Newcastle did not beat Manchester United today, because the long term trend is for Manchester United to beat Newcastle.
– Bishop Hill’s quote of the day today. He found it here. This is the game being referred to.
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Commenting on this reaction from Bishop Hill to a not-all-that-biased-by-their-standards BBC show about windfarms, regular BH commenter Philip Bratby says:
Bratby then mentions a website about a campaign called “Slay The Array”. Slay The Array seems to be an alliance between those who oppose these giant propellers on aesthetic grounds, and those who oppose them on economic grounds, and they have set their particular sites on a vast clutch of propellers (the “Atlantic Array”) which some gang of well-connected thieves and/or lunatics intend to build in the spot where the Severn Estuary turns into the Bristol Channel. Personally I quite like the look of these giant propellers. But then, I like pylons, and skyscrapers, even scaffolding. As for wildlife, some of it will suffer if they build all these propellers, but other life forms will benefit, just as with every other human impact upon the environment. However, I am entirely persuaded that, economically, these erections are ridiculous, in fact utterly fraudulent. So, for me, the biggest objection to them by far is this one:
If Artists Against Windfarms (who get a mention at the Slay The Array website where it says “our friends”) oppose these stupid, larcenous but to me rather handsome propellers on artistic grounds, that’s fine by me. January 2nd, 2012 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
 December 22nd, 2011 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
In Ecuador in 2003 a trial began against Texaco who were accused of dumping toxic material in the Amazon. They were ordered to pay $18bn in damages. Chevron bought Texaco, and they are fighting back. Their evidence includes out-takes from the documentary movie Crude. Wizbang links to some of the video (via Small dead animals, via Counting Cats). One of the video’s protagonists talks of using smoke and mirrors and bullshit in the Ecuadorian court to explain away the fact that the scientific reports only showed localised contamination. Chevron have some web pages with the background and more videos. I like it when companies bluntly defend themselves so publicly. None of this is to do with fracking, but it does shed some light on the opponents of oil exploration. Meanwhile, an Investors Business Daily piece (via Junk Science) suggests that as of May, the Environmental Protection Agency was not aware of a proven case of water being affected by fracking, and that recent concerns about this may be due to contamination from the chemicals the EPA used when drilling its own wells. Update: Now Instapundit is saying that the EPA struck gas! All of which suggests we need to be on our toes when faced with evidence of the dangers of fracking. December 14th, 2011 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Incoming email from newly signed up Samizdatista Rob Fisher (who can only do emails right now) about how Oxfam is proposing a global shipping tax. Watts Up With That? has the story. Says Rob:
Says Anthony Watts:
Says Bishop Hill commenter ScientistForTruth:
I do enjoy those Bishop’s Gaff Bishop’s Rules bits in his comments section. Perhaps “what a bunch of total snips” will catch on as an insult. December 7th, 2011 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Leo Hickman of the Guardian is apparently angry (as Bishop Hill mentions here) that the Spectator published an article by sea level expert Nils-Axel Mörner, an article I recycled the concluding paragraphs of as a(n) SQotD here on Thursday, and Leo Hickman isn’t the only one. The general mood in the CAGW camp is: get Mörner! To this end a commenter (“schoolswot” – today 11:10am) at Delingpole said this of Mörner:
To which commenter “rastech” (circa 1pm) replied:
So, it’s now officially official. Dowsing, like cold weather, is now right wing. All this in a comment thread attached to a Delingpole piece about Jeremy Clarkson, and about how all the shouting about Jeremy Clarkson is really about diverting attention from the fact that the recent public sector strike, some time last week, was a failure. Although, Guido reckons Clarkson is now laughing all the way to the bank. They haven’t so much diverted attention from the failure of their strike as given a ton of free publicity to someone who said, admittedly in his characteristically OTT manner, that the strikers were idiots. Please try to keep your comments on topic. The topics being: Leo Hickman, the Guardian, Nils-Axel Mörner, dowsing, whether tea really does taste better if made with water filtered through sandstone, James Delingpole, the BBC, public sector strikes, Jeremy Clarkson, whether it’s okay for Jeremy Clarkson to joke about people being taken out and shot without really meaning it, Guido Fawkes, how to get tabloid publicity by the ton, paper money collapse … well, I didn’t mention paper money collapse until now, but I thought I ought to. December 3rd, 2011 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment claimed that ‘there is strong evidence’ of sea level rising over the last few decades. It goes as far as to claim: ‘Satellite observations available since the early 1990s provide more accurate sea level data with nearly global coverage. This decade-long satellite altimetry data set shows that since 1993, sea level has been rising at a rate of around 3mm yr–1, significantly higher than the average during the previous half century. Coastal tide gauge measurements confirm this observation, and indicate that similar rates have occurred in some earlier decades.’ Almost every word of this is untrue. Satellite altimetry is a wonderful and vital new technique that offers the reconstruction of sea level changes all over the ocean surface. But it has been hijacked and distorted by the IPCC for political ends. In 2003 the satellite altimetry record was mysteriously tilted upwards to imply a sudden sea level rise rate of 2.3mm per year. When I criticised this dishonest adjustment at a global warming conference in Moscow, a British member of the IPCC delegation admitted in public the reason for this new calibration: ‘We had to do so, otherwise there would be no trend.’ This is a scandal that should be called Sealevelgate. As with the Hockey Stick, there is little real-world data to support the upward tilt. It seems that the 2.3mm rise rate has been based on just one tide gauge in Hong Kong (whose record is contradicted by four other nearby tide gauges). Why does it show such a rise? Because like many of the 159 tide gauge stations used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, it is sited on an unstable harbour construction or landing pier prone to uplift or subsidence. When you exclude these unreliable stations, the 68 remaining ones give a present rate of sea level rise in the order of 1mm a year. If the ice caps are melting, it is at such a small rate globally that we can hardly see its effects on sea level. I certainly have not been able to find any evidence for it. The sea level rise today is at most 0.7mm a year — though, probably, much smaller. We must learn to take the environmentalists’ predictions with a huge pinch of salt. In 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme predicted that climate change would create 50 million climate refugees by 2010. That was last year: where are those refugees? And where are those sea level rises? The true facts are found by observing and measuring nature itself, not in the IPCC’s computer-generated projections. There are many urgent natural problems to consider on Planet Earth — tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions not least among them. But the threat of rising sea levels is an artificial crisis. – Sea level expert Nils-Axel Mörner rips into the climate catastrophists. See also this piece, which drives a dagger into the heart of the climate catastrophe fraud. December 1st, 2011 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is an attempt to get an Instalanche, so he will probably ignore it just to make the point that he doesn’t do Instalanches for anything that flat out asks for it. Although, on the other hand … Either way, two recent objects of linkage at Instapundit in recent times have been Climategate and Goldman Sachs. Well, this Climategate email, spotted by Bishop Hill commenter “GS” (3:27pm), concerns Goldman Sachs, so the Prof ought at least to be interested:
Instapundit has also long been interested by the BBC, as a phenomenon of more than local interest. So I would also recommend to him, and to people generally, a read through of the Bishop Hill comment two down from that one above, this time from “ThinkingScientist” (3:41pm). He copies and pastes an email from a BBC Producer to Keith Briffa, about how Briffa must “prove” (the BBC Producer’s inverted commas) in a BBC TV show that there is something very extreme about the supposed current warming spurt. In other words, Briffa must put the C (for catastrophic) in CAGW. GW for global warming has clearly been happening, although it is not nearly so clear that it is still happening now. (Anyone who denies the second is routinely accused of denying the first.) A for anthropogenic GW is widely believed in, but its scale and even existence are matters of fierce controversy. It’s that C for catastrophic on the front of AGW that this is all about. For a power grab this big, there has to be a C in there. LATER: And, we have our Instalanche. Many thanks sir. (And thanks to the commenter who corrected my earlier wrong spelling of Instalanche.) November 28th, 2011 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Watts Up With That: “They’re real and they’re spectacular!” Scroll down to find the bit torrent link to the FOIA2011.zip file, though it is not working for me right now. Leo Hickman in the Guardian: not happy. November 22nd, 2011 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
In its varying degrees, the political, legislative and social applications of environmental science studies in this 21st century should be carefully compared to that of Eugenics in the late 19th and through the mid- 20th centuries. – Redoubtable serial commenter ‘RRS’ November 18th, 2011 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Well thank you IPCC authors for letting us know what is really behind that “very likely” assessment of attribution [of] 20th century warming. A lot of overbloated over confidence that cannot survive a few years of cooling. The light bulbs seem to be just turning on in your heads over the last two years. Think about all the wasted energy fighting the “deniers” when [you] could have been listening, trying to understand their arguments, and making progress to increase our understanding of the causes of climate variability and change. – Judith Curry, the climate-change non-alarmists’ favourite climate scientist, commenting on an article by Paul Voosen on Greenwire: “Provoked scientists try to explain lag in global warming”. October 31st, 2011 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
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