KULTURSMOG ERUPTION ROCKS NORTHUMBRIA

Josh, court jester & cartoonist to sundry 
Newcastle coal barons and the odd viscount
has blown his top again:

AFTERSHOCK REPORTED :

Josh Cartoons by Josh <josh@cartoonsbyjosh.com>	04:59 (9 hours ago)
to seitz

Hi Russell
many thanks for linking to your version of my cartoon, very amusing ;-)

The cartoons are my copyright (see the link to my website below each cartoon) and are allowed to be reproduced on request and with my permission, which in this case was not sought nor granted. So if you can please remove the cartoon I would be grateful.

All the best

Josh
www.cartoonsbyjosh.com

Dear Josh ;

Many thanks for for your amusing note; I wish you Godspeed in  producing equally funny cartoons  in the future.

Both parody and satire  constitute copright  fair usage  in reference to any object of public controversy.

This is of course a symmetrical point of copyright law, and you do not require any permission from me  to reproduce it. 

 if  it pains you  to see my fair comment on your fair comment on the copyright work of   Compton, Bennett & Hreinsdottir  in  THE JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH 

Climate driven vertical acceleration of Icelandic crust measured by CGPS geodesy^†

compared to your cartoon , just ask and I'll remove the link as a courtesy, failing which you can always ask the Bish to take down the original .

Best regards to Matt

JOSH'S  COURTEOUS NOTE HAS EARNED THE ADDITION OF A RUBRIC DESIGNED TO  ASSURE THAT HE IS NEVER AGAIN ACCUSED OF BEING A CLIMATE SCIENTIST .

 

†DOI: 10.1002/2014GL062446

IF YOU THINK CHARLIE HEBDO ISN'T FUNNY

Has the irony area of  Josh's brain succumbed to cartoonist spongiform encephaly? Today he smeared BEST author Richard Muller thus:

Not to be outdone, Watts soon posted this:

KEEP YOUR STICK ON THE ICE

As New England digs out from its latest blizzard, few recall Los Angeles' recent escape from an unseasonable heat wave that turned black asphalt roads into shimmering mirages as temperatures rose to 106 in the low winter sun.  Could that strange sight inspire the rescue of a Canadian tar sand industry even the Keystone Pipeline cannot save from oil prices in free fall?

The economic salvation of energy companies like Alberta's Suncor could be added value.  Tar sand is hardly the petroleum Texans are used to- converting frozen boreal subsoil into combustable goo, let alone free-flowing fuel entails removing carbon and adding hydrogen. But why bother with energy intensive processing when there's a traditional high added value Canadian  product that could could turn  bitumen's naturally vast viscosity into a feature rather than a bug?  

Nobody does hockey better than the great white north,  yet the national sport  has long depended on a product no more native to Canada than maple syrup is to Mexico:  rubber hockey pucks. 

Why should our northern neighbors depend on an alien product of tropical agrigulture when Alberta tar sand pioneer Rick George, President & CEO of Suncor Energy,  has  pointed to a native Canadian solution.  In March 2008, he told the World Heavy Oil Congress why the Athabasca tar sands require innovative thinking.

“Oilsands may be a hydrocarbon, but you can’t use it as a lubricant— quite the opposite: it contains minerals nearly as abrasive as diamonds. You can’t pump it—at least not without some serious technology. It’s as hard as a hockey puck in its natural state. And you can’t burn it as a fuel—countless forest fires over the millennia have failed to ignite it. The fact is, by itself, the oilsands are worthless. It has no value other than the value we create.”

While oil prices have plunged below $400 a tonne, the free market price of hockey pucks has stayed   rock solid at $19.99 a dozen. At roughly $20,000 a tonne, this amounts to a solid gold Maple Leaf for a goalie's weight in black dirt, rivaling DVD manufacture in added value. 

It is scandalous to let this valuable resource go up in smoke when a glorified waffle iron can stamp it into NHL ready hockey pucks. The fifty to one added value margin means Suncor can forego the environmentally dodgy Keystone pipeline and  sustain its profitability by pucking and trucking a mere 2% of its bitumen production into the sporting goods markets of the world - producing bitumenous bowling balls could be almost as profitable.

