The cheapest way to prevent man-made global warming is stop the BOM altering the data
First the BoM had “high quality” data. Then, with fanfare, after we asked for an audit they had the miracle of ACORN circa 2011. Then early this year ACORN 2.0 was quietly birthed with major adjustments as expert data became “more expert” but the BOM strangely didn’t want to mention that what was so good is now even better (apparently). The unofficial BOM audit team — especially Bob Fernley-Jones and Chris Gillham — have unearthed just how large the latest rewrite of history is. These men are truly independent, they have no funding, and nothing to gain either way. Please thank them for their unpaid dedication.
In this brazen latest round, even the summer of 2018 just got warmer. After all the headlines, after it was measured on supposedly modern first class equipment, even data just 18 months old is being re-fiddled. The temperatures read out on the news in January 2018? Nevermind what they said then. Those hottest ever records then were even hotter than the BoM thought, thanks to amazing new discoveries that the BOM doesn’t think are important enough to issue as a press release.
This time around the BoM have increased the warming rate by an astonishing 71%.
Who knew? Temperatures in 1910 are still getting colder. Pretty soon we’ll need to send blankets back with Dr Who so our grandparents don’t die of hypothermia.
Whopper #1: Bureau of Meteorology covertly (secretly?) made summer hotter
Part 1: Guest post by Bob Fernley-Jones
In 2011, the BoM adjusted Australia’s temperature records with the objective of making corrections for the varying measurement conditions back in time. Controversially, they deleted all data before 1910 by ruling them unreliable (especially the notably hotter values) and by adjusting the surviving early 1900’s values generally downwards. Amid the controversy, this program received much official praise and publicity that culminated in a government sponsored report of 2017 declaring it to be among world’s best practice. Despite that acclaim, in October 2018 they found it necessary to quietly launch a new program that further increased warming rates. Whilst there was no media release to inform the public, it was presumably well received by the IPCC.
The two adjustment programs employ a methodology known as homogenization which is described under the acronyms ACORN-SAT (2011), replaced by ACORN-SAT version 2 (hereafter v1 & v2). The discovery of what follows arose from enquiries to the BoM made last year over existing concerns with v1 data and the fortuitous archiving of BoM data and graphics that no longer exist on line (but which are easily proven). It resulted in citizen researcher awareness of v2 despite the lack of media release and thus in recent interest to compare outcomes.
The first example below animates the changes to the all-Australia summer averages (Southern Hemisphere DJF). This selection was made to avoid any suggestion of picking the worst case that might otherwise result from regional variability, and it is not the worst case. It is derived from a BoM online download archived in early 2018 compared with the replacing v2 copy and shows a v1 warming rate of 0.07 0C/decade to 2018 and for v2; 0.12 0C/decade to 2019. That results in an increased warming rate of an incredible 71%.
Australian Summer Maxes, animated changes from 2018-2019. Bureau of Meteorology.
The extraordinary value in 2019 clearly has an impact on the increased v2 rate but the v1 data were also archived. This has enabled determination of the v2 rate less the 2019 value, as follows:
Click to enlarge
From this, the increased warming rate v2 over v1 for 1910 through 2018 is 57% on top of that already accomplished in ‘world’s best practice’ of v1 over the original data. Typically, cooling adjustments randomly increase downwards towards 1910 and oppositely towards 2019 (the dotted trend lines intersect and pivot roughly in the centre = minimal net adjustments around the centre).
But, it gets worse. In Part 2, an increase in warming trend of 87% will be revealed, together with another problem where the State average data show inexplicable changes as late as in 2018 when none of its individual stations do (As also with the above but discussed in Part 2).
REFERENCES:
* Australian Climate Observations Reference Network – Surface Air Temperature (ACORN-SAT) v2
Just a quick note to say I’ll be out in the Gibson desert beyond phones and emails for the next ten days. Apologies, as I won’t be able to reply and haven’t set up an email auto reply. Responses will be very very delayed. Posts are still coming, David will keep an eye on things. Thanks to the moderators for keeping discussion going. Merci! Back soon. — Jo
Putin doesn’t think humans control the climate, and has said so openly. Now, he’s finally agreed to ratify the Paris agreement, though with very low targets. He even did it by a government order (which means he has bypassed the house — the State Duma) — presumably to avoid the people who would voice “the same kinds of arguments against the need for collective action that he himself has frequently expounded.”.
