Green Belief Helps You Channel The Future

A Call for Entries for a European Green Capital award? No big deal, obviously.

But…a 2009 call for entries for a European Green Capital award for 2012 and 2013? We’re definitely into “Obama Peace or Rather Hope Prize” territory there.

That’s all confirmed by the award “concept“:

 

Starting in 2010, one European city will be selected as the European Green Capital of the year. The award will be given to a city that:

• Has a consistent record of achieving high environmental standards;
• Is committed to ongoing and ambitious goals for further environmental improvement and sustainable development;
• Can act as a role model to inspire other cities and promote best practices to all other European cities.

The award marks a city’s wish and capability to solve environmental problems in order toboth improve the quality of life of its citizens and reduce the burden it imposes on the global environment as a whole.

Read carefully: “wish and capability to solve environmental problem“. The actual solving of environmental problems is no more than an afterthought: and so it makes perfect sense to designate winners years in advance, as if we already knew now which city will make the most effort to be environmentally friendly 3 or 4 years in the future…

 

 

Stop Press: AGW Believer Stumbles, Accuses Briffa Of Unethical Behavior, Threatens AGW Edifice

Barrel-scraping (and worse: outright unintentional humor): this is what happens when one wants to defend an untenable position.

And this is what happened to wannabe Briffa Defender, Eli Rabett (apparently of some fame in the blogging circuit), trying his best Musketeer of the Guard impersonation in the “Hockey Stick Redux” comments at Ben Hale’s blog (more about that blog later).

Trouble is, Rabett ended up (unwittingly) accusing Briffa of dishonesty, and (one suspects, even more unwittingly) threatening single-handledly to destroy much of the AGW edifice.

Time wiil tell if Briffa and AGW can survive Eli Rabett’s friendly fire…

=============================

Here’s how it started

Mr Rabett tried to defend Briffa with “a few basic questions“, including “the “data” the tree ring samples, belongs to the Russians. True or false” and “If [the previous statement] is true, the Russians are the ones to approach for the “data”. True or false“.

Alas, and of course, Rabett forgot to ask an even more basic question, that is if Briffa had indeed refused for years to release the data related to his articles published in journals whose stated policy is that all data related to all published articles should be released. What was Briffa thinking when he submitted articles to those journals, one wonders.

Furthermore, as pointed out by another commenter, MrPete, if a data set cannot be shared, that pretty much invalidates all articles based on that data set and published in journals whose policy is for data to be shared. Given the popularity of Briffa’s work, one can only imagine what very public slaughter of AGW articles Rabett’s idea would entail.

Reminded of, but still in complete denial of such fundamental points, Eli Rabett came back with a vengeance: “It looks more and more that the data was the Russian tree ring information which belonged to the Russians and which they had published on previously. Data shared by it’s owners cannot be ethically given to a third party by the people it was given to.“

(my emphasis)

How can one read the above but as an (unwitting) accusation by AGW believer Eli Rabett that Briffa’s sharing of the data has been…unethical?

If all other Briffa supporters are like Rabett (and, in some sense, Schmidt), then it’s going to be a long and hard way indeed for the CRU scientist…

Are Warmist-Journalists Helping Spread The Skeptical Word In The UK?

Who could have guessed…journalists are third from bottom in the list of trusted public figures in the UK, a poll has just shown. A great progress indeed (they had the pride of last place until now), apart from the fact that this year they have been beaten by scandal-plagued parliamentarians and Government ministers on their way down.

Now, consider also the vast amounts of AGW belief among British journalism (eg BBC, Guardian, Independent, most tabloids if not all of them, apart from a tiny number of mostly politically-motivated people at The Daily Telegraph).

Is it any wonder then that AGW skepticism is on the increase in the UK?

Perhaps the impact of all the rivers of ink and bytes dedicated by non-skeptical AGW British media should not be underrated…

A Plea To The (Almighty) G8 Group

Dear Presidents and Prime Ministers of the Group of Eight

I am glad to hear that you have “agreed on Wednesday to try to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius“.

While you’re at it, could you also please try to transform parts of the central Mediterranean into jacuzzis during the month of August, and provide in those same areas a gently cooling breeze, preferably between 2-4pm?

The final bill, to the taxpayer of course!

Many thanks and Best Regards
Maurizio

(heavily inspired by a comment to this blog)

The Temptation of AGW

To the left, somebody that believes that “global warming is essentially a hoax“. To the right, some…bodies that have just shot a calendar “to raise awareness about global warming“.

doesn’t believe in global warming

believe in global warming

For once, there is no skepticism here about…warming.

The Key To Changing The UK’s Stance On Global Warming

if only!!

