Craig,
Thinking in the background here, I have had an idea.
Your rebuttals of the arguments against you are seemingly based on "But ISIS' actions are abhorrent". None of us disagree.
However your claims are all "Islam is shite because: ISIS", and that's where we all disagree with you.
It's no more valid than pointing to Hitler and saying "Therefore Europeans are bad" or McCarthy and saying "BAD AMERICANS!!!".
RELIGION is bad for people. It abrogates the person to the dogma. Religion, at best, tells you about people (what bit of their religion do they talk about: that's an insight into them). See WBC. But that DOESN'T make religious people bad.
Indeed, the problem with religion is that it is so handy for making good people do monstrous acts. After all, God told the priest this was right, therefore it MUST be right!
From Arctic sea ice analysis: "Sea ice extent in August 2014 averaged 6.22 million square kilometers (2.40 million square miles). This is 1.00 million square kilometers (386,000 square miles) below the 1981 to 2010 August average"
Repeat: 1981 to 2010 average - the average when climate warming effects were well under way. Its certainly a lot greater than before 1981, when conditions were colder.
Contrast this with Duff's piffle. Moreover, Duff, Polar Bears do not forage optimally at ice edges but at holes on pack ice where the seals come up to breath occasionally. Trust a right wing nut like you to botch this up.
Dr Harvey.
Today is a new day and since my earlier post, more info has become public.
There has been a lack of transparency. BoM unwisely chose to not answer some simple questions quite some time ago.
Luckily, we live in one of those imperfect democracies in Australia and it is still possible to demand transparency from our public institutions.
Unfortunately it sometimes requires the assistance of the media.
It's unfortunate because by its nature, the media likes to sensationalise & exaggerate.
I think it's a real shame that BoM refused to deal with these questions sensibly when they were first asked.
Sorry Bill.
This particular issue has progressed way beyond that type of behaviour.
BoM has some questions to answer and it is a shame that they chose not to answer them in a normal democratic manner and timeframe.
Stu 2, assertions without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. That goes double when you refuse explicit requests for supporting material.
And you specialise in that.
And furthermore whenever you curiously refuse to provide citations, references or evidence and someone bothers to do the legwork to chase down the facts, your claims almost always turn out to be bogus. We have some spectacular examples to choose from ("Benevolent dictatorship! Fudged temperature records!")
What I want to know is this: are you foolish enough to believe that the most intelligent 98% of readers here don't see straight through this pattern of behaviour and think "spouter of nonsense" when they see your moniker, or are you making public assertions of nonsense in order to reinforce your own belief in it?
Or does the third alternative apply - you're easily fooled by seductive claims that you wish were true, and have a powerful Morton's Demon that refuses to allow any conflicting information to reach your analytical faculties?
And let us imagine for a moment that you finally manage to make a claim that does not fit any of those three options. Do you expect everyone else to believe that you would not answer requests to substantiate it if you actually had the evidence on your side for a change?
Indeed Lotharsson. I'm probably in the less well endowed 2% of readers but when I see a Stu2 post words like vacuous, evasive, air-head, and arse-clown immediately spring to mind. It's like the unrelenting tedium of a Brad Keyes thread bomb. At least Keyes was mildly entertaining (for a little while).
Marohasy has some questions to answer and it is a shame that she chose not to answer them in a normal scientific manner and timeframe before spouting unsupported accusations of fraud and incompetence on the part of other scientists.
I'd mention something about actually doing her homework in the first place, but it's already gone beyond pithy...
2Pid, you and your mates can get together and whip yourselves into an onanistic frenzy about Al Gore (fat!), Mike Mann (evil!), climategate ( conspiracy!), Stephan Lewandowsky (even more eviler!) and now the BoM until the cows come home, but it has nothing to do with bloody reality.
It is pathetic. You are pathetic. You'll no doubt go to the grave muttering these poisonous little incantations, the sacred Shibboleths of your dismal little tribe... and what a complete waste of time, resources, space, a life - everything! - you lot are...
What honest observers note is the complete absence of any evidence that either the national Australian temperature record or the global surface temperature reconstructions are in any way flawed.
What honest observers note is a smear campaign against BoM by liars and shills deliberately intended to erode trust in climate science.
What you are doing, Stupid, is cheering from the sidelines as the front men (and women) for vested interest swap the future for short-term profit. And you are too thick to realise that you are a silly little dupe.
Over the page I mentioned how education is being subverted by disparity in income but there are other forces at work, as Richard Feynman recognised when asked to assess science books for prospective school use which showed that any lingering democracy can be subverted by hacking school texts to suite ideology rather than truth.
Those who think the US and UK are democracies have little knowledge of the twentieth century history of both. They may think they do but then they have not realised that any history they have studied is likely based upon sources and ideas allowed to get through the filters of those who really run the world.
Take the origins of the First World War for example. I have just got hold of a book which looks at history in a very different light :
'Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War' by Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor. One is quickly appraised of the Rhodes-Milner-Esher, influenced by John Ruskin and Baliol College Oxford, secret society with Nathan Rothschild and King Edward VII within close orbit and others such as David Lloyd George, Asquith and Churchill at different layers of the cabal onion.
The authors early on point to the writings of Carroll Quigley scroll down to the 'Quigley and Secret Societies' section to get a taste, but don't ignore the other content.
I'll offer more when copies of those two key books arrive.
Lionel. I'll add that to my list. But it will have to come after a few others.
One I think I'm going to be disappointed in. Not because the book is inadequate, Henry Reynolds A Coloured History, but because my attention was grabbed by an aside from Reynolds during a "Big Ideas" session a couple of weeks ago. He was lamenting the huge emphasis on WW1 and especially Anzac Day in Australia. His point was that WW1 sucked Australians back into the Strong British Empire vortex when we had been on a rather different trajectory up to that point (Working Man's Paradise and all that). But his book is about the wars between indigenous and settler Australians so I doubt that empire idea gets much of a run.
Sorry deltoids.
No amount of sneering at me will change the fact that BoM is under the spotlight re public reporting of the Australian weather/climate data
They do not have a monopoly on weather/climate data. They are a public service and in a democracy transparency is important and necessary.
No one is arguing that homogenisation in and of itself is a bad practice.
Sorry Stu2.