By Natasha Doff, Ilya Arkhipov, and Yuliya Fedorinova, Bloomberg
Putin, who presides over the world’s fourth-largest emitter, is trying to position himself as a leader of the same transnational regulatory movement that his first economic adviser compared to fascism. After three and half years of foot-dragging, Putin has finally decided to ratify the 2015 Paris Agreement — and the reasons have less to do with the fate of the planet than with geopolitics and gross domestic product.
Mark it in your diary. Straight answer coming:
In fact, when asked if embracing the Paris pact means Putin now agrees with the scientific consensus on the primary cause of planetary heating, his spokesman was unusually blunt:
“No,” Dmitry Peskov said by text message.
He’s now speaking double-inverted climate speak — where he still says he doesn’t agree with the consensus but they should do some mitigation, while dropping coded complaints about “unidentified Western leaders who he said continue to cynically distort the issue for political and economic gain.”
In the leadup he was lobbied by leaders in Germany, France and Scandinavia.
[Officials involved in those discussions] said Putin’s policy pivot was driven by the cold calculus of economics and realpolitik rather than any real conviction in the efficacy of further crimping personal and corporate behavior.
The reason for the flip is that Russia is already isolated and faces sanctions from the West and he can see more coming. Environmental standards are being promoted everywhere and it’s just a matter of time before Russia is isolated further, and Russian exports are taxed out of business.
In other words, no nation (bar the US, perhaps) can stand alone against the Big Government Octopus. (It’s time other nations got organised – bring back the Commonwealth!) We need a coalition of countries, the Anglosphere, plus Brazil, Japan, Russia?
Because of the fallout from the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s emissions are 25% less than they were in 1990. So Putin could brag about that if he wanted too. Doesn’t count for anything though. It’s not how much CO2 you produce, it’s how much you say you care about it….
A declaration of a fake emergency is just like yelling “fire” in a crowded theatre
Photo by Takver.
A couple of days after skeptics were banned by The Conversation, came an article advising how people who do illegal, potentially dangerous things can use the “climate emergency” as a legal defense. Skeptics and scientists might rub their hands with glee, waiting for the climate emergency to be vaporised by any half decent prosecuting lawyer. But that won’t happen — the alleged law breakers don’t have to prove there is a climate emergency, they just have to prove that a reasonable person would think there is. So when East Widgiemooltha declares a “mergency”, that is enough.
So when a local council succumbs to fashion whims or gets heckled into declaring an emergency it’s effectively encouraging vandals, tyrants, and paranoid eco-terrorists.
Nicole Rogers, Senior lecturer, School of Law and Justice, Southern Cross University
The defence permits law-breaking in circumstances of “sudden or extraordinary emergency” if:
an ordinary person possessing ordinary power of self-control could not reasonably be expected to act otherwise.
It’s a version of the common law “necessity defence”, which allows law-breaking to avoid greater harm or irreparable evil. This defence has been argued by climate activists in the US and UK for over a decade.
But unlike the common law defence, the extraordinary emergency defence is only activated by a sudden or extraordinary emergency.
Using climate change as a legal defence worked in the UK in 2008 when Greenpeace protesters painted graffiti on the chimney of a British power station. A jury acquitted them of property damage charges on the basis of necessity.
And earlier this year, another UK jury acquitted Extinction Rebellion founder Roger Hallam and a fellow activist of similar charges. While the judge ruled climate change was irrelevant, the jury was persuaded by the defendants’ argument that their actions were a proportionate response to the climate crisis.
In the US, judges have been largely reluctant to let climate activists use this defence, and no climate activist has yet been acquitted of criminal charges when they do use it.
However, in 2018, a US judge downgraded the charges against pipeline protesters to civil infractions and then found them not responsible on the basis of necessity. And, in 2019, “Valve Turner” protester Ken Ward succeeded in having his conviction overturned, on the basis he should have been allowed to argue necessity as a constitutional right.
But framing the “necessity defence” as an “extraordinary emergency defence” in jurisdictions like Queensland allows Australian climate activists to take advantage of the growing acceptance of climate change as emergency.
