What follows is going to be old news for many readers, so bear with me. The issue of climate change is something that takes time to sink in for me, and I am a late arrival, so please, if you are up to speed already, humor me.
I finally took time these past few days to read some of the so-called Climategate emails, wherein over a thousand internal messages from The Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Norwich England were made public. I thought it was going to be a tortuous task for a non-scientist, but it is not. The emails that I read at this site are not loaded with jargon and math. They concern themselves with politics, playing defense against pain-in-the-ass skeptics, and making sure that the public only sees an alarmist point of view about climate change on news and television. In the emails scientists who are skeptical on this subject are ridiculed, stonewalled and suppressed.
Climategate is well covered elsewhere, as is the whitewashing that went on in the aftermath. Googling “Climategate” yields many sites that dismiss and “debunk” the matter, including the prestigious Union of Concerned Scientists. There was a circling of the wagons after the email “hack,” which was probably just a leak from someone inside CRU in possession of a conscience. I hope that when we get to the end of this post, you will understand that not only was it done to expose a serious breach of scientific ethics, and also massive science fraud.
Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth– was based on lies. He must have known. It suggests to me that his book, Earth in the Balance, appearing as it did in the 1992 election year, was probably ghost-written, as are so many books by politicians. At Harvard he was not a good student of either math or science. Wikipedia covers for his sorry ass on this issue, saying that he was “… an avid reader who fell in love with scientific and mathematical theories…”. Unpack that sentence – what does it even mean?
Let’s begin with the so-called hockey stick, developed by climatologist Michael Mann in concert with the CRU.
Mann, who now claims that the Hockey Stick should not have become so prominent in the climate change debate, appears to have known in advance what his findings would be, what the CRU would conclude, and what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) would be publishing. That is all I can make of it. Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) appears to be a project designed to sell costly and unnecessary legislation, and to cut back on CO2 even as it is an essential and beneficial molecule that grows our crops, run our machines, and helps us advance in comfort and wealth.
He had to know this in advance, otherwise he would not have committed the fraud that is contained in this graph. In order to show the flat and gradually cooling line seen here, he had to eliminate two periods in our planet’s recent history, the Medieval Warming Period MWP), and the more recent Little Ice Age (LIA), which ended around 1870. But it is worse than that … far worse.
Above is a temperature graph done by Hubert Lamb, the founder of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (in 1972). He died in 1997 – It is easy to see that it contradicts Mann’s hockey stick graph in total. In fact, in the released emails, Mann suggests that the Medieval Warm Period had to go away, as well as the Little Ice Age. Since we know that Vikings were farming in Greenland during the MWP, and that they had to leave due to the LIA, it is an inconvenient fact. Mann had to fudge the numbers to make them disappear. This is from one of Mann’s emails:
I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2000 years, rather than the usual 1000 years … that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “Medieval Warm Period”, even if we don’t yet have data available that far back.
Note that Mann wants to “contain” the MWP even as he has not seen the data. In accounting, we call that cooking the books.
(I put the red arrow in Lamb’s graph to point to the turn to the twentieth century and all of the warming that was already going on at that time, even as we were barely adding CO2 to the atmosphere. We are merely coming out of the LIA. The link between CO2 and warming is tenuous at best, and the fact that we are gradually warming is hardly a problem, far more a benefit. The LIA was not a good time to be alive – Iceland lost half of its population during that time. It was better to be around during the MWP, a time when the Vikings were farming in Greenland.)
It gets worse.I am quoting now from John Costella’s Climategate Emails site, linked in the opening paragraph:
That background now paves the way to our understanding the historic email which generations of schoolchildren to come will study as the 33 words which summarize one of the most serious scientific frauds in the history of Western science. Phil Jones [British head of CRU] to Ray Bradley, Mike Mann, Malcolm Hughes, Keith Briffa, and Tim Osborn, regarding a diagram for a World Meteorological Organization Statement:
“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temperatures to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
What does that mean – “hide the decline?” According to those prestigious groups that investigated and dismissed Climategate as a non-issue, exonerating the participants, it means nothing. The “trick” is merely scientific shop talk, we are told. Just move along.