Explanation For BBC Science News Webpage’s Climate Change Policy

Having carefully watched the BBC “Science & Environment” news web page for several weeks now, I am inclined to identify the following as their underlying “Climate Change” reporting policy:

1. No day shall pass without at least one climate-change-related link somewhere on that page
2. Reporting on scientific articles supporting AGW will be strictly confined to a slight change of the original press release with the smallest and most inconsequential of doubt and criticism in the results
3. Whatever Prince Charles or any other environmental celebrity has to say will be considered worthy of publication
4. No such luck for anything not supporting AGW, however authoritative the source.
5. Point 4 will not apply once a quarter or so, in order to demonstrate “balanced reporting”
6. No climate change link will be considered too trivial to report
7. There will be links to Richard Black’s blog
8. There will be no link to the BBC’s own “Climate Change – The Blog of Bloom” blog. After all, it does make fun of AGW

And so there goes my licence money at work supporting the fight against the destruction of the world by evil SUV drivers…

Either The Best BBC Climate Blog…

…or their way of “showing impartiality”?

In any case, the BBC’s “Climate Change – The Blog of Bloom” is well worth an entry in one’s RSS feeds list.

And the authors there are quite humorous and far, far less the self-conscious, bordering-on-pompous, depressive types like Roger Harrabin and Richard Black.

For a couple of suggestions, start from these:

Carbon-neutral adventurers find reason to love oil tanker

Giant trees decline in Yosemite: climate change may, or equally may not be to blame

Sacked climate minister reveals somewhat unsurprising support for state aid

——–

Now…can “The Blog of Bloom” really be used to demonstrate the impartiality of the BBC in the climate debate? I am afraid it cannot. See, there is no link to it, and there has never been, into the “Science and Environment” section of the BBC News website.

NASA Spends Three Billion Dollars To Manufacture Fake Sunspots (humor)

London, 17 May (MNN) – NASA, the American space agency, has been called into justifying the humongous(-ly little) money it spends every year for space exploration, in a shocking new development connected to the ongoing lack of sunspots.

Officials at NASA’s headquarters in Houston, Tx have neither confirmed or denied (or even been asked) if the whole purpose of sending the Space Shuttle Atlantis a few days ago, and the Hubble Space Telescope in April 1990, was in order to pretend the Sun is not asleep , as in the picture below

NASA-manufactured fake sunspots

In unrelated news: NOAA has announced two new sunspots have appeared on the surface of our star, thereby confirming everything is fine, global cooling is not in the making, global warming will kill us all instead and it’s all our fault.

Of Exceptional Climate Phenomena…In The XIX Century!

From Gustave Flaubert’s “Dictionary of Received Ideas“, “(in French, Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues) is a short satirical work collected and published in 1911-3 from notes compiled by Gustave Flaubert during the 1870s, lampooning the clichés endemic to French society” (text retrieved from this link):

SUMMER Always ‘unusual’. (See WINTER.)

WINTER Always ‘unusual’. (See SUMMER.)

(thanks to FM for pointing this out)

Pupils: Brothels, Not Wind Farms

Not-so-surprising results from a “survey of sixth year students at a Scottish secondary…quizzed on what they would like to see provided in their town” by the “Selkirk Regeneration Group (SRG)“.

One student suggested a house for prostitutes.

The pupils voted against a wind farm.

Cue a customary “a disappointing outcome” quote from SRG chairman Dr Lindsay Neil, and mention that “more [needs] to be done to ‘get the message across’“. Why has he bothered to ask, one wonders.

Hockey Heroes Check Melting Icecaps

In case you’ve missed this paradigm-changing news from sometimes in January 2007: “Hockey Heroes ‘Check’ Melting Icecaps – Zambonis to the rescue“.

Why, it was in the Weekly World News. Of course!

Hockey Heroes against melting icecaps

(via Il Disinformatico)

Save The Planet, Ban Pollution-Producing (Living) Devices!

With CO2 on its way to be classified as a dangerous polluting gas, since it is mostly created out of oxygen and carbon either by living beings or machines created by living beings, shouldn’t we ban oxygen, free carbon, and aerobic life from Planet Earth in order to save Nature itself?

Somebody please start a petition!!

ps cognoscenti will recognize that we are just suffering from something those evil stromatolites have done, so long ago

pps And what about methane? Let’s outlaw hydrogen too!

Stop Press! West Antartica Is Melting!!

Or maybe, not yet…

“In warmer past and likely future, West Antarctica melted regularly, raising seas tremendously“: yes, but the “likely future [...] will be hundreds if not a thousand years from now“.

From a “news” viewpoint, this is definitely one for the record books. Printed just a few centuries earlier than usual…

Upcoming breaking news: will the USA strengthen itself after the economic crisis of AD 6358? What to do to prepare for the influx of refugees in the Siberian wars of the 86th century? And will the Chicago Cubs win the World Series of AD 11,908, for the first time in a 10,000 years?