What they all need (the ABC, The Conversation, etc) is a calm voice reminding them of the 1001 reasons there’s no emergency. Obviously that won’t happen since they just banned calmness. Speaking of which: on this very important topic there were only 29 comments of which 13 (50%!) were “automatically flagged for inspection by a moderator” and remain trapped there four days later. What’s the bet these comments will appear in 1 week, 1 month, 1 year — or only after Donald Trump is declared King?
The only good question Nicole Rogers asks:
Climate change emergency makes legal norms unworkable
So what is reasonable conduct in the face of the mounting climate crisis? The importance of asking this question cannot be overstated.
The Climate Emergency is a Conversation Emergency. We need to talk about our national conversations.
Attempts to avert this catastrophe through non-violent acts of civil disobedience will come to seem reasonable.
Only in The Monologues thought bubble Nicole.
If you live in a Climate Emergency Zone it’s time to get it rescinded.
The only reason Climate Scare Machine played the Child card was because they’ve given up the adult contest of persuasion.
As a marketing tactic it has a lot going for it. Playing the “girl under seige” card brings out protectors. Holding the “girlie hype” card whips the gullible and emotional into a frenzy. The people who don’t do numbers but rather assess the world via indignation-hope-and-fear can be galvanized into action. They may not be able to add up the megawatts to keep the lights on, but they can leverage emotional barbs to control whole dinner parties. In a gregarious species, that matters.
Strategically, best of all, the kiddie card means most adults will pull their punches, and anyone who tries to reply can be framed as an instant bully. As Laurie Atlas (on 4RO radio) said today, “she’s like a human shield” — the UN put her up there to stop people firing shots back. Just like terrorists hide behind civilians, Eco-terrorists hide behind children.
The UN can fire shots from behind her, and then hold up the Greta-shield to deflect returning missives. “How dare you!”
So the girl too-young-to-own-her-own-home can tell whole nations how to run their economies. She doesn’t have to make sense, teenage girls are known to panic and scream better than anyone, except perhaps three year olds, who presumably are the next step in the devolution of the climate debate. So Greta can say things that no national leader can. She has no responsibility, it won’t matter if she’s wrong, there are no trade-offs and she can write the whole thing off as a folly of youth.
Speaking to Hack ahead of last week’s global climate strike, the 93-year-old threw his support behind young people taking to the streets in protest.
“Young people see things very clearly. And they are speaking very clearly to politicians,” he said.
Sir David said he backed the strategy of non-violent direct action.
“If they just sit on the sidelines, and [debate] in a nice, reasonable way, you know, they’ll say, ‘oh kids’. But if they actually do something in the way that they have been doing in this era, then politicians have to sit up and take notice.”
So, let’s decide national policy according to the number of children glued to crosswalks? May the most obnoxious, persistent trolls win…
Since her parents evidently didn’t teach her humility, Greta is going to find out about it one way or another.
After billions of dollars of “gifts” to the renewables industry, and a doubling of the wholesale electricity price, wind and solar power are still so inefficient and uneconomic that investors can’t make a profit without getting more free money. After the wild bonanza of the last two years the RET scheme has completed the large scale targets that were set so long ago, and that’s it, ppft.
What was 4,300 MW of new projects per quarter is now just 800MW: 83% less
After a record breaking two years of investment in large-scale wind and solar projects, the pace of projects reaching financial close has slowed dramatically over the past two quarters. The Clean Energy Regulator announced this month that the large-scale 2020 Renewable Energy Target (RET) has now been met. What happens next is unclear.
Quarterly investment commitments in new renewable energy projects reached a high of over 4500 MW in late 2018, but has since collapsed to less than 800MW in each of the first two quarters of 2019.
The 2020 large-scale RET was a highly successful policy which drove unprecedented levels of investment in new utility-scale generation over the past two years. Some 15,700 MW of new capacity has been financially committed over the past two years, with that generation either under construction or recently commissioned. This new generation was predominantly in the form of wind and solar, which has been supported more recently by investment in energy storage. With the absence of policy certainty beyond the 2020 RET and a range of regulatory barriers to overcome, investment commitments in new generation have fallen dramatically this year
Financial close is a leading indicator for the level of new generation likely to come online in the future, noting a construction lag of between 6-24 months between financial close and full commissioning. As illustrated in Figure 2 below, the level of new investment committed in the first half of 2019 has fallen to 2016 levels, when then-Prime Minister Tony Abbott attempted to remove the RET and froze the industry during a lengthy review period. And with the rate of new investment now slowing, the forward outlook for wholesale energy prices has started to rise again.
