Thursday, February 18, 2016

97% Consensus: ‘It is propaganda’

For years the media and politicians (including President Obama, John Kerry, etc.) have promoted the idea that 97% of scientists agree that climate change is real, that it's caused by human activity, and that it will be catastrophic.

It's a completely false narrative.

It always has been.

And yet I've heard it repeated over and over, usually with no citation. Those who have discussed it with me personally have had no idea where the statistic originated or what it actually means. It's basically an example of Goebbels' Principles of Propaganda.

So it's always refreshing to see another perspective:

MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen Mocks 97% Consensus: ‘It is propaganda’

97 Consensus? Dr. Lindzen: 'They never really tell you what they agree on. It is propaganda. So all scientists agree it's probably warmer now than it was at the end of the Little Ice Age. Almost all Scientists agree that if you add CO2 you will have some warming. Maybe very little warming. But it is propaganda to translate that into it is dangerous and we must reduce co2 etc. If you can make an ambiguous remark and you have people who will amplify it ‘they said it not me’ and he response of the political system is to increase your funding, what’s not to like?'

By: Marc Morano - Climate DepotFebruary 15, 2016 3:43 PM with 28 comments

Video of interview is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-fXj-ANWRk

Dr. Richard Lindzen, atmospheric physicist, MIT professor emeritus, and lead author of the “Physical Climate Processes and Feedbacks” chapter of the 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, attributes climate hype to politics, money, and propaganda. Lindzen particularly takes issue with the “97% consensus” claim that is being used to stifle debate and demonize skeptics.

MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen, an emeritus Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT:

RealClearRadioHour:

Question: How much warming do you expect for a doubling of carbon dioxide?

Lindzen: “Doubling is chosen for a very good reason. The dependence of the greenhouse gas effects what is called logarithmic. Which means if you double CO2 from 280 to 560ppm, you would get the same thing you as you would get from doubling from 560 to 10120. It’s a diminishing return thing.”

“There is no obvious trend for at least 18 years in temperature.”

Lindzen on ‘97% consensus’:

Lindzen: “It was the narrative from the beginning. In 1998, [NASA’s James] Hansen made some vague remarks. Newsweek ran a cover that says all scientists agree. Now they never really tell you what they agree on. It is propaganda.”

“So all scientists agree it’s probably warmer now than it was at the end of the Little Ice Age. Almost all Scientists agree that if you add CO2 you will have some warming. Maybe very little warming. But it is propaganda to translate that into it is dangerous and we must reduce CO2 etc.

If you can make an ambiguous remark and you have people who will amplify it ‘they said it not me’ and he response of the political system is to increase your funding, what’s not to like?

If I look through my department, at least half of them keep mum. Just keep on doing your work, trying to figure out how it works.

MIT ‘has just announced that they see this bringing in $300 million bucks. It will support all sorts of things.’

Related Links:

Academia Cashing in on Climate Scare: MIT announces $300 million five-year plan ‘for action on climate change’ – Each center will seek about $8 million in annual funding, or more than $300 million in total over the five-year period — which the plan says represents “far and away the greatest opportunity for MIT to make a difference on climate change.”

MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen on ‘hottest year’ claim: ‘Why lend credibility to this dishonesty?’ – Dueling Datasets: Satellite temperatures show no warming for over 18 years, while heavily adjusted ground based data shows alleged ‘hottest year’

Satellites: No global warming at all for 18 years 8 months

Watch: MIT’s Dr. Richard Lindzen on Fox News: ‘The whole thing is fairly absurd’ – ‘We are demonizing a chemical — a molecule essential to life – CO2’

Click here to watch: – Lindzen: ‘These guys think saying climate changes, saying it gets warmer or colder by a few tenths of a degree should be taken as evidence that the end of the world is coming.’

MIT’s Dr. Lindzen in WSJ: ‘The Political Assault on Climate Skeptics’ – ‘Billions of dollars have been poured into studies supporting climate alarm…even as the case for climate alarm is disintegrating’ – Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen: ‘Members of Congress send inquisitorial letters to universities, energy companies, even think tanks.’

The climate has been changing since the Earth was formed. This normal course is now taken to be evidence of doom.

