Audubon rex

Writing in Forbes, James Taylor praises the fossil fuel industry's efforts to restore CO2 levels to the glory days of Jurassic Park:

" the net effects of carbon externalities are beneficial rather than harmful. Carbon dioxide itself is fertilizer for the biosphere. As we add a little carbon dioxide to the trace amounts already in the atmosphere, crop production increases, trees and grasslands flourish and deserts recede...  a warmer planet has always benefited human welfare more"

Though far too modest to harp on the cultural and evolutionary benefits of letting CO2 reflate to the levels seen in the Eocene,  Taylor deserves homage for pointing us back to the Carboniferous future, where his campaign to restore the CO2 status quo promises 
a renaissance of environmental art : 

WATTS WAKES THE DRAGON : THE WEEK THAT WASN'T

While the Chinese Academy of Science has made clear its contempt for Fred Singer's 'NIPCC Report,' Heartland's Mandarin-challeged ambassador to Beijing doesn't seem to realize he's persona non grata, witness his latest newsletter's bizarrely ironic Quote of the Week:

WUWT's reposting of Singer's bombastic newsletter provoked many WTF ? comments. Here is Watt's diplomatic reply to the first :

Margaret Hardman says   June 16, 2013 at 11:16 pm  

I see the CAS/Heartland links don’t work and the “news” has rather unravelled.  Should you be repeating it when it turned out not to meet the hype? 

REPLY: Oh, a concern troll, how nice. The press release was removed because people like yourself created “hype” where there was none and bullied the CAS into a position. Typical warmers, they can’t handle it when any attention of any kind is given to alternate works, so they sling mud, and play bullies.For example, one of the hypes was that Heartland claimed that CAS “endorsed” the work, where no such claim was made. Try to find it in this press release. You won’t because it never existed.If Heartland wants me to remove it I’m sure I would have heard about it and will do so if they ask, but I don’t give a rats butt about the opinion of concern trolls or the activist bullies that made a non-issue of endorsement into a fake issue.The fact remains that the work was indeed translated, and no amount of whining will change that fact.- Anthony

Really? Here's Beijing's rejection of Singer & Heartland's claims:

                   Chinese Academy of  Sciences, June 14, 2013

            时间: 编辑   大 中 小 打印 关闭

The claim of the Heartland Institute about CAS’ endorsement of its report is completely false.

To clarify the fact, we formally issue the following statements:

(1) The translation and publication of the Chinese version of the NIPCC report, and the related workshop, are purely non-official academic activities the group of translators. They do not represent, nor they have ever claimed to represent, CAS or any of CAS institutes...

Since there is absolutely no ground for the so called CAS endorsement of the report, and the actions by the Heartland Institute went way beyond acceptable academic integrity, we have requested by email to the president of the Heartland Institute that the false news on its website to be removed. 

We also requested that the Institute issue a public apology to CAS for the misleading statement on the CAS endorsement.

(4) If the Heartland Institute does not withdraw its false news or refuse to apologize, all the consequences and liabilities should be borne by the Heartland Institute. We reserve the right for further actions.

      Information Center for Global Change Studies,

Scientific Information Center for Resources and Environment, 

AND IN OTHER NEWS FROM NEW YORK

Mayor Bloomberg struck a blow against criminal obesity today 
by announcing a city-wide ban on the sale of candy handguns 
containing more than 16 ounces of high fructose corn syrup,
including these banana and cherry models. 

                

LOST IN TRANSLATION

Heaven is high, and the emperor far away. The ever credulous Anthony Watts reports roving Heartland Institute Ambassador S. Fred Singer, former science advisor to this noted oriental potentate             -->                      

has been sent off to Beijing, or maybe Nanking, to present a puzzled Chinese audience with a translation of Heartland's downmarket parody of an IPCC report. :

Heartland’s NIPCC report to be accepted by Chinese Academy of Sciences in special ceremony 

Posted on June 12, 2013 by Anthony Watts
Note: I’ve been aware of this effort being underway for sometime, and I’m happy to be able to report it today. The fact that the Chinese undertook the effort speaks volumes. – AnthonyHere is the Heartland press release from their website:The Chinese Academy of Sciences in June 2013 translated and published a Chinese edition of Climate Change Reconsidered and Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report, two hefty volumes containing more than 1,200 pages of peer-reviewed data on climate change originally published by The Heartland Institute in 2009 and 2011.The two books present a sweeping rebuttal of the findings of the United Nations’ controversial Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose reports were widely cited as the basis for taking action to stop or slow the advance of climate change. More recently, the IPCC has been surrounded by controversy over lapses in its quality control and editorial bias.The Chinese Academy of Sciences is the world’s largest academy of sciences, employing some 50,000 people and hosting more than 350 international conferences a year. Membership in the Academy represents the highest level of national honor for Chinese scientists.