Please watch the video below – it is but a five minute clip. It is part of a a talk given by Richard A. Muller, professor of physics at the University of California. Fast forward to 2:20 if you are short of time.
I know the tendency when reading blogs is to not depart to watch videos. I do that too. So below are two screen grabs from this clip. The first shows the data as presented by Mann to advance the hockey stick.
Notice on the far right of the screen temperatures have taken off in the 20th century after centuries of gradual decline. This is the essence of the AGW scare. Mann used tree ring data coupled with atmospheric increases in CO2. Tree ring data is not reliable in discerning historic temperatures. It does not even work well in the present and is not used for that purpose by most climatologists.
Starting with 1961 he had to depart from it, as it was not telling him what he needed to hear. At that point in the graph, he substituted what appears to me to be made-up data. Much of the Climategate body of emails that I read have to do with refusal to release this data to other researchers, notably Steve McIntyre. This graph is the heart of the matter. The scientists at CRU stonewalled other researchers, and for good reason.
In the image below, Muller has placed Mann’s data with the real data in the graph. This is what Mann was hiding. This is the nut of the matter, the essence of Climategate.
Do you see what “hiding the decline” meant? Do you see what the “trick” was? It was science fraud. Here is is out in the open, and yet the CRU and IPCC are still pushing AGW, still urging curbs on CO2 and carbon sequestration and credits. This is how corrupt we are. Ask yourself, how can Michael Mann, currently the director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, still have a job? Why is he not waiting your table or selling you groceries?
Below is another graph based on ice core data from Antarctica.
That’s a little blurry, a scan of an image from a book, and one probably sexed up to make it understandable to the non-scientific public. It shows 800,000 years of our planet’s history. The blue parts are the routine ice ages. The red peaks are the interglacial periods of warmth. On the far right is our current interglacial period. Note that it has been much warmer in past times. There is nothing new going on now, nothing unprecedented. We are merely lucky to be alive during a period of warmth.
However, if you need to worry about something, worry about that. Ice ages are real killers. We are 11,000 years into our current warm period, which typically last 10-15,000 years.
* Quoting John Costella
Piece of Mindful 
http://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2019/01/17/the-manufacturing-of-greta-thunberg-for-consent-the-political-economy-of-the-non-profit-industrial-complex/
This is not about the science, but the businesses behind the mass, behind the “crisis.”
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I do not understand why the fraud if AGW is being foisted in us, what the real agenda is. I only know that CO2 is our friend, and they have made it the enemy. That does not bode well for the health of the people living on the planet.
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Because it is working on a new generation, the same way “nuclear winter” and “sex, drugs and rock and roll” worked on baby boomers. It is the emotion that places value on the image that creates mass psychosis. Like Procter and Gamble, same shit, new packaging and subliminal marketing that works. It works because most people went to public schools, are programmed to believe things literally, never question the talking heads, and grow to love living as a character in a cartoon rather than the difficult path of self-realization and struggle in a real world full of unknowns and risk.
Who doesn’t “love Big Brother” today? The so-called left despised the FBI and CIA until they obviously plotted to dump Trump. Bazaar 180 in the extreme. Easier than leading real sheep into a slaughter house.
The “Carbon Tax” is one of the key ingredients to a global taxation system and debt slavery under one government, IMO. Yellow Vest protesters seem to get this and resist. We lag behind.
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Science debate is endless. It is supposed to direct our gaze. It has. What are we not investigating as our attention is directed right were we’re supposed to be looking.
One could begin at the U.N. What’s happening there? Or on Wall Street connections to the climate “crisis.” Banks? Agenda 2030? I dunno’.
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In such a huge field we can pick and choose which horse to back and read blogs and forums which support our bias. I did read the comments below the recommended video also. The best thread starts from the thread by Cameron Farmer, which seems to have reactivated [2011 video] very recently.