The RET is more a forced payment — money is taken from consumers, secretly snuck out of their electricity bills — and gifted to the renewables industry.
It’s been relentlessly rising for nearly 20 years.
Despite that, the unreliables industry never stopped asking for “certainty”.
The Childrens Rent-a-crowd Crusade didn’t bring in the money
We all know why the climate picnic last Friday was not held on the weekend — hardly anyone would have come. When adults are too bored to go out and save the world, the only option is children. Butter them up, tell them they are heroes and rebels if they do what they want to do anyway and take the day off school. Climate protests have been shrinking for years, so the adults in charge needed to change strategies, and with a compliant media, it worked — it was a grand theatre.
World leaders were asked to come to the UN with concrete plans to cut emissions to net zero.
But on Monday, the presidents and prime ministers of the world’s largest emitting economies stumbled. Signalling just how difficult the work of removing CO2 will be compared to setting targets.
The tougher 1.5C goal of the Paris Agreement, backed by UN chief António Guterres and the majority of the world’s nations, requires achieving net zero global emissions by 2050.
The only speaker in the room that “resonated” was the only one in the room who had no responsibility
Greta could say any darn thing at all and none of it would have to be costed, or make sense:
And yet, incrementalism was the main theme at the UN climate action summit, as heads of state took to the podium one after the other. The speeches failed to resonate, except for Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who brought the hall to tears as she called out leaders for their inaction. “Yet you all come to me for hope? How dare you,” she said.
Greta Thunberg makes great theater (if you want to scare the world).
Someone has wound up a child into quivering rage and breathless tears. How dare you indeed – exploit the children for political ends.
…
….
Earth Day was a big hit too at the start, but repetition and boredom killed it. Presumably they’ll run some more “climate-strikes” until schools, parents and kids get bored again.
UPDATE: Michael Smith reports that Greta has a IMDB pagewhich lists acting credits and contact details for her agent. She lists climate performances. Just acting then? h/t Another Ian, Dennis.
So unfair that a child be a tool,
Of alarmists, to face ridicule,
Being so underage,
For the fake climate rage,
And would be much better off home at school.
Tony Heller does a fantastic video of the cherry picking done by US propaganda agencies formerly known as “scientific”.
It’s an excellent collection of graphs, mostly US based ones, all showing rising trends but all starting in different years. Somehow the warming effect of CO2 starts at different times in different datasets.
Unskeptical Scientists have an excuse for starting every dataset when they do, but there is no excuse for the pattern of continually picking the low point and hiding the hotter-drier past. Heller is calmly scathing about Arctic Sea Ice data. How many people know the early satellite data shows lower Arctic Sea ice in the 1970s?
It’s the pattern that matters. The US is only a small part of the surface of Earth, but it’s a large part of the propaganda. Formerly great institutions are deceiving the people who pay their salaries. A lie by omission is still a lie…
Before anyone asks: the graphs for Australia don’t necessarily look the same or start at the same date. Though the pattern of behaviour of our “scientists” is — and scary graphs usually start either in 1910 or “the 70s”. The wild heat of the 1890′s and the Federation Drought and the thousands of news stories about that might as well not exist.
Australia is on the opposite side of the Pacific, which means the opposite side of ENSO. Inasmuch as El Ninos and La Ninas drive the climate (which is quite a bit) hot and dry spells swing differently douwnunder, though there are longer underlying cycles which affect the whole globe.
James Cook University is appealing a decision … Federal Court documents reveal JCU has briefed one of Australia’s top barristers, Bret Walker SC, to argue it was legal for the north Queensland university to sack Dr Ridd last year after he publicly criticised its climate change science.
Physics professor Dr Ridd will on Monday launch an online bid for crowd-funding to help pay his legal costs, asking for an extra $1.5m, after supporters already tipped in $260,000 to help fund his unfair dismissal claim. Dr Ridd has spent $200,000 of his own money.
“It’s diabolically expensive because we expect it to go all the way to the High Court,” he said. “In the end, this is a battle for academic freedom. It’s about not allowing universities to stifle free speech.
