A HURRICANE IS A TERRIBLE THING TO WASTE

Given the nation's disastrous political climate, naming hurricanes after politicians seems woefully redundant.

Still, credit must be given where due, and Congressional aides and scientific dogsbodies who segue' into K Street P-R careers merit as much consideration as climate nuisance namesakes as their patrons.

Alpinists on both sides of the aisle should hail Rush & Sen. Inhofe's 

right-hand man by rechristening retreating tropical glacier remains:

MORANO MORAINES

Australians facing coastal dust-ups and rising damp exacerbated by Rupert's canoodling with coal exporters can henceforth bemoan

SINGER SIMOONS
and

SPENCER CYCLONES 

Greenlanders embittered at seeing their icecap go down the drain can complain of 

MONCKTON  MOULINS

As no pseudopundit has done more to disinform conservatives than Gregg Pollowitz of National Review's egregious Planet Gore blog,

Republican Oceanographers should redesignate gaping holes in circumpolar ice : 

POLLOWITZ  POLYNYAS 
 Bast Boras, Taylor Typhoons, Michaels Mesocyclones & Soon Squalls will be celebrated when and as they evolve.

Now that we've got that straight

It's strange how easily a thoughtless epigram can become a political movement's epitaph. Last year, Daily Telegraph climate punditoid and wannabe United Kingdom Independent Party candidate James ' I'm always right ' Dellingpole sent groans through denierdom by telling Royal Society president Sir Paul Nurse on BBC prime -time: 

‘It’s not my job to sit down and read peer reviewed papers.

 I'm an interpreter of interpretations.'

He's just been upstaged by the unlikeliest of competitors, a scatologically challenged troll styled 'economart GM' AKA Gary Marshall, who found his muse in FORBES yesterday with a remark in defense of Heartland Institute dogsbody James Taylor that deserves to be engraved in Comic Sans on a small slate tablet:

'WE ARE SKEPTICS, NOT SCIENTIFIC THEORISTS. 

WE DON’T HAVE ANY SCIENTIFIC THEORIES. 

THAT IS NOT OUR JOB. 

IT’S YOURS. '

FAITES VOS JEUX...

Monckton has been scurrying crabwise away from the wager posed by his nemesis, Professor of Thermal Science John Abraham:

Dear Mr. Monckton, [sic] 

I understand that you’ve claimed Earth’s temperatures will likely decrease by 0.5^oC in two years, but most certainly by 2020.  Specifically, you stated this on a website:“Meanwhile, enjoy what warmth you can get. A math geek with a track-record of getting stuff right tells me we are in for 0.5 Cº of global cooling. It could happen in two years, but is very likely by 2020. His prediction is based on the behavior of the most obvious culprit in temperature change here on Earth – the Sun.”Here is the link: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/27/the-200-months-of-the-pause/

 I am calling your claim.  I challenge you to a $1000 bet on both.  Specifically,
1.     I challenge you to a $1000 bet that the Earth temperature will not drop 0.5 C in two years
2.    I challenge you to a second $1000 bet that the Earth temperature will not drop 0.5 C by 2020...http://www.desmogblog.com/2013/08/28/monckton-challenged-climate-bet-john-abraham 

Viscount Monckton might find Professor Abraham's straightforward wager more difficult to evade if it were written down somewhere harder for him to ignore than a mere Colonial climate blog.

The betting book at Brooks's in St James's comes to mind, because the viscount has on occasion merged his bogus parliamentary logo with its soigne' address (vide supra), to lend false gravity to letters threatening the careers of climate scientists who dare contradict him.

It would hardly be the first bet regarding North American quarrels recorded there, and a plenum of earlier entries suggest the past as prologue to this wager's outcome:

DUD MERIDIAN

Watts' latest guest essay, Clanging of the bells on extreme weather change denies the validity of Bell weather, the 2012 Economist article, whence  comes  this  killer graph  :>
showing how rapidly  the statistical incidence of climate disasters increases with even modest warming.  

