Climate scientists have developed new models which plot natural oceanic temperature cycles, solar activity, and cathode-ray-tube (CRT) television household penetration against average global temperatures over time.  They show a surprising an unexpected result.  The recent unprecedented change in climate appears to be closely related to the number of cathode ray television sets in use.

At the beginning of the second world war, there were only about 8000 sets in use.  By 1949, there were over 3,602,872 in the US alone, and by 1959 accumulated sales in the US totalled more than 67 million.  Sales continued through the 70s and 80s at over 10 million sets per year.  As the global economy flourished, the trend was replicated all over the developing world.  The studies showed that the globe warmed more and more rapidly, matching the rising numbers of TV sets, until around the turn of the millennium, when it paused for ten years, and now appears to be in decline.

Interestingly, the models hind-cast the temperature variations since 1950 with astonishing accuracy. And critically, when the CRT penetration is removed from the models, we cannot explain those temperature variations.  There is no other acceptable conclusion, no other factor that can achieve the match with temperature variations.

Ah, I hear you object, China and India, the new Asian super-economies, are booming.  The number of TV sets sold is sky-rocketing again.  If Global Warming has ceased, how could it possibly be related to TV sets?  Right now, the number of sets in use in the world is 1416338245.

Pay attention!  TV technology has undergone a sea change.  The cathode-ray tube is out.  In the twenty-first century, flat-screen TFT and LED screens have taken over.  These do not emit the same radiation as the older, earth-warming monsters that sat in the corner of the room and heated our planet.  And as the old CRT screens sputter, distort and die, they are being replaced by the new, green, tree-hugging, polar-bear-loving flatties.  We are saved!

Earlier climate models achieved a reasonable match using global CO2 atmospheric variations, enough to give cause to speculate that the reason for the rise might be CO2.  But only to speculate.  CO2 concentrations are still rising at an increasing rate, but the global temperature since 2000, initially flat, is now declining.

And that, dear readers, should be the end of the argument.  I defy you to show me that this little analysis is any less robust or scientific than all of the scientific reports used by the IPCC, Al Gore, the EU or Skeptical Science.  The data behind my reasoning shows a closer match to world temperature fluctuations than any of the computer models used by NASA, GISS or UEA.

Trust the science on this.  Using our model, we can predict with 98.73% certainty that the temperature will decline for the next thirty years to at least the same level as it was in 1970.  More likely it will be even lower, as by 2040 there will be very few CRTs still in use.

What’s that?  You want to examine my data?  You have a confounded cheek.  It’s commercially sensitive and the TV companies have placed it under an embargo.

And I didn’t archive it, and seem to have lost it.

There is something very wrong with our priorities.

The world is reeling from, and must deal with, natural and man-made horrors.  Natural ones like the Christchurch and Japanese earthquakes, or tropical cyclones.

Man-made ones like the western world’s EU and UN-orchestrated CAGW-driven self-destruction and Libyan carnage.   And the consequences of the  stupidity of installing  nuclear power plants that rely on power to to run cooling systems that prevent fires, meltdowns and widespread radioactive contamination after an emergency shutdown.  Without considering that an emergency capable of forcing a shutdown can also knock out power supplies.  Especially in an earthquake and tsunami-prone location like Fukushima.

Rightly, these horrors are reported.  They deserve our concern.

In the middle of all this, I see a report of the views of an English TV producer given wide publicity.  Brian True-May is the producer of  the much-loved “Midsomer Murders”.  According to him, the ITV1 detective drama is “the last bastion of Englishness” and he asserts that ethnic minorities have no place in English villages.  That, of course, is ammunition for the politically correct brigade, who campaign actively to have every British programme portray minorities.

This is the “issue”, you see.  The programme has run for 14 series and has featured only one ethnic minority character!  And we are told that ITV is in “urgent discussions” about the lack of diversity in the programme.