A little Rectification of Names seems in order, because Heartland is trying to pass off this staged event as an endorsement of the bogus report by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. 

The wheeze works like this. As a very emeritus Professor Singer has long preyed upon academic courtesy by asking universities to invite him to speak. Many oblige him on the strength of his 1984 thesis that the Earth captured the Moon ,  a theory that so fascinated Reverend Moon that he made Singer The Washington Times' Science Guy. This academic schmoozing led to a deal with a Chinese university press of sorts , the Lanzhou branch of the National Science Library, to translate parts of the 800 page  anthology Heartland paid Singer $100,000 to concoct.

The reality is that the Chinese Academy of Science has nothing whatever to do with this book, and that the launch party isnt even at Beijing's University of Chinese Academy of Science, which in any event  no more speaks for the prestigeous Chinese Academy than the American University in Beirut represents America's National Academy of Science. 

The CAS views on climate forcing are so antithetic to the report that its authors  might as well have claimed Royal Society endorsement by hiring the Academy of St. Martin In the Fields to sing it aloud, on the grounds that it's an Academy, and its royal warrant is as good as the RS's down the road.

University  and academic library presses provide translation services for all comers, including think tanks fronting for PR firms (such as  Mrs. Fred Singer's- she's a registered lobbyist and former Moon employee as well) but Heartland's latest chinese fire drill recalls Reverend Moon at his most delusional - he once had himself crowned King of Peace in the Capitol building. 

This just in:

The Chinese Academy of Sciences is not amused. 

It has issued a formal démarche, and demanded a retraction from The Heartland Institute and its minions:

The Chinese translation of the “Climate Change Reconsidered—NIPCC report” was organized by the Information Center for Global Change Studies, published in May 2013 through Science Press, with an accompanying workshop on climate change issues in Beijing on June 15, 2013. However, the Heartland Institute published the news titled “Chinese Academy of Sciences publishes Heartland Institute research skeptical of Global Warming” in a strongly misleading way on its website, implying that the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) supports their views, in contrary to what is clearly stated in the Translators’ Note in the Chinese translation.

The claim of the Heartland Institute about CAS’ endorsement of its report is completely false.

To clarify the fact, we formally issue the following statements:

(1) The translation and publication of the Chinese version of the NIPCC report, and the related workshop, are purely non-official academic activities the group of translators. They do not represent, nor they have ever claimed to represent, CAS or any of CAS institutes. They translated the report and organized the workshop just for the purpose of academic discussion of different views.

(2) The above fact was made very clear in the Translators’ Note in the book, and was known to the NIPCC report authors and the Heartland Institute before the translation started. The false claim by the Heartland Institute was made public without any knowledge of the translator group.

(3) Since there is absolutely no ground for the so called CAS endorsement of the report, and the actions by the Heartland Institute went way beyond acceptable academic integrity, we have requested by email to the president of the Heartland Institute that the false news on its website to be removed. We also requested that the Institute issue a public apology to CAS for the misleading statement on the CAS endorsement.

(4) If the Heartland Institute does not withdraw its false news or refuse to apologize, all the consequences and liabilities should be borne by the Heartland Institute. We reserve the right for further actions to protect the rights of CAS and the translators group.
Information Center for Global Change Studies,

Scientific Information Center for Resources and Environment,

Chinese Academy of Sciences, June 14, 2013.

[ Thanx to Eli Rabbett for transmitting the mandate of Heaven ]

To which rescript, Heartland President Joe Bast has kowtowed thus : 

"Some people interpreted our news release and a blog post describing this event as implying that the Chinese Academy of Sciences endorses the views contained in the original books. This is not the case, and we apologize to those who may have been  confused by these news reports.
"   To be clear, the release of this new publication does not imply CAS and any of its affiliates involved with its production 'endorse' the skeptical views contained in the report. Rather, as stated in the translator's preface of the book, 'The work of these translators, organizations and funders has been in the translation and the promotion of scientific dialogue, does not reflect that they agree with the views of NIPCC.' "

Somewhere in China , a fatted duck is breathing  easy--the link to Heartland's launch party,  not as Watts reports, at the Academy, or the University, but a hired hotel banquet room, has been taken down.

