Muller, the snakes, the end: UPDATE

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"Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues."

I often wonder why it is that the "skeptic community" is inclined to deal with the fraudulent alarmist community as if they somehow had to respect them as scientist. I guess it is that real scientist are trying to hold onto the idea that this a scientific dispute rather than an ideological one. That if they just present the evidence then their peers will see the error of their ways and be won over by such passe principles as seeking facts and evidence not to mention truth.

But sadly we no longer live in the age of reason where men are moved to seek truth. We now live near the end of the progressive age where the narrative of the accepted is the path to glory and riches if not honor. Honor and truth being of little value when trying to transform the world to your ideological bent or just make a buck

Having watched this battle for many years and having honed my instincts in observation of liars on the progressive scene, it was easily recognizabble that the BEST project put together by Richard Muller was just another front for the fraud of the global warming crowd.

Two things gave me pause, the fact that Dr, Judith Curry was involved as a team member and initially that Anthony Watts was drawn into the project as I guess, an observer. Having respect for both I like most hoped that this was indeed a legitimate attempt to ascertain the truth, though I had serious doubts which I expressed when I first wrote about BEST here where I noted:

This Berkley Earth Surface Group is part of the Novim Group. It appears based on a quick review of their literature that they are very much into Geo-Engineering. In fact  in a linked PDF which is described as a Novim Overview their Executive Director Michael Ditmore is quoted:

.... When it comes to climate change, he said, the world doesn’t have time to let politics and innuendo block the best available scientific thinking from reaching the public. 

“The problems are not unsolvable, but we’re running out of time,” Ditmore said.

It seems to me that Mr. Ditmore has already determined in his own mind that man made climate change/global warming is not something to be determined through study of the temperature records but rather an established fact in need of  immediate control.

Being just an observer I let it go until a short time later when  a video of a presentation by Dr. Muller was getting a lot of attention. It seemed as if the entire "realist community" was christening him as some sort of new skeptics hero for a few comments he made in the presentation and ignoring the over all warmist bias of the presentation.

I did a rather long analysis of his "talk" which received a lot of attention for a time, but I guess was not taken as seriously as I would have hoped because everyone seemed as if they were waiting on pins and needles for BEST to release their report, as if this might finally validate the skeptics points.
But the entire presentation by Dr Muller was nothing more than flim flam as I pointed out

The contradictions in Dr Muller's public positions on the science of global warming is obvious. On the one hand he says that virtually all the science flowing from the IPCC and the various proponent individuals and organizations is shoddy yet he believes that the science that underpins it which is the product of those same indviduals and organizations is accurate. 

Nowhere is this contradiction more obvious than in the next section of his lecture when the good doctor goes after the  "Hockey Stick" and "climategate".  This is what made Dr Muller an instant hero in the realist community. This portion of the lecture went viral though it only represents 5 minutes of a 52 minute presentation. 

He basically destroys the reputation and research of most of climate science's  most notable super stars and yet he believes the science they promote is sound, amazing.

 Here you had a man going through the science of global warming pointing out all the flaws, not only in the theory but also impugning the reputations of the scientist most responsible for promoting the theory and the manner in which they have arrived at that theory and yet he still found the theory to be valid, he is either a fool or a charlatan. Dr. Richard Muller is no fool.

In a later post I pointed this out

This has become the normal operating method in the climate science field, even when it does not involve climate scientist. For all his dramatic outrage at the scientist involved in the "climategate" scandal, Dr Muller seems  totally willing to ignore inconvenient truths in his own analysis on the state of the science underpinning  global warming. He is not alone as  the vast majority of the rest of the scientific community seems to accept the theory on it's face without the least bit of critical thinking.

 Why does the skeptic community continually do battle with scientist who will obviously lie, distort, fudge and use any Alinskyesk trick in the book to promote their agenda? It is not as if these people are ever going to say, "Oh wow, now I get it, thanks for straightening me out." They don't care about science. From the Daily Mail:

In fact, Prof Curry said, the project’s research data show there has been no increase in world temperatures since the end of the Nineties – a fact confirmed by a new analysis that The Mail on Sunday has obtained.

