cover-ups

One small suppression of free speech in Australia, one giant leap towards the coming dark age.

Gillard's tame ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) is threatening businesses with million dollar fines if they have pre-carbon tax sales, or blame price increases on the carbon tax.

A few things: First, to non-Australians, the ACCC used to be a service to the country, but I have seen nothing useful done by them since their former chairman Professor Allan Fels retired. Time and again they seem to be refusing to act for the consumer and making lame excuses for not doing so. They aren't anybody's servant, just another tame bureaucracy doing the biddings of their political masters.

Next, this might seem petty. It is far from petty. When this story was reported on Wattsupwiththat.com, a commenter got the entire thing backwards:

The Chairman was quite clear about the organisations’s position in his presentation, which is no different than it has been in the past about any other misleading advertising ... “Business costs increase all the time, and businesses are free to set their own prices. However, if a business chooses to raise their prices they should not misrepresent this as a result of the carbon price when it is not the case.”

Baloney. The cause of a price increase is not a misrepresentation of the same kind as pretending prices have gone down when they went up, for example (which has been happening in Australia with the ACCC as usual doing nothing). And everyone, yes everyone, should have special leeway in commenting on government policy simply because governments are so much more powerful than individuals, or even businesses. If you can't risk being wrong when talking about a government, then you can't risk saying anything. As the writer of the story, Willis Eschenbach, explained to the above commenter:

"It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist."

Here in its entirety is Prof. Hal Lewis' public letter of resignation from the American Physical Society, from GWPF:

From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara

To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society

6 October 2010

Dear Curt:

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence---it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

The recent releases from America's NOAA National Climatic Data Center make a convoluted tangle of misinformation that has tripped up almost everyone - including many climate realists.

The confusion starts with NOAA's own website announcing the report at http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/20100728_stateoftheclimate.html. Here's a snapshot of the page (click to see a larger image):

See the image of the report cover at the top of the web page? That is not the cover of the Report. Now notice the pretty graphic "Ten indicators of a warming world" a bit lower down. That one is not in the Report, it is in the Report. Confused?

It turns out there are actually two reports, and the NOAA web page only links to one of them. At the bottom of the page, below the bit I screen-captured in the graphic, there is a link to "The Report" - which is the one whose cover is shown on the web NOAA page, and which is also the one written by "more than 300 scientists from 160 research groups in 48 countries". But that Report is not the Report that the NOAA website goes on to describe in detail!

There is a second Report, called "2009 The State of the Climate Highlights", which the NOAA web page does not link to (but which you can see here), which is the source of the alarmist statements quoted on the web page, including this one:

Posters on the alarmist Tamino's blog have accused Wattsupwiththat of suppressing critical comments (See http://tamino.wordpress.com/2010/05/10/goddards-folly )

dean  // May 11, 2010 at 3:37 pm | Reply

jbar asks:”So why aren’t y’all trying to shine some light in the comment-sphere at WUWT? At least a few people there are trying to learn something and are susceptible to scientific argument (even if Steve isn’t).”

Because they edit out critical responses. Please post this remark: “The fact that the atmospheric pressure is the same in the Sahara desert in midsummer and the Antarctic in midwinter is the same shows that surface temperature is not proportional to pressure.” Let us know how many diogeneses see the truth.

But but but!!!!!

The antarctic MUST have a higher pressure because it’s at the BOTTOM of the earth! And we all KNOW that things at the bottom are under greater pressure! Just look at the water behind the Hoover dam!!!

Therefore it’s not perporshunal… its INVERSELY perporshunal!!!

dhogaza // May 11, 2010 at 5:36 pm

The antarctic MUST have a higher pressure because it’s at the BOTTOM of the earth!

Naw, you’re forgetting all of the CO2 that’s not in the atmosphere down there because it’s all precipitated out in those massive CO2 blizzards Goddard’s mentioned earlier.

Two years ago, Wattsupwiththat demolished a crackpot story published on CBS (here and here). As stated in the second article, CBS wrongly attributed the story to Associated Press and then killed it without publishing a retraction.

At some time since, that story has been restored on the CBS site, and here is today's screenshot with a bit of surrounding material to prove the date of the screenshot:

Wattsupwiththat brings us the story of the curving line. Just when the Arctic ice seemed about to break through the long-term average, it made a sudden downturn. Anthony Watts' reader Anthony Scalzi prepared this animation:

The shape of the curve for each day actually changes (goes lower) on the subsequent day. As someone with expertise in computer science, I cannot see any way this can be an outcome of an automated algorithm of any reasonable design. To make the shape clear, I interspersed the four days' images with an image showing all four shapes:

It particularly irritates me when people make strident claims and then, when the claims are found to be untrue, someone says "Oh well, maybe a few people said that, but not any of us level-headed chaps." In other words, they get the mileage from the absurd claim, but when the claim is caught out, it is downplayed and disowned.

Which brings me to this 2006 article (index.php/ archives/ 2006/ 03/ bush-on-the-debate) from realclimate dot org, the website that proclaims itself "climate science from climate scientists." The site seems to be funded out of the taxes of those of you in America, so it must be reliable (wink wink):

"...warming yes, but is it caused by humans? This position is equally out of step with science, where the debate over this question has also now been settled."

"Nature", which imagines itself to be the international weekly journal of science, published an absurd piece trying to make out that the bullies in the global warming scare movement are in fact a naive group of timid waifs being rolled over by a powerful movement that dominates the media. Try telling that to David Bellamy, one of the best and most popular media biologists, banned from TV for his disbelief in anthropogenic global warming!

There's a really good deconstruction of Nature's cowardly piece over here on Talking About the Weather, but a few additional remarks are in order. To give you the flavour of the thing, here's a sample of the Nature article:

The Australian gives us this precious piece, reprinted from The Times:

Man-made climate change evidence stronger: study

EVIDENCE that human activity is causing global warming is much stronger than previously stated and is found in all parts of the world, according to a study that attempts to refute claims from sceptics.

I'll get to the bit that shows this "study" for what it really is in just a mo', but in passing, I note that real scientific work doesn't have an agenda, it attempts to find the truth. Yes, scientists do set up "devil's advocate" experiments in which they attempt to disprove theories, but the purpose is to test the strength of the theory: if it passes, it gains credibility. Or, of course, if it fails, it is disconfirmed. But one shouldn't set up 'studies' whose goal and methodology is designed to confirm what you already claim; science is tested by passing hard tests, not by being confirmed in 'studies' designed to be helpful. Moving on...

The "fingerprints" of human influence on the climate can be detected not just in rising temperatures but in the saltiness of the oceans, rising humidity, changes in rainfall and the shrinking of Arctic Sea ice at the rate of 600,000sq km a decade.

Now let's just stop and think for a moment about this, and let's overlook the detail that Arctic sea ice has risen every year since 2007, because I just can't get my eyes off that "saltiness of the oceans" bit. For all intents and purposes the amount of water on Earth is constant. Yes, meteorites may deliver some, and some may be broken up by radiation in the atmosphere, some hydrogen atoms escape the Earth's gravity, and so on. But compared with the total quantity of water, these changes are, on the scale of hundreds or even thousands of years, minuscule. So much for two countries' erstwhile best newspapers.

I attended the Brisbane leg of Lord Monckton's Australian tour last week. The Irish Club was packed. I tried to estimate capacity and got up to around 400, but as the talk started crowds poured in and a standing crowd filled the space between the seats and the back wall. While the crowd swelled, Lord Monckton took the opportunity to introduce himself to attendees.