USUALLY RELIABLE SOURCES OF SCIENCY STUFF

Who can Fox anchors turn to to deny that 97% of climate scientists agree on AGW, when 97% of its erstwhile climate experts turn out not to be climate scientists? 

For starters, there's these prolific WUWT regulars & limelightees :

1. Chief Hydrologist 
Civil engineer and Simpson's fan given to chaotically invoking chaos theory.

He says his screen handle celebrates the transformation of Sideshow Bob's younger brother, from a hydrologist into a criminal mastermind, an apparent homage to Jay Lehr's career.

2. Jay Lehr Ph.D.
Science Director of The Heartland Institute.
Speaks with greater legal authority that Heartland colleagues Peter Ferarra and James Taylor J.D. in denouncing climate science as a fraud and hotbed of criminal mischief, having himself been convicted and jailed for defrauding the EPA of $200K while directing the American Water Well Association.

3.William Hunt whose book, ‘ Global Warming Challenged Anthony Watts praised until someone pointed out its claim that :
“Prior to the Little Ice Age, most of the areas where today’s core samples are taken, were not covered with ice. The ice that scientists have stated is hundreds of thousands of years old can be no more than a maximum of 650 years in age“ Whereupon Watts un-whitelisted him  

4. Doug Cotton 

Monomaniac whose non-GHG-based theory explaining the Earth’s elevated temperature other wannabe Newtons can peruse at Prinicipia Scientific International.  

5.  Stefan “The Denier” Mikitch
Australian gulag survivor whose take on the geochemical cycle of carbon is that  methane stays underground because it is heavier than nitrogen or oxygen, and that those who disagree ought to be imprisoned.  Creator of the inimitable “METHANEGATE” website.

6. Oliver K. Manuel 

NASA dropout turned adjunct professor in the boonies. Author of the “Iron Sun” cold fusion thesis, albeit not much seen at science conferences since placed under house arrest for child molestation.

7. Harry Dale Huffman

Tries to disprove the greenhouse effect by eliding atmospheric data from the planet Venus with terrestrial adiabats. Gained moonbat fame with the theory that aliens altered the shape of the Australian continent to resemble an upside-down sheepdog. 

8. Girma Orssengo

Obsessive programmer who endlessly reposts a single graph employing data scale compression to render 150 years of global warming invisible

9. Tony (climatereason) Brown

A skeptic who teaches that qualitative anecdotes trump quantitative statistics as the basis of paleoclimatology, and points to renaissance paintings of winter scenes as evidence of modern warming being natural.

10. David Postma

Claims radiative energy balance models are wrong because a factor of ½ was omitted from one printing of the conventional model. Never mind the corrigendum- it’s part of the cover up too.

 11. Arno Arrack

Thinks global warming is just a shift of warmer ocean circulation into the Arctic region, thus generating a natural climate change. Self published author of  “What Warming?” whose forward whines about the content’s rejection by Nature and Science while citing the good and great Trofim Lysenko in support of his work.

12. Nasif Nahle 

Claims reconstruction of Whewell & Arrennius’ Victorian lab gear provides laboratory proof that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas. http://principia-scientific.org/publications/Experiment_on_Greenhouse_Effect.pd

13. Herman Alexander Pope

Retired NASA scientist whose nebulous epigrams :

“When the Arctic is liquid, Earth is cooling

When the Arctic is ice, Earth is warming

This is the Thermostat of Earth”

reflect his theory is that excess CO2 in the atmosphere cannot come from human activity

14. Joachim Seifert                                  

Barely intelligible eastern European crank whose secret theory of climate change may relate to solar variations.

To find out you must purchase his pamphlet in the original German from Amazon. ISBN number, 978-3-86805-604-4

15. The Sky Dragons

Consensus denying editorial collective indisposed to believe in electromagnetic radiation theory in general and the radiative equilibrium of greenhouse gases in particular.  

Claes Johnson stirs the pseudoscience pot while pseudo-lawyer, John O’Sullivan, does the marketing. Their self-published book proved so gonzo even Watts eventually figured out he was being conned.

  

16. Mike Haseler

Highly original Scottish author of the theory that photons are an elitist hoax:

“Over time I realised that:

1. There is no need for the idea of a “photon”.

2. That none of the raw evidence requires “photons”.

3. That the wave-particle theory of light is anti-scientific in the sense that it is impossible to disprove it “

17. Nicola Scafetta

Duke physicist who asks “Does the Sun work as a nuclear fusion amplifier of planetary tidal forcing? A proposal for a physical mechanism based on the mass-luminosity relation”.