James Cook Uni will dig deeper into taxpayer funds instead of doing research, in order to protect the reputation of overpaid bureaucrats:
Liberal senator James Paterson tells Alan Jones: “It looks like, so far, James Cook University has spent almost $2 million in order to silence the free speech of one of their own academics. “It’s an outrageous case.” - 2GB Alan Jones and James Paterson.
What’s the aim here? To protect the reef or protect the belief?
Because this is the high court, it’s potentially a bonfire of money about to be burnt. The only winners are lawyers. Taxpayers, skeptics and the environment can only lose if the case goes ahead. Before that happens, let’s run a campaign to ensure free speech at universities and to sack any VC that won’t support that.
Now is the time to outflank them. Let’s get all that money back into research, not yachts for lawyers.
Instant fix: No more Taxpayer funds for any university that won’t protect free speech
Here’s the campaign skeptics, scientists and taxpayers must run:
…
This could all be solved so quickly. Since losing the case JCU has changed its employment contracts, not to give their academics the unequivocal right to speak freely, but to make sure they can’t. Enough is enough — all universities need to guarantee free speech in employment contracts or no more government funds.
It’s time Dan Tehan, Minister of Education said to JCU — no more funds for you while you waste it on lawyers defending a case that — even if JCU wins — only shows that it’s not the sort of institution the govt should be funding. Even if the taxpayer wins, it loses. The nonsense must stop. The bonfire of money shows universities, particularly JCU, have lost their way in Australia.
Trump has done this in the US with free speech, and it just took a tweet.
….
In March 2019 that tweet became an executive order. Academics tried to claim that it made no difference anyhow, as campuses were already “legally bound to do so by the First Amendment.” But nothing in the first amendment says anything about funding. Australia doesn’t even have a first amendment, so we need this more than the US does.
Vice Chancellor, Sandra Harding AO earnt $975,000 in 2018. Her package must be over a million dollars a year now. The problem with paying her too much evidently is that she thinks she is more important than the scientists and researchers she manages. Giving her an AO (for what — wasting two million dollars and trashing the reputation of JCU?) has apparently cemented her delusion. She must go. If JCU loses funding it will force them to dump the incompetent decision-makers who bear responsibility.
Follow the responsibility for this up the chain. The taxpayer is funding this debacle, so someone in government has to be signing those cheques above JCU admin. The Education Minister (Dan Tehan) is responsible for the kind of universities we have and the student funding. Research grants are likely also coming from The Minister for the Environment (Sussan Ley) and The Minister for Science (Karen Andrews). So there are three points to start asking why taxpayers are funding any university that will not guarantee free speech for staff?
Conservative politicians will go weak at the knees so easily, but we have to stop letting them get away with the easy option of giving in to the namecalling bullies.
Time to head the money off before it reaches the lawyers. Let’s fix the main issue: government funding is strangling science
Universities are so dependent on Big-Gov they have become a wing of it. None of them are independent in Australia. What do taxpayers want? Professors who talk propaganda or ones that tell us what their research shows? Without free speech academics are being turned into advertising agents whose primary role is to get more money from taxpayers. We know now that all academic research at JCU is worthless. Any researcher that finds anything “politically inconvenient” will not say so out of fear, so therefore the only thing we know for sure about JCU research is that any result or expert opinion may be cherry picked, skewed, biased or a lie by omission, and that if it is, no one at JCU will say so.
What does the reef need — solutions dictated by elite business managers or fearless discussion from experts that question every aspect and priority til we get it right?
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UPDATE: The IPA is raising funds for the legal case.
To donate, head to Peter’s GoFundMe page at GoFundMe.
Anyone can say fossil fuels are evil. But let’s count the protestors living without them?
Every kind of motherhood spirit and mass delusion was at the Global Climate Picnic today. It was all things to all people, a day to absolve guilt about living rich, while simultaneously earning social status miles in the Flying Socialite Program. (Or perhaps that’s the Flying Socialist Program). The Climate Picnic was green and fluffy, nice and sunny, and a walk in the park with the distant promise of free perpetual motion machines. What’s not to like about a day off school feeling like a rebel for conforming with the throng?
