As someone over 60, I find myself suddenly interested in browsing obituaries. However, with the decline of newspapers, my only source is the “Notable Deaths” page on Wikipedia. Inevitably, my curiosity leads me to uncover some surprising and unusual details, so I thought I’d share my recent discoveries here.
Continue reading “My Notable Death Dossier #1”Category: Climate insanity
A Feigenbaum tree of chaotic behavior?
The above chart is a summary of various hurricane models predicting the future course of Hurricane Rafeal. I got it from an article at Watts Up With That by Kip Hansen, whose cv appears to be a Chaologist, or someone who studies chaos theory. The black spot above Cuba is the 24-hour point for the storm, and the diverging lines thereafter are predictions of its future course by the models.
As you can see, nobody knows. Why it seems almost … chaotic.
IPCC: Just Bad at Science … or Engaged in Science Fraud?
IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and climate alarmists in general don’t think the sun is terribly important in the matter of the climate of our planet. As absurd as that sounds, there is a reason: The UN’s political Agenda (established by Resolution A/RES/43/53 of the UN General Assembly in 1988) is to promote Anthropogenic Climate Change. That is the cart that precedes AGW and its so-called science horse. If the sun was shown to be a major player in global climate, it would short circuit the AGW movement. But that creates a problem, as the sun is indeed the major player behind our planet’s climate.
Continue reading “IPCC: Just Bad at Science … or Engaged in Science Fraud?”
National Interagency Fire Center joins the long con
The Heartland Institute is a group of climate change skeptics comprised of scientists and others, many like me simply impressed with their work and willing to contribute. (I tongue-in-cheek give them $33 a month). In 2022 they put out a booklet called Climate at a Glance for Teachers and Students that offers up a brief summary of thirty hot topics, so to speak. Each item is referenced so that debate among the public and climate “scientists” can go on intelligently.
The above graph is a 93-year record of forest fires in the lower 48. I recognize that it is somewhat blurry, as I had to scan it out of the book. It is no longer available on public agency websites. The X-axis is years, 1920-2020, and the Y-axis the number of acres burned in the lower 48, 10 million to 60 million. As we can see, the most acreage burned by forest fires was the 1930s and 40s, with 1931 seeing 52 million acres burned. I hesitate to say we “lost” acreage, as it has almost all grown back, and also know that wildfires are a natural component of forest health.
Continue reading “National Interagency Fire Center joins the long con”
Climate sensitivity: Warmists miss by a factor of 682?
I have maintained for some time now that the effects of CO2 on the planet’s temperature are insignificant, no more than a pimple on an elephant’s butt. CO2 was chosen as a stalking horse to enable warmists to surreptitiously level an attack on humanity via elimination of fossil fuels, our lifeblood. It’s people that they want gone.
Much of the debate surrounding CO2 is about what is referred to as “climate sensitivity”, or the amount of warming that would occur with a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere. Typically measurements of atmospheric CO2 start before the industrial revolution, in the late 1700s, at 280ppm (parts per million), so that a doubling would be 560ppm, which by my calculations will happen in 35-40 years at current rates. (We are currently at about 422 ppm, or stated otherwise, the percentage of the atmosphere that is CO2 is .0422, or .000422 if stated as a decimal. It is but a trace molecule, blown up by warmists to T-Rex proportion.
Before we dissect the above graph, I want to cite AI, which these days bleeds over anything I try to use a search engine for … this is AI describing IPCC Climate Models.
Continue reading “Climate sensitivity: Warmists miss by a factor of 682?”
Hottest day ever?
AP News recently ran a headline claiming, actually shouting, that Monday, July 22, 2024 was the hottest day ever in Earth’s history. My questions are many, but most importantly, do they really expect to be taken seriously when making such claims? This is followed by “Do they believe their own lies?” It appears to me that these screaming headlines are designed to reach gullible people who don’t read beyond headlines and who can’t think properly anyway. That must be the target market – most Americans.
Let’s have a look of some of the many problems with this headline:
We’re having a heat wave
Temperatures surged in New England these past days, and demand for electricity did too. Note above that nuclear, natural gas, hydro and petroleum filled the bill, with wind and solar barely visible on this graph.
This, after billions have been invested in solar and offshore wind.
Science class is cancelled today
The above three men are, left to right, Michael Mann, Keith Briffa (1952-2017), and Phil Jones. All three worked in or for the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University in Norwich, England when in 2009 there was a major leak of internal emails, a scandal now referred to as “Climategate”. Over the years, by means of whitewash and lack of media coverage, the subject of Climategate has been minimized if not forgotten, and the people at its center exonerated.
I do not exonerate them.
Ethically challenged “scientists” can say anything they want without repercussions
While on our recent trip back east, I had plenty of time (plane flights, evenings in motels) to do some very intense reading. I chose a book by A.W. Montford, a British writer and proprietor of the Bishop Hill blog. Prior to leaving on our trip, I deliberately avoided reading the book in question, The Hockey Stick Illusion, subtitled Climategate and the corruption of science. My objective in reading this book (which has so many post-it flags on it that it might fly away on me) was to come to grips with the science behind not just the Hockey Stick, but climate change as a whole. I have the distinct impression that climatologists are given carte blanche to say or publish anything that crosses their minds, without fear of fact-checking or follow-up.
Impressions of Michael Mann
This has been bubbling inside me for quite some time now. Maybe it started some years back when Dr. Michael Mann, the hockey stick guy, was on a TV panel show and someone suggested that climate affairs were so bad that it made her/him want to cry. As if on cue, Mann generated crocodile tears, pretending to lament the situation of our climate. It made me want to puke.
But I have a lot of impressions of Mann … perhaps foremost, that while his so-called Hockey Stick is pseudoscience at best, it is very detailed work that requires a great deal of intelligence and effort, even if he was probably exaggerating his case, perhaps even engaging in creative accounting. Steve McIntyre, the Canadian mining engineer who took apart the stick piece by piece, had to devote tremendous effort to replicate Mann’s efforts, not easily dissembled and beyond the reach of us mere mortals. What we found was that tree rings are a complicated science, and without a strong working knowledge of statistics cannot be assembled in a way that sends a “temperature signal” from the past to the present.
Piece of Mindful 