NOTICE TO THE AUDIENCE : YOU ARE BEING STUDIED.

Effective strategies for rebutting science denialism 

in public discussions

• Philipp Schmid & 
• Cornelia Betsch

Nature Human Behaviour (2019) | Published: 24 June 2019

Science deniers question scientific milestones and spread misinformation, contradicting decades of scientific endeavour. 

Advocates for science need effective rebuttal strategies and are concerned about backfire effects in public debates. We conducted six experiments to assess how to mitigate the influence of a denier on the audience. An internal meta-analysis across all the experiments revealed that not responding to science deniers has a negative effect on attitudes towards behaviours favoured by science...

We found no evidence that complex combinations of topic and technique rebuttals are more effective than single strategies, nor that rebutting science denialism in public discussions backfires, not even in vulnerable groups (for example, US conservatives). 

As science deniers use the same rhetoric across domains, uncovering their rhetorical techniques is an effective and economic addition to the advocates’ toolbox

TOSS ANOTHER BANANA ON THE CUBE OF TRUTH

The brutal battle for the soul of veganism

By Tim Elliott

Like born-again Christians and recovering alcoholics, many vegans credit their awakening to some kind of epiphany; a pivotal, before-and-after moment which allowed them to see the world for what it is, its true essence unmasked, their animal-free futures unfurling before them with rapturous clarity...

For Andy Faulkner, it all began with his penis.

 "For the first 41 years of my life, I was a typical Aussie barbecue-loving meat eater ... Bacon every weekend, steak at night. It was so normalised that I never saw it as an animal – a cow, a duck, or a calf – that was on my plate."

Around his late 30s, however, Faulkner's health began declining. He developed severe back pain and crippling haemorrhoids. He had so little energy that he was struggling to do his job as a primary school teacher. Worse still, he had erectile dysfunction, and was "even looking at using Viagra". One day he was searching the internet for answers when he came across an Australian vegan YouTuber called  Freelee The Banana Girl ...a former cocaine- and speed-using bulimic from Queensland who found fame in 2014 by spruiking a raw vegan diet that consisted of up to 51 bananas a day... impressed, Faulkner began his own banana diet.

"I ate 20 a day for a year. But I still wasn't vegan. I'd go to the fridge at night and grab some chicken."

What really clinched it for Faulkner was Gary Yourofsky. Yourofsky, 48, is an American animal rights activist, who, in 2010, delivered an address to students at America's Georgia Institute of Technology...

"That was it," Faulkner says. "As soon as I saw that speech, I went vegan." 

The results were gratifying. Within two months, his back pain and haemorrhoids had disappeared, and he was enjoying what he describes as "very firm erections"... He now devotes himself almost full-time to... his preferred form of activism...the Cube of Truth.

Originally developed in Melbourne a Cube of Truth ...involves activists... holding TV monitors. The monitors... play a constant loop... including piglets in holding pens drowning in their own excrement, cows having their necks sliced open, and live baby male chicks being fed into a macerator, where they are ground up into pet food... (A spokesman for the national industry body, Australian Eggs, says.. 

"current practice is for chicks to be given carbon dioxide gas so they are unconscious before being disposed of"

V 

THE GUY IN THE CHICKEN SUIT SWEARS BY THEM

LONG A STAPLE ON HEARTLAND CLIMATE CONFERENCE MENUS, SOLDIER FLY  LARVAE HAVE AT LAST DEBUTED IN WATTS' BLOG:

 Yum–Maggots are the answer to feeding a human population that’s heading to nine billion people

PostYum–Maggots are the answer to feeding a human population that’s heading to nine billion people

charles the moderator / 7 hours ago      From The National Post

A single acre of black soldier fly larvae can produce more protein than 3,000 acres of cattle or 130 acres of soybeans...

COMMENTS Jack Miller   July 5, 2019 at 6:14 am 

THE SHELL GAME

THE ECONOMIST NOTES :

(Royal Dutch) Shell may justifiably fear being on the wrong side of history when it comes to climate change. But it needs shareholders’ support to move in the right direction. 

Argonauta nodosa

Though some investors put global warming as their highest priority, most still relish the juicy 10%-plus returns that Shell generates on capital employed in big, risky projects such as oil wells and refineries. They are wary of cleaner-energy ventures such as electricity, where Shell has taken its first steps; returns are steadier, but puny (say 4%). New-energy businesses such as hydrogen and biofuels are seen as financial black holes. So Shell has to coax investors along with a mix of hard cash and prudent investments.

