Scottish Sceptic

I just posted a response to Latimer Alder on Bishop Hill:

Me: ‘The prevailing methodology in science is to create a model that fits the data. As such, scientists tend to assume all “science like” problems should all be tackled by creating a model and using that to predict what will happen.’

Latimer Alder: Wow. We used to do experiments instead. And test any models against them. Do they just leave out this essential step nowadays?

When I realised that my reply was based on a statistical evolutionary concept of theory building whereas I suspect Latimer’s question was based on the idea that there is only one theory which people uncover by enquiry much as an archaeologist uncovers a ruin by trial and error digging – I thought I’d follow this line of thought further and wrote this.
But beware … this is a personal note to myself working through this idea. The only reason I let to read it is because thinking someone might be daft enough to read this helps me write something that I have some chance understanding when I’ve forgotten why I wrote it. Continue reading →

I once wrote:-

I have a dream that my four little children will me day live in a world where they will not be judged by the colour of their party but by the content of their character.

Today we live in a world where individuals no longer matter. To the academics a climate sceptic is not a person who comes to their views because of their differing experience and skill set, they are part of an evil group of “deniers”. But many sceptics are just as bad, “warmists”, “eco-zealots”, are also group stereotypes that do not do justice the the massive variation of viewpoints in those supposed groups.
In ancient Greece, they had a political system which was not based on the “colour of your party” or your “grouping”. Indeed, the system that grouped people by their “colour” and asked people to chose the “colour” they preferred was seen as wholly evil and anti-democratic.

We still have the system they developed: the jury.

However, the quote was not about the jury. It was about a system developed to replace the present House of Lords selection process by a jury.  (OK, that sounds boring, but please read on.) Continue reading →

An environmentalist at the “SaveLenzieMoss” campaign which I seem to have been nominally acting spokesman rang me today to say that we had saved Lenzie Moss.
Whilst this isn’t strictly true as part of the Moss is still under threat, the area of main concern which could effectively “pull the plug” on the moss and drain the area destroying the whole area should be saved.
However, the whole episode has left a bitter after-taste. East Dunbartonshire council have come out of this looking like a bunch of sharks who all along planned to destroy the Moss in order to turn over the area to housing. The whole episode shows the way the land developers will step by step eat up all the green land around Glasgow until Lenzie is just another bit of urban slum in the greater Glasgow sprawl. But worst of all is the green part and other eco-groups. Because the Scottish green party did nothing at all to help this area and in fact there were more sceptics active in the campaign than greens!
But, let me be frank. Apart from attending a few meetings (and creating a website, posing for a photo, taking some others, delivering a few leaflets (like others)) … I didn’t do much as most of the work was done by one passionate individual named Christine.
And the big unanswered question: was I a nimby? Or did it really matter to anyone outside this area that we saved this “educational resource”? Or perhaps the answer is much simpler: the local council do F all for people in my area and given that there are next to no shops, no pubs, restaurants, no work units … in short almost nothing except a local school (which is good) the least we should expect of our local council is that they don’t destroy the only thing (no thanks to them) that makes this area half bearable: Lenzie Moss.

I was just thinking about the Lorry driver I met yesterday who was so vehemently opposed to “Alex Salmond’s folly” even though he was making money transporting wind loads.
He wouldn’t care less what prof Jim Al-Khalili said about the effect of CO2 … because for many of the population, the views of these academics which has become the face of “science” is just a joke.
I am reminded of the saying that the money earned by one generation will spent by the grandchildren. During the industrial revolution, the vibrant engineering companies transferred their skills and understanding to academia to create a scientific establishment which was the envy of the world.
A few generations later (in the reign of Thatcher), the scientific establishment, the child of British industry and engineering, turned against its parents and stabbed us in the back. Now that thankless, ungrateful and ignorant child has found politics, gone off to some hippy commune, thrown their lot in with new-age paganist greens and despises their parents and is wasting away the gains of previous generations.
Let me put it this way. If my three kids ask about science … I cannot honestly praise British science and suggest they seek a career there. As a science graduate, I would like to be able to say “yes a science degree is a good thing”. But the reality is that academic science is so politically motivated and so appalling at delivering anything useful to those doing degrees or to society in general … that whilst I would prefer a scientifically literate society, I cannot in all honesty recommend British science to anyone.
At least as far as Britain goes, I think we have seen the end of the age of science. Science has become a novelty act, a quaint thing to gorp at, a clown-like guest for journalists to fill out the silly season.