As  Wotts Up With That Blog notes : 

He [Bob Fernley-Jones] includes the following figure which is intended to show how the distribution will shift to higher temperatures as global temperatures increase, thus increasing the number of extreme events.
An illustration showing how warming can shift temperatures to higher values and increase the number of extreme events (credit : someone, but probably not WUWT)

Bob Fernley-Jones seems to be critical because global temperatures have only risen by 0.8oC, a negligible amount he seems to be suggesting. He suggests that using absolute temperatures would be a better representation. This is shown in the figure below. Here’s the point though, Bob, the distributions you’re criticising are not distributions of the entire globe’s absolute temperature."

... I really am trying to be civil, but it’s posts like this one by Bob Fernley-Jones that makes me wish Anthony would let someone submit a guest essay about the Dunning-Kruger effect. Hmmm, there seems to be a sufficient lack of self-awareness over at WUWT that it’s quite possible that someone could submit such a guest post and noone there would realise that it was referring to them.  

Could Watts, Herrnstein/Murray and Dunning-Kruger be related  ? 

Watt's success as a cargo cult science popularizer is lent credence by the work of Herrnstein and Murray, whose bell curve axiomaticaly centered on 100 means 47.34% of the population have IQs of 99 or less, a number in excellent agreement with the 158,000,000 fan hits Watts' blog claims.   

It's a wonder so intellectually omnivorous a Heartland Institute fellow as Watts has not explored the link between longitude and intelligence as thoroughly as that between extragalactic muons and tree rings in the Polar Urals, for it is a known fact that the elitist warming conspiracy is latitude-centric, lurking beyond the Arctic circle at the University of Tromso, and PROJECT HARP  headquarters in  Alaska, where chemtrail manipulation has warmed high latitudes beyond all reason by inducing the telluric currents that warp the flux of cosmic rays and Iron Sun neutrinos that combine with underwater volcano eminations to melt the Arctic sea.  *

The only thing proofier than a curve is a map. Recourse to one showing longitude should amply demonstrate to Tony's target demographic that average intelligence becomes a function of longitude as you approach the100th  meridian, along which right thinking people realize that the 100 days of 100 degree weather they experienced in 2012 just go to prove that the earth has not warmed in 15 years.

It is only by abandoning the demographic center of  American Thinker readership, and drifting towards regions of intellectual abnormality that readers will find populations unable to grasp  Fenley-Jones' new math, or fathom the degree to which the MSM have deceived them as to the climate hoax that obsesses the pointy headed denizens of the Left Coast. 

As to the far side of the map, no reasonable reader can believe two-digit longitudes may harbor sentient life, for congressional elections refute that hypothesis every two years.

*All these and sundry other head exploding topics have been aired at length at WUWT,  only to be taken down in the cold light of fisking, to leave a light but malodorous trail on Willard's Policy:page:

• "Certain topics are not welcome here and comments concerning them will be deleted. This includes ...barycentrism,... chemtrails,  HAARP, Electric Universe, mysticism, and other topics...

• For the same reasons as the absurd topics listed above, references to the “Slaying the Sky Dragon” Book and subsequent group “Principia Scientific” which have the misguided idea that the greenhouse effect doesn’t exist, and have elevated that idea into active zealotry, WUWT is a “Slayer Free Zone”. "

CISCO KID FLIPS LID

(THE CISCO KID)

SNARK SNIP SHOCK HORROR !

Were Watts sense of humor less dysfunctional than his blacklist, he might give Yosemite Sam a run for his money. 

Any acerbic comment on WUWT risks swift snipping by the Dear Leader's thought police.

So itchy are his censors trigger fingers, and so vestigial his readers' sense of irony that some feel obliged to add 
( sarc ) 
 [sic]
to comments attempting humor.

