Letters to the Editor

Poverty and the Environment

quill pen

To the Editor
Climate Conversation

28th March 2016

Desperately poor people focus on feeding their family and have no spare energy to support secondary concerns such as the environment.

Destitute societies also see large families as free labour and old-age insurance. Thus poverty inevitably produces growing populations and environmental degradation. Continue Reading →

Views: 53

Bulk of global warming fears gone — storms won’t increase

UPDATE NZDT 1845 Monday 7 March

My apologies. There were distractions while I was writing this post that caused a silly error: I mistook the author of the post I wanted to report on. Richard Cumming alerted me to it (thanks, RC) and the references are now corrected. Insertions shown by green highlighting.


The trickery has been going on for years. First, an alarmist paper will describe details of a hitherto unknown peril of man-made global warming. The media picks it up and circulates it for months. Then, maybe years later, once our selfish ruin of the environment is established, a rebuttal comes out, showing the peril is against the laws of physics.

But does the rebuttal get the fanfare of trumpets that greets the warmy paper? Not likely. Continue Reading →

Views: 161

Letters to the Editor

Warmth supports life — cold kills

quill pen

To the Editor
Climate Conversation

24th Month 2016

Texas blizzards recently killed 47,000 cattle — cold kills.

Wild animals and nomadic herders know this and move to avoid the cold.

Reindeer follow the sun — they spend summers grazing on the treeless tundra, but when the snows start they head south into the protective forests. Continue Reading →

Views: 51

Figueres leaves top climate job – world sighs with relief

UN climate chief Christiana Figueres has stepped down. Climate Depot has an excellent summary of reaction and Figuere’s record on climate.

Christiana Figueres, anti-democratic, cold-hearted.

“The world can smile today that Figueres will soon be out of power.” – Marc Morano Continue Reading →

Views: 55

Letters to the Editor

Get fair dinkum

quill pen

To the Editor
Climate Conversation

15th February 2016

If governments truly believed that man’s production of carbon dioxide causes dangerous global warming, they would ban the use of motor cars, motor trucks, tractors, motor homes, motor bikes, motor mowers, motor launches and petrol-driven chain saws. These all pump out the two dreaded greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide and water vapour. Horses, bullocks, wagons, bicycles, scythes, row-boats and axes are the true green tools. All were good enough for our pioneers. Continue Reading →

Views: 124

Slate reads too much into new temperature paper

A paper on US temperature adjustments was published in Geophysical Research Letters on February 5. Download full text here, (pdf, 1.5MB). The University of York has information about the paper including handy links to data.

The paper examines and offers improvements to adjustments to the continental US surface temperature record. The abstract is easy to read and understand:

Numerous inhomogeneities including station moves, instrument changes, and time of observation changes in the US Historical Climatological Network (USHCN) complicate the assessment of long-term temperature trends. Detection and correction of inhomogeneities in raw temperature records have been undertaken by NOAA and other groups using automated pair-wise neighbour comparison approaches, but these have proven controversial due to the large trend impact of homogenization in the United States. The new US Climate Reference Network (USCRN) provides a homogeneous set of surface temperature observations that can serve as an effective empirical test of adjustments to raw USHCN stations. By comparing nearby pairs of USHCN and USCRN stations, we find that adjustments make both trends and monthly anomalies from USHCN stations much more similar to those of neighbouring USCRN stations for the period 2004-2015 when the networks overlap. These results improve our confidence in the reliability of homogenized surface temperature records.

Slate’s response is straight out of the “I told you so” playbook but they haven’t actually read the paper. Continue Reading →

Views: 44

Met Office shock forecast: warming to continue

No warming for up to 25 years, but now…

The indomitable, indefatigable, never-say-die UK Met Office (under the spell of the IPCC) predicts that warming is set to “continue”, even though there’s been no global warming to speak of for about 25 years. Wonderful. In fact, the entire UAH satellite dataset from December 1978 to November 2015 (37 years) shows global warming at a yawn-inducing rate of just 1.14°C per century, well within natural variability. Stupendous. Continue Reading →

Views: 193

Science wants answers; climate science wants no questions

I warmly recommend anyone curious about the peculiar status of climate science and the theory of dangerous anthropogenic global warming to read and circulate this devastating analysis of modern climate science by Dr Robert McBride. The hard-hitting letter was published two days ago in NZ Farmers Weekly (paywalled). It concisely describes the extraordinary differences that have evolved to mark climate science out from other branches of science. It is accessible and significant. Robert works for agKnowledge in the South Island and earned a PhD in soil science in the US. – RT]
UPDATE 1145, Saturday 30 January: 300 scientists demand NOAA stop hiding its data – see below