‘There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped,’ she said. ‘To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.’ 

However, Prof Muller denied warming was at a standstill.

‘We see no evidence of it [global warming] having slowed down,’ he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. There was, he added, ‘no levelling off’...

...‘This is nowhere near what the climate models were predicting,’ Prof Curry said. ‘Whatever it is that’s going on here, it doesn’t look like it’s being dominated by CO2.’
Prof Muller also wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal. It was here, under the headline ‘The case against global warming scepticism’, that he proclaimed ‘there were good reasons for doubt until now’.

This, too, went around the world, with The Economist, among many others, stating there was now ‘little room for doubt’.

Such claims left Prof Curry horrified.

‘Of course this isn’t the end of scepticism,’ she said. ‘To say that is the biggest mistake he [Prof Muller] has made. When I saw he was saying that I just thought, “Oh my God”.’

In fact, she added, in the wake of the unexpected global warming standstill, many climate scientists who had previously rejected sceptics’ arguments were now taking them much more seriously.

They were finally addressing questions such as the influence of clouds, natural temperature cycles and solar radiation – as they should have done, she said, a long time ago.
Yesterday Prof Muller insisted that neither his claims that there has not been a standstill, nor the graph, were misleading because the project had made its raw data available on its website, enabling others to draw their own graphs.

However, he admitted it was true that the BEST data suggested that world temperatures have not risen for about 13 years. But in his view, this might not be ‘statistically significant’, although, he added, it was equally possible that it was – a statement which left other scientists mystified.

‘I am baffled as to what he’s trying to do,’ Prof Curry said.

What he is trying to do Dr Curry is feed the narrative. We now have another temperature study (with your name on it) reportedly confirming global warming is caused by CO2, thank you very much.

I invite you to watch again Dr. Muller's famous presentation or read my anylysis of it here and here but all you  really need to know is what I pointed out after Dr Muller's congressional testimony:

Contradictions seem to be Dr Muller's method of operation. As an example during his recent testimony to congress he said: 

Prior groups at NOAA, NASA, and in the UK (HadCRU) estimate about a 1.2 degree C land temperature rise from the early 1900s to the present.  This 1.2 degree rise is what we call global warming. Their work is excellent, and the Berkeley Earth project strives to build on it.  

Putting aside the much commented on inaccuracy of the 1.2 degree C claim, he also claims that the existing work by NOAA, NASSA and Had CRU is excellent. So why set up a new study to compete with them?...

So that he and his solution to the problem of AGW can be the new authority. It is shape shifting, the old way of promoting the BIG lie has been discredited. So a new way of presenting the same lie is put forward, by garnering support of the skeptic crowd by pointing out the very distortions and lies which are the foundation of the original lie to begin with. It seems not to matter that  you can destroy the very foundation of the lie and still promote the lie itself! It is the very definition of intellectual dishonesty.

The global warming crowd does not need to be right to win, they just need to be the authority, When you are the authority then you have power and that is all this is about and always has been about... power, political and economic.

Truth only prevails when it is known and you can not unleash the truth from the bed of the devil. If you are looking for respect from those who wish to destroy you then you shall destroy yourself in the attempt.


The only way for this progressive beast to be beaten is through a new structure, the old system is corrupt and decaying, it can not be propped up. This distortion of truth is happening throughout our societal institutions, no more so than in academia and the media yet the realist scientist feel they must somehow play within it. This is not a time to convince the enemy of the rightness of your view, they know that they lie and simply do not care. How do you change a system that is willing to lie to have their way? You don't, you flee it and create new structures built on truth.

You do an Ayn Rand Shrug, a Tea Party Movement, a Pajama's Media, a NIPCC, you create new structures that can replace the old ones as they collapse which they inevitably will one way or another.