Innovations such as these would would not only  cut CO2 emission by 98% , making Quebec as carbon-neutral as the Vatican, but  spare the fair face of Western Canada pimpling with brimstone piles the size of ski jumps, the inevitable byproduct of convention business models for dealing with sulfur-rich tar sands.

George owes it to its stockholders to ditch the unsporting Fraser Institute and hire a real advocate of creative destruction, Canada's greatest living watermelon, duct tape guru Red  Green, to tell Suncor execs to stop pucking around, and turn tar sand mining's real bug,  deforestation, into a productive part of the renewable resource landscape. Trees now bulldozed to create tar pits could enable the horzontal integration of Suncor into a global hockey stick monopoly. 

If American libel lawyers can reinvent themselves, why not Canadian MBAs?  Inflategate already has Harvard B-School sports strategists asking why Canada can't add ounces to the throw-weight of NFL quarterbacks' pigskin bombs by filling them with heavy xenon isotopes from Ontario's Candu  reactors?

ONE DAY, NATURE WILL THANK THE GWPF

PRIMARY SOURCES

.uʍop ǝpısdn pǝuɹnʇ pןɹoʍ ǝɥʇ sı pɐǝɥ ɹǝɥ uı ʎsɐʇuɐɟ ʎɹǝʌǝ

In the begnning, technophilia  was one of the hallmarks of American conservatism,  In the decades following  the Manhattan and Apollo projects, Taft, Goldwater and Reagan all welcomed the sight of science unfolding into new engineering triumphs and expanded knowledge of the material world.  But now we see conservatives of an evangelical bent- and their neoconservative political allies shun science as  as an affront to metaphysical underpinnings of their systems of  belief.

The architects of faith-based policy, from The Discovery Institute and The  Center For Ethics and Public Policy, to editorial boardroom of First Things  barely wag a finger as diehard heliocentrists declare "Gallileo was Wrong : The Church Is Right ! "  and subscribers to The New Atlantis and The Weekly Standard adduce conservatism as a system of belief rather than a collection of principles owing as much to John Locke  and Adam Smith as Aristotle and the Decalog.

In the vanguard of science denial in the Climate Wars we see Dominionists and Straussians advancing the political precedence of metaphysics over materialism. In their  view the inability to grasp biology as the product of random and meaningless  mutation is a display of virtue, as is a refusal to consider that teleology applies  to intentional acts of climate forcing as well as purpose in biology

Where ever do they get the entities that pass for ideas  in their public conversation ?  Certainly not from  Hegel. Nuance and rigor are equally lacking from the rhetoric of anti-scientific motives that powers neocon discourse on education and the environment, and the think tank wights that write for its journals would sooner be  caught spouting Marx than dealing in categorical imperatives or flirting with  Quine or Rawls. So where are the wellsprings of conservative disenchantment with the science that has driven the acceleration of the history of the modern world ?

The embrace of metaphysics  and political mythology  over modern science  by neoconservatives and evangelicals all too vividly recalls  this New England literateur :

"WE LIVE ON A PLACID ISLAND OF IGNORANCE IN THE MIDST OF THE BLACK SEAS OF INFINITY, AND IT WAS NOT MEANT THAT WE SHOULD VOYAGE FAR...

The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality ... that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

                          H.G Lovecraft

ORESKES TIPS HER HAND

En route to  the movie of her book, the latest vice-presidential court historian to earn a Harvard appointment swoops in full cry upon her lawful prey : 

       A dead white male,  name of Milton Friedman.

A half hour of verbal cutaways follow, leaving the distinct impression that $45,000,000 spent on a decade of tobacco-free biology research at Rockefeller University that led to the 1993 Nobel Prize in medicine, for prions, was spent instead on cigarette industry PR.