So called “climate science” is not science. Science is a process typically involving controlled experiments to isolate a single variable in an effort to get the best answer to a specific question. Continue Reading →

Views: 87

Hottest year ever was 2015

But only in Ethiopia, Vietnam, Brazil …

Here’s a place to keep all this together. It’s an important issue tissue of lies, since the warmists are making a great deal of it and I’m sure a lot of otherwise well-informed people have gained quite the wrong impression from the lies put about by scientists like Gavin Schmidt and Mike Mann that the temperature has been rising for years. Continue Reading →

Views: 149

Paris Climate Party agrees to have another Party

• Guest post •

— by Viv Forbes, Chairman of Carbon Sense

7th January 2016

Hurrah! We all agree to be friends!

Hurrah! We all agree to be friends!

(You can also view the original Carbon Sense newsletter in your browser.)

Premature celebrations by sceptics

Many climate sceptics are celebrating that “nothing in the Paris deal is legally binding.” They should look deeper. They have suffered a huge political defeat. Continue Reading →

Views: 238

Guardian of climate John Vidal

Though untruth be widely believed, it will never be true. Since open-minded people can be too busy to research complex climate issues, the CCG helps by presenting reliable fact and comment with links to sources. We strive to understand the ill-conceived global warming campaign, describe it accurately yet memorably, expose distortions that poison the policy debate, give easily assimilable descriptions of climate’s complexity and provide perspective. Continue Reading →

Views: 322

NIWA shuts door but says ‘we’re open’

Pliant Ombudsman even supplies lock—will we ever get in?

Four-year battle continues

The Dominion Post recently chastised the Chief Ombudsman, Dame Beverley Wakem, for her poor performance.

It is truly extraordinary to hear her scolding journalists as “rottweilers on heat” and warning them not to annoy “innately conservative” officials who might then become “gun-shy”. These statements are what you would expect from a bad-tempered bureaucrat, not an ombudsman.

Continue Reading →

Views: 98

Wherefore art thou, Reason?

This report from a New Zealand youth delegation at COP-21 gives significant insight into the real drivers of this dangerous anthropogenic global warming (DAGW) nonsense, especially as seen by the young.

Many of our youth unschooled in reason by watchful family or teachers are being systematically indoctrinated both to expect a cataclysmic future and to distrust science. Cataclysmic expectations are created by endless descriptions of it; distrust of science is efficiently created by refusing to teach it. It is a campaign of exceptional lunacy shot through with avarice. Continue Reading →

Views: 102

Fallacy of “carbon” footprint

CO2 molecule

CO2 model: colourless, odourless gas vital to life.

The carbon dioxide molecule itself reveals that what activists call a “carbon footprint” is a fallacy.

For 30 years our emissions of carbon dioxide have been reviled for the dangerous warming CO2 is believed to exert on the climate. Activists abbreviate its name to “carbon”, call it pollution and claim to calculate “carbon footprints” for all manner of activities, products and lifestyles. They say these carbon footprints will cause environmental destruction through global warming in the far future. Continue Reading →

Views: 731

Monckton spell-binding again

Lord Christopher Monckton is tireless in discrediting climate deceit and refuting climate falsehood wherever he finds it. This time, a luckless denizen of the lower echelons of Yale is given cause to regret poking his head above the parapet. The unwary NYT becomes collateral damage. – Richard

NYT incautiously parrots climate falsehood

And pays the price

The Marxstream news media have always been champions of every passing totalitarian fad, however murderous. Hitler only got away with the slaughter of six million Jews because the Western news media fawned upon him and demanded appeasement almost until the first shots were fired in the Second World War. Likewise, the totalitarian Press fawned upon Communism, even as it killed 100 million in the 20th century alone, to such an extent that some papers could scarcely bring themselves to cheer when the Berlin Wall was torn down. Continue Reading →

Views: 52

Lunatic Greens

Loony thinking once more

This today from the *co-leader of the Green Party:

Kia ora Richard,

This National Government is letting us down. Yesterday they did it again.

