BatFlattery

In another victory for the blogosphere, NASA have been forced to admit to errors in their temperature record. Although the Times article does not mention the blogger, it was Steve McIntyre of climateaudit.org.

Of course, “the flawed data had a negligible effect on global warming statistics, and none at all on the overall warming trend.” Uh, right. But how many other errors are there?

It’s amazing that every time a climate scientist get caught out (remember the Great Hockey Stick debacle?) the rest rush in to reassure the public that the great project is unaffected. Global warming is still happening, we all still need to feel very guilty and make drastic changes in our lifestyles (based on their say-so), nothing to see here, move along.

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Was thinking a bit more about the Tesla and my reaction to it, which is similar to my reaction to low-energy lamps. I buy the latter, not because I give a sod about so-called global warming, but because they last longer (hate changing the buggers) and cost less to run. When LED bulbs finally become available I’ll buy them because they last forever (yay!).

In the same way, I would buy a Tesla (if I had £50k to spend on a car) because it’s a fantastic performance machine, looks cool (you can see Lotus are involved) and it costs less to run. Starting to see a pattern here? If you serve a real need, offer a real advantage, people will want your product. No hectoring required.

And this explains my basic antipathy to the global warming bandwagon. It’s stuffed with people who live to hector, who can’t be bothered finding out what people want because they’re so busy telling them what they ought to want. The antipathy to the market is most marked, I think, in those who have the guilty knowledge, deep down, that what they want is not what most people want. And therefore they have to avoid, at all costs, any mechanism for making that fact known, while promoting any scheme, from socialism to anti-discrimination to environmentalism, that gives them license to tell other people what to do.

The darling of the eco-poser set, the supposedly super-efficient (and super-expensive) Toyota Prius is the most environmentally damaging car to build. And it takes five years for the petrol savings to offset its high price. By which time the battery is probably dead.

Me, I’m buying a Tesla. As soon as I win the lottery.

LGF has the recent Channel 4 global warming documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle. Not nearly as fact-free as A Convenient Untruth, it’s actually pretty good. You come away marvelling at the ability of grown people to so studiously ignore the pretty obvious truth of the role of the Sun in determining the climate of the Earth, something that was actually discovered a century or more ago! And it also highlights an inconvenient truth that Al Gore forgot to tell you: the Arctic ice cores that form the centre of his presentation clearly show that rising temperature causes an increase in carbon dioxide, and not the other way around.

The final ten minutes are pretty heart-breaking, actually, showing the awful reality of the peasant lifestyle romanticised by the anti-human environmentalists, and how the West is once again betraying Africa. Not content with tolerating or colluding with the kleptocratic thugs in power, the environmentalists are now moving in to deny Africa the use of its own mineral wealth, and thus progress, in the name of saving the environment. Very sad viewing.

An interesting article in The Times about new evidence for the solar hypothesis, which posits that fluctuations in the solar wind affect cloud formation by influencing the influx of cosmic radiation, which in turn affects temperature. An experiment has confirmed a key element of the hypothesis. Now this is real science: come up with a theory and then test it. Interestingly, it was difficult to find funding for the experiment. With all that money going to the pseudo-science that is climate modelling, you’d have thought they could have spared a few bob for the real kind. But I guess science is out of fashion now: much easier to climb on the funding bandwagon. Time was, science fuelled technological progress. Now the new faithful have managed to pervert scientists into supporting their neo-Luddite, anti-tech pseudo religion. Marxism is dead. Long live environmentalism- the new hope for destroying capitalism! (And getting people to behave the way we think they ought to.)

Don’t look now but there’s some (gasp!) non-doctrinal thinking posted on the Guardian’s Comment is Free blog from time to time. For example, this eloquent puncturing of the earnest arguments in favour of doing something about global warming: A Convenient Truth

As Al Gore (you remember him, he invented the Internet) prepares to release his new movie, An Inconvenient Truth, the guys at JunkScience have put together a page that summarises (it’s a complex issue, so the summary is pretty long) the issues around climate change, “global warming”, the greenhouse effect, etc. In talking with friends and colleagues it’s pretty clear that most people confuse carbon-reducing measures with anti-pollution laws, think that C02 is an unmitigated negative that is entirely produced by humans, and that the atmosphere has warmed by at least 3 degrees this century. (The real figure is about 0.6 degrees). Anyway, definitely worth a read if you are concerned about this issue.