The cash comes from Shell’s legacy businesses, upstream oil and gas, and downstream chemicals and oil products. Last month it laid out a plan to return $125bn—a whopping half of its current market value—to investors, through dividends and share buy-backs from 2021 to 2025. Some analysts worry that it might be planning to drain its hydrocarbon reserves to keep the cash machine running. 

Shell insists that is not the case; it has sought to reassure critics by earmarking most of its $30bn annual capital-expenditure budget over the five-year period for fossil-fuel related projects. As for the prudence, it will only ramp up spending on its nascent power business if it can show that returns come close to those of oil and gas. 

Investors wanting more ambitious climate strategies can put their cash into clean-tech companies instead.

INUNDATION IS FOREVER

The Cornwall Alliance is one of several groups devoted to defending traditional Biblical exegesis against the incursions of modernity. Just as the Vatican opposed the threat of heliocentric astronomy in  Galileo's day, Dominionist protestant dominies like  Cornwall director Dr. Calvin Biesner, Th.D are conducting a Theologically Imperative  holding action against the rising tide of anthropogenic climate change.

The Reverend Doctor's logic regarding sea level rise is internally impeccable.  Forget the thermal expansion of water in a warming world -- the Earth is the Lord's, and He has said on the record. Genesis 9:11:

Thus shall I establish My covenant with you; Never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood; never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.

So forget anthropogenic climate forcing- nothing much can come of it becase Noah.

Yet while this is the percieved wisdom in many oil Patch Sunday schools many  Christian evangelicals, Latter Day Saints and  Old Testament fundamentalists who regard this as nothing less than the Word of the Lord are also devotees of Biblical archaeology, and live in hope of one day finding concrete historical evidence of the events Genesis depicts. 

Exegesis owes a considerable debt to archaeology. Evangelical tourists venture as far afield from the Holy Land as the mountains of Armenia in search of the resting place of Noah's Ark, and many revere sites like Jericho that archaeologists concede to be  five or six millennia older than the Pyramids of Egypt or the ziggurats of Ur of the Chaldees.

However, their cheerful and copacetic embrace of the Song of Gilgamesh, and cuneiform Mesopotamian flood legends as independent and disinterested corroboration of the Biblical flood opens a door leading down into the sub-basement of the archaeology of Genesis. Geophysical research and underwater archaeology have revealed that there was indeed a Flood of Biblical proportions back when ,with writing uninvented, Holy Writ remained unwritten. The event's center was well North of the original Bible Belt, in a land that no longer has a name because it has been under water since the late Neolithic when the Mediterranean cut through the marble lip of then-Isthmus of the Bosphorus , and roared downhill from sea level to  flood the low-lying plains that now form the bottom of the Black Sea.

If that is the epic flood of which Genesis speaks, and Noah made his timely escape from it on the Ark,  what the Lord said unto him was indeed the Bible truth. Never again can there be a flood that destroys the world that Noah knew, because it no linger exists to be drowned anew. The Reverend Doctor is barking up the wrong tree-

the geological record suggests that the rising tide that drowned Noah's neighborhood arose not from global climate change, but the force of gravity that sent the waters of the Med rushing downhill from sea level to fill a depression lower than Death Valley or the Dead Sea on steroids. 

THE GLORIOUSLY ENERGY EFFICIENT 4TH

Today, tens of millions will applaud America's annual amateur geoengineering  experiment, in which  2,500 tonnes of sulfur dioxide are injected into the troposphere in a transcontinental wave three hours long. 

As this aerosol extravaganza  coincides with the annual low in SO2 release from the nation's major sources, heating and heavy diesel fuels  (nobody much drives bulldozers or heats homes on the 4th of July)  wannabe Keelings may wish to skip the fireworks, and harrow the satellite IR data stream in search of publishable climate forcing results. I think I'll observe the latest progress in spectral pyrotechnology instead.

The often wan red , violet and blue glare of old school skyrockets reflected ingredients contaminated with common salt, whose baleful yellow sodium D-line emission washed out less vivid elemental colors.

No longer-  purer chemicals produce purer colors. and increased purification of pyrotechnic strontium , cesium, barium and potassium salts, and new zeolite phosphors to host them, has produced an unprecedentedly saturated spectral palette. Together with new, hotter burning.and hence more brilliant, metallic flash powders ( titanium, lanthanum and zirconium react with the nitrogen as well as the oxygen in air) this has  increased the efficiency and aesthetic impact of colored fireworks as radically as LED development has improved lighting efficiency. 

