Monckton in Canberra - guest post

From MarkL in Canberra

Attended the Monckton/Plimer public lecture at the National Press Club today. A quick reprise.

The hall was packed, 370 people +/-5%, with a handful standing. Prof. Plimer gave a rollicking 4 minute intro covering 3 billion years to set the geological scene, Monckton spoke to 85 minutes covering 150 years since. Peter Spencer was present and got a rousing round of applause. He and 30,000 other farmers have had their farms essentially expropriated as ‘carbon sinks’ by a dirty deal between the Rudd Government and the State governments. That expropriation deal is in direct breach of the Constitution.

The trip was funded by a retired couple from Noosa, from their superannuation. They are being paid back by the $20 ‘donation’ to attend. If I had known that I’d have paid more.

Monckton’s presentation was brilliant; erudite, witty, crammed with facts and with small insights just not seen anywhere. For example, the IPCC said there was no discernable human impact on climate until 1995, when some bureaucrat realised saying this might affect his job. So they got one man (yes, just one, over at Benson-Livermore Labs) to rewrite what the scientists said and this appeared in 1995. By 2001 they still had not been caught, so ICC was waffling about a 66% chance, up to 90% chance in 2007. They were caught then, 90% is an unusual statistical marker. On investigation, that figure had been chosen by a show of hands by the political reps of the governments funding IPCC!

That is the warmies ‘scientific consensus’.

He ran through the bad human outcomes of ‘science groupthink’, pointing out that before DDT was banned, 50,000 people a year died from malaria. After the ban, 1,000,000 a year died of it, mostly third world children. The ban lasted 40 years, so lefties, greenies and the scientific groupthink they created caused a policy outcome of 40,000,000 dead, mostly kids. Places the left in their real light: as feel-good mass-killers.

Demostrarted how the IPCC uses bogus methods to ‘prove’ warming since 1970 by taking exactly the same data and the same method to ‘prove’ global coldening since 1970.

Ran through the real costs of Climate change policy and pointed out the sheer fatuous idiocy behind it, then dived into the cesspool of scientific fraud, lies, chicanery and deceit being the AGW ringleaders. The flow of examples was astounding. He even covered the way they have deliberately corrupted individual station temperature records at places like Darwin.

Points to take away:

The Warmies have to lie to make any case, so minimise the damage of their lies and let the truth come out.
Point out that the UN itself says that shutting down the global economy to a Stone-Age level for 40 years will ‘prevent’ ONE DEGREE of warming. So why destroy the economy for nothing, when we can adapt to any climate change an less than 1% of the cost of the failed Kyoto Agreement?
Science will be saved by stopping taxpayer funding, which has created a ‘welfare culture’ of dependency among scientists.

Excellent afternoon, and I now have a copy of Plimer’s book ‘Heaven and Earth’ with both his and Monckton’s signature in it.

I'm jealous!

Clive James

Bless him.

The Climate Change Timeline

From JoNova's, Climategate: 30 Years in the Making, a long and interesting read.

Tally-ho!

Lateline tonight

Have a look at it.

It seems to be more of the crock, just touched on the Climategate scandal... whaddya know, the IPCC is going to investigate.

Should be interesting.

Hansen's now saying that the carbon cap and trade is not going to work. But he still says that we must cut down our production of CO2 into the atmosphere, we must stabilise the atmosphere.

He wants a carbon tax on petrol and oil, etc, at the source, then the money can be redistributed to the people who can't afford to pay the higher prices... I think he said something else about using this tax to support developing the other non-carbon energy sources, the carbon ones must be made more expensive.

Arrgh.
I'm going to bed. Anyone else wants to watch it they're welcome, I can't take any more of this crap.

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

Makes me so angry.

Tony Jones needs a biff around the melon.

Update:
Hansen lied about a lot of things. One of which was that sceptics had arrived at their sceptical position without taking any data and checking it. Funny that, considering the refusal of the holders of the temperature data to release that information and also the loss or destruction of that information at one particular organisation which was providing the "tricked up" "hide the decline" data...

Thanks to Wand, heres a WUWT post by American Thinker's Marc Sheppard dated 6/12/09.

UN scientists turn on each other (Canada Free Press)

A UN scientist is declaring that his three fellow UN climate panel colleagues “should be barred from the IPCC process.” In a November 26, 2009 message on his website, UN IPCC contributing author Dr. Eduardo Zorita writes: “CRU files: Why I think that Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Stefan Rahmstorf should be barred from the IPCC process.”

Zorita writes that the short answer to that question is: Short answer: “Because the scientific assessments in which they may take part are not credible anymore.”

Zorita indicates that he is aware that he is putting his career in jeopardy by going after the upper echelon of UN IPCC scientists. “By writing these lines I will just probably achieve that a few of my future studies will, again, not see the light of publication,” Zorita candidly admits, a reference to the ClimateGate emails discussing how to suppress data and scientific studies that do not agree with the UN IPCC views.

More here.

Climategate in Australia

The MSM in Australia is still catching up with climategate.... it has republished an article by Frank Ferudi which first appeared in Spiked online.

Climategate is being discussed widely in the British and international media. It has involved the publication of private emails sent by employees of the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit, emails that appear to show scientists colluding to ensure that facts do not stand in the way of their science.

Of course there is little doubt that advocacy research - research that is driven by an already desired policy goal - plays a key role in framing the discussion of climate change. But whatever one thinks of the morality of climate-change alarmism, it is important to understand that the people involved in this campaign honestly believe in their cause. This is not a movement that seeks to deceive or that conspires to fiddle the figures. It is a lobby driven by powerful convictions, which need to be taken seriously if the issues are to be clarified and understood.

I have my doubts that the second paragraph is entirely correct.

Then the last four paragraphs:

In any case, no objective observer should be surprised by what the emails reveal. The emails do remind us, however, of one regrettable development in recent years: the politicisation of peer review. The emails reveal scientists having discussions about whose work should get the peer-review stamp.

In an ideal world, the system of peer review - where scholarly work is subjected to the scrutiny of other experts in the field - would ensure disinterested science informed public debate. Through peer review, the authority of science may inject public discussion with some useful ideas and facts. Unfortunately, however, this ideal is rarely realised. Even at the best of times the system of peer review is not entirely free from vested interests. Peer reviewing is often conducted through a mates' club, and all too often the matter of who gets published and who gets rejected is determined by who you know and where you stand in a particular academic debate.

Nevertheless, peer reviewing worked for many years as a more or less adequate system of quality control. In the end, the damage caused by cliquishness tended to be overcome through debate and the triumph of scientific integrity. But the situation has changed. Unfortunately, in some disciplines peer reviewing has become politicised. The way peer review is now used in public debate as a form of divine revelation - where we are told peer-reviewed science shows we must believe and do certain things - indicates how this institution risks being corrupted by advocacy researchers.

The politicisation of peer review in the climate-change debate raises issues that concern all scientists. We must depoliticise the peer review system and encourage scientists to think of themselves as disinterested researchers. That does not mean scientists can't have opinions or must not participate in political campaigns. It means that they do not confuse science with ideology. That way, they would not have to worry every time they send an email.

I have my doubts that the second paragraph is entirely correct.