I have moved

You can find me at ScottishSceptic.uk

For information

WordPress used to have a reasonably price for using my own domain name. But whereas it used to cost around ~£10/year to redirect, WordPress upped their charges to nearly £100 a year.

Given that I’ve also had to stop using Google adverts as they are deliberately blocking material for CLEAR POLITICAL reasons I cannot justify that amount. (bing project veritas and see the a wig wig in Google admitting they are planning to prevent Trump getting re-elected by manipulating what people find through google – election tampering on that grand scale should result in lengthy prison sentences!).

NCDC/NCEI’s Karl and Peterson refuse congressional subpoena on flawed ‘pausebuster’ paper

#NOAAgate is worth reblogging

Watts Up With That?

Wow, just wow. I told Dr. Tom Peterson in an email this summer that their highly questionable paper that adjusted SST’s of the past to erase the “pause” was going to become “their waterloo”, and Peterson’s response was to give the email to wackadoodle climate blogger Miriam O’Brien (aka Sou Bundanga) so she could tout it with the usual invective spin that she loves to do. How “professional” of Peterson, who made the issue political payback with that action.

Another reminder of Peterson’s “professionalism” is this political cartoon he made portraying climate scientists holding different published opinions as “nutters”, while working on the taxpayer’s dime, courtesy of the Climategate emails in 2009:

Now, it looks like Karl and Peterson think they are above the law and forget who they actually work for. They’ve really stepped in it now.

Via The Hill:

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Agency won’t give GOP internal docs on climate research

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The Royal Anti-Science Society of Edinburgh?

Watts Up With That?

By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

The campaign by certain rent-seeking scientific societies to push a single, narrow view of the climate question continued in Scotland today with a meeting coyly entitled Climate Change: Science and Society at the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland’s once-famous, once-scientific society.

Your correspondent, following a tip-off from “rms”, a WUWT commenter, tootled round from Queen Street and sat through this gag-reflex-tweaking propaganda event.

This was the first meeting at any scientific society at which not only did I hear a member of the audience demand less science but the rest of the audience actually applauded.

We’ll come to that. But I’m not surprised. An eminent Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh suggested to its then president almost ten years ago that I should be asked to address the Society on the climate question so that the Fellows could hear both sides. He was told…

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Welcome

Welcome to Scotland’s Right

A Global Epidemic Of Data Tampering At The US Government

This is one of the most blatant frauds in history. The evidence is so clear and unequivocal that it beggars belief that those involved are not already serving jail sentences.
NASA have a clear self interest in promoting environmental doomsday as they get a lot of money off the back of these scares for yet another space program to launch another satellite to look down on earth to “monitor” whatever the latest fashion is in environmental doomsdays from ozone to acid rain to CO2.

In the UK when it was discovered that bankers had merely fabricated the LIBOR inter bank lending rate – the police investigated, bankers were in court billions of fines were imposed and ministers were forced to resign.
But when it comes to this scam – the scam Stephen Goddard and many other people have repeatedly shown this to be a fraud, yet not a single person in the “establishment” has taken this clear unequivocal fraud seriously.

Which shows they all have their snouts too deep in this scam to admit the truth.

Real Climate Science

Satellites show us that there has been little or no warming over the past 19 years on this planet. Something has changed though – the published historical temperature records from NASA and NOAA. The planet is not warming, but NASA and NOAA are rewriting history to create the appearance of warming.

The published NASA global temperature graph has changed dramatically since 2002

Since 1999, they have completely rewritten US history to turn a long term cooling trend into a warming trend. The animation shows the published NASA US temperature graphs from 1999 and 2014

NASA has dramatically altered their own graphs from Iceland since 2012.

The next graph shows the divergence of NASA Reykjavik temperatures from those published by the Icelandic Met Office. The NASA data is from the same thermometer, and the divergence is due entirely to data tampering by NOAA and NASA

data.giss.nasa.gov/tmp/gistemp/STATIONS/tmp_620040300000_14_0/station.txt

en.vedur.is/Medaltalstoflur-txt/Reykjavik.txt

They have done the same…

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Mann Made Global Warming Is Real!