The Real Inconvenient Truth.

Mark Steyn has a brilliant piece on the climate change scaremongers. One bit that interested me:

Remember what they used to call “climate change”? “Global warming.” And what did they call it before that? “Global cooling.” That was the big worry in the ’70s: the forthcoming ice age. Back then, Lowell Ponte had a huge best seller called The Cooling: Has the new ice age already begun? Can we survive?

As I grew up in the ’70s, interested in science and environmentalism, I well remember worrying about the coming ice age. Also the world running out of food. And of course nuclear armageddon.

Funny how nobody’s said “Sorry about that. We were all idiots.” Funny nobody’s stopped to say “Hang on, you know the last time we went on about this kind of stuff, we were dead wrong. Maybe we should rethink things a bit.” Funny how it’s turned out that anti-nuke was actually anti-American-and-British-nuke. Wonder why CND want America to stop giving Iraq a hard time about wanting nukes.

Wonder why anyone ever listens to these idiots.

I recently read Michael Crichton’s latest, State of Fear, which is well up to his usual standard in terms of compelling reading (I confess to finishing it in a few hours, its 736 pages notwithstanding). But what’s really great about it is a very well-researched, impeccably dramatised devastation of the climate change industry, the fear merchants who are trying to create the state mentioned in the title. And there are some delicious sideswipes at airheaded Hollywood celebrities who jump on the bandwagon du jour.

In this speech Michael gives an interesting account of how he came to write the book:

The book really began in 1998, when I set out to write a novel about a global disaster. In the course of my preparation, I rather casually reviewed what had happened in Chernobyl, since that was the worst manmade disaster in recent times that I knew about.

What I discovered stunned me. Chernobyl was a tragic event, but nothing remotely close to the global catastrophe I imagined. About 50 people had died in Chernobyl, roughly the number of Americans that die every day in traffic accidents. I don’t mean to be gruesome, but it was a setback for me. You can’t write a novel about a global disaster in which only 50 people die.

Undaunted, I began to research other kinds of disasters that might fulfill my novelistic requirements. That’s when I began to realize how big our planet really is, and how resilient its systems seem to be. Even though I wanted to create a fictional catastrophe of global proportions, I found it hard to come up with a credible example. In the end, I set the book aside, and wrote Prey instead.

The fact that his impression of what had happened at Chernobyl, moulded by the media, was so strikingly and incredibly at odds with the reality, made him think about the value of disaster prediction in general, and the particular disaster that we are being asked to believe we face today. Could it be that these predictions may be just as wrong, and will go the way of the predictions of every other “disaster”, from the new ice age to global famine, that have been given (ahem) some prominence over the last forty years?

Mark Steyn makes his bid to reduce global warming:

Here’s a headline from the National Post of Canada last Friday: “Forests may contribute to global warming: study.” This was at Stanford University. They developed a model that covered most of the Northern Hemisphere in forest and found that global temperature increased three degrees, which is several times more than the alleged CO2 emissions. Heat-wise, a forest is like a woman in a black burka in the middle of the Iraqi desert. In my state of New Hampshire, we’ve got far more forest than we did a century or two ago. Could reforestation be causing more global warming than my 700m-per-litre Chevrolet Resource-Depleter? Clearly I need several million dollars to investigate further.

I think he should get it. It would be better spent than more money going to people who engage in outright fraud:

Question: Why do most global warming advocates begin their scare statistics with “since 1970″?As in, “since 1970″ there’s been global surface warming of half a degree or so.

Because from 1940 to 1970, temperatures fell.

Now why would that be?

Who knows? Maybe it was Hitler. Maybe world wars are good for the planet.

Or maybe we should all take a deep breath of CO2 and calm down.