Keith Raphael Briffa , whose earlier tree ring work ‘chilled’ the warm middle ages period, died “peacefully” in 2017 – late October aged 64 …. just a month or two short of his 65th birthday [hmmmm] and extraordinarily for such a seminal scientist, the UEA’s own tribute didn’t filter out for SEVEN months! Phil Jones was a co-author, naturally.
Click to access briffa_inmemoriam_holocene2018_withtemplate_submittedversion.pdf
The earlier anomalous work by Briffa seems to be dependent on a single tree in Siberia YA06 in support of the ‘hockey stick’ which has its own wiki page. Briffa has slightly back pedalled from the hockey stick while maintaining his stance a wider selection of samples – Briffa et al . Quaternary Science Reviews [2013] 72, 83-107
“Allowing for chronology and reconstruction uncertainty, the mean of the last 100 years of the reconstruction is likely warmer than any century in the last 2000 years in this region.”
In the following youtube video [go to 20:55] Phil Jones describes the “peaceful” death as sudden and unexpected.
Title – Measuring climate change global temperatures—Interview w/Dr. Phil Jones—Radio Ecoshock 2019-03-13
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Phil Jones talking climate, uploaded Mar 27 2019
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He claims that CO2 is the primary greenhouse gas … water vapor takes that prize. Reminds me of Al Gore saying that “after you remove water vapor” that CO2 is the primary greenhouse gas. That’s distortion.
[Anyway, he was using tree ring data on a scale to the left that was calibrated as temperature. When the tree ring data stopped giving him what he needed, he switched to other means. That does two things, in my mind, discredits tree ring data, and discredits the work in total.]
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but, apparently,
the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is controlled by air temperature, unlike other greenhouse gases, which are controlled by emissions (Myhre et al. 2013). Other greenhouse gases, primarily CO2, impact the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere through modulating the air temperature. The strong coupling between water vapor content and air temperature provides the basis for a strong positive water vapor feedback that amplifies the initial temperature changes induced by other greenhouse gases. [Wang, 2016]
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/JCLI-D-15-0485.1
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He makes these claims without that additional data. (But note also, as El Nino events clearly demonstrate, that oceans are the primary driver of air temperature, and not atmosphere.) It has never been satisfied, in my mind, how sensitive temperature is to atmospheric CO2. I read stuff like this link as a non-scientist and conclude … I must now read that again. It is my sincere hope that things eventually penetrate the cranium. https://judithcurry.com/2019/04/01/whats-the-worst-case-climate-sensitivity/
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They wish to fool the folk into giving up the industrial ways of the West to save the planet & willingly outsource even more production (jobs) overseas. And along w/many new laws & regulations (AGENDA 21 for a start) there will be a food crisis to really scare the bejesus out of the sheepski’s. The money is just a tool, they want total control. But by consent, not force.
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I know numbers can be overplayed, but it is weird the compiler of those climategate emails would single out a “33 word email” and make a big deal of it (with the improbable claim it will be read by generations of schoolchildren as an example of science fraud… Lol. What, in schools run by fakeologists?)
The emails seem pretty genuine to me, I can’t imagine they are fabricated… (although maybe!).. But maybe this compiler is still trying to control the leak somehow, in his selection, or maybe by connecting them (and criticism of them) to whatever organization he’s part of. I’m grasping at straws, it’s just weird to get a 33 tossed in, on an issue that’s so fraught with spooky players.
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The author of the email could not possibly have known that his words would be publicized. Who would he be signaling? The email is addressed only to insiders. (Is “i.e.” considered a word?)
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My answer above is 33 words. I meant to do that.
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But the compiler chose to highlight “33”, in his discussion of the emails.. The compiler is the one throwing that in as an apparent marker. I hope that’s more clear…
The email itself having 33 words is trivial as you say, so why does the compiler underline it?