While US overall fireworks consumption has grown by 70% , so great is the increase in colored light emission by the state of the art  'stars',  that light up  the sky that the weight of mortar-launched display shells, and the amount of propellent needed to launch them, has fallen roughly 60% since the turn of the century.

Somebody should give these guys the Copley medal for having saved the nation close to a megaton of gunpowder at no cost in shock and awe. 

ANNALS OF ALTERNATIVE ALTERNATIVE ENERGY

Solar bitcoin mining operation secreted deep in Appalachia

THE NEXT BIG GREEN THING: COMPOSTING DISHWASHERS

Proposed Dishwasher Energy Standards Turn Back Time

Fourth Generation Standard Would Negate Savings from Prior Energy Efficiency Standards and Result in Unacceptable Product Performance
WASHINGTON, DC (July 16, 2015)-- New energy and water efficiency regulations proposed by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) would result in dishwasher performance that is unacceptable to consumers, essentially turning back the clock to the days of hand-washing dishes. The proposed standards, which will become effective in January 2019, would require dishwashers to cut energy use by 24% and water use by 38%, leaving just 3.1 gallons of water to clean an entire load of dishes in a normal wash cycle.   This will force handwashing and repeat cycles, undermining the energy and water savings accumulated from the three previous standards, and will trigger enormous consumer dissatisfaction.

THE FEDERAL REGISTER REVEALS THAT THE FAILURE OF DISHWASHERS COMPLIANT WITH OBAMA-BIDEN ERA ENERGY REGULATIONS  TO WASH DISHES IN COMPLIANCE WITH CLINTON-GORE ERA DISHWASHER STANDARDS HAS LED TO A NEW ERA IN DISHWASHER REGULATIONS:

This document, concerning dishwashers is an action issued by the Department of Energy. Though it is not intended or expected, should any discrepancy occur between the document posted here and the document published in the Federal Register, the Federal Register publication controls. This document is being made available through the Internet solely as a means to facilitate the public's access to this document.

[6450-01-P]
DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY 10 CFR Part 430   Energy Conservation Program: 
Energy Conservation Standards for Dishwashers, Grant of Petition for Rulemaking

AGENCY: Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Department of Energy.ACTION: Proposed rule.
SUMMARY: 
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) received a petition from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) to define a new product class under the Energy Policy and Conservation Act, as amended (EPCA), for residential dishwashers. 

The new product class would cover dishwashers with a cycle time for the normal cycle of less than one hour from washing through drying. DOE published this petition and request for comments in the Federal Register on April 24, 2018. Based upon its evaluation of the petition and careful consideration of the public comments, DOE has decided to grant this petition for rulemaking and propose a dishwasher product class with a cycle time for the normal cycle of less than one hour.

DOE intends to consider appropriate energy and water use limits for such a product class, if adopted, in a separate rulemaking.

1

DATES: Written comments and information are requested on or before and will be accepted on or before [INSERT DATE 60 DAYS AFTER DATE OF PUBLICATION IN THEFEDERAL REGISTER].
ADDRESSES: Interested persons are encouraged to submit comments using the Federal eRulemaking Portal at http://www.regulations.gov. Follow the instructions for submitting comments. Alternatively, interested persons may submit comments, identified by docket number EERE-2018-BT-STD-0005, by any of the following methods:

1. Federal eRulemaking Portal: http://www.regulations.gov. Follow the instructions for submitting comments.
2. E-mail: Dishwashers2018STD0005@ee.doe.gov. Include the docket number EERE- 2018-BT-STD-0005 in the subject line of the message.
3. Postal Mail: Appliance and Equipment Standards Program, U.S. Department of Energy, Building Technologies Office, Mailstop EE-5B, 1000 Independence Avenue, SW., Washington, DC, 20585-0121. Telephone: (202) 287-1445. If possible, please submit all items on a compact disc (“CD”), in which case it is not necessary to include printed copies.
4. Hand Delivery/Courier: Appliance and Equipment Standards Program, U.S. Department of Energy, Building Technologies Office, 950 L’Enfant Plaza, SW., 6th Floor, Washington, DC, 20024. Telephone: (202) 287-1445. 
   
    please submit all items on a CD, in which case it is not necessary to include printed copies.