Real Climate Science

Temperatures at Melbourne were hottest ever this last year, with their thermometer located five feet away from the asphalt.

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Laughable new paper claims 99.999% certainty global warming over past 25 years is man-made

The claim of 99.999% is so utterly ridiculous that I can’t believe anyone seriously wrote it.

However, Anthony’s put together a very concise summary debunking this whole “it must be man-made” claim. The 1910-1940 warming is key – because that warming must be largely natural, and by inference whatever caused that could easily be responsible for the 1970-2000 warming. How unlikely that is depends on the noise model you assume, however based on my assessment I’ve always (since at least 2009) said that “the 1970-2000 warming is entirely consistent with natural variation and cannot be distinguished from noise”.

Watts Up With That?

I was tipped off to this paper by a Tweet from SkS Reichfurher John Cook, and I started on writing a rebuttal, but discovered The Hockey Schtick had already done a complete job, so I’ve reposted it here.  -Anthony

The Hockey Schtick writes: A new paper published in a journal called “Climate Risk Management” claims a ridiculous degree of “certainty” of  99.999% that global warming over the past 25 years is man-made. The claim is made based upon climate models already falsified at confidence levels of 98%+.

According to the authors,

“there is less than a one in one hundred thousand chance of observing an unbroken sequence of 304 months [25.3 years] (our analysis extends to June 2010) with mean surface temperature exceeding the 20th century average.”

Fundamental problems with this claim [which is basically the falsified IPCC attribution claim of 95% certainty on steroids] include:

There is no statistical…

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Lewandowsky: those believing in global warming are gullible.

Summary

Based on the ethics application, Lewandowsky’s known views on skeptics and comments he made about “the pause” it appears this project was set up with the expectation that it would show that skeptics changed their views depending what they thought the graph showed. It was probably expected that skeptics would demonstrate a bias by changing their estimation of future trend when informed the graph showed global temperature and it might have been expected that many would say it was cooling.

To test this idea, the groups were randomly split into those told the graph was the share price and another told it was global temperature. They were also asked their views on climate and Lewandowsky then compared those within each group to see how their beliefs on climate was related to their average prediction of the future trends.

It turns out the survey showed the complete opposite effect to that we believe was expected. Skeptics in the group told it was temperature and those told it was share prices had almost the same prediction of the future trend. So irrespective of whether it was shares or global temperature skeptics estimate of future trends were very similar. In contrast the expected trend given by global warming believers differed dramatically between those who were led to believe the graph showed share prices and those led to believe it was global temperature.

This is a very significant finding. It appears to show that those who believe in warming are very suggestible and that skeptics base their views very largely on the evidence and not what they are told the evidence shows.

But the final paper avoided this conclusion by focussing on another point saying that: “even skeptics predict it will warm”. This focus only appeared after the results were available.

To put it bluntly, the paper strongly suggests that people who believe in global warming are more gullible and skeptics are very resistant to false suggestions.

Background

Steve McIntyre has been investigating the ethical application for the Lewandowky NASA conspiracy paper which was originally drawn up for another project. But this project is also dynamite. (also see WUWT)

The original application was submitted on or about 14 December 2009, with the title:

Understanding Statistical Trends

The aims of the project were described thus:

The project seeks to explore people’s understanding of statistical trends in time series data. If we are monitoring a stock price, what do we think will happen to it in the future?

Participants will be shown simple graphs of time series (samples enclosed) and will make predictions about the future trends.

The procedures are expanded upon in a further part of the application (section 9):

Subjects will be shown a number of statistical graphs (3 or 4 at most) that contain time series data. Subjects will be asked to extrapolate the visible trend into the future by indicating their guess of the next most likely values (see enclosed sample).

Some of the trends will be upward, some downward, and most will be presented as fictitious stock prices. The actual data will either be generated randomly or will be the world’s temperature (climate) data collected by NASA (NASA GISS data set).

For some subjects, the climate data will be identified as such whereas for other subjects (chosen at random) they will be presented as stock prices.