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I just got done reading McIntyre/McKitrick paper titled Hockey Sticks, Principal Components, and Spurious Significance from 2005 … it is written for scientists (statisticians) and is only slightly penetrating for me, introducing me to such concepts as Red Noise, eigenvalues, and Monte Carlo Experiments. Here is what I gleaned from it, however: Mann’s methodology almost always produces a hockey stick graph, even when random and meaningless values are inserted in the mix. When McIntyre and McKitrick ran the tree ring data without using Mann’s data transformation, no apparent pattern emerged from tree rings from 1400 to 1980. Scientists have to be ever-so sterile in these presentations, but the authors on page 4 under Discussion and Conclusions labeled the results of their review of Mann’s work as “disquieting.” That is, in this type of work, like yelling “Fraud!”
I suspect that John Costella realized what I now realize too, that the [smoking gun document] for the AGW panic/propaganda campaign was fraud, plain and simple. He chose to highlight it in his 180-page review with strong language unlike any he used anywhere else in this work, by counting the words and telling us they would be infamous. It doesn’t work like that, really. In our corrupt world, fraud is rarely exposed and even more rarely punished.
If the email he was quoting had 32 or 34 or fifty words, I have no doubt he would have used those numbers in the same manner. I regard the appearance of 33 here as coincidental. There’s number flying all around in this AGW business, and I have seen no patterns.
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My second answer was 11 words, also intentional.
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And that was eight. Not making fun of you or anything. 33, 11 and 8 all happen innocently in real life.
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Muller: “Let’s use Mike’s trick to hide the decline, that’s the words, ‘Let’s use Mike’s trick to hide the decline'” [go to 2.02 in the video]
On closer inspection, those were not the words.
Phil Jones never said that and Muller is conflating two parts of one email.
https://skepticalscience.com/Mikes-Nature-trick-hide-the-decline.htm
The ‘decline’ is answered elsewhere :
The ‘decline’ refers to a decline in northern treerings, not global temperature, and is openly discussed in papers and the IPCC
reports.
Muller was interviewed in September 2018 [link below] which touched on the ‘hockey stick’ of Michael Mann [9 minutes in]
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https://www.sumologic.com/podcast/climate-science-data-richard-muller/
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A fascinating discussion.
Muller “I look at solutions to global warming being proposed by the people who seriously, honestly believe global warming is real, and that includes me…”
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We all agree on that. The Earth has been warming since the mid-1600s. What appears to be going on is the insertion of a political agenda into this natural cycle.Mann’s bizarre behavior fits well inside a project. He can lie and deceive and bully with ease, knowing he is protected. Look at his current cushy job. After hiding the decline as he did, he should be waiting tables. Instead, he fails upwards.
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By the way, I have done some intensive, though non-scientist work here on this blog with other scientific matters, AIDS, Prostrate and PSA, and have wandered into jungles of immense corruption. Each of these jungles appears to have had a point-person, a man in charge of the project, or hoax. With AIDS, it was Richard Gallo, and with the prostate nightmare, William J. Catalona. They are actors, seem untouchable, their dishonesty immense and backed by power, real power behind them. With AGW, it is Michael Mann. Just wondering, do you know any of these gentlemen?
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and while we’re here, there’s an interesting Mother Jones youtube video on the ‘hockey stick’ buried in this 2013 piece
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/the-hockey-stick-the-most-controversial-chart-in-science-explained/275753/
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The hokey stick was way too easy, IMO. A taunt, perhaps. Today’s speculative “news” chorus is singing: “12 years to doomsday.” https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/426353-ocasio-cortez-the-world-will-end-in-12-years-if-we-dont-address
Same, same, but different. Polling is leading the issues right now — over 50% for middle age, and over 70% for young, likely voters. I’ve seen it in the 80s more recently. With over 20 presidential challengers vs. Trump, this irrational fear of doomsday will not end anytime soon. Science vs. politics is no contest, politics wins every time. Science as religion (or non-secular humanism) still loses to media propaganda/politics. A big bag of popcorn and a cold one anyone?