No amount of sneering by the shills will change the fact that BoM is under the spotlight by them for the simple reason that they are doing everything to undermine the facts about AGW. The corporate bought and paid for shills represent private interests and for them democracy threatens their control of power.
You are a simpleton. That is clear. And your views come straight from the corporate PR handbook.
No amount of sneering at me will change the fact that BoM is under the spotlight having mud thrown at it in the hope that some of it will stick re public reporting of the Australian weather/climate data
Fixed the obvious goal post shift and the missing-of-the-point relying on unsubstantiated allegations.
No one is arguing that homogenisation in and of itself is a bad practice.
Obvious red herring is still obvious after umpteen explanations why it is a red herring.
(Also, you need to get out more. Some denialists do actually argue this.)
They do not have a monopoly on weather/climate data.
Obvious red herring is obvious.
Also, that fact has been used to point out by comparing with those other records that some of the claims made by those allegedly "shining the spotlight" are false so thanks for highlighting it again - even if you clearly don't understand that you're engaged in self-rebuttal.
They are a public service and in a democracy transparency is important and necessary.
Obvious error in the service of mendacious allegations is obvious.
The published methods had already been publicly and transparently discussed in the literature. Those "shining the spotlight throwing the mud" apparently hadn't even availed themselves of the existing transparency before they started throwing mud, so it's a bit rich to pretend that the BoM was not transparent here and ignore the massive dishonesty (never mind the staggering incompetence) on the part of the mud throwers.
You are acting the useful fool for these dishonest and/or incompetent tools, which is why so many hold your pronouncements here in contempt. And the "sneering at you" is entirely justified here because your modus operandi as I pointed out in #3 and in a series of posts on the previous page, is transparently and obviously to play the part of that useful fool by mindlessly and endlessly repeating allegations you never can back up.
No amount of sneering at me will change the fact that BoM is under the spotlight
Bullshit.
I'm not as inclined to be polite as some folks here, because frankly I'm sick to death of you all - you and your fellow hysterics from the circle-jerk blogosphere can become as mendaciously overwrought as you like, but no such f'ing thing is happening!
It's not. It's a fantasy. A dream. A phantasm. A paranoiac figment of your overactive amygdalas.
The only thing that's actually happening has been described to you repeatedly above. You're a hack. A dupe. a patsy. A mark. A useful idiot.
--
From Nassim Nicholas Taleb recently (author of 'The Black Swan') -
Someone wrote: "Dear Mr Taleb, I like your work but I feel compelled to give you a piece of advice. An intellectual like you would greatly gain in influence if he avoided using foul language."
Answer: "Fuck off."
--
Oh, dear, Lionel - Docherty and MacGregor is textbook conspiracy ideation, bearing close parallels to the worst climate change denial. No scholarly treatment? Pal review! No evidence? Data tampering! The facts don't support the argument? We don't need no steeenkin' facts!
Docherty and MacGregor is a ridiculous treatment where the only real light is shone on the authors ignorance. It's difficult to know where to start, because large slabs of it are "not even wrong".
There is enough sensible debate about the importance of various factors that led to the Great War without having to resort to illogic and antifacts. Suffice to say I would not recommend anyone waste their time with such rubbish - at the end of the book, you will know less about what took place than you did before you started. Even for entertainment value - paying for this book merely encourages the perpetrators.
What annoys me is this sort of tripe distracts from the very real anti-democratic forces and real (not imagined) conspiracies in play. There was no need for a "secret elite" when there was an open elite running British Foreign policy in such a way as to compromise the principles of cabinet-based government. But that open elite could hardly work in cahoots with a French government with a life expectancy of less than a year and a Russian government whose personnel line up depended on the whim of the Tsar and changed almost as frequently. All the players genuinely undermined democratic principles in their respective countries, because they were ALL antidemocratic reactionaries. That is all the "conspiracy" that is required.
The outbreak of WW1 is best characterised by Hanlon's razor - "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Which is not to say that the "accidental war" theory has any merit. People in power made choices. Many of those were bad ones due to the shortsightedness, narrow-mindedness or recklessness of their authors. Those choices were made by all parties. And many of them were staggeringly foolish, but few were truly malicious.
If one wants to understand the outbreak of the war I suggest:
1. To get the framework, any decent conventional history - Thomas Ottes "The July Crisis" looks to be one of the better recent ones, though I liked William Jannens "Lions of July" where the source material tells the story with little intervention from the author (other than his choices of material to quote, of course). Even somone like Massey or Keegan is probably good enough.
2. For an opposing, but credible, viewpoint, Chris Clark's "The Sleepwalkers". Clark is a Germanophile and (in my opinion) overreaches in trying to place the whole blame on the Entente, but he has some interesting insights and his detail on the Serbia-Bosnia-Austria part of the crisis is exceptional.
3. Having got the opposing ends (within the bounds of sanity) Holger Herwig's "Decisions for War", which appraises the actual choices made by each country, within the context of their strategic position, available information and decision-making apparatus.
Seriously - this sort of claptrap? I wouldn't waste my time.
Adelady,
His point was that WW1 sucked Australians back into the Strong British Empire vortex when we had been on a rather different trajectory up to that point (Working Man’s Paradise and all that).
It certainly led the trajectory Australia was on to jump the tracks, but I'm more doubtful that it was into the SBE vortex (setting aside the Menzies and so on).
I think the best summary I've heard recently was from Dr Clare Wright (LaTrobe University) in the ABC's "The War that Changed Us":
"I think what the war did was root Australia in a moment that was about death, that was about heroism. But it was a military heroism, so that by tying Australia's future fortunes to the idea that the nation had been born on the battlefields of Gallipoli, Australia became a backward-looking nation. It always returned to that moment when it believed something fundamental had happened."
To be honest, I don't think much has changed, in Anglo-Australia, anyway. Too many Australians hark back to their metaphorical childhood to make adult choices about Australia's future.
What I have not gone into as yet were my reservations about Docherty and Macgregor and the reasons why I put the book down half way through. I am re-skimming to rediscover why I did that as it was a few months ago. But having started to read 'Planning Armageddon' by Nicholas Lambert I picked it up again.
I was in the process of making such a post when illness caught up with me again and forced me to desist.