So taking to heart Watts' exhortation that readers lend censors a hand, on my last visit, I elected to spare them some effort  by adding the (SNIP) that has so often replaced my prose in the past. If you enjoy watching category 5  blowhards wax apoplectic, Watts response is hilarious ,  but the prize goes to an overwrought minion who thinks '(SNIP)'  represents climate science's  :

"...only defense from being shown purporting fraud. Control through fear.
Happily Anthony knows his software and how it functions enough to cut a potential manufactured threat to the site off at the knees..."

What ever would this semiotic prodigy have done had I put 'parenthesis' in parentheses?

Willard T. Watts went on to do the full Monckton, threatening academic doom and bidding me never darken his webstep again.

Again.

Still, I suppose he has a point about my failing to employ a professional cartoonist. Volunteers may respond by Heartland billboard, smoke signal or postcard.

Nyquist's Revenge

    Why all the sound and fury about naming past intervals, when reflecting on paleoclimatology's signal-to-noise ratio remains about as rewarding as ruminating on what goes into knockwurst ? 

Go Fisk

Borrowing his theme from Matt Ridley, Anthony Watts recently presented his views to a Houston conclave in this summary slide:
________________________________________________________

The Ten Tests to Determine Whether You

Should Be Concerned about Global Warming 

1. The temperature Trend So Far - NOT ALARMING
2. Amplifications and Feedbacks - NOT EVIDENT
3. The Role of Aerosols - ISN'T SIGNIFICANT
4. Arctic Sea Ice Decline - ISN'T GLOBAL. MAY BE SOOT
5. Failure of the Models to Predict "the pause" - CONFIRMED
6. Climate Sensitivity - IS LIKELY LOW
7. Adaptation to Changing Climate - IS POSSIBLE
8. Climate and Future Generations - MAY NOT NEED OUR HELP
9. Reducing Emissions _ ISN'T BEING DONE WORLDWIDE
10. The Integrity of the Surface Record -CREATES ALMOST A DOUBLING OF TEMPERATURE TREND                                                     [sic]

________________________________________________________________________________________

While Watt's powerpointery provides meat enough for a miniseries, I have been content to propose it as the subject of a six minute video, four of its points being too tendentious or self-contradictory to merit even six seconds infamy on Vine.

Needless to say, none of Watt's fellow speakers, including Fred Singer and Willie Soon, objected to a word of this decalogue of National Enquirer headlines.

Readers will be kept informed of this production's progress.

HICKS NIX STYX PIX

Today is Tuesday- this must be Pluto.

While the oil patch wants to lionize astronauts as credible additons to the ranks of climate denial, corn and cattle country Congressmen can't throttle NASA's budget to defuse the climate policy debate without damaging space exploration as well. Like climate satellites, space probes only work if mission control is still in business when deep space instuments and cameras get to their distant destinations.

Two Bastile Day's and another few hundred million miles hence NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will start snapping pics of Nix, Styx , Charon and the rest of Pluto's orbiting entourage as whips past en route to the Kuiper Belt - the cloud of seriously cold planetesmals surrounding the more familiar disc of the solar system.  Not many people have noticed the probe's long outward bound career since it left Jupiter behnd in 2007after returning spectacular views of Europa's erupting sulfur volcano Tvashtar.

Although it's cold outside, and there's no kind of atmosphere, Pluto's northern hemisphere weather has been warming as its pole precesses towards the sun,  creating enough of a heat wave ( if you call half the 77 degree Kelvin temperature of liquid nitrogen heat )  to erode its surface film of solid nitrogen frost and expose the solar wind blasted stuff beneath.

Whatever the surface may be - think radiation crosslinked  tarry polymers, nbsorbs more sunlight than the frozen gas-frost that has begun its spring migration, and in consequence , Pluto is getting redder as the probe approaches, in a faint hearted way mirroring the albedo shift in progress on Earth as warming erodes  pallid Arctic sea ice to expose the deep blue sea beneath.