It was a chance to complain about corporate greed, and do a cathartic exorcism of smoke and black stuff, which everyone knows must be bad. It was a spiritual event, a social event, and faked up as a science event too. The dumb could feel smart, the rich could feel pious, and everyone could feel so important. They were of course superheroes saving the whole goddam planet.
Fighting Climate Change is morally right, just like the battle against slavery — says someone in The Guardian, as if setting people free is like liberating electrons. Lordy! Those exploited subatomic particles imprisoned in solar panels would feed the world if only we let them!
So nice, but poorly educated kids skipped getting a bit more education while their overly educated parents acted out a pagan ritual drilled into them during the degree in landscape architecture that they didn’t need and never used. And the luckiest generation on Earth found reasons to panic and emote about balmy weather.
With rather meaningless lives in a civilization they’ve been taught is a toxic imperial invader, the gullible, the lost and the resentful were easy pickings to be swept up into a fake movement promising salvation, better weather, nicer insects and less jellyfish. The nonsense runs wild, and placards prophesy a dying Earth in a game of theatre designed to spook weak politicians. This was climate propaganda week after all. These people were part of the advertising.
Let’s see some real climate action
Anyone can wave a banner at a climate picnic. True believers need to prove they care and show us the way. None of this one-day walk-in-the-park stuff. If solar is so cheap — let’s see those leaders go off the grid. No more coal fired electricity. No more gas back up. No more frequency stability for free. Let them put the wind turbines on their own roofs and run their cars on solar powered battery packs.
Years from now PhD students will pore forth over the historic artefacts of The Great Global Warming Delusion and wonder how so many thousands of people got swept into the witchdoctor cult that stops storms with magic PV panels.
Coincidentally this week snow fell in Australia right down to 560m in one area, and it was also starting to fall already in the Northern Hemisphere, in Sweden, China and California. Not that means anything. Just another #climateemergency. They’re everywhere you know.
These people are calling for the end of coal, but they have no idea what that means.
Spot the new religion
Apparently a lot of people want to find a messiah to follow:
…
Would you like to feel smug with that?
A lot of people who aren’t very good at science enjoy a chance to feel like they are.
Today, for your amusement, Misha Ketchell, ex-ABC journalist, editor and ED of The Conversation scrambles to justify why banning half the population from speaking is not censorship. It’s almost a form of satire, but it’s not that clever.
He pulls out the old Argument from Authority and Ad Hom fallacies, known since Aristotle. He’s only 2,300 years behind the leading edge of rhetoric. Worse, the journalist doesn’t even understand the basics of journalism — as in, to research, present the best of both sides, and let the readers decide. Instead Ketchell, whose top scientific qualification is watching the ABC for twenty years, has decided that climate sensitivity of CO2 on planet Earth is 3.3C give or take nothing.
The biggest scandal of university research and science is there waiting to be told, but Ketchell-the-journo is 100% obedient to a collection of unaccountable foreign committee members who do unaudited work with unvalidated models.
Real experts just answer the questions, they aren’t scared of the uninformed. Why is it only climate science where we need to protect the public from know-nothing comments? Either the punters are too stupid to spot the expert, or perhaps the fake experts need to be protected from the punters?
This absolutely is about free speech
Just saying it isn’t won’t make it so:
This is not about a denial of free speech. Media outlets have always curated the ways in which they feature audience feedback. Think about the big bags of letters newspaper editors used to sift to pick a dozen or so to publish every day. The skill was always about giving a debate a chance to be aired, to allow all sides to be heard, and then to move on.
But Ketchell isn’t banning misinformation, he’s banning a whole class of people, even “locking their accounts”. That makes it absolutely about “free speech”. Read his words, “deniers are dangerous”. No matter what they say, how well they say it, or how qualified they are, some citizens are the unmentionables who shall have no voice sayth Cardinal Ketchell. It doesn’t get more unfree than a namecalling pogrom with no right of reply.
The Conversation has become the definition of unfree speech. It’s the case study of 2019. The GoTo classic story of censorship for scholars a hundred years from now. The only uncertainty here is if Ketchell has the faintest idea of what free speech is?
Say hello to the false equivalence and strawman meme of your doctor versus your untrained friend:
Imagine you discovered you had a serious illness and went to a doctor who recommended an operation. Then you surveyed 10 of your friends about whether they thought you needed an operation. Then, rather than have the operation, you spend the next 10 years, in deteriorating health, every day hearing from your doctor the operation is needed, while a small subset of your mates comment on how the doctor is a nutjob.