If you work within a corrupt system you are either corrupted or destroyed by the system. You can not be dependent on a lie for your livelihood and tell the truth, it never works. This may not be fair, but it is reality. When you live with snakes you are bound to be bit, it is as simple as that.

I suspect that like much of this progressive agenda it will come crashing down on society like an October blizzard. But for those who know the truth my advice is to cease to work from within and find or found new places from without. It is the best thing you can do for humanity and yourself.

UPDATE:


I had meant to make a comment on this section of the Mail article talking about Dr. Muller:

However, he admitted it was true that the BEST data suggested that world temperatures have not risen for about 13 years. But in his view, this might not be ‘statistically significant’, although, he added, it was equally possible that it was – a statement which left other scientists mystified

One of the reasons it would leave other scientist mystified is that none of the models which are a large part of the foundation for the global warming theory predicted this. If temperatures have not risen over the past thirteen years the theory has in affect been falsified. But this is precisely what has happened as Dr Muller admitted even before the BEST Analysis was done which ironically is exactly what he is chastising Jim Hanson of doing in this segment of his "lecture".

Consider what he is saying here. He says "it is still happening. (global warming) The fact that you do not have warming for thirteen years does not mean that you don't have a trend."

The dispute is not whether or not there has been a warming trend over the past 150 years, the dispute is whether or not that trend is primarily the result of man made carbon dioxide introduced into the atmosphere. If ever increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does not generate an increase in temperature over a thirteen year period then what does that say? A proponent can say that natural variables or atmospheric sulfates  counteracted the CO2 warming but then what does that say about the nature of the scientific models and scientific understanding which could not foresee this but wishes us to believe they see the increase in temperatures decades hence?

In real world terms, my grandchildren who are being the most indoctrinated by this theology have in fact never experienced the very thing they are being taught to fear.

Global Warming -- RIP

FROM-RCP

By Victor Davis Hanson

Not long ago, candidate Obama promised to cool the planet and lower the rising seas. Indeed, he campaigned on passing "cap-and-trade" legislation, a radical, costly effort to reduce America's traditional carbon energy use.

The theory was that new taxes and greater regulations would make Americans pay more for fossil-fuel energy -- a good thing if it reduced our burning of coal, oil and gas. Obama was not shy in admitting that under his green plans, electricity prices would "necessarily skyrocket." His energy secretary, Steven Chu, at one point had even said, "Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe" -- that is, about $8-$10 per gallon. Fairly or not, the warming movement seemed to cast a tiny elite imposing costs on a poorer and supposedly less informed middle class.

But despite a Democrat-controlled House and Senate in 2009-2010, President Obama never passed into law any global warming legislation. Now the issue is deader than a doornail -- despite the efforts of the Environmental Protection Agency to enact new regulations that would never pass Congress.

So what happened to the global warming craze?

Corruption within the climate-change industry explains some of the sudden turnoff. "Climategate" -- the unauthorized 2009 release of private emails from the Climatic Research Unit in the United Kingdom -- revealed that many of the world's top climate scientists were knee-deep in manipulating scientific evidence to support preconceived conclusions and personal agendas. Shrill warnings about everything from melting Himalayan glaciers to shrinking polar bear populations turned out not always to be supported by scientific facts.

Unfortunately, "green" during the last three years has also become synonymous with Solyndra-style crony capitalism. Common-sense ideas like more windmills, solar panels, retrofitted houses and electric cars have all been in the news lately. But the common themes were depressingly similar: few jobs created and little competitively priced energy produced, but plenty of political donors who landed hundreds of millions of dollars in low-interest loans from the government.


Of course, it didn't help that the world's most prominent green spokesman, Nobel laureate Al Gore, made tens of millions of dollars from his own advocacy. And he adopted a lifestyle of jet travel and energy-hungry homes at odds with his pleas for everyone else to cut back.

But even without the corruption and hypocrisy, sincere advocates of man-made global warming themselves overreached. At news that the planet had not heated up at all during the last 10 years, "global warming" gave way to "climate change" -- as if to warn the public that unseasonable cold or wet weather was just as man-caused as were the old specters of drought and scorching temperatures.