‘Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have been vastly higher through most of Earth’s history. Climates both warmer and colder than the present have coexisted with these higher levels

Bee-pocaclypse called off

Bee colony collapse (BCC) was a huge media sensation a few years ago. Here's the latest.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/02/17/bee-pocaclypse-called-off-bees-doing-ok-global-warming-was-never-a-cause/

Bee-pocaclypse called off, bees doing OK, global warming was never a cause

Anthony Watts / 15 hours ago

Back in 2007, Wired Magazine mused:

It’s only slightly less ridiculous than the other bee killing theory that year – cell phones.

I published a story about the loony idea that was proposed by some researcher in Europe about “cell phone radiation may be killing bees”. I pointed out that it was garbage then, as it is now.

In 2012, I published a post saying global warming is off the hook for the issue, due to the discovery of a phorid fly parasite that had been spreading through colonies due in part to the commercial trucking of bees on demand.

Now in a new set of data from USDA, publicized in a story from the Washington Post today, it turns out bee colonies are now at a 20 year high, and that beekeepers have basically solved the problem on their own.

Call off the bee-pocalypse: U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high

The trouble all began in 2006 or so, when beekeepers first began noticing mysterious die-offs. It was soon christened “colony collapse disorder,” and has been responsible for the loss of 20 to 40 percent of managed honeybee colonies each winter over the past decade.

The math says that if you lose 30 percent of your bee colonies every year for a few years, you rapidly end up with close to 0 colonies left. But get a load of this data on the number of active bee colonies in the U.S. since 1987. Pay particular attention to the period after 2006, when CCD was first documented.

As you can see, the number of honeybee colonies has actually risen since 2006, from 2.4 million to 2.7 million in 2014, according to data tracked by the USDA. The 2014 numbers, which came out earlier this year, show that the number of managed colonies — that is, commercial honey-producing bee colonies managed by human beekeepers — is now the highest it’s been in 20 years.

So if CCD is wiping out close to a third of all honeybee colonies a year, how are their numbers rising? One word: Beekeepers.

A 2012 working paper by Randal R. Tucker and Walter N. Thurman, a pair of agricultural economists, explains that seasonal die-offs have always been a part of beekeeping: they report that before CCD, American beekeepers would typically lose 14 percent of their colonies a year, on average.

So beekeepers have devised two main ways to replenish their stock. The first method involves splitting one healthy colony into two separate colonies: put half the bees into a new beehive, order them a new queen online (retail price: $25 or so), and voila: two healthy hives.

The other method involves simply buying a bunch of bees to replace the ones you lost. You can buy 3 pounds of “packaged” bees, plus a queen, for about $100 or so.

Beekeepers have been doing this sort of thing since the advent of commercial beekeeping.

Full story here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/23/call-off-the-bee-pocalypse-u-s-honeybee-colonies-hit-a-20-year-high/

End of a crisis that never was. Case closed, and climate was never to blame.

Thursday, February 11, 2016

UHI fraud at NOAA

One of the biggest challenges in climate science is getting accurate, reliable data.

The challenge is made worse by the way the government is collecting and processing data. Here's an important example:

Extreme UHI Fraud At NOAA

Posted on February 11, 2016 by tonyheller

NOAA has 16 USHCN stations in Maryland, but they have stopped collecting data from all but four of them. One of the disappearing stations is at Laurel, which has been collecting since 1895 – but no data reported since August 2015.

Laurel raw data shows no warming over the past 60 years, but Beltsville (at I-95 and The Beltway) is five miles closer to Washington DC and shows two degrees warming during that period as the city has expanded. Beltsville is one of the four stations still reporting.

The fact that 75% of the stations in Maryland are missing doesn’t stop NOAA from fabricating temperatures for the 12 missing ones. Laurel is located midway between Washington DC and Baltimore, where another one of the four active stations is located.

NOAA generates the fake Laurel temperature data by interpolating from the neighboring stations, which in this case would be UHI infected Beltsville and Baltimore. The graph below shows how Laurel temperatures are adjusted by USHCN. They cool pre-1975 temperatures and warm post-1975 temperatures. The exact opposite of what would be expected.

But here is where the NOAA fraud really gets ugly. Beltsville raw temperatures have warmed two degrees over the last 60 years due to Urban Heat island effects. But instead of adjusting recent temperatures downwards to compensate, they do the exact opposite and massively cool the past.

The final temperature graph for Beltsville shows almost five degrees warming over the past 60 years, when in fact there has been none.

This level of fraud defies explanation, but is standard operating procedure at NOAA and NASA.

natureoftheclimate