If I am ever bored or feeling down I often turn to the Wikipedia article on Global warming to get a laugh – almost invariably it turns up trumps.
So what was it today?
There was a time a few years ago when I noticed a day on the Wikipedia article when there was no change. That in itself was a landmark. When I tried to edit the article there were dozens if not hundreds of edits a day.
Today, I noticed that almost for the whole of July (if we exclude formatting changes and reverted edits) there had only been one substantive change. What was that change? A familiar named editor “Enescot” (usually meaning a warmist) made the change:

Future warming and related changes will vary from region to region around the globe.

Changed to:

Future climate change and associated impacts will vary from region to region around the globe.

And the reason given:

Enescot  . . (Slight change in lead. Most – but not all – regions will experience warming, so “climate change” is a better term to use)

So what?  “Most – but not all”. Or to put that another way, from “every area will warm” it has become “on average more areas will warm than cool”, which is exactly how most sceptics would express the small impact of CO2.
But more importantly, I have long argued that there is no such thing as “Global warming” because unless you specify the time period it is just a nonsensical idea. E.g. we have warmed since the ice age, cooled since the time of the dinosaurs and no doubt the world warms and cools as it gets nearer and farther from the sun each year.
So, in reality the Wikipedia article “Global warming” was pure and simple propaganda with the message “mankind is warming the planet”. A message we all know is false as it is currently not warming: a message which the zealots who run Wikipedia would never allow to be diluted. And yes, for a while I tried to get them to change the name to something that was less obviously biased like “Manmade Climate Change” but no.
Fortunately people have far more common sense than those editing the article because calling it “Global warming” when it is not warming is tantamount to putting a notice up saying “Nothing in this article can be taken as true!” So, the result has been that the article (much like the idea of Wikipedia neutrality)  has died on a its feet. It is there in name, but the number of active editors have plummeted, those who do contribute clearly have no knowledge of the climate.
Now we have effectively had the first month where the only change was “sceptical” … to do what I suggested a long time ago: change “Global warming” into “Climate change” … and note it was not even “man-made climate change” … in other words it now admits what we sceptics have been saying all along: “the climate changes”.

I’ve just heard news that the Whithorn Trust has a funding shortfall of £18,500 and will be forced to shut down this summer. If this happens, its museum and visitor centre will also close.
Please: http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/save-the-whithorn-trust.html
Whithorn is one of the earliest Christian sites in Britain and has a good claim to be the first church in Scotland as about 731 AD the Venerable Bede writing of Whithorn and St. Ninian said: the Southern Picts “a long time before. (Columba’s ministry in 565 AD) embraced the true faith as the fruit of the preaching of Ninian, a Briton, a deeply revered bishop and a man of great sanctity”.and is recorded is some of the earliest history.
The visitor centre tells the story of Whithorn from its Early Christian beginnings to the time when its medieval priory was a renowned pilgrimage venue. With a history spanning more than 1500 years, Whithorn stands alongside Iona and St Andrews as one of the most important religious sites in Scotland. It began sometime around AD 500, as a monastery and trading centre with links to the Mediterranean.
See Also: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-south-scotland-22380085

After a lapse in any blogging I’ve had a rush of posts on various topics to Scottish Sceptic.  And when Climategate III came along I remembered the fun in blogging … and it seems others like Philip Bradley had the same idea. But as is my character, as soon as I saw that Philip Bradley had set up a new blog I started thinking “how can I help him”?
OBVIOUSLY  the first step is to add a few links and recommend others to go and comment on his first article.
BUT, I also felt a bit guilty encouraging someone to get involved in something that can take so much time – and often is very unrewarding.
WUWT works well because a group of people work together to create the blog. From outside, we probably don’t appreciate just how much the people get out of the group co-operation and I suspect many would be just as happy with a fraction of the readers if they maintained the same friendships. Continue reading →