And finally:

Upon completion of the graphical task, subjects will be presented with 3 – 4 questions about their impressions of scientific certainty. For example, people will be asked how certain they think sceintists are about the association between emissions and climate change, HIV and AIDS, and tobacco smoke and lung cancer (using a scale from 0 – 100%)

The aim is very clear. The project aimed to understand how participants background affected how they viewed statistical trends. This was going to be tested by asking them to predict the future trend of a plot after one group was told it was stock market data and other that it was global temperature. Then this would be tested to determine whether participants views on issues like climate change affected their perception of the likely future trend.

Results & change in name

But was not what was reported in the results. Instead the result was a paper named:

Popular Consensus: Climate Change Set to Continue

This is a very odd name for a paper intended to find any link between people’s views on issues like climate science and their expectation of future temperature. And there was nothing in the ethical assessment about “contrarian claims about global warming having stopped”. But according to the report this is suggested as the focus of the project:

This study,… suggests that presentation of climate data can counteract contrarian claims about global warming having stopped.

This was clearly not the aim of the study, so what could have led to such a dramatic change in focus. The answer appears to come from the following paragraph:

Notably, although extrapolations overall differed little between presentation formats, people’s perceptions were related to their attitudes only when the data were identified as temperatures; however, even for those few individuals in that condition who explicitly rejected AGW, extrapolations were still (just) significantly positive.

Like most people would, when I read this I understood this to be a statement about “contrarians” to the effect that contrarians were more likely to change their view depending whether the data was said to be climate or stock markets.

But this conclusion is clearly false. Although the paper does not give all the relevant figures, there is enough figures in the paper to estimate how the future trend of “contrarians” compares to the predicted trend of other people as shown by the table below:

	Predicted temperature trend	Predicted Share trend
	r(96)=0.09	R(96) = 0.21
All	5.51	3.66
Neutral or disagree with AGW	3.75	~3 (estimated from regression)
Disagree (6)	3.77	Not Stated

Discussion

This shows that whilst “skeptics” tended to interpret a temperature graph as having a slightly higher gradient (3.75) than that of shares (3), those who believed in global warming dramatically changed their view of the graph because when everyone was included there was a dramatic change between when told it was temperature (5.51) and when share trend (3.66).

As skeptics would have reduced this figure, it is fairly safe to say that whereas skeptics showed almost no change in the predicted trend irrespective of what they were told the data was, believers must have doubled their predicted future trend depending only on what they were told the graph portrayed.

But this obvious conclusion that those believing in global warming are very subjective and change their interpretation to fit their beliefs in sharp contrast to skeptics who tended to base their views only on the data and not what they were told the data showed, was not only omitted from the paper, but instead it was replaced with a conclusion very strongly suggesting the opposite.

Conclusion

As such not only does this paper show that members of the public who believe in global warming change their perception of the global temperature graph to fit what they believe it shows, but it is also strong evidence that at least some academics are so strongly influenced by their beliefs regarding global warming that (to put the best possible interpretation on their actions) they are “blinded” to obvious conclusion that do not fit their world-view.

Great Forecasting Moments At The Met Office

Real Climate Science

October 28, 2010

The Met Office, using data generated by a £33 million supercomputer, claims Britain can stop worrying about a big freeze this year because we could be in for a milder winter than in past years.

Winter to be mild predicts Met Office | UK | News | Daily Express

Five weeks later the UK looked like this :

UK snow: 7 trapped in Lion Inn pub in Yorkshire for last NINE days | Mail Online

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Lewandowsky and Oreskes Are Co-Authors of a Paper about ENSO, Climate Models and Sea Surface Temperature Trends (Go Figure!)

Yet another example of lewandosky “motivated ideation” of what the data actually shows.

Watts Up With That?

The new paper Risbey et al. (2014) will likely be very controversial based solely on the two co-authors identified in the title above (and shown in the photos to the right). As a result, I suspect it will garner a lot of attention…a lot of attention. This post is not about those two controversial authors, though their contributions to the paper are discussed. This post is about the numerous curiosities in the paper. For those new to discussions of global warming, I’ve tried to make this post as non-technical as possible, but these are comments on a scientific paper.

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Why climate engineers beat the climate academics

The academic way: if one theory won’t reach, just use two.

There is no doubt that skeptics have a proven track record on predicting the inability of climate academics to predict the climate. After nearly 18years without warming which none of the academics predicted (even after it started), they are looking increasingly sheepish and trying to talk about anything but their proven inability to predict the climate.