Yesterday, they stood up in Parliament and voted down my Fossil Fuels Divestment Bill. They said that they think the smart thing to do with our public funds is to invest it in fossil fuels instead of protecting our climate and our future. Continue Reading →

Views: 37

Open thread

open thread

A few weeks ago we put an offer on a nice big house in Te Puke. We’ll share it with our daughter, her partner and three children, and it couldn’t go through without selling our present house. It’s been a bit difficult keeping the house in pristine order as buyers streamed through at odd hours to inspect it but now an offer is about to go unconditional, which means we will move out in two weeks. But not into the new house until it is vacated, so our lives are still unpredictable. It’s frustrating having so little time to contribute to the blog and I apologise for apparently paying little attention to the flurry of climate activity ahead of Paris; well, not really climate activity but activity concerning the climate—the climate itself is no more chaotic than usual. Anyway, here’s a fresh open thread. I’m watching, and I’ll have something substantial for you soon. A special note to the fourteen thousand patient, unseen readers every month from all over the world: thank you very much for visiting.

UPDATE 2230, Friday Nov 6

The deal went unconditional late this afternoon. So, we’ve sold the house, hurrah! Two weeks to get out. Another adventure.

UPDATE 0955, Friday Nov 13

Late last Tuesday, we finally made our offer on the Te Puke house unconditional. So we have a house to go to! We just have to wait until the 8th of December to take possession. We are all such happy campers!

Just six days to go before the truck arrives here to take everything into storage.

Views: 110

Reject Paris pandemonium

A Message from James M. Taylor, Vice President of External Relations at the Heartland Institute

One of the most important battles in the history of the global warming debate will be fought this December at a United Nations climate conference in Paris. The UN is attempting to impose binding carbon dioxide restrictions on the United States and transfer billions of dollars of climate “reparations” from the United States to nations like Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela. Continue Reading →

Views: 42

Engineers make things happen

UPDATE — John Cook cited

Complaint lodged over breach of Professional Engineers Act

This is brilliant and simple: attack climate activists when they trespass on forbidden areas.

I’ve just heard about this from Warwick Hughes. There’ll be more, by the sound of it. Malcom Roberts has laid a complaint with the Board of Professional Engineers of Queensland regarding academics giving professional engineering advice though they are not registered engineers. Continue Reading →

Views: 94

Contempt is not evidence

Climate warmistas mouth off at us for the global warming we cause but universally, staunchly and ignorantly refuse to say how we cause it. It’s time this was stopped, and the only way to stop it is for us to keep asking for the evidence and complain fairly loudly each time we are ignored.

The warming experts paint endless scenarios of different amounts of warming in different decades up to a century from today, describing multifarious ills and tragedies that might befall various kinds of living things. Continue Reading →

Views: 86

No warming, no worries, no windmills

caption

The Freedom Clock shows nearly 20 years without global warming

Christopher Monckton thoughtfully keeps us acquainted with some essential moving targets on the climate change range. One monthly chore he undertakes is to update the RSS global mean temperature at Watts Up With That and (the neat part) find out whether the pause has got longer. It usually has. This is from his latest post a week or so back. Continue Reading →

Views: 246

Scientist: Give us evidence we cause climate change

This article was submitted to NZ Farmer but the editor, Jon Morgan, rejected it on the grounds he had run one piece on each side of the argument and that was all he wanted. Further contributions had to be mere letters (250 words). So, feel free, gentle reader! Send him your letters. – RT
Dr Doug Edmeades

Dr Doug Edmeades – smart scientist

When Dr Doug Edmeades, MNZM, (independent soil scientist, managing director of agKnowledge and perhaps the smartest scientist in the country) wrote recently in NZ Farmer about the theory that we are the major cause of climate change, he said: “On this subject I am a sceptic.”

He didn’t ridicule the theory or mock those who believe it. Rather, he carefully explained the reasons for his doubts that our activities are responsible. Continue Reading →

Views: 264

Personal tidbit

Sorry I’ve been all but absent.

We’ve put our house on the market, it’s all been a bit of a rush and we’ve been battling to fix a few things and make it look nice. First open home is this Sunday. The intention is to buy a house in Te Puke. Yes, that place a few kilometres from the coast recently hit by a small (practice?) Chilean tsunami and shortly thereafter by a 5-point-something quake.

Ah well, seemed a good idea at the time.

But seriously, we’re chasing grandchildren. Again. We moved to Waiuku only a year ago. I’m putty in their hands.

Views: 64

So VW cheats to join the fraudulent climate change fight

Who is the greatest climate criminal?

