Reblogged from NoFrakkingConsensus:

Peter Gleick has issued a statement about the Heartland documents. The Heartland Institute is a free-market/conservative think tank based in Chicago that expresses dissident views on climate change (see here for more info). Confidential documents, including personnel matters and financial records, were recently obtained from that organization under false pretenses. Last week they were released onto the Internet. The Heartland says that one of the files – the most-quoted and most sensational of the eight …

Not just a little fishy

Reblogged from Watts Up With That?:

Heartland has yet to produce a press release, but I thought in the meantime I’d share some behind the scenes. If/when they do, I’ll add it to this post. UPDATE: 11:45AM -The press release has been added below. One of the key documents is a fabrication UPDATE2: 2:30PM The BBC’s Richard Black slimes me, without so much as asking me a single question (he has my email, I’ve corresponded with him previously) or even understanding what the project is about Hint: Richard, it’s about HIGHS and LOWS, not …

“It’s a trap”

How the respective parties deal with this alleged leak will show who is sceptical and who is prepared to simply accept whatever fits or supports their established beliefs.

Remember to read the instructions

Image: Wikimedia.org

before setting off the bomb.

SCOOP: Peter Slipper's Secret Procession Rehearsal

The Speaker of the House of Representatives in Australia  wants more pomp and ceremony. An anonymous correspondent has scooped this picture of secret procession rehearsals.

For those unfamiliar with satire, the picture orginates from an article in the UK’s Daily Mail.

Minimum and Maximum Temperatures at Medina Agricultural Research Station

Turns out that it wasn’t so hot just a few kilometres South of the city. Not when one eyeballs a plot of daily minimum and maximum temperatures over the past 15 years collected at the agricultural research station in Medina. WA’s Department of Agriculture operates a number of automated weather stations. The one in Medina has been operating for 15 years, albeit with some data collection problems in the early days.

A correspondent on Warwick Hughes’ blog may be able to explain the “warming”:

Philip Bradley Says:
January 29th, 2012 at 4:56 pm

The East Perth location of the official Perth site before 2004 is across the road (about 20 meters) from a large grassed park that is irrigated every night in summer. The 2004 move to an unirrigated location at Mt Lawley resulted in an approx 1.5C fall in nighttime temperatures.

…

Nighttime irrigation causes a near ground greenhouse warming effect.

The new Mt Lawley location is in middle of field of bare earth (sand), which will reflect more heat than grass, heating up the Stevenson screen nicely during the day.

So BoM is making comparisons between apples and oranges. They ought to know better.

The lame-stream press are of course falling over each other to predict imminent immolation of mankind.

UPDATE: I’ve managed to make 2011 the warmest year in, like evah!

Averaging extremes over a year gives the "desired" result

NB: The dip in the curves around 2000 is a result of the automated station not working for 2 months in 1999. Maximum temperature was recorded at 0°C during outages and that has an effect when you take the running average or total which includes that period.

The green line shows “clearly” that 2011 was the hottest year. But the trick is to take an average of the temperature extremes over a year.

Statisticians and those who deal with the science of measurement can explain it better than I. Such jiggery-pokery to get the desired result (alarm) has no statistical or physical validity. For starters; John Brignell explains the Extreme Value Fallacy in his FAQ.

“Raw” data plotted earlier shows no such trend at a glance. The human brain is much quicker at recognizing patterns visually than going through abstract mathematics. If you don’t see a pattern or a trend at a glance, then there probably isn’t a real pattern or trend.

Besides which; temperature is by itself useless in determining global warming.

I’ve also plotted insolation (yellow), the amount of energy received from the sun as a running total over the same period as well as rainfall (blue), also as a running, accumulated total. The values for those two are shown on the right Y-axis.

When there’s sunshine, it gets warmer. Unless it’s been wet. (Correlation, not causation.)

No Nobel Prize in Physics for that observation. And no Pulitzer Prize for the pun.

UPDATE 2:

On a hunch, I decided to investigate our very own hockey-stick phenomenon a little further… why the up-tick in the 2010/2011 average maxima?