ANNALS OF ALTERNATIVE ENERGY: SOLAR MINING STOCKS

1904

EYE SHOCK HORROR: DELLERS OUTS MENTOR AS GREATEST LIVING NORWEGIAN BLUE

RIP Christopher Booker the World’s

 Greatest Climate Change Sceptic

JAMES DELINGPOLE 3 Jul 2019

Christopher Booker, the world’s greatest climate sceptic, has died. 

BRITON MOURNS PASSING OF WORLD'S GREATEST  CLIMATE SCEPTIC

  Booker – “Bookers” as I used to call him on our regularly weekly phone chats – would have hated being called the ‘greatest’ but he was, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, he wrote the definitive book on the climate change scam:

The Great Global Warming Disaster: 
IS THE OBSESSION WITH ‘CLIMATE CHANGE’ TURNING OUT TO BE THE MOST COSTLY BLUNDER IN HISTORY?

... he was one of very, very few journalists capable of getting climate sceptical arguments... in his weekly Sunday Telegraph column.... he made it very hard for his many enemies on the green side of the argument simply to dismiss him as an ignorant crank.,, 

WORLD'S SECOND GREATEST CLIMATE SCEPTIC

unlike more than a few on the sceptic side of argument, Booker did not attempt to cover his rear or make himself seem more reasonable...

Booker, in other words, was considerably more formidable... than most of the tragic little pigmies who made it their business to mock his journalistic columns and to wear him down with vexatious complaints to the Independent Press Standards Organisation...During his long, varied career he had been the founding editor of Private Eye... jazz critic for The Spectator, a... correspondent at the Moscow Olympics and a crusader against the European Union... 

But in our final 

conversations he did admit to finding it extraordinary – as I do – that almost a decade after Climategate,,, we are still no closer to derailing the $1.5 trillion (plus) per annum... vast and powerful climate alarmism industry screams that the sky is falling and that we’re all doomed (unless we spend still trillions more on this non-existent problem…

Booker was like my honorary dad...when the phone rings... I’ll still pick it up half expecting to hear a man about to launch into another hour long conversation ranging from the European Union to climate change to Peter Cook to his schooldays at Shrewsbury: “Dellers!…”

AND I TELL YOU IT'S CHEMTRAILS ALL THE WAY DOWN

 TIRED OF BABY TRUMP BALLOONS? TRY

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

Stratospheric imperialism: Liberalism, (eco)modernization, and ideologies of solar geoengineering research

Kevin Surprise April 18, 2019Research Article 
Once a fringe notion, solar geoengineering via Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) is gaining traction as a climate management tactic within mainstream institutions and factions of the climate justice movement. Cautious considerations of SAI are driven by the layered realities of climate urgency, political inaction, and the potential for climate impacts to harm the most vulnerable. 

This narrative is difficult to dispute, yet it originates from leading centers of SAI research—particularly the Harvard Solar Geoengineering Research Program (HSGRP)—that construct the “necessity” of research, experimentation, and potential deployment under ideological pretenses aimed at maintaining the hegemony of liberal-capitalism. Hence, advanced under the auspices of HSGRP, SAI would constitute a form of imperialism rather than a tool for climate justice. I link SAI to theories of capitalist imperialism, and situate HSGRP within Harvard’s legacy shaping U.S. imperialism and position as a nodal point of liberal-capitalist power. In this context, I identify three dominant ideologies undergirding SAI research at Harvard—ecomodernism, Realist International Relations theory, and Keynesianism—that construct a specific narrative whereby established climate solutions (liberal-capitalist ecomodernism) are frustrated by “anarchical” international politics, leaving the poor vulnerable to near-term climate impacts. SAI is thus positioned as a mechanism capable of buying time for market-driven policy and reducing near-term climate risk. HSGRP directly counter poses this approach to radical elements of the climate justice movement that address capitalism as the root cause of both climate change and global poverty.

MAYBE THEY'LL GET TO FLY HIM ON GROUNDHOG DAY

The Parks Service struck a blow against geoengineering today, by forbidding the 4th of July  D.C. deployment of the first of an exprimental "megasol chemtrail" of Presidential balloons, each capable of  intercepting  megawatts of solar energy in order to cool the capital's swampy  microclimate, and reduce the risk of hyperthermia and sunburn  casualties amongst climate tourists staying at the Trump International Hotel :

Feds ground 'Baby Trump' blimp

Rob Hotakainen, E&E News reporter

Published: Tuesday, July 2, 2019

Protesters had hoped the big blimp known as "Baby Trump" would fly high on the National Mall on the Fourth of July, but those plans have crashed in a big way.

