Party Boy Corey Interviewed on Insiders

Very cleverly done - even people outside of Australia may have heard of Corey Delaney - a 16 year old "legend" who threw a particularly wild party while his parents were away and made the news internationally.

Apparently he is now the new leader of the opposition. Thanks to Andrew Bolt.



Plus the Naughty Corey Song - Music Video!

Reasons not to panic

The phrase "catastrophic climate change" is bandied about quite freely these days and some are even losing sleep about it, including children.

But what is the evidentiary foundation of these claims?

How do we know that any temperature rise caused by a doubling of preindustrial levels of CO2 will be "catastrophic"?

Or put another way, what is the "climate sensitivity" to said doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere?

Nobody doubts that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and has a warming effect on the Earth, so additional CO2 must mean some extra warming.

But by how much, (that is, what is its climate sensitivity), is an unresolved question.

Not that the basic physics is difficult or not understood. If the Earth's atmosphere was as simple as a vial of gases in a laboratory the answer is around 1 degree C. That is to say, a doubling of the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere should, all other things being equal, increase the global average temperature by about 1 degree C.

That's all.

So where do we get all these dire predictions of impending doom, citing temperature increases of 4 or 5 degrees or more, or even of "runaway warming" frying the planet, from?

Where do they get much higher numbers for the climate sensitivity of CO2?

In a word, feedback.

What this means is that the Earth isn't a simple glass vial in a lab, but rather an enormously complex and chaotic system that is in a constant state of flux and that changes to one element of the mix affect others and that these effects can either work against another change or make it stronger.

So if any warming effect of CO2 is made stronger by one or more of these other components of the system, this is known as positive feedback.

If they work against the warming effect (in a manner of speaking - push back against it), this is know as negative feedback.

Thus the warnings of catastrophic climate change are based on the assumption (and it is only an assumption, because we only partly understand what the feedbacks are and how they work) that the climate feedbacks are positive and that this multiplies the base sensitivity of CO2 several times.

But as the short video below explains, it is very unusual for stable systems to be built on positive feedback regimes.

But the IPCC and other alarmists have assumed positive feedback in their calculations of likely future temperatures.

So what do real world observations have to say about the projections of the IPCC based upon their assumptions of substantial positive feedbacks and figures for climate sensitivity of anywhere up to 6 degrees C or more?

Well, watch the video and find out. But I can say that they haven't been doing very well and they've had to try and find something else to explain why the planet isn't warming as fast or as much as they think it should be.



Video from Climate Skeptic blog

Bad News

Got a terrible shock this morning reading the Instapundit and learning that Tim Blair has been diagnosed with cancer, and will have major abdominal surgery next week.

Tim talks about it here.

I can't pray or do anything like that, but for anybody so inclined - please say a prayer, light a candle, burn some incense, anything.

Money & influence: ExxonMobil vs Greenpeace

I've said previously that Greenpeace is basically a money making racket, but I never imagined it was so successful at separating the naive, the gullible and the stupid from their money! Over $US2 billion since 1994.

http://www.climate-resistance.org/2008/01/well-funded-well-funded-denial-machine.html

So, what is the very well funded lobbying organisation that is distorting and debasing the climate change debate?

No convincing evidence for decline in tropical forests

"Claims that tropical forests are declining cannot be backed up by hard evidence, according to new research from the University of Leeds."

So where do false green claims end? Greenpeace was saying 20 years ago that 30,000 species a year - that's right, a year! - were going extinct, so give us money. The evidence? They had no idea, just heard it somewhere and it sounded like a lot of extra donations.

Turns out it was based upon a mathematical model built upon false assumptions like these about forest loss.

Then another paper gets published recently saying that upwards of 50,000 species may be going extinct a year. The evidence? There was none, none at all, just the same dodgy mathematical modelling.

Now, I realise many possible extinctions could be of insects and other arthropods that haven't even been formally described yet, but the hard question remains valid for people making these types of outlandish claims - name, say, just 10 animals (insects, birds etc) that have definitely gone extinct in this time due to forest loss.