Beginning in the mid-1990s, mindful of their commitments to cut carbon emissions, Europe’s governments embarked on a prolonged drive to convert their car fleets from gasoline to diesel. With generous use of tax preferences, they succeeded. In the European Union as a whole, diesel vehicles now account for more than half of the market. In France, the first country to cross that threshold, diesel now accounts for roughly 80 percent of motor-fuel consumption. But the switch to diesel probably didn’t cut greenhouse gases. VW may have perpetrated one of the biggest frauds in corporate history. Europe’s clean-diesel strategy, which set the scene for that fraud, may be the most expensive mistake in the history of environmental policy. —Clive Crook, Bloomberg, 23 September 2015

hat tip: Global Warming Policy Foundation Continue Reading →

Views: 50

If even one climate model was accurate we wouldn’t need another

On the Helix Facebook page yesterday, Richard Betts writes about High-End Climate Impacts and Extremes.

He claims “the chances are that global warming will exceed the 2°C “guardrail” that the EU and UN aim to stay below,” and doesn’t disagree with alarmist interpretations of the scale and effects of man-made global warming, such as the possibility of 6°C warming. But “science” says little about our future climate. Continue Reading →

Views: 76

Sea level lunacy slammed by Sir Tipene

Sir Tipene O'Regan

Sir Tipene O’Regan.

from a National Business Review article of 1 September posted on Facebook:
“Sir Tipene rails against madness of Christchurch sea rise plan” by Chris Hutching

Resentment is growing among property owners in Christchurch and residents are organising themselves since the council announced it would tag 18,000 coastal properties with warnings of inundation from rising sea levels, severely depressing land values without good cause. Continue Reading →

Views: 372

Fatal deficiencies destroy scientific case for climate catastrophe

snow flake

As a member of the NZ Climate Science Coalition, I am frequently privy to learned conversations. Occasionally I publish excerpts, suitably altered to preserve privacy. The conversation below emerged sedately over several weeks and expertly defines the fatal deficiencies in the believers’ case for alarm. It deserves a big audience. Continue Reading →

Views: 502

Expert opinion against exponential sea level rise

UPDATE below

Letter to Chch Press 4 Aug 2015

Letter to Christchurch Press from David Beach, 4 Aug 2015. Click to enlarge.

Letter to Christchurch Press from David Beach, 4 Aug 2015. Click to enlarge.

David Beach sent a letter to the Christchurch Press published 4 August, 2015, which contains grievous errors. Whatever he intends by the use of the term ‘exponential’, we can only take it in its usual sense of increasing at a more and more rapid rate, or a rate expressed by a mathematical exponent. His salient point is this:

First, the 1m figure is absolutely the best case for sea level rise. The worst case (expressed by an expert team led by Dr Hansen) is 5m. Second, it does not stop at whatever figure turns out to be true, as it increases exponentially.

Continue Reading →

Views: 122

Recycling burps and farts

Sheep

Sheep.

• Guest post •

— by Viv Forbes, Chairman of Carbon Sense

5th August 2015

Yesterday morning, before the frost had left the grass, I was sitting quietly beside my fashionably-green wood-burning heater reading the latest explanation in “The Green Gospel” on why the Arctic ice had not yet melted. Suddenly Flora burst into the room like an Arctic Blizzard with a look on her face that said I was in big trouble. Continue Reading →

Views: 78

Yes, Dr Hansen says our oceans will boil

The man is dangerous

This loony scientist-turned-climate-activist is reckless with science and his unfounded claims of peril are a threat to public order. Even his followers cannot believe he really said the oceans will boil, but here is the evidence. Should you not believe my biased sceptical transcript, just read his lips.

James Hansen: The Runaway Greenhouse Effect   (video posted Jan 10, 2012)

At 1:55 (the link goes straight there) Hansen poses the question:

Dr James Hansen

What is the runaway greenhouse effect?

Which he answers concisely and unambiguously:

That means once the planet gets warmer and warmer then the oceans begin to evaporate, and water vapour is a very strong greenhouse gas, even more powerful than carbon dioxide, so you can get to a situation where it just… the oceans will begin to boil and the planet becomes so hot that the ocean ends up in the atmosphere and that happened to Venus. That’s why Venus no longer has carbon in its surface. It’s atmosphere is made up of… basically of carbon dioxide because it had a runaway greenhouse effect.