Then, when "climate change" was not still enough to frighten the public into action, yet a third term followed: "climate chaos." Suddenly some "green experts" claimed that even more terrifying disasters -- from periodic hurricanes and tornadoes to volcanoes and earthquakes -- could for the first time be attributed to the burning of fossil fuels. At that point, serially changing the name of the problem suggested to many that there might not be such a problem after all.

Current hard times also explain the demise of global warming advocacy. With high unemployment and near nonexistent economic growth, Americans do not want to shut down generating plants or pay new surcharges on their power bills. Most people worry first about having any car that runs -- not whether it's a more expensive green hybrid model.

Over the last half-century, Americans have agreed that smoky plants and polluting industries needed to be cleaned up. But when the green movement began to classify clean-burning heat as a pollutant, it began to lose the cash-strapped public.

While the Obama administration was subsidizing failed or inefficient green industries, radical breakthroughs in domestic fossil-fuel exploration and recovery -- especially horizontal drilling and fracking -- have vastly increased the known American reserves of gas and oil. Modern efficient engines have meant that both can be consumed with little, if any, pollution -- at a time when a struggling U.S. economy is paying nearly half a trillion dollars for imported fossil fuels. The public apparently would prefer developing more of our own gas, oil, shale, tar sands and coal as an alternative to going broke by either importing more fuels from abroad or subsidizing more inefficient windmills and solar panels at home.

We simply don't know positively whether recent human activity has caused the planet to warm up to dangerous levels. But we do know that those who insist it does are sometimes disingenuous, often profit-minded, and nearly always impractical. 

Cult of Global Warming Is Losing Influence

FROM-RCP


By Michael Barone

Religious faith is a source of strength in many people's lives. But religious faith when taken too far can prove ludicrous -- or disastrous.

On Oct. 22, 1844, thousand of Millerites, having sold all their possessions, climbed to the top of hills in Upstate New York to await the return of Jesus and the end of the world. They suffered "the great disappointment" when it didn't happen.

In 1212, or so the legends go, thousands of Children's Crusaders set off from France and Germany expecting the sea to part so they could march peaceably and convert Muslims in the Holy Land. It didn't, and many were shipwrecked or sold into slavery.

In 1898, the cavalrymen of the Madhi, ruler of Sudan for 13 years, went into the Battle of Omdurman armed with swords, believing that they were impervious to bullets. They weren't, and they were mowed down by British Maxim guns.

A similar but more peaceable fate is befalling believers in what I think can be called the religion of the global warming alarmists
.
They have an unshakeable faith that manmade carbon emissions will produce a hotter climate, causing multiple natural disasters. Their insistence that we can be absolutely certain this will come to pass is based not on science -- which is never fully settled, witness the recent experiments that may undermine Albert Einstein's theory of relativity -- but on something very much like religious faith.
All the trappings of religion are there. Original sin: Mankind is responsible for these prophesied disasters, especially those slobs who live on suburban cul-de-sacs and drive their SUVs to strip malls and tacky chain restaurants.

The need for atonement and repentance: We must impose a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system, which will increase the cost of everything and stunt economic growth.

Ritual, from the annual Earth Day to weekly recycling.

Indulgences, like those Martin Luther railed against: private jet-fliers like Al Gore and sitcom heiress Laurie David can buy carbon offsets to compensate for their carbon-emitting sins.

Corporate elitists, like General Electric's Jeff Immelt, profess to share this faith, just as cynical Venetian merchants and prim Victorian bankers gave lip service to the religious enthusiasms of their days. Bad for business not to. And if you're clever, you can figure out how to make money off it.

Believers in this religion have flocked to conferences in Rio de Janeiro, Kyoto and Copenhagen, just as Catholic bishops flocked to councils in Constance, Ferrara and Trent, to codify dogma and set new rules.