That view is hotly disputed by the novelist Anthony Horowitz, as reported in the Telegraph: http://t.co/KlK8Ohw.  Horowitz wrote the first episodes of the drama and came up with the title.  As Horowitz notes:

“Brian True-May’s comments were inappropriate and should not have been made, but in our over-sensitive society there is this silly reaction to anything we say that involves ethnicity or religion.

Brian True-May’s comments were clearly inappropriate because race is an irrelevance here. The point about Midsomer Murders is that, in a village in Midsomer, all outsiders are equally unwelcome whatever their colour. If your family has lived here for 300 years, they’re likely to be white. That’s quite obvious.

“It was a foolish observation to make because colour is not an issue.”

The truth is, there are very few non-white people living in the Midsomer villages.  According to the landlord of the The Six Bells in Warborough, Oxon, pub that features so often in the series, there is only one black man in the village,  Who, by the way, drinks at the pub.  The series depicts the villages as they are.  Does that make it racist?  Is “The fresh Prince of Beverly Hills” racist?  Is “The Cosby Show” racist?

Of course not – none of them are.  So why bother to float achingly politically correct and factually incorrect ideas?  Well. there’s a guaranteed audience – a public that slavishly laps up celebrity gossip, and thirsts for controversy and sensational news.  Were it not for that demand, and the existence of media to satisfy it, ideas like that would float like lead balloons.

There is quite enough really sensational and controversial news to report. There are sufficient matters of real importance to discuss.

Like me, a bloke called Eric Worrall comments on journalists’ blogs from time to time.  He has an interesting explanation for why people concentrate on trivia, and are so ready to believe rubbish like this accusation of racism.  Decadence is what he calls it.  He notes that decadent societies focus on the inconsequential and lose sight of what is really important.

That’s probably the most accurate definition of decadence that I have ever seen.

On Tuesday 8 March 2011, Justice Joseph Williams sentenced Rikki Leigh Scott Ngatai-Check, 23, to life imprisonment, with a minimum non-parole period of 17 years, for kicking a two-year old toddler to death for wetting his pants.  Seventeen years before he can even apply for parole.  That’s pretty strong these days, when our penal systems are organised on the precept that all criminals are basically good guys, who need only TLC and rehabilitation to set them right, in spite of our appalling rate of criminal recidivism.

The sentence is deservedly strong.  Here is the shocking sequence of events, transcribed from the NZ Herald report:

The murderer was in charge of the little boy, who slept on the couch while Ngatai-Check spotted cannabis with a friend.  The boy woke up wet.

Ngatai-Check spun the child around, slamming him into a coffee table.  The impact broke the child’s ribs, causing internal bleeding.  The caring killer took the wounded boy to the toilet and left him there, while he went to the bedroom to play video games.

Five or ten minutes later, the boy came into the bedroom, trailing toilet paper.  Ngatai-Check sat up and planted a roundhouse style kick in the boy’s stomach, tearing internal tissue.  Then he kicked him again, ramming him against the wardrobe door.  This time the impact split the boy’s pancreas.

Ngatai-Check then took the boy to hospital, where he died.

One might expect the judge’s words to be at least as strong as the sentence.  One would be wrong.  This is what Justice Joseph Williams said:

“You did a monstrous thing, but I do not think you are a monster.  No one says you intended to kill Karl”.

Noting that Ngatai-Check had no previous history of violent behaviour, the judge said the stress of his hidden relationship was possibly made worse on the day because “you probably didn’t want baby Karl dumped on you again and just wanted to chill out”.  Moreover, Justice Williams said beatings from a stepfather when he was young had taught Ngatai-Check that children should “harden up”.  The judge noted further that in later years Ngatai-Check had been in the shadows of the Wanganui drug and gang scene, which normalised brutality. There, “violence is not just OK, it is downright cool”.

But the judge said there were “sadly too many cases like this”, in which adults abused the trust of vulnerable children – some much worse than Ngatai-Check’s.  He also stressed that the mandatory 17-year non-parole period was introduced by Parliament as a reminder that “these little people are at our mercy. We can so easily kill them”.