As the condition is continuing all I can offer is that certain elements of Hidden History are food for thought with the characters of Rhodes, Milner, Esher and those that were associated with them being worthy of closer scrutiny and thought.
I have read a number of what you call 'standard' texts including Massey, the later I mentioned over page along with Laurence Lafore. Another mentioned was Thomas Pakenham with 'The Scramble for Africa' and 'The Boer War' both of which back up some of the points made in 'Hidden History'.
I think you are far to dismissive as not all of it is tripe particularly when you consider the historical roots of the Rothschilds in financing the effort of Britain in the Napoleonic War and a conduit for intelligence. My interests go back to that earlier period also.
But I must look up Chris Clark, thanks
Now the world is falling again, erratic blood pressure, I will have to desist again for awhile.
BBD, can we run a pool on how long it will take before we get another mendacious allegation from someone that clearly hasn't bothered to do their homework (because you don't need to in order to be mendacious) about some institution manipulating data to make AGW look worse?
With bonus points if it's one of the commenters here who has done exactly that several times in the past and been proven wrong every time?
And more bonus points if they concern troll using any of the concepts "democratic" and "transparency" and "taxpayer funded/public institutions"?
I'd run another pool on the likelihood of seeing a thorough and apparently genuine retraction of the incorrect claims - not just about the records, but about the institution - from the key touters of said claims at Deltoid, or by Marohasy, or by Graham Lloyd and the Australian - but it would be hard to find someone to bet on the side of it actually happening.
Lionel - yes, I had noted your Massey references, which was why I pitched it in there. And Pakenham, which I thought was a cracking book.
Sorry if that invective seemed to be directed at you, but it was about D&M. I honestly believe their thesis only survives their own writing of it (let alone any critique of it), by their very selective deployment of facts. So by all means read and reflect, but be aware that there are huge swathes of misinformation in there. Be cautious in any conclusions you draw, but that does not preclude enjoyment or interest .
For example, I'm currently reading "Paris at the End of the World", which ostensibly is about Paris in WW1 and the end of the Belle Epoque. As a history book it is an utter failure, with almost every fact of which I have some prior knowledge being demonstrably wrong. But ignoring its claims as a history book, its one of the most amusing things I've read in ages, as his investigation into his grandfather's war service bring him in to contact with some of the most bizarre people you would never want to meet. It's also a wonderful travelogue of Paris, a city I hope to visit again armed with better insight than previously. I trust (and enjoy) the authors personal journey, but will believe little to none of the "history" without double-checking.
Sorry your BP's wonky, hope you're better soon - always enjoy your comments, even the ones I disagree with.
There a 112 stations in ACORN-SAT. I'll bet a shiny penny that we haven't heard the last accusation from the paranoid concern trolls.
I'll bet another that each instance will reveal sound reasons for any adjustments made in the homogenisation process.
And, since third time counts for all, I'll wager a third that before we get to the end of the cycle, we will hear again about how the gummint fraudulated the Rutherglen record. Trolls and zombies, zombies and trolls...
FrankD, I think some of why you have such disdain for such conspiracy ideation is that it can appear to be a conspiracy despite not being *engineered* as a conspiracy.
Look at the inactive collusion that led to the last crash: not one of the players actually got together with any of the others to screw things up, but the rules as they DID conspire to get neutered said, they were allowed to bury toxic deals inside a sugar coat of positive assets.
Much of the conspiracy is due, I feel, to the very richest people ALWAYS get together on regular intervals in MASSIVE secrecy and, due to capitalism equating money with power, worth and authority, the world leaders will go along to have their egos stroked and their biases reinforced.
And they care not if the results are bad for others, as long as they themselves do not achieve any great harm in the process.
Resulting in (in)actions that appear inimical to the populace at large and therefore colluded.
Often, too, actions that are actually inimical.
E.g. Germany would have become a full sized and primary world power if they had finished the train service to the middle east, allowing them access to petroleum products they otherwise have to beg for off the then current world powers (Russia, France and the UK).
WWII inaction was due to the influence of the hidden elites. See the early refusals to bomb german factories in the 1930's because "they were owned by private individuals".
The idea that private property should be destroyed would not be welcomed by those owning much of the world...
The outcome of this is that there is ample evidence to support collusion and ample evidence of non-existence of a conspiracy, since in some cases collusion is not required, only individual action toward the same goal under the same pretexts.
For anyone following the sorry saga of the call for "heads to roll" at the BoM based on apparently little more than someone's delusions of their own super-competence and/or power to reshape reality by simply declaring it, follow the link in first response to this comment.
Anyone wanna bet (as discussed on that post) on the chances of suitably abject apologies being made all round?
Are you perhaps referring to this Lotharsson? http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/acorn-sat/rutherglen/rutherglen-st…
I have to say that Hotwhopper piece has drawn a very long bow.
Who or what do you believe needs to give 'suitably abject apologies" ?
The question has always been about BoM's singular focus on neatly packaging temperature data and then reporting such things as 2013 being the hottest Australian summer on record.
" Instead of looking down on commentators, why not look at data for yourselves.
I'm the Bill Johnston Jennifer is referring to.
There are many issues with the primary data. For instance ACORN's homogenised Rutherglen minimum temperature series contains an abrupt step-change in 1965, which is indicative of an undocumented station move (fancy trend with that!).
Although trends each side of the shift are no different to zero trend; their quasi-trajectory are influenced by missing daily data, that you could, if you took the trouble, see for yourselves. Missing summer-values reduce average temperatures don't they?
Annual minimum temperature at Rutherglen, has a simple relationship with rainfall, but because of the location, which I know well, it is the opposite of what you would expect. You could check that out too.
These problems are by no means restricted to just a few ACORN stations; they are widespread.
Inhomogeneities are common. They arise from changes in observers; missing data; data rounding; undocumented infrastructure developments etc. Etc.
If the base data are widely and generally faulty, then no matter how they are massaged, the trends they produce will also be faulty.
It is simply not logical to create trends from data that are non-trending. Nor is it acceptable for people to claim trends are real when they are clearly not.
The question has always been about BoM’s singular focus on neatly packaging temperature data and then reporting such things as 2013 being the hottest Australian summer on record.
There's no evidence whatsoever of any issues with the Rutherglen station. Nor any other of the cherry-picks the shills have been waving around.