Incidentally, the correct citation for  "$45,000,000 dollar man"  meme is  an article in that not very learned  journal Vanity Fair , which got it in turn from  two other fountains of 'Merchants of Doubt ' historiography, 'Ecosyn', the collected online  works of 'Lion Kurtz, Science Cop' and the 'BushHitler' conspiracy website. 

These primary sources have oddly gone missing from the scholarly apparatus of  Prof. Oreskes book. Will they be missing from the screen credits too? 

ANOTHER D-MNED THICK SQUARE BOOK, EH, MISTER GIBBON?

Judith Curry deserves thanks for an unintended  epiphany: the appearance of Volume II makes the Heartland Institute's self-congratulatory NIPCC Report  thicker than The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but why does the PR business bother subsidizing  all the scribble, scribble, scribble  ( and daub ) that goes into such spectacularly bogus works of climate skepticism?  

The answer is that bad lawyers need worse books.


Here, revised from Judy's Marshall Institute gig is a sketch that shows Singer & Bast's 4-pound magnum opus being put to its intended use:

Singer's opponents in contrast,  continue to produce books worth reading, like  Eija Korhola's intriguing Helsinki  doctoral thesis, 

CLIMATE CHANGE AS A POLITICAL PROCESS

ANTHROPOIDS BEHAVING BADLY

It wouldn't be the Anthropocene without anthropoids behaving badly. The South Park of the Climate Wars has just furnished further evidence that Watts' fanboys have escaped the ravages of evolution:

COMING  SOON FROM  PLANET WATTS : AN ENTIRE PAGE  OF  RICHARD  ALLEY OOP  JOKES,  RATED PG-13

THE TRUTH THAT SETS MEN FREE

IS SELDOM THE ONE WATTS, CLIMATE AUDIT ,  OR BISHOP HILL READERS WANT TO HEAR, BUT  IT  SPEAKS  FOR  ITSELF  ANYWAY.

Another WUWT sympathizer  has escaped to the side of physics:

ALDO THE RED AND THE CHAINSAW QUEEN

To paraphrase Lenin, you can't make an omlette without breaking watermelons. 

Word that Brazil's new Science Minister is a true-blue Red State Red  seems  to  have  equally dismayed the environmental Left, and Neocons given to chanting 'Green on the outside, Red on the inside.' 

Simon Romero, The New York Times man in Rio reports:  

Calling Aldo Rebelo a climate-change skeptic would be putting it mildly. In his days as a fiery legislator in the Communist Party of Brazil, he railed against those who say human activity is warming the globe and called the international environmental movement “nothing less, in its geopolitical essence, than the bridgehead of imperialism.”

...his appointment this month as minister of science by President Dilma Rousseff is causing alarm among climate scientists and environmentalists here, a country that has been seeking to assert leadership in global climate talks.

“At first I thought this was some sort of mistake, that he was playing musical chairs and landed in the wrong chair,” said Márcio Santilli, a founder of Instituto Socioambiental, one of Brazil’s leading environmental groups. “Unfortunately, there he is, overseeing Brazilian science at a very delicate juncture when Brazil’s carbon emissions are on the rise again.”

Socialist International president turned United Nations Environmental Program head Dr. Gro Brundtland has yet to call Comrade Rebelo a Left  Deviationist,  but  Environmental  Defense  Fund  Director of Tropical Forest Policy Steve Schwartzman styles him an 

"old-line Communist fan of Marx and Engels,... on exactly the same page on climate science as the hardest of the hard-core tea  partiers  in  the  United  States : it’s  all  speculation  – ‘scientism’ – not real science.”

Schwartzmann isn't happy with Aldo's counterpart, either:

'The new Minister of Agriculture [ former Senator ] Katia Abreu  ...led the Congress’ powerful anti-environmental, anti-indigenous 'bancada ruralista' or large landowners’ caucus, and earned the title among environmentalists of “chainsaw queen.”

Will  Rebelo & Abreu's 2012 widely reviled revision of Brazil's forest protection laws divert Chris Mooney from his  war on Republican scientists?  The Climate Progress party line thus far remains  pas d’ennemi à Gauche , in more ways than one.