Like many of my posts, I started to write this as a reply to a post on WUWT. It started as a list of comments. But as I found more and more, it grew into a more thorough review of what other people had said and more details of why I have reached the conclusions I have.
So where is FOIA from? First, of all let’s try to summarise the various suggestions by listing what others have said:
JanSmit: As a translator from Dutch to English, I can’t help sensing a Dutch mind at work.
normalnew: About the letter. There is something about it that make me think it’s a fellow Norwegian
Espen: I’m not a native English speaker myself, … possible native language to one of the slavic languages (except Bulgarian), the baltic languages or the Finno-Permic languages (Finnish, Saami, Estonian).
Enjoying the speculation (Climate Audit) “Climate protection” also translates nicely to Finnish (ilmastonsuojelu, ilmasto = climate, suojelu = protection). I believe there are no equally fitting ways of saying this in swedish, norwegian, danish or german. So that narrows it down a bit. Finnish and Hungarian have some similarities in grammar but I still feel this must be a Finn.
Coldish (Climate Audit) ‘Climate protection’ is a literal translation of the common German term ‘Klimaschutz’
hro001 (Climate Audit) “The quirks of grammar/sentence structure that some have noticed remind me of the those that one might encounter when talking/writing to a Quebecois and/or other francophone who has become fluently bilingual (but whose mother tongue is French, rather than English). “
Oscar Bajner. (I think jokingly) Rules how out England, Wales, Scotland, Americans, French, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain, Swiss, Scandinavians, & “the rest” (Irish, Antipodean/Canadian) and … by eliminating the impossible, what remains, however improbable, is that our boy is:
South African — Vat Hom, Fluffy! Skrik vir niks boet!
wws the phrase “It’s easy for many of us in the western world” to me rules out Russia,
Ryan says:But the writer does say he is a part of the Western world (so not Indian..
pottereatonCould be a Canadian but I don’t think so. Uses phrases like “game-changer” and “over and out” that while not exclusively American are probably used here more often than elsewhere.
Armagh Observatory: Eugene WR Gallun draws attention to the phrase used by FOIA – “Papal Plural” ie “we” meaning himself. It would be strange for a Brit to use this phrase …. We would use the phrase “the royal we” in this context.
Reed Coray: he/she has excellent command of the English language. … my gut feeling tells me he/she is from an English speaking environment.
Pat Frank: F writes English with a completely American idiom. His syntax also has none of the subtle errors that betray a foreign first language. All-in-all, he’s a native American speaker.
DubFOIA’s native language might be revealed in his expression, “hole-digging-and-filling-up endeavor.” This awkwardness of this expression in English indicates it is a literal translation from a different language.
SimonThe covering note has clearly been machine translated from some other language.
Chad WozniakThe omission of articles might also reflect practice in the Scandinavian languages and Romanian and Bulgarian,
Philip BradleyI find it difficult to believe the above wasn’t written by a native English speaker. I’ve read it carefully, and there are none of those small things that result from translating from a foreign language that don’t sound quite right to a native English speaker.
Eugene WR GallunIt seems to me –
The persona of FOIA is that of an Indian who has learned English as a second language.
So with all these desperate suggestions how on earth do we decide what to make them? Continue reading →

When I was running SCEF, I tried to keep some clear water between SCEF and UKIP.
On the pro side, they are the only party with any common sense on the climate, they are the only party that talks about the serious policy of immigration and are willing to stand up to the racists like the BBC who falsely and maliciously use the race card to stifle political debate. They also have a good EU policy.
On the negative side … they are a political party and …. well a plague on all politicians.
But, I have been so sickened by the democratically corrupt political elite in Scotland and … particularly the Civil servants in the Climate Division whose behaviour puts cowboy builders to shame. Scotland can’t go on like this. I don’t mind political arguments. But when the people playing politics are the supposedly neutral civil servants, there is something seriously wrong and perhaps it is now time to join UKIP.