No, Nicola, it really, really does not.

18. Bob Tisdale

Data analyst who thinks, “ENSO and sea level pressure can explain the warming of OHC”, (ocean heat content) but can’t explain how to his journal submissions’ long suffering referees

19. Myrrh

Ane Australian who ridiculeth ye Climate-Philosophers in ye Olde English style & ye third Person

So first Myrrh is saying that the greenhouse gases water/carbon dioxide cool the Earth by taking away the heat from the surface of the Earth through the Water Cycle and it is this cycle which has been expunged from the AGW world to pretend that greenhouse gases warm the Earth...

May be a Poe.

20. Spartacusisfree (aka  mydogsgotnonose , aka AlecM)

Engineer with a sock puppet problem who claims that the radiative properties of CO2 don’t apply to the atmosphere:

“There is absolutely no experimental proof of any CO2…

I became a ‘denier’ after I concluded there were 5 errors in IPCC physics. I may be mad, bad and deluded, but I want a second option because I’m a scientist who believes no-one.”

In the interest of relative brevity some excellent fishing guides turned amateur climate scientists have been omitted. They can be found most days pontificating at WUWT. Tip of the topper to the heroic bloggers who have run lists of fisks such as this out to four score and N-- .

Rising Tide

All quiet on the climate front,  the cheerleaders  having gone to Colorado's Front RAnge for the Chapman Conference on Communicating Climate Science, reflexively panned unseen by Tony Watts.

Kudos to Simon Donner of Maribo, for his Schneider-likecandor in cautioning wannabe Kiribati climate tourists

 to beware the difference between climate change, and things that merely look like it, such as half-meter local sea level fluctuations as the Pacific flows in response to El Nino's comings and goings .

The audible tinkle of gnashing teeth induced among those attending to grind their behavior modification axes was music to my ears.

Rainbow Yawn

Rush Limbaugh's favorite climatologist, Roy Spencer has suffered another turn of the exploding headscrew for declaring victory for the seventh time in as many years on the strength of a rainbow yawn of a graph that purports to debunk every climate model extant:

Epic fail ? Alas for Roy, David Appell  has found  a fly in the ointment, or a quark in the soup , as the case may be: Roy has downshifted the data to empasize his own group's results :

But then there is this: the linear trend for the entirety of the two datasets on middle tropospheric temperatures in the tropics is
UAH MT 20S-20N:   0.030 ± 0.028 °C/decade
That's right -- their trends differ by a factor of three, with UAH by far the lowest -- a fact which is neatly hidden away in Spencer's graph by taking their average. (Added 6/8: How can Spencer claim"...the observations (which coincidentally give virtually identical trends)...."?)
Most people would consider that a failure of its own, and quite a bad one.
Maybe the people doing the measurements should be paying attention to getting their own piece of the science right, and they ought not be giving everyone else cause to wonder if perhaps their own data is extremely inaccurate or biased low.

RSS MT 20S-20N:   0.090 ± 0.028 °C/decade 

But if we cut through the spagetti, and highlight the real range of temperature observations, the graph looks more like this :

This isn't the first time  Roy has been caught trying to put his own dodgy modeling on a par with the real McCoy.  

IF YOU CAN'T JUMP THEM, JOIN THEM

Why worry about warming oceans when Hollywood has gazumped Watts mutant meteorology with a rogue tornado made of sharks.

This is a hard act to follow, but we have a duty to try-

With apologies to Tom Tomorrow

Keeping Up With The Orwells

Having declared scientists 'persona non grata' 

Big Brother Watts' Ministry of Truthiness
has anounced another climate blogging first:

 AUTOMATED CENSORSHIP:

Calling blacklisting whitelisting may seem Orwellian to oldthinkers, but
James 'It's not my job to sit down and read peer reviewed papers' Delingpole
finds the bellyfeel of regurgited Newscorp newspeak doubleplus good--

  "Then, of course, there is the great Anthony Watts – founder of the most widely read and important sceptical website of the lot... I owe Wattsy an enormous amount...

Ultimately, it seems to me, that the war we're fighting concerns the battle between openness, honesty, truth, liberty and freedom of expression on the one hand, and corrupt, dishonest, bullying authoritarianism on the other. What's particularly valuable about Watts Up With That? is ... Anyone is welcome to contribute to the debate," Daily Telegraph  11 April 2013

Really? Watts  has serially embraced dozens of crank climate theories, from underwater volcanoes to the Iron Sun, only to drop and bury them at the first sign of scientific laughter.  

