APS and the Global Warming Scam


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On 3/13/2017 at 12:18 PM, william.scherk said:

Another absorbing discussion to be had is at Judith Curry's blog, Climate Etc. She highlights and discusses remarks uttered by EPA head Scott Pruitt, and the media kerfuffle following it; the discussion is now at 385 comments ...

Scott Pruitt’s statement on climate change

Quote

[...]

What Scott Pruitt actually said

Listen to what Scott Pruitt actually said on CNBC and then compare it to the portrayal in the media.  Here is the key text:

I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.  But we don’t know that yet.  We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.

Bye, Scott. Thank you. Bye bye big spender. I think I want to use some aspects of Pruitt to round out a character in Weather War. Another perhaps-justified paranoid taken down by Project Jupiter, otherwise known as Them.

My lasting impression of Pruitt is that he felt a little bit touched by God, from my point of view a bad touch -- and that he did what he was asked to do in rebalancing the EPA mission and imposing a friendlier-to-industrial-interests mandate.  I contrast a nickle-and-dime miser of his own monies with a lavish spender of taxpayer funds. He also seemed to lose the trail on that part of the swamp-levee where favours end and corruption begins.

The policies of Trump's EPA will be nudged not or only negligibly from their trajectory.  "Scott Pruit ate my homework" alarmists will be celebrating, however.

-- here is squawking from the usual suspects pool. I kinda see what he is getting at, the gawd-awful gawdliness ...

The full letter of departure is at Foxnews ... 

"Attacks!"

Edited by william.scherk
Added link to Pruitt's resignation letter
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There is an old joke we used to tell in the orchestra pit when I was still an orchestra musician and we were doing an opera. (This is from my Brazil days.)

There was a tenor on stage who was receiving boos and hisses. When they started throwing tomatoes, he stopped. He said to the audience, "OK. I get it. I'm leaving now. But here comes the fat lady." 

:)

Michael

 

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On 8/20/2017 at 12:14 AM, Ellen Stuttle said:

 

But here's the rub:  For alarmist blame-humans scenarios to look viable, it has to be the case that atmospheric CO2 concentration is the primary driver of global temperatures, and the longer the hiatus continued, the less viable this requirement became.  So what the alarmists started doing as their main tactic was to try to get rid of the hiatus with data maneuvering and verbal tricks.

The Sun is the primary driver of global temperatures.  CO2, water vapor  and other trace "greenhouse"  gases modulate (in some cases)  or amplify (in other cases) the Sun's effect on the atmosphere.  The other modulator of the Sun's effects are the seas and oceans. Water has a very high heat capacity which means it can absorb a lot of heat with only small temperature increases.

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5 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

The Sun is the primary driver of global temperatures.  CO2, water vapor  and other trace "greenhouse"  gases modulate (in some cases)  or amplify (in other cases) the Sun's effect on the atmosphere.  The other modulator of the Sun's effects are the seas and oceans. Water has a very high heat capacity which means it can absorb a lot of heat with only small temperature increases.

I never did get those lyrics, "Smoke on the water . . . " We have the Chesapeake on one side and the Atlantic on the other, with the Delaware Bay between us and Jersey. Ahhh.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Someone made fun of James Delingpole, columnist for the UK tabloid the Sun:

On 4/13/2017 at 1:40 PM, Ellen Stuttle said:
On 4/1/2017 at 2:15 AM, BaalChatzaf said:

Right now we know the planet is warming.  That is not in dispute.  We must know the nature of the warming

[..] And it isn't true that it isn't in dispute that the planet is warming.  The data records are so messed up, impossible to be sure.

Weather Porn!

Spoiler

gfs_nh-sat1_t2_1-day.png

 

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  • 4 months later...