So we return to the beginning: you are making a baseless accusation of fraud against BoM which you accuse of exaggerating the warming trend in the Australian national data.
This Dr Bill fuckwit is still banging the "raw data are the only accurate data" fallacy. Either he's clueless, or he's trying to confuse people on purpose. Or both.
Can't tell, because you didn't bother to provide the common courtesy of indicating which comment you were referring to.
I have to say that Hotwhopper piece has drawn a very long bow.
And yet you can't even manage to state what you reckon is the long bow, let alone why anyone else should agree with you. Why, it's almost like you're hoping that readers won't bother to read the article you're referring to, because if they did they might find your claim to be the only long bow here...
The question has always been about BoM’s singular focus on neatly packaging temperature data and then reporting such things as 2013 being the hottest Australian summer on record.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
That's a transparently obvious attempt to shift the goalposts. (It's also quite obviously not the singular focus of the BoM.) Whoever confidently asserted that to you may have suckered you in but the most gifted 98% of English readers here aren't so easily fooled.
This is the Bill Johnson who I previously reported here relies on his own non-peer reviewed methods to draw those kinds of conclusions. Those methods were examined by a commenter at The Conversation who found the conclusions Johnson draws from his methods are unwarranted (IIRC in part because the methods do not reliably achieve what he asserts that they do).
But that's not all.
This is also the Bill Johnson who allowed his name to be used to "support" the claim in the media - that he could not legitimately make, because he wasn't nearby anywhere near long enough - that there was no station move, despite his own methods (flawed as they are) telling him that there was most probably a station move. So not only is he overly enamoured with his own non-existent brilliance, but he's not the most honest tool in the shed either.
And then he also engages in this lovely example of immediate self-refutation:
If the base data are widely and generally faulty, then no matter how they are massaged, the trends they produce will also be faulty.
It is simply not logical to create trends from data that are non-trending.
If the base data are to be used for climate purposes rather than weather, then the base data are indeed "faulty" for that purpose, however appropriate homogenisation is part of making them fit for purpose. And that purpose includes deriving climate scale trends. Bill saying the opposite doesn't make Bill correct.
As BBD indicates, it's also simply false to spin this process as "creating trends" over climate time-scales. The trends resulting from the homogenised corrected data, whether different from or effectively the same as the trends in the raw data, are the outcome of producing a climate-scale temperature record. The fact that the base data are unfit for producing climate scale trends means that one cannot claim that the "base data" are "non-trending", because it's invalid to derive a climate-scale trend from that raw data. Bill is either completely incompetent on this kind of most basic matter, or he is lying to his audience. (And given the organisation he fronts for, it could be both.)
Nor is it acceptable for people to claim trends are real when they are clearly not.
If Bill is alleging that the warming trends are not real, that's a rather incredible claim. Bill would then be asserting - without having produced a temperature reconstruction that Bill deems reliable (not even one using whatever confidence interval Bill deems appropriate), and hence without having produced a trend that Bill deems reliable - that the actual trends have some property. But Bill doesn't admit that any trends are reliable in the first place, so he cannot draw any conclusions about what range the actual trends fall within.
And we have other evidence that the globe and indeed the country is warming. Bill would love his readers to think that we don't, despite that evidence...
Meanwhile, Stu 2, you'll note that Bill is effectively arguing against homogenisation here in order to produce temperature records suitable for climate science - an argument you claim "no-one" is making. Perhaps you could at least stop making that claim in future?
Are finally - and this has been asked of other information several times before - are you simply not intelligent enough to stop relying on Bill's invalid claims after their invalidity has been pointed out (several times now), or are you smart enough but instead prefer to actively try to deceive people, but dumb enough to try and do it when most of them have already pointed out many times that your schtick doesn't fool them?
BTW, Marohasy turned up in comments at that HotWhopper article and started out by saying:
You guys are extraordinary… the Bureau have not actually provided any documentation for a site move.
Well, doh! And their methodology does not require such documentation - because requiring it would be clearly wrong in many cases! Way to prove she still don't understand the basics of the methodology she alleges has been abused to the point of requiring scientists to be "thrown in jail", despite all of the corrections to her mistaken assumptions that have been helpfully provided to date!
She seems almost as intellectually intransigent as Stu 2.
And then she doubles down with this:
But let me be generous and consider that one might have occurred… as the Bureau suggests… between paddocks… how could this account for a change in the magnitude and direction of the temperature trend.
Double doh! There's no generosity there, nor is it required, not is it relevant. And if she needs to ask how this could account for a change, a question that appears to rely on the fallacy that the raw data are fit for climate scale trend derivation - and indicates she hasn't bothered to find out the basics about creating climate scale records, then she still hasn't got the slightest idea of how incompetent she is!
Stu 2, this is the Lack-Of-A-Clue Train you've hitched your wagon to. I suspect that all it takes is for Marohasy to make those kind of allegations and you reflexively go along for the ride, which would explain why you feel you "...have to say that Hotwhopper piece has drawn a very long bow."
As Sou observed, BOM have provided multiple lines of evidence for at least one station move. Marohasy has provided how much evidence for not-a-station-move, again? Oh that's right, precisely none.
I posted some comments on Marohasy's latest call for sackings due to allegedly "making up global warming" on that article at HotWhopper.
TL;DR
That particular post appears to be the same kind of train wreck as earlier posts - impressive, given all of the corrections she had to ignore to make it thus.
Just reading now. Very good responses. What troubles me still is why Stu2 cannot read what you wrote earlier here and now at Sou's and understand what is being said.
I can manage, so it cannot be especially hard to parse.
Anyway, thanks for your recent efforts to bring clarity and objectivity to the contrarian murk.
Just reading now. Very good responses. What troubles me still is why Stu2 cannot read what you wrote earlier here and now at Sou’s and understand what is being said.
I can manage, so it cannot be especially hard to parse.
Anyway, thanks for your recent efforts to bring clarity and objectivity to the contrarian murk.
I may at some point use this thread to carry on the conversation with FrankD as my reading extends through recent purchases.
One thing about the pace of this is that I tend to have books spread around and move from one to another as different points of contention arise. A practice I expanded whilst at Uni, as a mature student.