However, whilst us “climate engineers” have been vindicated, there is still the question: “why?” Why is it that people from a general engineering/science background like us skeptics could have known that the academics would get it wrong?

Of course, the obvious answer is: “because they are academics”. But … how do I put this … I’d rather like a more academic answer.

In my previous post I highlighted yet another shot in the foot comment from The EndOfPhysics:

People who are insisting on validation of models, or precise confirmation of certain quantities (like the ECS for example). It’s as if they think science should be more like engineering and don’t realise that science is about trying to understand the world around us, not control or use it. You can’t just deliver a scientific result on demand, you can only do as well as is possible given the tools/knowledge available at that time.

Strangely he does add to the sum of human knowledge – but not quite in the way he hopes. Because he confirms some key points.

The Toad goes rowing – TheEndofPhysics laments those “insisting on validation of models”

I nearly thought about posting on this, where the Toad (aka Connolley) has finally decided that 8minutes of watching him rowing is more important than anything else.

However, then I noticed people were commenting and I couldn’t help wondering what the eco-fascist line was on rowing. Then I spotted this gem from the EndOfPhysics:

Apart from the “can can’t” this is something I seem to be encountering more and more. People who are insisting on validation of models, or precise confirmation of certain quantities (like the ECS for example). It’s as if they think science should be more like engineering and don’t realise that science is about trying to understand the world around us, not control or use it. You can’t just deliver a scientific result on demand, you can only do as well as is possible given the tools/knowledge available at that time.

Yet another classic example of the ivory tower mentality: “You can’t just deliver a scientific result on demand“. And yes, because engineers deal with this type of problem day in day out where “You can’t just deliver a scientific result on demand“, engineers are the professionals in judging a situation where “You can’t just deliver a scientific result on demand“, and this is why engineers work on these kinds of issues where we do need to make decisions where “You can’t just deliver a scientific result on demand” and this is why we don’t allow academics in their ivory towers to go anywhere near problems where you do want “scientific results on demand“.

This is the delusion of academia. They sit in their ivory towers thinking they are better than engineers, telling us they are “95% confident” and that there is “97% consensus”. But when anyone asks them to justify their claims that any engineer can see are fraudulent they say: “You can’t just deliver a scientific result on demand“.

The difference between science and engineering.

An engineer is a scientist. The difference is that engineers have ADDITIONAL TRAINING, SKILLS & TECHNIQUES which allow them to make the best possible decisions when “You can’t just deliver a scientific result on demand“. So engineers are scientists who are also trained to deal with situations with limited information, with unclear results, with the human factors and with life and death decisions – and make the best decision.

In contrast academics don’t make any decision. They understand how to deal with less-that-perfect real world situation. The reality is that they only work in areas where “You CAN deliver a scientific result on demand“,  and look down at the far higher training, skills & techniques of engineers having to make time-critical, life-critical decisions in the real world outside their ivory towers.

And it is this arrogant stupidity of academics, who clearly do not have any legitimacy as any kind of expert in situations like the climate where “You can’t just deliver a scientific result on demand“. It’s this arrogance they have any expertise, which has led them into the non-science of pretending to be experts in an area where they have no competence:Climate Engineering

Definition: Climate engineering is the scientific & engineering skills, techniques & training to  make the best scientific, engineering, economic & policy decisions on  climate in a situation where “You can’t just deliver a scientific result on demand“.

Corruption Of Academic Journals For Profit and Climate Change Propaganda

A long time ago, I recognised that the climate signal was far too short a time period to be able to say anything at all about it – and so it was fraudulent to say much at all.
But academics don’t get grants for saying “we don’t know”.So a whole academic industry has been born to fabricate “understanding” about the climate where there is none.
And now it appears that much of what the public call “science” is very much the same: fraud!

Watts Up With That?