So I plotted the running average of minimum temperatures (the darker green line below) and found an even sharper up-tick.

Who left the kettle on?

So it looks like the location has recently taken to not cooling off as much at night. As we don’t get 2°C of warming a year from a 2ppm increase in CO₂. Besides; it’s an argicultural research station where there a lots of plants which love the demon gas.

When one is too close to the data, one loses perspective. Wood for the trees.

The view from above produced a useful perspective. A water treatment plant (Beenyup) within 500 metres to the East.  One that has recently been expanded in capacity. In the years 2008 to 2010.

Reblogged from Tallbloke's Talkshop:

Chris Huhne, the Energy Secretary, has been charged with perverting the course of justice and now faces a criminal trial and the loss of his Cabinet position. Mr Huhne and his ex-wife Vicky Pryce have both been charged with the same offence amid allegations that he asked her to take speeding points on his behalf. The pair now face the prospect of a criminal trial over allegations that they conspired to pervert the course of justice. The offence carries a maximum life sentence. Miss Pryce, who separated …

Fe Fe Fe
That irony.

Adding C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁ to that is the revelation that Mr Huhne was previously a director of a company (TSS) that introduced speed cameras into the UK. Making it sweet irony.

Reblogged from Financial Post | Opinion:

The EU was no noble experiment worth preserving, but the world’s grandest experiment in social engineering The dream of a politically unified, economically integrated Europe is now dead. “It’s impossible,” French President Nicolas Sarkozy said this week, in admitting the need for a “two-speed Europe” that sheds debt-laden Greece and/or other non-core countries. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the only other European leader able to decide Europe’s fate, is believed to have agreed, her …

Dating back to November, Lawrence Solomon‘s article outlines some of the reasons why the EU is doomed to fail.

Reblogged from Watts Up With That?:

Burt Rutan writes in via email about an exchange he had with the proprietor of the website Scholars and Rogues, Brian Angliss. Burt writes: I recently read a treatise showing that CAGW theory is a fraud. I thought it was a good summary and agreed to have my name used as a supporter of the facts when it was published by the Wall Street Journal.  You can find it here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577171531838421366.html Then, shortly after publication, an alarmist engineer wrote …

Burt Rutan presents reality to confront belief

Reblogged from Wegweiser Mobilität:

Zum neuen Jahr wurden wieder einige bestehende Umweltzonen verschärft. Doch nicht nur das: Es wurden auch neue Umweltzonen geschaffen sowie eine großflächige, zusammenhängende Umweltzone im Ruhrgebiet eingerichtet. Der ADAC bezweifelt Sinn und Zweck dieser für manchen Autofahrer sehr kostspieligen und einschneidenden Maßnahmen. …

Germany’s ADAC finds that German cities which restrict access to all but the cleanest cars show no measure of improvement in air quality.

(updated 2012-01-28)

Motor vehicles not meeting strict environmental standards have been banned from driving in some cities. The cost of compliance is onerous unless one has recently bought a new car.

The ADAC finds that after several years of such vehicle exclusions, there is no difference in air quality compared to similar cities without such draconian regulations. Still, more cities scramble to impose the useless “Environment Zones”.

It seems that when you’re green-minded, measureable outcomes are irrlevant. As is punishing those who cannot afford new cars or to retrofit their old ones to bring them up to spec.

Taking the easy route, the ADAC issues stern words, but doesn’t follow up with pressure on the city governments to dismantle their festering bureaucracies which serve nobody but the bureaucrats and fulfill no useful function.

Reblogged from Obvious Inventions:

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that wind-powered generation is a practical failure; failing miserably to deliver electricity when needed. This invention makes use of the existing wind-generator structure and infrastructure connection to provide electricity generation when the wind doesn’t. The invention is to install one or more pulse-jet engine near the tip of each wing in order to rotate the machine and generate electricity when there is no wind, but a demand for electricity. Pulse jet engines are …

Judge not people by the wonderful gifts that they give, but by the fact that they don’t wring your neck when it suits them.