In NZ, murder means unlawful deliberate homicide.  Intent must be established to the satisfaction of the jury for a murder conviction to be obtained.  Yet here we have a sentencing judge who states that the killer, poor little Rikki Ngatai-Check, did not intend the killing, that he is a victim of his upbringing and gang lifestyle, wanted nothing more sinister than to chill out, and is receiving the heavy sentence only because an act of parliament made it mandatory!

What on earth is the judge thinking of?  All I can offer is a very astute quote from a Daily Telegraph blog posting by a British journalist, James Delingpole:

“We no longer understand or value our civilisation; indeed many of us feel rather embarrassed about it. We have been taught to view all our great historical achievements through a filter of post-colonial guilt; we have learned the weasel art of cultural relativism where, in their own special way, cultures that practise female circumcision and bury homosexuals under walls are just as vibrant, valid and meaningful as the one that gave us Michelangelo, penicillin and the splitting of the atom; we’ve been persuaded that elitism and authority are undesirable”.

Judges like Williams may be part of the reason that Parliament found it necessary to impose a seventeen-year minimum parole period for child-murderers.  I am sad that it was necessary, but glad they did so.  Frankly, I wish they would do so for all murders.

Those arguing for action against the perceived threat they call variously Catastrophic Anthropgenic Global Warming, Climate Change, Climate Disruption or whatever new name they can come up with to try to keep it alive have long relied on the argument that there is overwhelming scientific consensus about it and the “the science is settled”.

In another blog I have argued that consensus has no bearing on scientific accuracy, and that no science is ever settled.  AGW believers say that is nonsense.

Well, it now seems there is scientific consensus that AGW is incorrect, unscientific, fraudulent, and on the data available so far, most probably plain wrong:

http://www.climatedepot.com/a/9035/SPECIAL-REPORT-More-Than-1000-International-Scientists-Dissent-Over-ManMade-Global-Warming-Claims–Challenge-UN-IPCC–Gore (Hat tip to Joe Bastardi through one of his tweets).

In the face of this, look out for AGW supporters declaiming that consensus has no bearing on accuracy…

Democracy is not working for Maori, according to the New Zealand Minister of Maori Affairs, Pita Sharples.  He says Maori will not be fairly represented in the Auckland super city.

New Zealand has separate Maori seats in parliament, which is something Sharples wants for the super city, and he now says democracy is failing Maori.  “There is a democratic process but it’s not working for Maori, they are outside of that system,” Sharples says.  He says the principle of one person one vote will not give Maori representation.

“Unless we find some ways for them to be more involved, that is user friendly to their culture, then we have to do something else and I believe seats for Maori is the answer,” Sharples says.

The principle of one person one vote gives every individual equal representation.  Not every racial group – every person, regardless of ethnic origin.  European countries have comparatively recently become democracies.  European societies evolved from a tribal system, in which everything belonged to the chief, the tribes were constantly at war, and no common man had individual representation.  The societies developed into feudal systems, in which everything belonged to the king or duke and his lords and knights, the kingdoms and fiefdoms were constantly at war, and no common man had individual representation.  Finally (and with much struggle) European societies became democracies.  Pre-European Maori society and culture was tribal, and the tribes were constantly at war.  Now New Zealand is a nation, not a collection of tribes or fiefdoms, and it is a democracy.  That democracy brings individual representation to all.

Maori culture, having declined for too long, is undergoing a renaissance within our democracy, and is flourishing.  So what’s this about democracy not being user friendly to Maori culture?  What does that mean, Pita?  Are you implying that Maori who, like you, have been through the NZ education system, are inherently incapable of understanding the political system, inherently incapable of benefiting from the representation they now have?  Isn’t it time to acknowledge that all can achieve and make their mark according to their abilities?  That all Maori people can aspire to academic distinction, or to become a Minister of the Crown?