Opinion by Dr. Tim Ball

Everything you read in newspapers is absolutely true, except for the rare story of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge. – Erwin Knoll

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers. – Thomas Jefferson

CRU and Academic Publishing

Recent revelation of extensive corruption of the peer review process, by a group of academics, is another blow to academic credibility. Commendable in the tawdry story was the reaction of the publisher of the Journal of Vibration and Control (JVC); they immediately withdrew 60 articles. But what happens when the publisher is part of the schemes to pervert the proper scientific checks and balances? How many other corrupted publishing stories are there? How many with or without knowledge of the publisher? Probably many, as the iceberg analogy almost always applies.

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R code to plot CET daily

As a programmer who has learnt & used perhaps 20-30 programming languages (I even created my own “language” at one one for a particular application), when I heard some other skeptics talking about using ‘R’ I made the mistake of thinking it would be a very simple task to get up to speed with ‘R’

I was wrong R … isn’t a language

It’s the expression I find myself saying when trying to do even the simplest thing Rrrrr … If that hasn’t deterred you, then you can download the code here:

http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/

And there’s an introduction here:

http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-intro.html

And quickly here are a few “hello world” examples. Copy and paste these into the window that says “R console”:

Neil Craig, the Lone wolf howls no more

Neil Craig, the Lone wolf

It is with sad regret that I have to announce the sudden death of Neil Craig, friend, SCEF committee member, prolific blogger, and strident “voice in the wilderness” who gained the nick name “the lone wolf”.

Excellent letter from Mr Craig. He is like a lone wolf howling in despair in the intellectual wilderness of our politics.

As founder of the 9% growth party he was ambitious in his politics or as he put it:

The policies advocated then were unquestionably the most progressive (ie promoting progress) of any party in Scotland, indeed by a very wide margin.  Even after these years they still are. Indeed moreso since our ruling political class have deliberately put us through an unnecessary recession when we could have had at least 9% growth, and put over 1 million Scottish households into fuel poverty with the world’s most damaging “Climate Change Act”, allegedly designed to prevent the catastrophic global warming we are suffering from – despite it being admitted there has been no warming, catastrophic or otherwise since 1995.

A strong advocate for nuclear power and free market thinking, he was a constant thorn in the side of a complacent public sector frequently being heard to ask the question:

Name me one scientist who supports the alarmists, anywhere in the world, who is not ultimately paid by the state

Always surprising, Neil recently married to a lady I never had the chance to meet, however whilst he appeared to mellow following that union, I also saw a marked improvement in his political writings so that  I felt he had a real chance of being elected for UKIP.

If so, he would no doubt have livened up the otherwise drab and boring politics of Scotland.

Neil Craig

A Place to Stand

The climate consensus is not 97% – it’s 100%

Watts Up With That?

By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

Shock news from the Heartland Institute’s Ninth International Climate Change Conference: among the 600 delegates, the consensus that Man contributes to global warming was not 97%. It was 100%.

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Mirror Mirror on the wall who’s the most electable politician of them all?

The new role of the press

The press, hammered by lost advertising revenue, are now little more than copy and paste merchants. The result is the “reality” politicians see is increasingly an uncritical mirror of themselves.

We’ve all seen the graph below. This shows that the “reality” as believed by the scientific establishment has increasingly diverged from the reality of the climate. Well, the same thing is also happening in politics.

IPCC AR5 figure 1.4 showing predicted versus actual. (spurious grey area removed)

The road on which I live isn’t very long, yet we have two  journalists living here. One used to write on health and education – but now she doesn’t. The other used to write on important things like government policy, but now he laments the good old days because he hardly has time to read the press releases he edits into the paper let alone critique them.

They are both victims of the internet revolution. Before the internet, papers had massive revenues from advertising. As a result they could employ lots of journalists to fill the space between the adverts. Then along came the internet and this is what happened:

US Newspaper Advertising Revenue corrected for inflation (Newspaper Association of America published data)

Advertising revenue fell off a cliff and with it still continuing in its death spiral downward, the industry has been shedding journalists left right and centre.

The biggest story never printed by the press – it’s own demise!

Donna Laframboise who runs the  blog “No Frakking Consensus“, is another example of the biggest story that was never printed: the story of the death of mainstream print journalism. All over the story is the same. Just over a decade ago, the print press was full of highly intellectual people sifting and commenting on news.

Warning: the end of TV could herald a scared world without experts

As we all know….