For those of us in the know, we realise just how hard this question is because we know that the list of actual confirmed extinctions over the last 100 years is a very, very short list.

read more digg story

Update on the average global temperature for 2007

Warning - 10 years of data is probably still too short a time to be speaking about trends one way or another, but if there is any trend, it's a small downward one of 0.05 degree C.

http://denerding.blogspot.com/2007/12/global-warming-earth-cooled-005c-in.html

King's College Choir - Once In Royal David's City

A bit late for Christmas, but I only chanced upon this today. You don't have to be religious to appreciate the beauty of this tune or the choir that sings it.

But why miss an opportunity to diss our ABC yet again? Why it has made the decision not to show the service of Nine Lessons and carols on Christmas Eve any more I don't know, though I suspect that small-minded parochial nationalism is behind this.

Now all we get is a similar kind of thing from an Australian cathedral. The simple fact is that the choir of King's is head and shoulders above the quality of any local one. And this service is a long standing international Christmas tradition.

I'm all for the ABC supporting local choirs and giving people an opportunity to hear them sing, but why play around with this?

And do we really need to see the Anglican archbishop of Melbourne pretending to be an Orthodox hierarch, giving the blessing at the end with the tip of his fourth finger touching that of his thumb? I think not.



And while I'm at it - The Seven Joys of Mary:



Finally, one of my favourites, the old Basque carol The Angel Gabriel:

Are Carbon Emissions the Cause of Global Warming?

(Gratuitous advice for those whose jobs depend on the idea that carbon emissions cause global warming: Find another job to pay your mortgage and feed your kids!)

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“Let them drink rat’s milk” #4

Fixing global warming is important to Google co-founder Larry Page - so why fly 600 guests to a small Carribean island for you wedding, all by private jet? Sir Richard “We must not be the generation responsible for irreversibly damaging the environment” Branson will be best man and also flying by private jet.

read more | digg story

Cold 2007 defies warming predictions

With just a few weeks to go it’s looking like 2007 will be the coolest year this century and possibly the coolest since 1995. If so then one more year like this and we will begin to have enough statistical information to speculate about a downward trend, though a few more years will be better.

read more | digg story

Stolen generations myth claims yet more children

Andrew Bolt explains why the "propagandists who invented the “stolen generations” myth have blood on their hands."

The trees were kidding: world was warmer just a few centuries ago

The IPCC used it in its third assessment report. Al Gore used it in his movie. In fact, no graphic has had such a huge effect as the infamous hockeystick produced by Michael Mann, who used tree ring data to allegedly show that the last century’s warming was unprecedented, and the globe had never in 2000 years been this hot:

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UN chief snows us on Antarctica

In fact, while we’re told to panic about rising carbon dioxide levels, the globe still refuses to warm above the maximum temperature recorded in 1998. Indeed, South America has become very chile chilly, as Alexandre Aguiar of Brazil’s MetSul Weather Center complains:

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The greenest thing about Gore’s company is the cash

“GIM’s portfolio is a run-of-the-mill mix of financial service, healthcare, consumer products, technology and industrial materials companies that hardly seems to live up to Gore’s rhetoric about social and environmental sustainability allegedly driving GIM’s investment choices”

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A professor catches Rudd red-handed on green spin

Rudd was less than honest in the way he described the modelling by MMA, especially in associating it with Monash University.

read more | digg story

Wind power: Ugly, expensive and next to useless

The latest VENCorp annual planning report has yet more bad news for wind farms.

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Greenland celebrates local warming

It’s a reminder that Greenland was once named Greenland for a reason, in days even warmer than these before the deep ice came.

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Best joke ad of the election?

Leave working tipplers alone

THE true sickness of our times is not that we eat too much, smoke cigarettes or knock off a bottle of wine in an evening.It is the ever-growing tendency of medical boards, government officials, politicians and other groups who seem to have nothing better to do than tell us how to lead our lives.

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Grow up Mr Rudd

As Andrew Bolt observed, there's a blogger's vibe to the current series of ads from the two main political parties here in Australia.

Labor anticipated the Coalition's attack on its links to the union movement and immediately had a reply deconstructing it.

Now the Coalition responds in kind.