice.  But in each of these cases, closer examination of the available evidence reveals the role of guesswork in the estimation of these ‘indicators’ of climate change and its effects.  Worse still, perhaps, is the possibility that these ‘indicators’ are presupposed to be in decline for no other reason than the truism ‘climate change is happening’.

Once you presuppose that climate change is happening, it doesn’t take a leap of faith to incorporate the assumption into models to estimate the health of polar bear populations, the progress of glaciers, and the vulnerability of Arctic sea ice.  There were no data showing polar bears and Himalayan glaciers to be in terminal decline.  Even measurements of Arctic sea ice only extend back to 1979.  And so knowledge which is patchy, based on sparse data, estimates and guesswork is fitted into an encompassing storyline of climate change.  Really, they ought to remain disconnected stories, at least until more robust studies can show otherwise.

The most extreme conditions on the planet are naturally the least accessible and therefore the least understood.  Such regions aren’t simply distant; our primary access to them is through the imagination.  It is no coincidence, then, that stories about climate change seem to be located at the hottest, highest, deepest and coldest parts of the world.  The most alarming stories about climate change rest where there is the least data.  Like explorers in search of Yeti, climate researchers hunt frozen landscapes hoping to make the myth a reality.

See “Why the Climate Skeptics Are Winning” by Steven F. Hayward:

The Gleick episode exposes again a movement that disdains arguing with its critics, choosing demonization over persuasion and debate.  A confident movement would face and crush its critics if its case were unassailable, as it claims.  The climate change fight doesn’t even rise to the level of David and Goliath. Heartland is more like a David fighting a hundred Goliaths.  Yet the serial ineptitude of the climate campaign shows that a tiny David doesn’t need to throw a rock against a Goliath who swings his mighty club and only hits himself square in the forehead.

See “AGW—A Falsified Hypothesis”, by Geoff Brown, at The Climate Sceptics Blog.

See “Fakegate: Can’t Hide This Decline”, by Rand Simber at PJ Media:

For the record, I greatly resent being called a “denier,” with its clear — and fully intended, as the LA Times analogy reveals — connotation to Nazis.  I am a skeptic.  I don’t “deny” AGW, because I don’t have sufficient knowledge of how climate works, or its history, to confidently have a strong opinion about it.  What I do deny is that the proponents of the theory do have such knowledge or competence, and my doubts were buttressed by the release not just of the emails that revealed their duplicitous and unscientific behavior, but of the shoddy and unreplicable climate data sets and models themselves.

So, yes, I guess I am a denier.  Here’s what I deny.

I deny that science is a compendium of knowledge to be ladled out to school children like government-approved pablum (and particularly malnutritious pablum), rather than a systematic method of attaining such knowledge.

I deny that skepticism about anthropogenic climate change is epistemologically equivalent to skepticism about evolution, and I resent the implications that if one is skeptical about the former, one must be similarly skeptical about the latter, and “anti-science.”

As someone who has done complex modeling and computer coding myself, I deny that we understand the complex and chaotic interactions of the atmosphere, oceans and solar and other inputs sufficiently to model them with any confidence into the future, and I deny that it is unreasonable and unscientific to think that those who believe they do have such understanding suffer from hubris.  To paraphrase Carl Sagan, extraordinary policy prescriptions require extraordinary evidence.

On a different note, see “Arrested without Evidence over Accusation of Gun Ownership” at Shall Mot Be Questioned:

There’s a story out of Canada about a guy who was arrested and told by officers that he was being charged with possession of a firearm.  Normally, you would expect this to happen after they found someone in possession of a firearm.

He was given an attorney who was informed of the charges and even had a date set with a judge for a bail hearing for this charge.  At no point did he ever possess a firearm, but they kept him locked up and moved forward with the charges.

With his wife hauled down to the station and his children taken in for questioning by the relevant agency for possible endangerment issues, he signed a document that allowed police to search his home.  They did and there was still no firearm found in his possession.  Finally, they let him go free.

The evidence seems to come from a he said/she said scenario because his 4-year-old daughter drew a picture of a firearm and said the guy holding it was her daddy who would fight off bad guys and monsters.  Yes, a child who thinks monsters are real was used as evidence for the arrest instead of, you know, actual possession of a firearm.

See “Lower than Pond Scum” by Alan Caruba:

On Thursday, February 23, President Barack Obama was on the UM campus to tell the biggest bunch of lies about energy in America I have heard compressed into a single speech.
This President has already set records wasting taxpayer’s money on a range of so-called clean energy and renewable energy “investments”.  Solyndra, the solar panel company that went bust and stuck taxpayers with a half-billion in loan guarantees is just one of those “investments” and I keep waiting for someone to ask why public funds are being flushed down the toilet when, if the companies involved were viable, they could not raise private venture capital?  [...]
All politicians put the best face on their pet projects, but to flat-out lie about one of the most idiotic ideas to replace oil when this nation has enough oil, domestically and offshore, known and estimated to exist, defies the imagination.  It is an insult to every one of us.  And Obama wants to pump $14 million into algae, otherwise known as pond scum.  [...]

Barack Obama has been lying about so many things for so long I doubt he even knows when he is lying or even cares.  It’s not enough to dismiss this saying that all politicians lie because many do not.  Some in Congress right now are desperately trying to get the public in general and voters in particular to understand that America has more debt per capita than Greece.  We are on the precipice of financial collapse and Barack Obama just wants to spend more and more and more; some of it on pond scum.  [...]
This is the same President who stopped the building of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada that would provide more oil for our refineries and not cost the American taxpayer one penny to build.  This is the same President who imposed a moratorium on oil from the Gulf of Mexico even after the courts told him to remove it.  It caused the loss of an estimated 12,000 jobs while rigs departed for Cuba, Brazil and Mexico.
Between now and November, the President will be out campaigning and telling the same lies.  The rise in the cost of oil isn’t just a seasonal thing though prices have usually gone up in the summertime when people travel more for vacations.  It’s up because the Iranians are closing in on making their own nuclear weapons and their own missiles to hit, not just Israel, but the U.S.  It’s up because it is essential to ensure that the tankers oil-producing nations around the Persian Gulf can enter and exist it via the Strait of Harmuz.
The world isn’t running out of oil and is not about to run out.  The Earth floats on an ocean of oil despite the rising demand from Asia and other developing nations.  To replace foreign oil with algae-based fuel would require a chemically-controlled tank the size of the State of Colorado, about 69.3 million acres.

Finally, see “Radical Animal Rights Activist Arrested for Soliciting Undercover Hitman ‘Willing to Kill Someone Wearing Fur’”, by Liz Klimas, at The Blaze:

An Ohio woman who compared animal-welfare work to the liberation of World War II concentration camps has been charged with soliciting a hit man to fatally shoot or slit the throat of a random fur-wearer, federal authorities said.