Climate Depot: Monckton: ‘Just about everything the mainstream news media say about global warming and its supposed dangers is the opposite of the truth’

… that the print media have been printing nonsense about climate for years.

In my last post (The Bloggers that killed the mainstream Press) I came around to the view, that the massive drop in revenue of the press may have been largely responsible for the drop in press standards and the “struggle for headlines” that allowed the scandal of the global warming scare to happen.

However that massive drop in revenue did not happen to the TV. Unlike the printed press, TV largely retained a viable income stream. That is not something I had expected. I had assumed that if the print media was affected by the rise of the internet, then so would TV. It turns out that the public are continuing to watch TV and the internet does not appear to be eating into that.

However, a new report (http://s3.amazonaws.com/kpcbweb/files/85/Internet_Trends_2014_vFINAL_-_05_28_14-_PDF.pdf?1401286773) is beginning to worry me.

In this report, they highlight the growing increase of portable devices and video streaming. Seeing how the change in technology that enabled easy access to blogs and information online so impacted the press, this is a change we should treat with caution. We are now at a stage, where it is very likely that “portable video” is cost effective and we may be on the verge of seeing this technology transform – or more accurately undermine – TV in the same way as the internet undermined the press.

Also the report supports my view, that academia will also be under pressure to report. (The end of the UK university? )

A world without experts

So, I am now beginning to realise that what happened to the press (a drop in revenue of 80%) could be about to happen elsewhere. So I am forecasting these major trends in the next decades:

1. The press will continue to decline and by around 2020 we will be left with a rump of around 20% of the news content we had at the peak of 2000.
2. TV as a fixed format by large companies will likely suffer a similar catastrophic decline to that seen in the press. TV, will largely disappear to be replaced by “on demand viewing” with a rapid increase in content from small internet sites with a small rump of “big channels” dominated by public sector organisations like the BBC, the (once) big US companies and  YouTube.
3. Academia, will also be facing a similar crisis of funding as new low-cost formats start to eat into the education budget replacing “tenured” academics.
4. Similar threats may also be seen by doctors and other experts as “online expertise” becomes a viable alternative to “face to face” consultation.
5. Politics will see a rise in smaller, almost anti-establishment parties (like UKIP).

This might sound a great thing. However, it may well be much worse than we thought. Because rather than this being an improvement, we may just be creating the environment whereby pressure to “up ratings” on TV leads to another “dash for scares, but this time most of the other forms of trusted authorities such as journalists, academics, etc., will also have been undermined.

So, I am now issuing this warning to all skeptics:

WE MAY WELL SEE AT LEAST ONE, IF NOT SEVERAL, OTHER MAJOR SCARE LIKE GLOBAL WARMING OVER THE NEXT FEW DECADES.

It may be climate, it may be medical, “latent” pyschological effects of …,  but if internet TV starts to take off, we must be more vigilant than ever that unscrupulous scammers like the wind lobbyists and carbon traders of global warming do not use it to feather their own nests.

The Bloggers that killed the mainstream Press

In 2000 the US newspapers had their best ever year with $65billion worth of ad revenue. Less than a decade later it had dropped 2/3 that value and as the graph below shows it continues in free fall and online revenue has not replaced the loss in print revenue.

US Newspaper Advertising Revenue corrected for inflation (Newspaper Association of America published data)

If present trends continue then it is likely that by 2020, print revenue and online revenue combined will be around 20% of their peak in 2000.

New 97% accurate climate forecast model

After extensive & thorough testing against the climatic science evidence (aka models), I am now ready to reveal to the world the latest state of the art climate prediction system. The current forecast is below:

Forecast model

My 100 year forecast
(97% accurate)

The above image was supposed to change each time it is viewed, but unfortunately, wordpress caches the file which spoils the joke. For a working demo see: uburns.com

Please note, that as a real time system constantly taking account of new temperature data (both modern and historical) the temperature prediction may vary slightly between views. This is to be expected as it is having to constantly adapt to new 20th century temperature data.

Note: whilst every endeavour has been made to ensure this model is 97% accurate – it should not be relied on for any commercial, industrial, military, medical, governmental, agricultural, marine, fictional, crossword, scrabble or any other form of intellectual use.