And then I am also studying across different texts on climate change and also and having conversations to do with 1960s FAA history and technical matters. Will my head explode?
Craig,
Thinking in the background here, I have had an idea.
Your rebuttals of the arguments against you are seemingly based on "But ISIS' actions are abhorrent". None of us disagree.
However your claims are all "Islam is shite because: ISIS", and that's where we all disagree with you.
It's no more valid than pointing to Hitler and saying "Therefore Europeans are bad" or McCarthy and saying "BAD AMERICANS!!!".
RELIGION is bad for people. It abrogates the person to the dogma. Religion, at best, tells you about people (what bit of their religion do they talk about: that's an insight into them). See WBC. But that DOESN'T make religious people bad.
Indeed, the problem with religion is that it is so handy for making good people do monstrous acts. After all, God told the priest this was right, therefore it MUST be right!
From Arctic sea ice analysis: "Sea ice extent in August 2014 averaged 6.22 million square kilometers (2.40 million square miles). This is 1.00 million square kilometers (386,000 square miles) below the 1981 to 2010 August average"
Repeat: 1981 to 2010 average - the average when climate warming effects were well under way. Its certainly a lot greater than before 1981, when conditions were colder.
Contrast this with Duff's piffle. Moreover, Duff, Polar Bears do not forage optimally at ice edges but at holes on pack ice where the seals come up to breath occasionally. Trust a right wing nut like you to botch this up.
Again, contrast the data in my last post with Duff's, "With arctic sea-ice growing bigger and bigger..."
I don't know if this is just out-and-out stupidity or willful ignorance or a bit of both.
"But I note today that there is further info at Dr Marohasy’s blog"
should read...
"But I note today that there is further misinfo at Dr Marohasy’s blog"
There Stu2, corrected it for you.
Dr Harvey.
Today is a new day and since my earlier post, more info has become public.
There has been a lack of transparency. BoM unwisely chose to not answer some simple questions quite some time ago.
Luckily, we live in one of those imperfect democracies in Australia and it is still possible to demand transparency from our public institutions.
Unfortunately it sometimes requires the assistance of the media.
It's unfortunate because by its nature, the media likes to sensationalise & exaggerate.
I think it's a real shame that BoM refused to deal with these questions sensibly when they were first asked.
2Pid, you really are a fool! Talk about drinking the kool-aid...
Your epistemic bubble is pathetic.
Sorry Bill.
This particular issue has progressed way beyond that type of behaviour.
BoM has some questions to answer and it is a shame that they chose not to answer them in a normal democratic manner and timeframe.
Stu 2, assertions without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. That goes double when you refuse explicit requests for supporting material.
And you specialise in that.
And furthermore whenever you curiously refuse to provide citations, references or evidence and someone bothers to do the legwork to chase down the facts, your claims almost always turn out to be bogus. We have some spectacular examples to choose from ("Benevolent dictatorship! Fudged temperature records!")
What I want to know is this: are you foolish enough to believe that the most intelligent 98% of readers here don't see straight through this pattern of behaviour and think "spouter of nonsense" when they see your moniker, or are you making public assertions of nonsense in order to reinforce your own belief in it?
Or does the third alternative apply - you're easily fooled by seductive claims that you wish were true, and have a powerful Morton's Demon that refuses to allow any conflicting information to reach your analytical faculties?
And let us imagine for a moment that you finally manage to make a claim that does not fit any of those three options. Do you expect everyone else to believe that you would not answer requests to substantiate it if you actually had the evidence on your side for a change?
Stu2 has some questions to answer and it is a shame that he chose not to answer them in a normal democratic manner and timeframe.
There, fixed it for you.
Indeed Lotharsson. I'm probably in the less well endowed 2% of readers but when I see a Stu2 post words like vacuous, evasive, air-head, and arse-clown immediately spring to mind. It's like the unrelenting tedium of a Brad Keyes thread bomb. At least Keyes was mildly entertaining (for a little while).
Following turboblocke's lead, there's also this:
I'd mention something about actually doing her homework in the first place, but it's already gone beyond pithy...
2Pid, you and your mates can get together and whip yourselves into an onanistic frenzy about Al Gore (fat!), Mike Mann (evil!), climategate ( conspiracy!), Stephan Lewandowsky (even more eviler!) and now the BoM until the cows come home, but it has nothing to do with bloody reality.
It is pathetic. You are pathetic. You'll no doubt go to the grave muttering these poisonous little incantations, the sacred Shibboleths of your dismal little tribe... and what a complete waste of time, resources, space, a life - everything! - you lot are...
More baseless insinuations from S2.
What honest observers note is the complete absence of any evidence that either the national Australian temperature record or the global surface temperature reconstructions are in any way flawed.
What honest observers note is a smear campaign against BoM by liars and shills deliberately intended to erode trust in climate science.
What you are doing, Stupid, is cheering from the sidelines as the front men (and women) for vested interest swap the future for short-term profit. And you are too thick to realise that you are a silly little dupe.
Over the page I mentioned how education is being subverted by disparity in income but there are other forces at work, as Richard Feynman recognised when asked to assess science books for prospective school use which showed that any lingering democracy can be subverted by hacking school texts to suite ideology rather than truth.
Those who think the US and UK are democracies have little knowledge of the twentieth century history of both. They may think they do but then they have not realised that any history they have studied is likely based upon sources and ideas allowed to get through the filters of those who really run the world.
Take the origins of the First World War for example. I have just got hold of a book which looks at history in a very different light :
'Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War' by Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor. One is quickly appraised of the Rhodes-Milner-Esher, influenced by John Ruskin and Baliol College Oxford, secret society with Nathan Rothschild and King Edward VII within close orbit and others such as David Lloyd George, Asquith and Churchill at different layers of the cabal onion.
The authors early on point to the writings of Carroll Quigley scroll down to the 'Quigley and Secret Societies' section to get a taste, but don't ignore the other content.
I'll offer more when copies of those two key books arrive.
More reading. I have a ton of it to do already.
Lionel. I'll add that to my list. But it will have to come after a few others.