But like the Millerites, the global warming clergy has preached apocalyptic doom -- and is now facing an increasingly skeptical public. The idea that we can be so completely certain of climate change 70 to 90 years hence that we must inflict serious economic damage on ourselves in the meantime seems increasingly absurd.

If carbon emissions were the only thing affecting climate, the global-warming alarmists would be right. But it's obvious that climate is affected by many things, many not yet fully understood, and implausible that SUVs will affect it more than variations in the enormous energy produced by the sun.

Skepticism has been increased by the actions of believers. Passage of the House cap-and-trade bill in June 2009 focused politicians and voters on the costs of global-warming religion. And disclosure of the Climategate emails in November 2009 showed how the clerisy was willing to distort evidence and suppress dissenting views in the interest of propagation of the faith.

We have seen how the United Nations agency whose authority we are supposed to respect took an item from an environmental activist group predicting that the Himalayan glaciers would melt in 2350 and predicted that the melting would take place in 2035. No sensible society would stake its economic future on the word of folks capable of such an error.

In recent years, we have seen how negative to 2 percent growth hurts many, many people, as compared to what happens with 3 to 7 percent growth. So we're much less willing to adopt policies that will slow down growth not just for a few years but for the indefinite future.

Media, university and corporate elites still profess belief in global warming alarmism, but moves toward policies limiting carbon emissions have fizzled out, here and abroad. It looks like we'll dodge the fate of the Millerites, the children's crusaders and the Mahdi's cavalrymen. 

FROM-The Wall Street Journal

During the decade that Al Gore dominated the environmental debate, global carbon-dioxide emissions rose by 28.5%.

By ROBERT BRYCE

Over the past two months, environmental activists have held protests at the White House and elsewhere hoping to convince the Obama administration to deny a permit for the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf Coast. Some of those same activists have launched a series of demonstrations called "Moving Planet" to move "the planet away from fossil fuels towards a safer climate future." And next month, leaders from dozens of countries will meet at the 17th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Durban, South Africa.

But for all of the sturm und drang about climate change, what has actually happened? It's time to acknowledge five obvious truths about the climate-change issue:

1) The carbon taxers/limiters have lost. Carbon-dioxide emissions have been the environmental issue of the past decade. Over that time period, Al Gore became a world-renowned figure for his documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," for which he won an Oscar. In 2007, he, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), collected a Nobel Peace Prize for "informing the world of the dangers posed by climate change." That same year, the IPCC released its fourth assessment report, which declared that "most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions." (Emphasis in original.)

Two years later, Copenhagen became the epicenter of a world-wide media frenzy as some 5,000 journalists, along with some 100 world leaders and scores of celebrities, descended on the Danish capital to witness what was billed as the best opportunity to impose a global tax or limit on carbon dioxide.

The result? Nothing, aside from promises by various countries to get serious—really serious—about carbon emissions sometime soon.

Here's a reality check: During the same decade that Mr. Gore and the IPCC dominated the environmental debate, global carbon-dioxide emissions rose by 28.5%.

Those increases reflect soaring demand for electricity, up by 36%, which in turn fostered a 47% increase in coal consumption. (Natural-gas use increased by 29% while oil use grew by 13%.) Carbon-dioxide emissions are growing because people around the world understand the essentiality of electricity to modernity. And for many countries, the cheapest way to produce electrons is by burning coal.

Warmists Think We're Stupid

FROM-American Spectator

By Ross Kaminsky

But they're not so hot themselves, as a Reason Foundation study delicately points out.

One of the key attributes of the global warming movement, like any cult, is that it posits a doomsday scenario if we don't follow their dangerous prescriptions. Whether it is cyanide-laced Kool Aid or the economic equivalent (were we to follow the cap-and-trade crowd), the "cure" is not only worse than the so-called problem but premised on the idea that people are stupid.

The warmists say that we'll have more disease and death if the planet warms even though studies by actual scientists frequently conclude otherwise.