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The nail that was driven into the coffin of AGW for me was two side by side pictures of Rio De Janeiro’s coastline. A photographer in 1900 climbed the mountain behind the city and aimed his box camera to the southeast showing most of the cities beaches.
The second exposure was taken from the same location 115 years later. The differences were the amounts of development that surround the bay. However, the waterline remained the same.
Stop for a moment and consider how our world has changed inn the last hundred years. The industrial age, horse to train to car to plane, world wars, middle eastern wars and oil wells set on fire, container ships flooding the seaways, millions of tractors planting and harvesting.
And to what end? Little or no change in ocean levels.
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132 words or 4 times 33
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I am trying to remember if there was any single moment or insight that changed my mind on AGW. Probably as recently as 2012-13, I was saying things like “scientists are in agreement, what can I do but trust them?” I did not know that science follows money, and that money for the most part is NSF and agenda-driven. In general, as this blog as developed over time, I have taken on a more skeptical attitude about everything. When I learn that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse wants to invoke RICO to punish people who do not believe in AGW and refuse to STFU, I realize I am dealing with a religion and an official State ideology, a regime of intolerance and corruption that Galileo understood so well.
It is nice to know the planet will survive as these people perish into infamy. Don’t worry, be happy!
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I knew it! I knew it! You’re juiced! (8)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_S._Whitehouse Check his dad & grandfathers participation in organized crime. Diplomats, YALE, armed forces, yada-yada… Juiced like a NBL home run king.
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Would you please report to us on this matter? I am more curious about the name, and the name of the place where our seat of government resides. Is there some connection? Probably coincidental, but worth a look.
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That question^^ to me?
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Yes.
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DC or District of Columbia (really go deep into that columbia name) is a sovereign state. IT is the top of tier of organized crime. Diplomats?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consigliere Rhode Island as tradionally been occupied directly by a decedent of the DuPont lineage.
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h t t ps://climatesciencenews.com/
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They are now calling Climate ‘Change’, Climate ‘Crisis’? With a numeral value of ‘3’ for the letter C? K.
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I was listening to Michael Mann yesterday speaking in 2018, long after his hockey stick has been discredited. He still doubles down on it, claims it represents real data, claims that the only driver of temperature is CO2. He’s a fraud, easily seen. He closes by emphasizing alternative energy, solar and wind. I think that is the heart of the matter, to shut down fossil fuel, the engine of prosperity. That has to be the goal all along, fewer people, less food, less wealth. He’s a Luddite, but on a mission. He could not have dreamed this up on his own. It is a large propaganda project backed by powerful sectors of our society. He’s just a tool. That he can stand there and tell bold-faced lies is a tribute to lack of character.
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You’re right, Mann is indeed discredited We can ignore him.
The following graph from 1950 to recent years is found on the homepage of Stefan Rahmstorf which is more interesting :
http://herdsoft.com/climate/widget/image.php?width=400&height=230&title=
Any ECS – Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity – which is positive seems to indicate a connection between global tempearture rise and doubling of CO2 concentrations. McKitrick willingly analyses data Lewis and Judith Curry in J. Climate [2018] as reported in Financial Post June 20 2018. Their ECS estimate is 1.5 degrees, with a probability range between 1.05 and 2.45 degrees. whereas the IPCC says between 1.5 and 4.5 They even overlap.
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I think it time we all just relax, enjoy Canadian wine.
Yes, we are warming. Maybe CO2 plays a small role, and if so, I want a poster of the molecule to place on my wall. Thank you CO2! You might be an agent that in small part delivers us from ice ages, migration, disease and starvation. None of this is unprecedented.