One I think I'm going to be disappointed in. Not because the book is inadequate, Henry Reynolds A Coloured History, but because my attention was grabbed by an aside from Reynolds during a "Big Ideas" session a couple of weeks ago. He was lamenting the huge emphasis on WW1 and especially Anzac Day in Australia. His point was that WW1 sucked Australians back into the Strong British Empire vortex when we had been on a rather different trajectory up to that point (Working Man's Paradise and all that). But his book is about the wars between indigenous and settler Australians so I doubt that empire idea gets much of a run.
Sorry deltoids.
No amount of sneering at me will change the fact that BoM is under the spotlight re public reporting of the Australian weather/climate data
They do not have a monopoly on weather/climate data. They are a public service and in a democracy transparency is important and necessary.
No one is arguing that homogenisation in and of itself is a bad practice.
Sorry Stu2.
No amount of sneering by the shills will change the fact that BoM is under the spotlight by them for the simple reason that they are doing everything to undermine the facts about AGW. The corporate bought and paid for shills represent private interests and for them democracy threatens their control of power.
You are a simpleton. That is clear. And your views come straight from the corporate PR handbook.
Fixed the obvious goal post shift and the missing-of-the-point relying on unsubstantiated allegations.
Obvious red herring is still obvious after umpteen explanations why it is a red herring.
(Also, you need to get out more. Some denialists do actually argue this.)
Obvious red herring is obvious.
Also, that fact has been used to point out by comparing with those other records that some of the claims made by those allegedly "shining the spotlight" are false so thanks for highlighting it again - even if you clearly don't understand that you're engaged in self-rebuttal.
Obvious error in the service of mendacious allegations is obvious.
The published methods had already been publicly and transparently discussed in the literature. Those "shining the spotlight throwing the mud" apparently hadn't even availed themselves of the existing transparency before they started throwing mud, so it's a bit rich to pretend that the BoM was not transparent here and ignore the massive dishonesty (never mind the staggering incompetence) on the part of the mud throwers.
You are acting the useful fool for these dishonest and/or incompetent tools, which is why so many hold your pronouncements here in contempt. And the "sneering at you" is entirely justified here because your modus operandi as I pointed out in #3 and in a series of posts on the previous page, is transparently and obviously to play the part of that useful fool by mindlessly and endlessly repeating allegations you never can back up.
Bullshit.
I'm not as inclined to be polite as some folks here, because frankly I'm sick to death of you all - you and your fellow hysterics from the circle-jerk blogosphere can become as mendaciously overwrought as you like, but no such f'ing thing is happening!
It's not. It's a fantasy. A dream. A phantasm. A paranoiac figment of your overactive amygdalas.
The only thing that's actually happening has been described to you repeatedly above. You're a hack. A dupe. a patsy. A mark. A useful idiot.
#14 hear ffing hear!
--
From Nassim Nicholas Taleb recently (author of 'The Black Swan') -
Someone wrote: "Dear Mr Taleb, I like your work but I feel compelled to give you a piece of advice. An intellectual like you would greatly gain in influence if he avoided using foul language."
Answer: "Fuck off."
--
Yay.
Oh, dear, Lionel - Docherty and MacGregor is textbook conspiracy ideation, bearing close parallels to the worst climate change denial. No scholarly treatment? Pal review! No evidence? Data tampering! The facts don't support the argument? We don't need no steeenkin' facts!
Docherty and MacGregor is a ridiculous treatment where the only real light is shone on the authors ignorance. It's difficult to know where to start, because large slabs of it are "not even wrong".
There is enough sensible debate about the importance of various factors that led to the Great War without having to resort to illogic and antifacts. Suffice to say I would not recommend anyone waste their time with such rubbish - at the end of the book, you will know less about what took place than you did before you started. Even for entertainment value - paying for this book merely encourages the perpetrators.
What annoys me is this sort of tripe distracts from the very real anti-democratic forces and real (not imagined) conspiracies in play. There was no need for a "secret elite" when there was an open elite running British Foreign policy in such a way as to compromise the principles of cabinet-based government. But that open elite could hardly work in cahoots with a French government with a life expectancy of less than a year and a Russian government whose personnel line up depended on the whim of the Tsar and changed almost as frequently. All the players genuinely undermined democratic principles in their respective countries, because they were ALL antidemocratic reactionaries. That is all the "conspiracy" that is required.
The outbreak of WW1 is best characterised by Hanlon's razor - "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Which is not to say that the "accidental war" theory has any merit. People in power made choices. Many of those were bad ones due to the shortsightedness, narrow-mindedness or recklessness of their authors. Those choices were made by all parties. And many of them were staggeringly foolish, but few were truly malicious.
If one wants to understand the outbreak of the war I suggest:
1. To get the framework, any decent conventional history - Thomas Ottes "The July Crisis" looks to be one of the better recent ones, though I liked William Jannens "Lions of July" where the source material tells the story with little intervention from the author (other than his choices of material to quote, of course). Even somone like Massey or Keegan is probably good enough.
2. For an opposing, but credible, viewpoint, Chris Clark's "The Sleepwalkers". Clark is a Germanophile and (in my opinion) overreaches in trying to place the whole blame on the Entente, but he has some interesting insights and his detail on the Serbia-Bosnia-Austria part of the crisis is exceptional.
3. Having got the opposing ends (within the bounds of sanity) Holger Herwig's "Decisions for War", which appraises the actual choices made by each country, within the context of their strategic position, available information and decision-making apparatus.
Seriously - this sort of claptrap? I wouldn't waste my time.
Adelady,
His point was that WW1 sucked Australians back into the Strong British Empire vortex when we had been on a rather different trajectory up to that point (Working Man’s Paradise and all that).
It certainly led the trajectory Australia was on to jump the tracks, but I'm more doubtful that it was into the SBE vortex (setting aside the Menzies and so on).
I think the best summary I've heard recently was from Dr Clare Wright (LaTrobe University) in the ABC's "The War that Changed Us":
To be honest, I don't think much has changed, in Anglo-Australia, anyway. Too many Australians hark back to their metaphorical childhood to make adult choices about Australia's future.
FrankD
What I have not gone into as yet were my reservations about Docherty and Macgregor and the reasons why I put the book down half way through. I am re-skimming to rediscover why I did that as it was a few months ago. But having started to read 'Planning Armageddon' by Nicholas Lambert I picked it up again.
I was in the process of making such a post when illness caught up with me again and forced me to desist.