(yes some things will never change)

The Pop Psychology Of Climate Change

This is how it might have all started:

1. Over the years since Illuminism and the Industrial Revolution, lots of very intelligent people with a penchant for control freakery got convinced the world was going to the dogs, due to intrinsic faults in the way humans organized their societies
2. They thought the only solution was their own particular form of egalitarianism/socialism/communism
3. Eventually, they all found a discharge valve for their ongoing frustrations in the existence of actual Socialist states, “Workers Paradise” and the likes
4. Sadly for them, but happily for many people, that all collapsed around 1989 (with the tearing down of the Berlin Wall) and then 1991/1992 (with the disappearance of the USSR)
5. But then, in their established mindset, if there is no hope for Socialism then there is no hope for humanity itself
6. This means that for lots of very intelligent people etc etc, the world is effectively going to the dogs, or better yet to the cockroaches. But how?
7. Cue “anthropogenic global warming” (AGW) as the “perfect storm”, including the world going to burn to cinders and people and societies too selfish to recognize their guilt
8. This makes “global warming” a particularly leftist ideology, no matter what the science behind it actually says (and doesn’t)
9. Some people (for obvious reasons, mostly not of a Leftist disposition) actually recognize the situation for what it is (AGW as a political attempt at reorganizing human society around the communal good as established by whomever is in charge, dressed up as a purely scientific theory even if cracks continuously need to be tapered up (see the “scientific group” called the IPCC getting the one and only political Nobel Prize, Peace’s).
10. Those people dare express their skepticism.
11. But if you are convinced the world is going to the dogs because of human and societal faults, therefore those skeptics are ipso facto the very representation of human and societal faults.
12. Hence the skeptics “have” to be silenced, summarily dismissed, marginalized, described as figures of fun or evil or both

Is there any way out? Yes there is. All we need for the AGW brouhaha to get out of the way, allowing climatology to be more science than politics for the first time in 15 years or more, is for something else to keep busy those mostly Leftists with good intentions on making everybody’s life as awful as possible but in a “Workers Paradise”.

Where is a big financial crisis when one sorely needs it?

Is Gavin Schmidt The Best Thing Ever Happened To AGW Skeptics?

One wonders. As one has been wondering. For quite some time.

There’s Probably No AGW

Anybody up for a new “Bus Campaign”?

It would be quite appropriate indeed, given the fact that Anthropogenic Global Warming has become an article of faith for some. Take Arianna Huffington (please!):

Although HuffPost welcomes a vigorous debate on many subjects, I am a firm believer that there are not two sides to every issue, and that on some issues the jury is no longer out. The climate crisis is one of these issues.

(my emphasis)

Climate Change Humor…Tired But Still Funny

Like crossing chickens of old, there are some recurring themes in Climate Change humor that for some unfathomable reason still manage to be funny. Here some examples:

(1) From Climate Audit

How Al Gore Saved Christmas

(2) From Watts Up With That

Inconvenient Warmth

(3) From Yours-Omniclimate-Truly

“Sex and Global Warming: the Underrated Issue“

(4) From Climate Progress

Every other blog entry (wait…I thought we were only dealing with intentional humor – Ed.)

Space Aliens May Have Destroyed Home Planet With CO2 Emissions

(an example of Do-It-Yourself climate alarmism)

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has discovered carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting another star.

Translation: Powerful life-threatening gas is so abundant on that planet, it has been detected light-years away

This breakthrough is an important step toward finding chemical biotracers of extraterrestrial life.

Translation: We have no hopes but to find only the traces of whatever life might have been there before runaway global warming

The Jupiter-sized planet, called HD 189733b, is too hot for life.

Translation: QED

[...] Previous observations of HD 189733b by Hubble and the Spitzer Space Telescope found water vapor. Earlier this year, Hubble found methane in the planet’s atmosphere. [...]

Translation: The planet’s atmosphere is made up almost 100% of greenhouse gases! Those space aliens must have been in the SUV business big time, poor them.

—

Is the above justified? I say yes, and why not? Of course it’s all possible, therefore on the basis of the precautionary principle, of course we ought to behave like it were true.

Please stop breathing.

Pass The Handkerchief

According to Italian CO2 emission calculator “Ecodieta” (in Italian) I emit around 40kg of CO2 per day. That’s double my ideal quota, apparently, even if my larger than average body frame is not considered!

Funny thing is, around half of my sinful attitude comes from having the temerity of…heating my own house!

Will I qualify for an award were icicles to lend beauty to my living room? If only, to pay all those recurring bronchopneumonia treatments…

ps the other half involves using the oven. Perhaps I should switch to heating up the frozen pizzas with the icicles.