Space. The Final Frontier. Neil DeGrasse Tyson was accused of sexual misconduct and here is part of his response on Dec. 1st  which almost sounds like a Saturday Night Live sketch. So, what is creepy and what is “socially scientific curiosity, Rover?”  Peter

Neil wrote, “A colleague at a well attended, after-conference, social gathering came up to me to ask for a photograph. She was wearing a sleeveless dress with a tattooed solar system extending up her arm. And while I don’t explicitly remember searching for Pluto at the top of her shoulder, it is surely something I would have done in that situation. As we all know, I have professional history with the demotion of Pluto, which had occurred officially just three years earlier. So whether people include it or not in their tattoos is of great interest to me. I was reported to have “groped” her by searching “up her dress”, when this was simply a search under the covered part of her shoulder of the sleeveless dress.

I only just learned (nine years after) that she thought this behavior creepy. That was never my intent and I’m deeply sorry to have made her feel that way. Had I been told of her discomfort in the moment, I would have offered this same apology eagerly, and on the spot. In my mind’s eye, I’m a friendly and accessible guy, but going forward, I can surely be more sensitive to people’s personal space, even in the midst of my planetary enthusiasm.” end quote

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3 hours ago, Jonathan said:

I find the dude to be creepy in general. Very "Look at me, aren't I special? Praise me! Give me attention! Me, me me!"

J

Yeah. That's the guy with a nice voice, though Carl Sagan's was better and so was the Kraft Cheese announcer's. I wonder if this will kill his broadcast time? I hope not. I could actually understand a nerdy guy doing that and not meaning any harm. If I see something odd or interesting about a person I have a hard time NOT looking. But if someone is doing that to me I might say, "What? Is something wrong?"  

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"If we don't take action, the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon."

https://www.npr.org/2018/12/03/672893695/david-attenborough-warns-of-collapse-of-civilizations-at-u-n-climate-meeting

We need to control and punish people. The little people.

In fact, it may not be enough to just punish them. We need serious sacrifices. Human sacrifices. Blood. That's the only thing that will stop Climate Doom.

We've backed off of the scare tactics and ridiculous predictions for a while, so now it's time to bring them back. Most people have forgotten by now how silly our previous doomsaying was, so now it'll be fresh again and more effective, especially if we can get useful idiot celebrities to go along with it, and extra-especially if we can get celebrities with a veneer of an illusion of gravitas, like non-scientist Sir David F. Attenborough! He was knighted by the queen. Were you knighted by the queen? No? Then shut the fuck up.

It's settled science. We have to kill some people, lots of them, and enjoy doing it, in order to save existence.

J

 

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The end is near crowd have always been nuts. I like the editorial cartoon where a guy in a long white robe and with long hair and sandals is holding up a sign that prophesizes doom. The fake climatologists deserve ridicule, like the "seerist" Jean Dixon who told us what terrible things were going to happen in the coming year. Her predictions were garbage. To avoid the never ending funeral I was watching Varney on Fox Business and he had three "experts" saying what will happen in the stock market in the coming year. They disagreed. The nerdy lady was a bit of a scoffer when she said there is always a downturn once a year and a few days.    

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20 minutes ago, Peter said:

The end is near crowd have always been nuts. I like the editorial cartoon where a guy in a long white robe and with long hair and sandals is holding up a sign that prophesizes doom.

Years ago I saw a great variation on that cartoon: First panel, titled "Then," shows that same cartoon of a man holding a sign prophesying doom, with people walking by laughing at him. The second panel, titled "Now," shows a man holding a sign which states that we are not doomed, and all of the people walking past are laughing at him.

J

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Were the people laughing because he was spoofing the doomsdayer's or because he was not reporting real news? We are lucky space debris was mostly cleaned out of our solar system before people evolved. That recent television show about an asteroid heading to earth was interesting but I kept thinking how long can they drag this out? 

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22 hours ago, Peter said:

Were the people laughing because he was spoofing the doomsdayer's or because he was not reporting real news?

I think the point of the cartoon was that kooks and gullible believers in doomsaying were rare back in the day, something to be looked at sideways and laughed at, where now, the kooks and gullible believers are the majority, and they perceive anyone who isn't preaching panic as a kook.