Continue Reading →

Views: 464

Reminder: your stubborn sceptical mind will be dissected this week

UPDATE 1600, Monday 20 July: Lecture cancelled – see below
Manukau Institute of Technology

Manukau Institute of Technology, Otara. Look for the theatre. Click to enlarge.

Come along and hear all about it

This is a reminder to readers in and near Auckland about the free public lecture next Wednesday to address the problem of sceptical minds stubbornly clinging to questions about global warming. Since there can be, by our definition, no genuine scientific questions unanswered by our mainstream climate scientists, there must be something in the mind interfering with the acceptance of climate change.

Can sceptics help themselves or do we have to help them? Can they ever put their denial behind them? Victoria University has a highly-skilled psychologist who will dissect their anti-social behaviour. Continue Reading →

Views: 283

NSW Farmers go over to dark side of climate change

Josh Gilbert, district chairman of the NSW Young Farmers (right) speaking to rural reporter Josh Becker (left). The belief that the climate is being dangerously changed by warming caused by human activities, though on careful examination unsupported by evidence, infiltrates remorselessly into all aspects of society. It will take some shifting when people wake up to it.

Climate change is back on the NSW Farmers Association agenda after a push from young farmers. Young Farmers triumphed over sceptics and complex meeting procedures to push climate change onto the agenda at the New South Wales Farmers Association annual conference. In a rejigged policy on climate, they emphasised the need to move away from fossil fuels and closer to renewables.

Source: Young farmers rewrite NSW Farmers climate change policy – ABC Rural (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) Continue Reading →

Views: 92

New paper suggests no warming in NZ in past 100 years

The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition today issued a press release:

New Zealand may not have warmed at all in the past 100 years, according to a peer-reviewed paper published in the international science journal, Environmental Modeling & Assessment. The paper, A Reanalysis of Long-Term Surface Air Temperature Trends in New Zealand, by New Zealand authors Chris De Freitas, Bob Dedekind and Barry Brill, covering the period 1909-2009, shows an increase of 0.28+/-0.29 °C/century, compared with the current official NIWA seven-station series (7SS) showing an increase of nearly 1 °C/century. Continue Reading →

Views: 88

de Freitas temperature study reaches top 5% of 3.67M scientific papers

Confirms Salinger’s Trojan Horse (see below)

Altmetric ranking

Altmetric ranking for de Freitas et al in January. Current Altmetric ranking (click SCORE IN CONTEXT on SUMMARY tab then click a category for details). Click to enlarge.

I am delighted to report that A Reanalysis of Long-Term Surface Air Temperature Trends in New Zealand (de Freitas, Dedekind & Brill, 2014) is top-ranked by Altmetric.

Altmetric has tracked 20 articles from EMA, the journal our authors used, and our paper tops them all. More significantly, it ranks in the top 5% of all 3,671,975 articles ever tracked by Altmetric, and in the top 8% of 102,471 articles published around the same time. It’s an outstanding result. Continue Reading →

Views: 116

NZ’s ‘climate change target’ 30% below 2005 levels by 2020

Wahoo! It looks really low (though it should be nil), but how much will it cost?

The government has announced a new climate change target that aims to reduce New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions to 30% below 2005 levels by 2020 and a review this year of the existing Emissions Trade Scheme as part of its policy mix to meet the new targets.

Source: Government sets climate change target to reduce CO2 emissions to 30% below 2005 levels by 2020 | The National Business Review

Views: 49

EPA’s McCarthy: ‘Every voice needs to be in this discussion’

Of course, we only listen to normal people

h/t Richard Cumming. When he pointed to Jamie Glazov’s article I discovered the McCarthy outrage.

Lots of people have stopped listening to climate science, which observes no warming for 20 years. They are now being exhorted to stop listening to ‘climate deniers’.

US EPA chief Gina McCarthy is spouting insidious totalitarian doctrine hidden beneath a pretended admiration of democracy and camouflaged by appeals to the good of the majority. So she prepares the ground for legal restraints against honest free speech, and someone must point it out. Continue Reading →

Views: 178

Climate science should abandon the cudgel and present evidence

Further to Are you a scientist?:

Someone the other day was telling me I shouldn’t have criticised the VUW lecture on the basis of a brochure—she said I should wait to hear the lecture first. She made a good point, but she knows nothing (because the TV news never mentions it) of the unbelievable saga of flawed “climate” papers presenting patronising descriptions of the inadequate mindset of climate sceptics. Continue Reading →

Views: 74