This week's five-alarm fire (literally) comes from the NY Times which warns us that "Across millions of acres, the pines of the northern and central Rockies are dying, just one among many types of forests that are showing signs of distress these days." The article, which implies that the earth will die if we don't stop climate change from killing trees, is at least honest enough to use "if" six times, "might" three times, "may" seven times, and other qualifiers of their doomsday view such as "not sure," "possible," and "could."

While this particular Times story concerns North America, an actual study of African rainfall, done by scientists from NOAA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder (both hotbeds of climate change alarmism), concludes that changes in rainfall levels in both northern and southern Africa are due to changes in sea surface temperatures, and that those temperature changes are not human-caused. Furthermore, when the UN's IPCC tried to model the change in African rainfall based on human causes, they failed: "The ensemble of greenhouse-gas-forced experiments, conducted as part of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, fails to simulate the pattern or amplitude of the twentieth-century African drying, indicating that the drought conditions were likely of natural origin."

But if you really want to scare people into wasting their lives on public transport or sleeping in uncomfortably cold houses during the winter or subsidizing Solyndra, you have to make them think that human life is directly at stake.

One such example regards malaria, long the bogeyman for those warmists who, in the interest of scaring us about what the evil rich are doing to the southern hemisphere's poor, claimed for years that warming will cause a massive increase in the prevalence of and deaths from malaria.

However, a 2010 study led by scientists from the University of Florida concluded that "widespread claims that rising mean temperatures have already led to increases in worldwide malaria morbidity and mortality are largely at odds with observed decreasing global trends in both its endemicity and geographic extent." Furthermore, they said that any increase in malaria cases from warming would likely be two orders of magnitude smaller than the reduction in cases due to "control measures" taken by humans, such as bed nets and anti-malarial drugs. (Two orders of magnitude means 100x, so 10 is two orders of magnitude smaller than 1000.)

It's also worth noting that the lead scientist, whom I interviewed, was a full member of the cult of Algore. It was fascinating to hear him claim that when it comes to warming, people like me who think it's somewhere between an exaggeration and a hoax (and closer to the latter) are "bucking a broad scientific consensus." Yet when it came to his study's different results from other people's claims, he suggested that "Science is intrinsically adversarial, and we get at the truth through critical thought. That means scientists should question every single study they read." You don't say.

The key point is not that malaria cases won't increase, but that they won't increase because humans are smart and adaptable.

Malaria isn't the only case of warmists trying to scare us with disease and death: Every few years, it seems someone claims that global warming "is to blame for cholera bacteria becoming more widespread." (And here is another example from 2002.) But you know things aren't going well for the cult when even that same "the forests are burning!" New York Times has to tell us, as they did just one month ago, that "Cholera outbreaks seem to be on the increase, but a new study has found they cannot be explained by global warming." (Study link here.)

Perhaps you will not be surprised by a comparison between the two articles (at least their web versions): Last week's article about supposedly dying forests contained over 4,100 words, while the August 29th article saying that cholera outbreaks are not increasing due to climate change was -- wait for it -- a grand total of 230 words. And if that's not enough, the forests article was on the paper's front page, whereas the cholera article was on page D6.

Humans live in deserts and in the Arctic. We live in places like Denver and Chicago, each of which will see temperatures over more than a 100-degree (F) range in the course of a year -- and routinely a 30 or 40 degree range in a day (or 20 in an hour) in the mountains and deserts. And these aren't even the records. Imagine being in Spearfish, South Dakota, in 1943 when the temperature reportedly rose 49 degrees in two minutes! Or Loma, Montana, which in 1972 reported a 103-degree temperature rise in 24 hours? We scuba dive and mountain climb. We invent air conditioning and efficient heating systems. We have nearly eliminated smallpox and polio, two of the greatest scourges of eras past. In other words, we adapt to our environment -- in those cases when we can't adapt our environment to us.

For that reason, it defies common sense to believe that man-made global warming, even if it were real, would have the devastating impact that its anti-capitalist, wealth-redistributionist proponents claim.