Part of Mann’s immense deception upon us is to, by means of devious science, remove the Minoan, Roman and Medieval Warming from our history, achieved by the Hockey Stick. Also gone on his graph is the Little Ice Age. He’s a hack, working for pay, carrying out an unstated agenda. I rank him with Gallo, Catalona, Lysenko and Malthus in the upper stratosphere of fake scientists. Impressive for a man of so little note?
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Forget Mann. Head for the high ground with your northern Manitoba Chardonnay and listen to Rahmstorf , 12 mins concise presentation
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Another “We’re all gonna die!!!” guy. He’s Mann with a less grating edge, that’s all. There’s more to cover at this tiny blog, far more. But I think it is important to get to the nut of the matter. They are pushing solar and wind, inefficient and unreliable technologies, and urging the end of the use of fossil fuels. The end result of such a strategy, if it is successfully implemented, will be less wealth, less food, more human suffering, and a decrease in population trends. That is what I suspect the the ultimate goal of this immense propaganda campaign, to put an end to spreading prosperity. How much happier a place for the 1 or 2% who control most of the wealth if the 98% stay mired in suffering and poverty.
And it is all done by propaganda magic! They demonize CO2 without ever having to explain how the warming started as we came out of the Little Ice Age and continued well into the 1st half of the 20th century without a notable increase in CO2. But being on the receiving end of NSF grants that only fund CO2 demonization campaigns means never suffering burden of proof. Just assert assert assert until my ass hurts. It gets worse … they fail to explain how a warmer planet is a danger to humans. More on that later. Right now I would like to take all of the climate scientists on the planet, put them in an auditorium, seal it off and let it fill with CO2 from their exhalations of doom and gloom, and then have them explain why they are not dying off from heat.
I once sat through a funny presentation by a professor of philosophy called counting from 1 to 10, philosophically speaking. He said the big problem was not how to get from 1 to 10, but rather how to get from 0 to 1. The solution was existentialism … you assert 1! There is no burden of proof. This is the current state of climate crisis science, assertion without proof. We’re all gonna die!
I might enjoy Alaskan wine too. Uncap the potential of that land mass while we are at it.
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By the way, his assertions of more and stronger hurricanes, more droughts, not supported by data. Just asserts.
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Several years ago I was debating this same subject with commenters at a Great Falls based blog. My point then was if temperature data was collected nationally at Airports over hot black asphalt next to blast heaters connected to 747 wings then the warming trend figures are inaccurate.
Vindicated at last. Even NOAA admits their collection sites fail to be accurate indicators.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/05/03/big-news-verified-by-noaa-poor-weather-station-siting-leads-to-artificial-long-term-warming/
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We are warming, Swede. And it is a good thing. Fossil fuels are an engine of prosperity, eliminating a contradiction in my earlier life, being an environmentalist and making a living off natural gas extraction. Human activity has very little to do with warming. We are just enjoying an interglacial period of prosperity. I have often wondered what drove the Vikings to move south, invade what is now England and France and Central Europe. It was climate change … the bad kind. Things were getting colder. Warming? not a problem.
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The sun may have something to say about your warming prediction.
But if your right the northern hemisphere has the most to gain in longer growing seasons.
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My ancient relatives conquered lands north and south, east and west.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_Age#/media/File:Viking_Expansion.svg
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NOAA is just one organisation whose temperature measurements are used to measure GW
https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-how-do-scientists-measure-global-temperature
Watts seems as intolerant of criticism as Mike Mann at the opposite end of the GW spectrum, from the comments there, Big Swede.
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His intolerance is justified, he’s been fighting the AGW theory for many years. It’s been my impression that global warmists take on a religious fanaticism.
Far as data collection is concerned I and other doubters would eliminate the possibility of “data adjustments” and flawed computer modeling which promotes or even entices agenda driven results.
Every scientific experimentation that I did in high school and college always based itself against a control, for example a petri dish that wasn’t exposed to any outside elements. We have that control. We can visually monitor ice caps on distant planets where there’s no human activity and compare those fluctuations to earth based data.
But somehow that’s not being done, or it’s being buried.
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