Let’s say their models didn’t predict who got sick, who got well, how many died, and apart from random luck, not much that happened even 10 days in advance?
Misha Ketchell says “don’t ask” just pay the bill, take the drugs — your doctor is practically a God
When we do this to experts of any sort, these uninformed comments undermine their authority. People are less inclined to believe experts when their views are presented alongside hostile opinions. But the two things are not the same; they are entirely different types of information and they don’t deserve equal weight.
The right approach, if you don’t believe your doctor, is to seek a second opinion from another medical expert. And maybe a third or a fourth. And then you make a decision on how to act, based on the evidence.
What if there are other doctors all performing the exact same unnecessary operation, collecting huge fees, being treated like Planet Saving heroes on the ABC and getting nice two week junkets in Bali as well? They are the leading “experts” eh? Who cares that their expertise, status and income is also totally dependent on that type of operation. Complete patsies will ask them, ignore the conflicts of interest, and sign up to have a lung removed to stop their cough.
Which journalist has not done any, as in five minutes of research Misha Ketchell?
He’s out of his depth, like the journo’s who just repeat the sales catalogue of the local real estate agent — the boom is just around the corner! Reality is going to blindside him. He believes in the “thousands” of unnamed expert modelers who don’t even exist. And he believes there is rigor in anonymous unpaid pal review:
In the case of climate science we don’t just have two or three expert opinions, we have thousands. All rigorous and peer reviewed. We also have a range of vested interests who are attempting to discredit that science, following the playbook of big tobacco to profit from casting doubt and delaying action.
Sure, and thousands of commenters on The Conversation get cheques and instructions in the mail from Phillip Morris. Who knew? Or more to the point, who’s got a huge baseless conspiracy theory?
Ketchell talks about “vested interests” but doesn’t realize there are $1.5 trillion in vested interests 100% depending on him (and other un-journalists) to swallow up their prospectus and sell their schemes. Most so-called Big Oil funding goes to alarmists, not skeptics. Big Oil uses the carbon-hate against its main competitor Big Coal, and panders to EPA whimseys out of fear of offending the bureaucrat rulers it depends on. Woodside oil and gas not only doesn’t fund skeptics it won’t even let one speak at a tiny niche Christmas event for petrophysicists. So much for the myth of Big Oil being a merchant of doubt.
Having announced such a cackhanded crackdown, Ketchall is feeling the heat and complaining that he’s being bullied, but who’s the bully here? The one that uses his power arbitrarily to say shut up to tens of thousands of people who partly fund his own job, or the one earning money from voluntary payments who is working to persuade others to stop funding an incompetent publisher?
A few loud media voices have claimed our approach is totalitarian. In an interview with Senator Eric Abetz on Sky News Chris Kenny did what bullies often do – he tried to intimidate and cause maximum damage by asking the Senator to ensure The Conversation never again receives government funding.
Yes, let’s talk intimidation – and start with “deniers” and “denialists” and let Ketchall define them in scientific terms. What empirical evidence is being denied? Or are these just pure insults, declaring that anyone who doesn’t agree has the brain of a lizard and is not worth listening to?
As I’d explain to the children in the room, obviously the only point of these hostile demeaning terms is to stop people questioning the religion.
Ketchell is still in denial that half the population just don’t buy the foreign committee report he considers gospel:
The truth is that how to handle the views of the small group who are hostile to climate science is a complex media ethics question…
Remember the “climate election”? Survey’s, polls and millions of votes show the citizens of Australia are not convinced the world is going to hell — the journalists job is to persuade them, the totalitarians job is to shut them up.
Hypocrisy knows no bounds
Misha Ketchell says:
And this means less emotive argument that distorts the evidence.
Jo Nova says: Sure, and calling critics “predators of our children“, or zombies is all calmness and light yeah? Not to mention “great science”. Go “the Con”.
A climate-change ideologue,
Fearing comments and free dialogue,
From the skeptical few,
Who challenged his view,
Had them shut down and barred from his blog.
–Ruairi
PS: Readers, send in your ideas for the logo. The Conversion needs a new byline.
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