As the condition is continuing all I can offer is that certain elements of Hidden History are food for thought with the characters of Rhodes, Milner, Esher and those that were associated with them being worthy of closer scrutiny and thought.
I have read a number of what you call 'standard' texts including Massey, the later I mentioned over page along with Laurence Lafore. Another mentioned was Thomas Pakenham with 'The Scramble for Africa' and 'The Boer War' both of which back up some of the points made in 'Hidden History'.
I think you are far to dismissive as not all of it is tripe particularly when you consider the historical roots of the Rothschilds in financing the effort of Britain in the Napoleonic War and a conduit for intelligence. My interests go back to that earlier period also.
But I must look up Chris Clark, thanks
Now the world is falling again, erratic blood pressure, I will have to desist again for awhile.
Attention all rebroadcasters of denier lies!
You need to read this.
The bullshit emanating from Marohasy continues to unravel in the face of the facts, Just as everybody here kept telling you it would.
BBD, can we run a pool on how long it will take before we get another mendacious allegation from someone that clearly hasn't bothered to do their homework (because you don't need to in order to be mendacious) about some institution manipulating data to make AGW look worse?
With bonus points if it's one of the commenters here who has done exactly that several times in the past and been proven wrong every time?
And more bonus points if they concern troll using any of the concepts "democratic" and "transparency" and "taxpayer funded/public institutions"?
I'd run another pool on the likelihood of seeing a thorough and apparently genuine retraction of the incorrect claims - not just about the records, but about the institution - from the key touters of said claims at Deltoid, or by Marohasy, or by Graham Lloyd and the Australian - but it would be hard to find someone to bet on the side of it actually happening.
;-)
Lionel - yes, I had noted your Massey references, which was why I pitched it in there. And Pakenham, which I thought was a cracking book.
Sorry if that invective seemed to be directed at you, but it was about D&M. I honestly believe their thesis only survives their own writing of it (let alone any critique of it), by their very selective deployment of facts. So by all means read and reflect, but be aware that there are huge swathes of misinformation in there. Be cautious in any conclusions you draw, but that does not preclude enjoyment or interest .
For example, I'm currently reading "Paris at the End of the World", which ostensibly is about Paris in WW1 and the end of the Belle Epoque. As a history book it is an utter failure, with almost every fact of which I have some prior knowledge being demonstrably wrong. But ignoring its claims as a history book, its one of the most amusing things I've read in ages, as his investigation into his grandfather's war service bring him in to contact with some of the most bizarre people you would never want to meet. It's also a wonderful travelogue of Paris, a city I hope to visit again armed with better insight than previously. I trust (and enjoy) the authors personal journey, but will believe little to none of the "history" without double-checking.
Sorry your BP's wonky, hope you're better soon - always enjoy your comments, even the ones I disagree with.
Lotharsson,
There a 112 stations in ACORN-SAT. I'll bet a shiny penny that we haven't heard the last accusation from the paranoid concern trolls.
I'll bet another that each instance will reveal sound reasons for any adjustments made in the homogenisation process.
And, since third time counts for all, I'll wager a third that before we get to the end of the cycle, we will hear again about how the gummint fraudulated the Rutherglen record. Trolls and zombies, zombies and trolls...
FrankD, I think some of why you have such disdain for such conspiracy ideation is that it can appear to be a conspiracy despite not being *engineered* as a conspiracy.
Look at the inactive collusion that led to the last crash: not one of the players actually got together with any of the others to screw things up, but the rules as they DID conspire to get neutered said, they were allowed to bury toxic deals inside a sugar coat of positive assets.
Much of the conspiracy is due, I feel, to the very richest people ALWAYS get together on regular intervals in MASSIVE secrecy and, due to capitalism equating money with power, worth and authority, the world leaders will go along to have their egos stroked and their biases reinforced.
And they care not if the results are bad for others, as long as they themselves do not achieve any great harm in the process.
Resulting in (in)actions that appear inimical to the populace at large and therefore colluded.
Often, too, actions that are actually inimical.
E.g. Germany would have become a full sized and primary world power if they had finished the train service to the middle east, allowing them access to petroleum products they otherwise have to beg for off the then current world powers (Russia, France and the UK).
WWII inaction was due to the influence of the hidden elites. See the early refusals to bomb german factories in the 1930's because "they were owned by private individuals".
The idea that private property should be destroyed would not be welcomed by those owning much of the world...
The outcome of this is that there is ample evidence to support collusion and ample evidence of non-existence of a conspiracy, since in some cases collusion is not required, only individual action toward the same goal under the same pretexts.
For anyone following the sorry saga of the call for "heads to roll" at the BoM based on apparently little more than someone's delusions of their own super-competence and/or power to reshape reality by simply declaring it, follow the link in first response to this comment.
Anyone wanna bet (as discussed on that post) on the chances of suitably abject apologies being made all round?
Are you perhaps referring to this Lotharsson?
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/acorn-sat/rutherglen/rutherglen-st…
I have to say that Hotwhopper piece has drawn a very long bow.
Who or what do you believe needs to give 'suitably abject apologies" ?
The question has always been about BoM's singular focus on neatly packaging temperature data and then reporting such things as 2013 being the hottest Australian summer on record.
I found the comments here quite interesting.
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16680&page=0
Particularly those made by Dr Bill Johnson.
This is one example:
" Instead of looking down on commentators, why not look at data for yourselves.
I'm the Bill Johnston Jennifer is referring to.
There are many issues with the primary data. For instance ACORN's homogenised Rutherglen minimum temperature series contains an abrupt step-change in 1965, which is indicative of an undocumented station move (fancy trend with that!).
Although trends each side of the shift are no different to zero trend; their quasi-trajectory are influenced by missing daily data, that you could, if you took the trouble, see for yourselves. Missing summer-values reduce average temperatures don't they?
Annual minimum temperature at Rutherglen, has a simple relationship with rainfall, but because of the location, which I know well, it is the opposite of what you would expect. You could check that out too.
These problems are by no means restricted to just a few ACORN stations; they are widespread.
Inhomogeneities are common. They arise from changes in observers; missing data; data rounding; undocumented infrastructure developments etc. Etc.
If the base data are widely and generally faulty, then no matter how they are massaged, the trends they produce will also be faulty.