J

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  • 2 years later...

This is interesting. Peter

Robert L. Park is a professor of physics at the University of Maryland at College Park and the director of public information for the American Physical Society. He is the author of Voodoo Science: The Road From Foolishness to Fraud (Oxford University Press, 2002).

I have identified seven indicators that a scientific claim lies well outside the bounds of rational scientific discourse. Of course, they are only warning signs -- even a claim with several of the signs could be legitimate.

1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media. The integrity of science rests on the willingness of scientists to expose new ideas and findings to the scrutiny of other scientists. Thus, scientists expect their colleagues to reveal new findings to them initially. An attempt to bypass peer review by taking a new result directly to the media, and thence to the public, suggests that the work is unlikely to stand up to close examination by other scientists.

One notorious example is the claim made in 1989 by two chemists from the University of Utah, B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, that they had discovered cold fusion – a way to produce nuclear fusion without expensive equipment. Scientists did not learn of the claim until they read reports of a news conference. Moreover, the announcement dealt largely with the economic potential of the discovery and was devoid of the sort of details that might have enabled other scientists to judge the strength of the claim or to repeat the experiment. (Ian Wilmut's announcement that he had successfully cloned a sheep was just as public as Pons and Fleischmann's claim, but in the case of cloning, abundant scientific details allowed scientists to judge the work's validity.)

Some scientific claims avoid even the scrutiny of reporters by appearing in paid commercial advertisements. A health-food company marketed a dietary supplement called Vitamin O in full-page newspaper ads. Vitamin O turned out to be ordinary saltwater.

2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work. The idea is that the establishment will presumably stop at nothing to suppress discoveries that might shift the balance of wealth and power in society. Often, the discoverer describes mainstream science as part of a larger conspiracy that includes industry and government. Claims that the oil companies are frustrating the invention of an automobile that runs on water, for instance, are a sure sign that the idea of such a car is baloney. In the case of cold fusion, Pons and Fleischmann blamed their cold reception on physicists who were protecting their own research in hot fusion.

3. The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection. Alas, there is never a clear photograph of a flying saucer, or the Loch Ness monster. All scientific measurements must contend with some level of background noise or statistical fluctuation. But if the signal-to-noise ratio cannot be improved, even in principle, the effect is probably not real and the work is not science.

Thousands of published papers in para-psychology, for example, claim to report verified instances of telepathy, psychokinesis, or precognition. But those effects show up only in tortured analyses of statistics. The researchers can find no way to boost the signal, which suggests that it isn't really there.

4. Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal. If modern science has learned anything in the past century, it is to distrust anecdotal evidence. Because anecdotes have a very strong emotional impact, they serve to keep superstitious beliefs alive in an age of science. The most important discovery of modern medicine is not vaccines or antibiotics, it is the randomized double-blind test, by means of which we know what works and what doesn't. Contrary to the saying, "data" is not the plural of "anecdote."

5. The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries. There is a persistent myth that hundreds or even thousands of years ago, long before anyone knew that blood circulates throughout the body, or that germs cause disease, our ancestors possessed miraculous remedies that modern science cannot understand. Much of what is termed "alternative medicine" is part of that myth. Ancient folk wisdom, rediscovered or repackaged, is unlikely to match the output of modern scientific laboratories.

6. The discoverer has worked in isolation. The image of a lone genius who struggles in secrecy in an attic laboratory and ends up making a revolutionary breakthrough is a staple of Hollywood's science-fiction films, but it is hard to find examples in real life. Scientific breakthroughs nowadays are almost always syntheses of the work of many scientists.

7. The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation. A new law of nature, invoked to explain some extraordinary result, must not conflict with what is already known. If we must change existing laws of nature or propose new laws to account for an observation, it is almost certainly wrong.

I began this list of warning signs to help federal judges detect scientific nonsense. But as I finished the list, I realized that in our increasingly technological society, spotting voodoo science is a skill that every citizen should develop.

 

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