Hours after Delingpole celebrated WUWT as an open forum, whitelister Roy Spencer noted the unauthorized appearance of :" a comment that is actually from John O’Sullivan, who Anthony has banned."  
 But whom Dellingpole  has hailed for authoring one of a" superb crop of books on AGW- Slaying The Sky Dragon", an anti-thermodynamics tract once celebrated, but later dropped by, you guessed it :

THE TRUTH THAT SETS MEN FREE

IS SELDOM THE ONE  WATTS UP WITH THAT?  WANTS THEM TO HEAR

Followers of the Tea party Party Line on policy responses to climate change are invited to guess the author of this acute ecomium on carbon taxation:

We must demand that the liberal left keep their hands off of our wallets. Not one dime of the carbon fee should be used to make the government bigger. One hundred percent of the money must go to the public.

Nor should any of this money be used for subsidizing research on specific government-selected industries.
The government is not competent to choose the best technologies—let them all compete. There are existing government resources and departments for research, development and demonstration, which can assist early development of candidate technologies.

True to censorious form, Watts excluded these words from his coverage of the event where they were spoken.

Spoiler at  http://www.thenation.com/article/174223/courage-fight-climate-change#ixzz2UnDDeo3y

THE JEWEL OF DENIAL

During a study of the hydrology of the Nile 

a British Engineer discovered that the annual runoff appeared to have a memory. The Hurst Exponent (H) named in his honor is calculated using Equation 1, in which R, S and n are the rescaled range, standard deviation and observation number.
Equation 1. H = Log[R(n)/S(n)] / Log (n)

The rescaled range is the amplitude of the integral trace of deviations from the mean of a serial data vector. Hurst had anticipated an exponent near 0.5, which is termed Brown Noise and can be simulated from a series of random numbers. Values above 0.5 indicate increasing auto-correlation in the data with 1.0 termed Black Noise indicating extreme correlation with the past or strong “memory”.'

Those who search the fever swamps for badly sited nilometers should heed the Scroll of Toth:

[ BRAIN DEATH COMES ON SWIFT WINGS TO HIM WHO DEFILES PEER REVIEW ]

Witness this 2004 Nature article:

                     The Memory of Water 

The life and work of Jacques Benveniste taught us valuable lessons about how to deal with fringe science, says Philip Ball.

Jacques Benveniste, who gave the world the 'memory of water', ... will certainly be remembered for the phrase his work inspired, which has become the title of a play and a rock song, as well as a figure of everyday speech.
But his controversial career also highlighted the tricky issue of how to deal with research on the fringes of science, a question with which Nature itself became intimately entangled. 

In France, Benveniste was a celebrity, and it is not hard to see why. He was a charismatic showman who knew how to wield a rhetorical foil. His talk of witch-hunts, scientific priesthoods, heresies and 'Galileo-style prosecutions' played well with those inclined to regard science as an arrogant, modern-day Inquisition.
He conjured up images of a conservative orthodoxy, whose acolytes were scandalized by a ground-breaking discovery that demolished their dogmatic certainties. He was, he suggested, a Newton challenging a petty-minded, mechanistic cartesianism.
Back in 1988, however, Benveniste was very much part of the establishment...

That was when he sent his notorious paper to Nature¹. In it, he reported that white blood cells called basophils, which control the body's reaction to allergens, can be activated to produce an immune response by solutions of antibodies that have been diluted so far that they contain none of these biomolecules at all.

Incredible resultIt was as though the water molecules somehow retained a memory of the antibodies that they had previously been in contact with,.... But no one, including Benveniste, gave much attention to the critical question of how such a 'memory' effect could be produced.

The paper itself offered only the suggestion, at face value almost meaningless, that "Water could act as a 'template' for the [antibody] molecule, for example by an infinite hydrogen-bonded network, or electric and magnetic fields." The idea that water molecules, connected by hydrogen bonds that last for only about a picosecond (10-¹² seconds) before breaking and reforming, could somehow cluster into long-lived mimics of the antibody seemed absurd. 

Other teams were subsequently unable to repeat the effect, and the independent results that the reviewers had asked for were never published. Further experiments carried out by Benveniste's team, in double-blind conditions overseen by [Nature Editor Sir John] Maddox, magician and pseudo-science debunker James Randi and fraud investigator Walter Stewart, failed to verify the original results.... The talk that I saw [Benveniste] and his co-workers deliver last June was a blinding blizzard of histograms