The moral to be expected from the forthcoming photographic interviewwith the least warm planet in the inner solar system ( yes,  planet- I am as skeptical of the IAU's semantic agression as Heartland Institute's) is that radiative equilibrium is a universal feature of planetary physics - you can't avoid albedo forcing by fleeing to the outer limits of the solar system, let alone hiding behind a cloud of rhetoric on Earth, where the  increasing warmth outside signifies some kind of atmospheric mischief in progress.

OUR FRIEND, CO2

 

Political mastermind Watts chides the strongest living Republican for badmouthing the vital natural fertilizer we canot live without:  

'Speaking of clods, Ahnold...Schwarzenegger got off some good gibes to win the crowd over.

Speaking of greenhouse gas deniers:

 “Strap some conservative-thinking people to a tailpipe for an hour and then they will agree it’s a pollutant!”...

Luboš Motl says it’s a gas chamber analogy'

That's putting it mildly--here's his August 15 pitch 

Arnold Schwarzenegger orders gas chambers for some conservatives

...with his thick Austrian accent...

The Terminator's comments at the National Clean Energy Summit were... unfortunate.

According to the Huffington Post, he has proposed a final solution to some disagreements with his opponents that seems to be highly popular among famous Austrian-born expats (let me not mention a former German chancellor by his name), perhaps even more popular than their irrational opposition to peaceful nuclear energy:

Speaking of greenhouse gas deniers: "Strap some conservative-thinking people to a tailpipe for an hour and then they will agree it's a pollutant!"

An interesting but not original (as visitors of a camp in Poland know) technique. But will it achieve what the ex-governor believes that it will achieve? Will the conservative-thinking people agree that CO2 is a pollutant?



Arnold admitted he used to be a big admirer of his countrymate Adolf and has been lying about this relationship for decades.

I don't think so. It seems more likely that they will agree with nothing because they will be dead and dead people can't agree with anything. Instead, Arnold Schwarzenegger will be tried for crimes against humanity – and I guess that the judges would agree that this method to terminate the lives of some conservative-thinking people is a crime against humanity. He will be shown that the Terminator's being human is a film propaganda and his abilities to escape justice indefinitely are movie fantasies.

Moreover, their death won't have anything to do with CO2. Why?...Carbon dioxide, while a greenhouse gas, is not toxic and it is not noxious. It's probably carbon monoxide that will be responsible for the genocide. Too bad that Arnold Schwarzenegger didn't attend an elementary school during George W. Bush's administration because the "No Child Left Behind" program was firmly in place. He didn't have to become a child who was left behind and a walking confirmation of the stereotype that people with his physique are stupid and redundant piles of pork and related proteins – 

 Since the effects of elevated CO2 are not limited to making  the Tree of Woe grow faster or putting a head on Plzeňský Prazdroj, Lubos ought to read this note from the safety specialists at:

CO2 Gas Hazards in the Brewing Industry July 2013

The hazards associated with CO2 in the brewing industry are well known, yet people still die needlessly every year in tragic and completely avoidable accidents in breweries. Just last year in Germany, which has a good safety record, two workers died in separate incidents at the same brewery.

In the first incident, the owner was found dead with his head and torso in a beer mixing tank... 10 months later in the same brewery a worker was found dead in a pressure tank ... He was found up to his hips in the container and had been poisoned – probably in seconds – due to the high concentration of CO2...

CO2 is extremely hazardous and can kill in two ways: either by displacing O2, leading to rapid asphyxiation, or as a toxin in its own right. Exposure to as little 0.5% volume CO2 represents a toxic health hazard, while concentrations greater than 10% volume can lead to death. 

SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS

Watching Watts & Co. precess from the sub-Newtonian to the post-Velikovskian is more fun than a Perseid meteor shower:

Solar cycle 24 continues the slump

Posted on August 13, 2013 by Anthony Watts

About the only significant even in the last month is that the solar polar fields have begun their reversal, indicating we are at “solar max”, which seems like a misnomer given the low activity observed at the moment. That’s why I think we may have seen the “double peak” and it is downhill from here.