CAPTAIN WILLARD'S CLAMSHELL ALLIANCE

While the Spongebob Squarepants of  the  Palaeoclimate Wars  stalks

the giant clam  as propaganda fodder, others are putting the megamolluscs to more tasteful use . 

If grown to 100 kilogram adulthood, these tropical creatures can be a trifle tough on the half shell,  but  slow-cooked Tridacna gigas chowder presents a savoury and nutritious way for people to consume their way into carbon neutrality by turning their trash into an environmental treasure.

Eating just one jumbo giant clam a day can mount into a yard-filling shell midden in the space of a year, and since the clam's carbonate carapace is almost pure limestone -- white as a cool roof and  1/7th carbon by weight, soup sequestration could easily offset the average American's  6 tonne a year addition of carbon to the atmosphere, and spare suburbanites much hard labor by eliminating the need for gas guzzling trips to the garden center to fetch lime for the lawn.

A trifling investment in dimensional analysis reveals added benefits.  Removing a cubic foot or more of clam per capita from the water each day could take a bite out of sea level rise, as  tens of cubic meters  of clamshells a year times 7,000,000,000 chowderheads could generate enough tonnage of abstracted water for each square kilometer of ocean surface to stem the rising tide of thermal expansion by nearly a milimeter. 

With enough chowder, and long enough driveways, SUV owners can put Prius drivers to shame for discarded giant clamskells can be crushed into an ideal driveway paving  enough of which can offset or even reverse the impact of the fuel these gas guzzlers burn,  for the clamshell's high albedo can amplify the white roof effect in rolling back the urban heat island effect of the black asphalt that covers all too many roofs and roads today.

IT'S NEVER TOO SOON TO JUMP THE CLAM

TIRED OF CHERRYPICKING?  TRY  CHERRYSTONES !
WATCH WILLIE & WATTS  FORAGE  FOR  FACTOIDS  IN THE SOUTH CHINA SEA : 

China Sea for the past 2500 years: A unique look into seasonality and seasonal climate changes during warm and cold periods

• Hong Yan, 
• Willie Soon, 
• Yuhong Wang

doi:10.1016/j.earscirev.2014.12.003

Get rights and content

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Abstract

High-resolution late Holocene climate records that can resolve seasonality are essential for confirming past climatic dynamics, understanding the late 20th century global warming and predicting future climate. Here a new composite record of the sea surface temperature, SST, variation in the northern South China Sea (SCS) during the late Holocene is constructed by combining seven seasonally-resolved coral and Tridacna gigasSr/Ca-based SST time-windows with the instrumental SST record from modern interval between 1990 and 2000. This composite multi-proxy marine record, together with the reconstructions from mainland China and tropical Western Pacific, indicates that the late Holocene warm periods, the Roman Warm Period (RWP) and Medieval Warm Period (MWP), were prominently imprinted and documented in the climatic and environmental history of the East Asia–Western Pacific region. Meanwhile, substantial and significant SST seasonality variations during the late Holocene were observed in the composite record. The observed increase in seasonality (or amplitude of seasonal cycles) during the cold periods around our study area was probably caused by the different amplitudes between winter versus summer SST variations in northern SCS, with much larger SST variation during winters than during summers for the late Holocene. In addition, the distinctive warm, cold and neutral climatic episodes identified in our northern SCS composite SST record correspond well with other paleo reconstructions from mainland China and especially well with the Northern Hemisphere-wide composites by Moberg et al. (2005) and Ljungqvist (2010). The overall agreement however also calls for more information and insights on how seasonal temperatures and their ranges vary on decadal–centennial timescales.

WHILE  MAKING  LIBERAL  USE  OF   HOCKEY  STICKS 
COMPOSITE  PALAEO RECONSTRUCTIONS 
AS   MEDIEVAL  OCEAN  TEMPERATURE   PROXIES ,
WILLIE  & CO.  IGNORE  THE  ISOTOPIC SYSTEMICS
 OF  ARCTIC   CLAMS  LIKE   A. islandica,  
THAT  POINT  DOWN ,  NOT  UP