The giant 20-foot balloon will still make an appearance during the holiday celebration, but protest organizers complained this morning they won't be allowed to use helium or to even hoist it 2 feet off the ground.

"It is ironic that it is right here, in the land of the free, the balloon is being grounded," said Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK, the organization in charge of the protest.

Under conditions of a permit approved yesterday, the National Park Service said the blimp "must be filled with cold air only and unable to achieve flight." The permit also requires the balloon "to remain tethered at all times."

The protesters are also unhappy that the Park Service is insisting on a location not visible from the Lincoln Memorial, where President Trump will speak and watch a military flyover.

THERE GOES ANOTHER . 2 % OF EARTH'S ALBEDO

On Feb. 24, Andy May told  Watts Up With That?  readers that:

"Antarctic sea-ice is also growing this year with respect to last year, so global sea-ice extent is going to see an important jump this year."

Yesterday, the following appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science:

A 40-y record reveals gradual Antarctic sea ice increases 

followed by decreases at rates far exceeding

the rates seen in the Arctic

Claire L. Parkinson
first published July 1, 2019 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1906556116 

A newly completed 40-y record of satellite observations is used to quantify changes in Antarctic sea ice coverage since the late 1970s. Sea ice spreads over vast areas and has major impacts on the rest of the climate system, reflecting solar radiation and restricting ocean/atmosphere exchanges. The satellite record reveals that a gradual, decades-long overall increase in Antarctic sea ice extents reversed in 2014, with subsequent rates of decrease in 2014–2017 far exceeding the more widely publicized decay rates experienced in the Arctic. The rapid decreases reduced the Antarctic sea ice extents to their lowest values in the 40-y record, both on a yearly average basis (record low in 2017) and on a monthly basis (record low in February 2017).

Abstract

Following over 3 decades of gradual but uneven increases in sea ice coverage, the yearly average Antarctic sea ice extents reached a record high of 12.8 × 106 km2 in 2014, followed by a decline so precipitous that they reached their lowest value in the 40-y 1979–2018 satellite multichannel passive-microwave record, 10.7 × 106 km2, in 2017. In contrast, it took the Arctic sea ice cover a full 3 decades to register a loss that great in yearly average ice extents. Still, when considering the 40-y record as a whole, the Antarctic sea ice continues to have a positive overall trend in yearly average ice extents, although at 11,300 ± 5,300 km2⋅y−1, this trend is only 50% of the trend for 1979–2014, before the precipitous decline. Four of the 5 sectors into which the Antarctic sea ice cover is divided all also have 40-y positive trends that are well reduced from their 2014–2017 values. The one anomalous sector in this regard, the Bellingshausen/Amundsen Seas, has a 40-y negative trend, with the yearly average ice extents decreasing overall in the first 3 decades, reaching a minimum in 2007, and exhibiting an overall upward trend since 2007 (i.e., reflecting a reversal in the opposite direction from the other 4 sectors and the Antarctic sea ice cover as a whole).

Since the late 1990s, it has been clear that the Arctic sea ice cover has been decreasing in extent over the course of the multichannel passive-microwave satellite record begun in late 1978 (1⇓–3). The decreases have accelerated since the 1990s and have been part of a consistent suite of changes in the Arctic, including rising atmospheric temperatures, melting land ice, thawing permafrost, longer growing seasons, increased coastal erosion, and warming oceans (4, 5). Overall, it has been a consistent picture solidly in line with the expectations of the warming climate predicted from increases in greenhouse gases. In particular, modeled sea ice predictions showed marked Arctic sea ice decreases, and the actual decreases even exceeded what the models predicted (6).

STAY TUNED FOR GARGLING NOISES FROM  CONTRARIAN READERS OF
Strong Arctic sea-ice growth this year | Watts Up With That?

"Antarctic sea ice grew from 1979 to its peak year of 2014, while Arctic sea ice declined from 1979 to 2012."
 STRAWMAN ALERT!!!! Arctic ice is floating on water, Antarctic ice is land bound....".

Pas De Zèle!

 VOL. XXXV, NO. 4, SUMMER 2019

The Empty Radicalism of the Climate Apocalypse 

BY TED NORDHAUS

What would it mean to get serious about climate change?

Well worth reading !