It is simply not logical to create trends from data that are non-trending. Nor is it acceptable for people to claim trends are real when they are clearly not.
Cheers,
Dr. Bill
Stu2
There's no evidence whatsoever of any issues with the Rutherglen station. Nor any other of the cherry-picks the shills have been waving around.
So we return to the beginning: you are making a baseless accusation of fraud against BoM which you accuse of exaggerating the warming trend in the Australian national data.
That's:
- unsupported
- libellous
- a conspiracy theory
This Dr Bill fuckwit is still banging the "raw data are the only accurate data" fallacy. Either he's clueless, or he's trying to confuse people on purpose. Or both.
The kool-aid is strong in this one. Waste of time 'debating' it.
Can't tell, because you didn't bother to provide the common courtesy of indicating which comment you were referring to.
And yet you can't even manage to state what you reckon is the long bow, let alone why anyone else should agree with you. Why, it's almost like you're hoping that readers won't bother to read the article you're referring to, because if they did they might find your claim to be the only long bow here...
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
That's a transparently obvious attempt to shift the goalposts. (It's also quite obviously not the singular focus of the BoM.) Whoever confidently asserted that to you may have suckered you in but the most gifted 98% of English readers here aren't so easily fooled.
This is the Bill Johnson who I previously reported here relies on his own non-peer reviewed methods to draw those kinds of conclusions. Those methods were examined by a commenter at The Conversation who found the conclusions Johnson draws from his methods are unwarranted (IIRC in part because the methods do not reliably achieve what he asserts that they do).
But that's not all.
This is also the Bill Johnson who allowed his name to be used to "support" the claim in the media - that he could not legitimately make, because he wasn't nearby anywhere near long enough - that there was no station move, despite his own methods (flawed as they are) telling him that there was most probably a station move. So not only is he overly enamoured with his own non-existent brilliance, but he's not the most honest tool in the shed either.
And then he also engages in this lovely example of immediate self-refutation:
If the base data are to be used for climate purposes rather than weather, then the base data are indeed "faulty" for that purpose, however appropriate homogenisation is part of making them fit for purpose. And that purpose includes deriving climate scale trends. Bill saying the opposite doesn't make Bill correct.
As BBD indicates, it's also simply false to spin this process as "creating trends" over climate time-scales. The trends resulting from the homogenised corrected data, whether different from or effectively the same as the trends in the raw data, are the outcome of producing a climate-scale temperature record. The fact that the base data are unfit for producing climate scale trends means that one cannot claim that the "base data" are "non-trending", because it's invalid to derive a climate-scale trend from that raw data. Bill is either completely incompetent on this kind of most basic matter, or he is lying to his audience. (And given the organisation he fronts for, it could be both.)
If Bill is alleging that the warming trends are not real, that's a rather incredible claim. Bill would then be asserting - without having produced a temperature reconstruction that Bill deems reliable (not even one using whatever confidence interval Bill deems appropriate), and hence without having produced a trend that Bill deems reliable - that the actual trends have some property. But Bill doesn't admit that any trends are reliable in the first place, so he cannot draw any conclusions about what range the actual trends fall within.
And we have other evidence that the globe and indeed the country is warming. Bill would love his readers to think that we don't, despite that evidence...
Meanwhile, Stu 2, you'll note that Bill is effectively arguing against homogenisation here in order to produce temperature records suitable for climate science - an argument you claim "no-one" is making. Perhaps you could at least stop making that claim in future?
Are finally - and this has been asked of other information several times before - are you simply not intelligent enough to stop relying on Bill's invalid claims after their invalidity has been pointed out (several times now), or are you smart enough but instead prefer to actively try to deceive people, but dumb enough to try and do it when most of them have already pointed out many times that your schtick doesn't fool them?
BTW, Marohasy turned up in comments at that HotWhopper article and started out by saying:
Well, doh! And their methodology does not require such documentation - because requiring it would be clearly wrong in many cases! Way to prove she still don't understand the basics of the methodology she alleges has been abused to the point of requiring scientists to be "thrown in jail", despite all of the corrections to her mistaken assumptions that have been helpfully provided to date!
She seems almost as intellectually intransigent as Stu 2.
And then she doubles down with this:
Double doh! There's no generosity there, nor is it required, not is it relevant. And if she needs to ask how this could account for a change, a question that appears to rely on the fallacy that the raw data are fit for climate scale trend derivation - and indicates she hasn't bothered to find out the basics about creating climate scale records, then she still hasn't got the slightest idea of how incompetent she is!
Stu 2, this is the Lack-Of-A-Clue Train you've hitched your wagon to. I suspect that all it takes is for Marohasy to make those kind of allegations and you reflexively go along for the ride, which would explain why you feel you "...have to say that Hotwhopper piece has drawn a very long bow."
As Sou observed, BOM have provided multiple lines of evidence for at least one station move. Marohasy has provided how much evidence for not-a-station-move, again? Oh that's right, precisely none.
I posted some comments on Marohasy's latest call for sackings due to allegedly "making up global warming" on that article at HotWhopper.
TL;DR
That particular post appears to be the same kind of train wreck as earlier posts - impressive, given all of the corrections she had to ignore to make it thus.
Lotharsson
Just reading now. Very good responses. What troubles me still is why Stu2 cannot read what you wrote earlier here and now at Sou's and understand what is being said.
I can manage, so it cannot be especially hard to parse.
Anyway, thanks for your recent efforts to bring clarity and objectivity to the contrarian murk.
Whoops. Stuffed up the sign-in. Again:
Lotharsson
Just reading now. Very good responses. What troubles me still is why Stu2 cannot read what you wrote earlier here and now at Sou’s and understand what is being said.
I can manage, so it cannot be especially hard to parse.
Anyway, thanks for your recent efforts to bring clarity and objectivity to the contrarian murk.
BBD (and everyone else), the Sep thread is finally up!
I may at some point use this thread to carry on the conversation with FrankD as my reading extends through recent purchases.
One thing about the pace of this is that I tend to have books spread around and move from one to another as different points of contention arise. A practice I expanded whilst at Uni, as a mature student.
And then I am also studying across different texts on climate change and also and having conversations to do with 1960s FAA history and technical matters. Will my head explode?