But if you are right about democracy not suiting particular races, then let’s try it your way.  Let’s have a racist organisation.  Let’s have, say, separate seats for New Zealanders of European descent, and for New Zealanders of Chinese descent, and of Samoan, Tongan, ad nauseum descent.  Let’s have a racially divided proportional representation, with the interests of each racial group stridently represented by each bloc.  And decided by majority vote.

No?  You bet, no!  It would pit ethnic group against ethnic group, leading to hatred and conflict instead of acceptance and harmony.  Let’s have simple democracy instead.  It may not be ideal, but it’s the best we can hope for.

Like you, Pita, I have Maori and European ancestors.

References:

Pita Sharples on Democracy:  http://tvnz.co.nz/politics-news/sharples-says-democracy-not-working-maori-3428048

“Any scientist who can’t explain to an eight-year old what he is doing is a charlatan.” – Dr Felix Hoenikker, nuclear scientist.

“Write it down, then ask yourself ‘Would it make sense to my Grandmother’?” – Ken Dixon expounding his “Grandmother Test”.

A Stanford University study has concluded that domes of increased carbon dioxide concentrations – discovered to form above cities more than a decade ago – cause local temperature increases that in turn increase the amounts of local air pollutants, raising concentrations of health-damaging ground-level ozone, as well as particles in urban air.  The overall conclusion is that CO2 domes in US cities are responsible for an increase in premature mortality of 50 to 100 deaths per year in California , and even more,  300 to 1,000 more premature deaths in the contiguous 48 states.

How is this established?  By data-evaluated numerical computer modeling of CO2 feedbacks and health impacts for the contiguous 48 states, for California and for the Los Angeles area, to determine the increase in the death rate from air pollution for all three regions compared to what the rate would be if no local carbon dioxide were being emitted (See Appendix below).

That’s it – no hard data.  Nothing testable.  They built a complex model predicting heating impacts, made assumptions about the health consequences of that heating, and then made recommendations about carbon taxes based on the model’s estimates.  So CO2 causes the urban heat islands (UHI)!  Not concentrations of people and services and central heating and power and motor vehicles and concrete and stone, but CO2!  Come on – cities are hotter than the countryside simply because they are cities.

But no -we gotta blame CO2.  Carbon taxes are depending on it.

Pity the scientists didn’t try explaining it to their grandmothers.  Or failing that, to an eight-year-old.  They might have realised just how ludicrous their “study” really is.

References:

pdf of the Stanford study:  http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/CO2loc0709EST.pdf

WUWT Post on the story:  http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/16/stanford-urban-co2-domes-mean-more-death/

Appendix:

This is what they claim to have real-world modelled to a standard of certainty sufficient to predict the urban death-rate due to CO2:

Example CO2 feedbacks treated include those to heating  rates, thus temperatures, which affected

• (a) local temperature and pressure gradients, stability, wind speeds, and gas/particle transport
• (b) water evaporation rates
• (c) the relative humidity and particle swelling
• (d) temperature-dependent natural emissions, air chemistry, and particle microphysics.
• (e) photosynthesis and respiration rates
• (f) dissolution and evaporation rates of CO2 into the ocean
• (g) weathering rates
• (h) ocean pH and chemical composition
• (i) sea spray pH and composition
• (j) and rainwater pH and composition. Changes in sea spray composition, in turn, affected sea spray radiative properties, thus heating rates.

The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, a group composed of natural and social science researchers, announced a study that “shows” that a solar minimum will not slow global warming.  The study is an attempt at a pre-emptive strike.  The sun goes into a cooler period and bingo – they rush to add to the endless repetitions of predictions of doom.  It’s what they do, and why they exist – to advocate for global warming.