( It's hard to see what he's talking about, as the solar polar field is only a few hundred microtesla--  the last two flips didn't register on the temperature record )

vukcevic says:

August 13, 2013 at 12:30 am

Most of readers here are expecting for the low solar activity to cause (or coincide) with global cooling. My expectations are that low solar activity would coincide (but caused is a very different proposition) with reduction in the Arctic and sub Arctic tectonic activity.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SSN-NAP.htm
As a consequence of the les active sun or the far North Atlantic/Arctic regions, the N. Hemisphere’s climate may cool. Either way scientist (and not only climate ones) will have a new fertile field of research.

Salvatore Del Prete says:

August 12, 2013 at 10:01 am

4.
This flip is nothing like a normal flip and I would not be surprised (as the prolonged solar minimum continues due to angular momentum exerted by the planets on the sun, which Leif also says is not correct) that this may be the last flip , or at the very least the future flips are going to be even less pronounced then even this one.

While some fear WUWT's censorship limits its scientific scope, its censors have views of their own on such vital topics as the ether :

tallbloke says:

THE MEASURING OF ETHER-DRIFT VELOCITY AND
KINEMATIC ETHER VISCOSITY WITHIN OPTICAL
WAVES BAND
http://www.spacetime.narod.ru/0015-pdf.zip

This paper confirms the experimental work of Dayton Miller,... subjected to a rather inept hatchet job by his former assistant Robert Shankland...Shankland was rewarded for this infamy with a string of audiences with Einstein, and a well paid job as a pen pusher in the nuclear industry.

Miller’s work, which ran from 1906 through the mid-1930s, most strongly supports the idea of an ether-drift, 

Miller's Interferometer at Mount Wilson. - Case W. R. U. Archive

This does not bode well for Big Bang or General Relativity. Einstein himself knew that if Miller’s experiments were successful, the jig was up:

January 12, 2010 at 4:01 pm

Some held it was a highly tensile, springy medium which transmitted the ‘action at a distance’ forces like gravity across space, and and at the same time was so tenuous that the Earth would pass straight through it. Others though it more as gaseous fluid, which would be swirling around planets as they passed through it. The now vindicated Miller results seem to confirm the latter view, which would indicate the ether is composed of particles of some sort, which are blocked by shielding around interferometers and everything else.

Of course, permissivity values used in practical design work here on Earth take into account the gases of the terrestrial atmosphere.

And deep in the heart of Texas, appearing as  Watts'  Doctors for Disaster Preparedness:warm-up act, the inimitable Willie Soon  used this graph to Power Point the way to the consilience of implausible astrophysics and improbable geophysics in exorcising sea level rise.

Willie says not to fret about an ice cap meltdown, because in the very long run subduction may take care of it:

INSIDE A TOM TOLES CARTOON

THE DEVIL MADE THEM DO IT

Forget wedges and teragrams. 

The next big thing in forcing metrics is the pentagram:

CLIMATE PROGRESS

Government Acknowledges 2012 Climate Milestones Show We’ve Reached ‘A New Normal’

BY KATIE VALENTINE ON AUGUST 7, 2013 AT 8:42 AM

CREDIT: NOAA

. . . In a press conference Tuesday, Kathryn Sullivan, acting NOAA administrator and co-author of the report, said the findings in the report paint a picture of a “new normal” for the Earth...

The report noted several other climate records broken in 2012:

– The world emitted a record 9.7 pentagrams — about 9.7 quadrillion grams — of carbon pollution in 2012.

The devil is in the details. While Hollywood climatologists agree it takes five starlets to form a pentagram, they have yet to stipulate the amount of CO2 in a telegram. 

FOR WHOM THE POLL TOLS ?

Willard is once more  handing out ballot boxes to stuff.