The entire study depends on the assumption that the IPCC climate models are comprehensive and correct in their predictions of twenty-first century climate change.  These models include only the possible causes they know about and are capable of modelling, with all of their weightings of climate forcing tuned to enable reasonable hind-casting, applied to a warming world.  When the models approximately predict the global temperature (they are very approximate, and then only while the earth is warming) the climate change scientists conclude that they have proved their estimate of the climate forcing due to man-made CO2, and that their forecasts of temperature rises to come in the twenty-first century must therefore be correct.  They call this modelling technique “optimal detection”.  That is the technique that Ptolemy used in his geocentric model of the universe, which made very accurate predictions of the motions of the moon, planets and stars.  It took more than a thousand years for later scientists to discover the truth,  That is understandable – the relative predictive accuracy of Ptolemy’s model left little reason to suppose that it might be wrong.  So until Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, astronomers fully accepted the geocentric model.

Similarly, the Potsdam people take AGW and the IPCC-sponsored models as fact.  The very notion that the earth cools and warms in cycles, and that in inter-glacial periods like the present, there are mini-cycles of warm periods between little ice-ages, is dismissed as unscientific wishful thinking.  It is nothing of the kind.  It’s simple observation.  And within the last two thousand years, we have written history to draw upon.  Written history that documents the Roman Warming and the Medieval Warm Period.  The IPCC claim that the recent warming is unprecedented is false.  So are the models.

There has been a fifteen-year hiatus in the warming, against the model predictions.  Even Phil Jones of the CRU agrees that there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995.  And in spite of the present warmth, all indications are that the PDO is now turning negative, and that in five-to-ten years the AMO will also turn negative.  The earth is in for 20 – 30 years of cooling, while CO2 continues to rise, fed by the economic growth in China and India.  The IPCC models did not predict the flat temperature since 1995, and they do not predict the forthcoming cooling.

Greenhouse gases did not cause the twentieth-century warming, or the earlier MWP and still earlier Roman warming.  When cooling sets in, it will not be because greenhouse gases are reduced, or because we are saved by a quiescent sun.  It will be a result of the natural cycles.

Reference:

Discovery News Article    http://news.discovery.com/space/the-sun-cant-save-us-from-global-warming.html

Potsdam Press Release:   http://www.pik-potsdam.de/news/press-releases/weakening-sun-would-hardly-slow-global-warming

On March 14 2010, Sciam (Scientific American) tweeted a report called “Climate Change – State of the Birds 2010 Report”.  A link is in the Reference section at the end of this post.

My wife and I are a lifelong conservationists with a special place in our hearts for birds.  In our home country, New Zealand, we gardened organically, without pesticides or artificial fertilisers, and planted native trees in the garden of every house we have owned, to attract, feed and encourage the NZ and exotic birds back into our lives.  People change landscapes, and we feel strongly that we should provide the means for the native wildlife to survive those changes.  So we do just that, and are rewarded by the tuis, wood pigeons, fantails, wax-eyes, goldfinches, starlings, sparrows and other birds that swarm in our garden.  They are so comfortable with us that they pick for food at our feet when we sit on the garden deck.  They will do so again when we return.

Here during our sojourn in the Netherlands, our greatest delight is the splendid variety of birds that grace the trees in our tiny lane in Haarlem, and fill the polders, reserves and wetlands.  We put out seeds, nuts, fat balls and insect blocks this winter, because it has been the harshest for forty years.  No doubt we have assisted the great tits, blue tits, jays, tree-creepers and robins that are outside the window, ten feet from me, right now.  And now that spring quickens the trees and the temperature is finally back above zero, we shall once more roam the cycle lanes in the reserves, among the swans, ducks, herons and magpies.

So how does a Grumpy Old Conservationist react to the report?  By grumping – it is shameless advocacy.  A load of self-serving twaddle riding the coat-tails of the highly exaggerated predictions of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming.  Prediction after prediction in the IPCC report is being exposed as nonsense.  Himalayan glaciers, African crop yields, Amazon rain-forest health are three examples.  These are not small errors – they are critical for the IPCC’s advocacy.  It will not be long before their predicted six-degree Celsius global temperature rise for the twenty-first century is similarly nailed, and nailed conclusively.  Already, scientific analyses of the various bases on which that prediction was based are showing them to be doubtful at best, and suggest that some of them have been shamelessly manipulated.  The leaked emails of the Climategate incident add weight to that suggestion.

Audubon and the other conservation agencies have done a great conservation job of maintaining, recovering and protecting wildlife populations, and will continue to do so.  It is important work, mitigating the environmental consequences of the actions of humankind.  It enriches all of life.  They should keep it up.

It saddens me to see that work, and the agencies who perform it, hooked up in the advocacy of the AGW group.  The predictions of the AGW camp will be shown to be about as accurate as the Jehovah’s Witnesses predictions of the end of the world in 1914, 1915, 1918, 1920, 1925, 1941, 1975 and 1994.  IPCC and all of those who have promoted AGW will be utterly discredited.  An angry world may well discredit all conservationist groups along with them.

That would be a very great shame.

References:

2010 State of the Birds:  http://www.stateofthebirds.org/habitats

Postscript: Scientific American is diminished.  It used to be great magazine that reported science.  Now it is an avenue for advocacy.

In a post in the SFGate blog, Dr Peter Gleick sets out to counter AGW skepticism by painting skeptics as deniers and bar-room brawlers.

He starts by stating that there is no argument against global warming, ignoring the fact that skeptics do not argue that global warming is not happening.  That’s the first mistake.  There are red-necked fools who deny that the earth warmed from the mid-nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth, certainly.  But they are not the skeptics.

Then he says: “in this world, no alternative explanation for climate change has ever come close to doing a better job than the science produced by the climate community and represented by the IPCC“.  There are two big things wrong with that statement.

Firstly, the IPCC and all the scientists who are funded by the AGW group have never provided any evidence that the recent warming is unprecedented.  It is clear that the Medieval Roman warm periods were at least as warm as the present, and some studies indicate they may have been much warmer.

Secondly, the “scientific” explanations of the IPCC themselves do not come close to explaining the warming.  All they have is models that include only the possible causes they know about and are capable of modelling, with all of their weightings tuned to enable reasonable hind-casting, applied to a warming world.  When the models approximately predict the global temperature (and they are very approximate) the climate change scientists conclude that they have proved their estimate of the climate forcing due to man-made CO2, and that their forecasts of temperature rises to come in the twenty-first century must therefore be correct.  They give this technique a fancy name – they call it “optimal detection”.  The very notion that the earth cools and warms in cycles, and that in inter-glacial periods like the present, there are mini-cycles of warm periods between little ice-ages is dismissed as unscientific wishful thinking.  It is nothing of the kind.  It’s simple observation.  And within the last two thousand years, we have written history to draw upon.

He then groups opponents as “marginal, discredited climate deniers”, put up by the media.  Hmmm.  He wants us to infer that Spencer, Lindzen, Watts, D’Aleo, McIntyre, Christy, Pielke Sr (and Jr.), Idso, Soon, Loehle, Micheals, Moberg, Singer, Landsea, Plimer, Ball etc are not serious scientists, just deniers.  That is quite some diversion he is attempting in his posting.

The next step he takes is to associate skeptics by implication with the right-wing red-necked ravers, who place hate-filled comments in climate blogs: “… there’s no such thing as global warming, you f!@%$#%@ing idiot and your f!@%$#%@ing colleagues.”  I understand his annoyance with that sort of offensive rubbish.  But such obscene tripe is in no way comparable with skeptical argument, and Peter Gleick knows it.

He finishes with a Simpsons cartoon showing an AGW opponent as a bully.  All-in-all, his posting is not a reasoned essay opposing the skeptical position.  It is a swinging, no-holds-barred, boots-and-all attempt to discredit all skeptics as bar-room brawlers.  He is not arguing logically, not speaking as a scientist.  He is displaying the very bullying behaviour that he accuses skeptics of.

But then, as he himself says, oblivious to the irony: “The world of policy often doesn’t give a hoot for the world of science.”

References:

Peter Gleik’s complaint: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gleick/detail??blogid=104&entry_id=58962