Scottish Sceptic

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.

I’m still trying to fathom the linguistics of the Climategate III text. The author(s) appears to be overly concerned with linguistics and I quote the first few sentences in full:-

It’s time to tie up loose ends and dispel some of the speculation surrounding the Climategate affair.

Indeed, it’s singular “I” this time.  After certain career developments I can no longer use the papal plural

If this email seems slightly disjointed it’s probably my linguistic background and the problem of trying to address both the wider audience (I expect this will be partially reproduced sooner or later) and the email recipients (whom I haven’t decided yet on).

They write to tie up loose ends, dispel speculation … then rather than doing this, they focus on the linguistics of “I” vs. “WE” and then go on to explicitly state the linguistics are odd attributing this to their “linguistic background”. There is certainly a strong emphasis on language right from the second paragraph.
This was probably what sent me off trying to locate the likely linguistic background from the turn of phrase used. At first I thought that would be a latin derived language, but there are also a number of noteworthy Germanic (group of language) phrases (which may have been picked up as phrases). But nothing I found linked the phrases used to foreigners speaking English. If they were created by someone because their first language wasn’t English, the odd phrases should have been readily found on the internet being used by foreign speakers. They weren’t.
So, my next assumption was that this was some kind of computer generated speech. The obvious example would have been to translate the text through a language translation program several times. This would tend to “standardise” the words used into the linguo-franco of the world “USScandoLatinoChienglish”. Continue reading →

Hereafter is the text of a post I put on WUWT. I used to think it was a lone individual in the UEA who had contacted another lone hacker who had then disseminated the material. The text of the letter sent out with Climategate III strongly suggests US republican links. The only additional note of caution I would add, is that being technically minded myself, I may have missed the more obscure technical turn of phrases which would be what is needed to find links to technical language articles.
C.W. Schoneveld says: “The spelling “endeavor” suggests a non-Brtish educational background”.

In the past, I found a good barometer of the latest propaganda from the warmists was to search the BBC for their copy-and-paste warmist articles.
I can’t find any! Searching BBC + “Global warming” brings up nothing but other people talking about global warming (or perhaps more accurately, the word “global warming” perhaps as an out of date link on a page with recent news).
Indeed, I thought I had found an offender in Paul Hudson’s article “Still no sign of spring“, but reinforcing my previous post … it was a sceptic comment that brought up the subject and not Paul Hudson.
The daft thing, is that if anyone were to suggest erecting massive skyscrapers throughout the British countryside based on the flimsiest evidence … the chattering classes as represented by the BBC would be the first to object. So, starting from where we are now, there is no way on earth anyone could introduce the policy of destroying the countryside on the basis of such flimsy “evidence” on the climate.
So, we do not carry on the policy of wind because it is supported, by the chattering classes, but because attacking the policy means attacking their own actions. In short, all that is keeping this bandwagon going, is the momentum it gained from a decade of spin … because those usually tasked with applying the breaks (politicians, green groups, environmentalsists, etc.) are too damned embarrassed by their own hypocritical actions attacking the sceptics to now do the job.

After I stopped spending all my time campaigning to end the nonsense of Global Warming, I had anticipated some changes in view. But not the one I’ve had.
SCEPTICS ARE TOO BELIEVING OF GLOBAL WARMING.
Yes! One of the biggest culprits for continuing the scam is the way sceptics are still thinking there is something to fight.
Strangely, the main change I’ve felt is “what on earth was I fighting?” Because the only people I see seriously suggesting that global warming may still be real are the sceptics. (I discount “UFO-spotting” type commentators)
To use an analogy. It is like a battle field. The leaders are still very much preoccupied hacking away at a very small group of people, and for those close to that action, it looks as if there is a fierce battle. But walk away, and there is only one side left on the battle field as the opposition have fled. Indeed, so decisive is the victory that most people don’t see the point in hanging around to watch a foregone conclusion.
As for those like the wikipedia climate “team”. They remind me of the soldiers in an impenetrable armoured car … which has run out of petrol. Yes, the natives are incapable of penetrating their armour. But sooner or later they are going to have to get out of their armour and climb down. The only question is this: is their best strategy to wait out the natives in the hope their anger will disperse, or … will making them wait longer and longer just infuriate them more? …. and I should also comment about the soldiers who have already turned “native” … who no one seems to notice except me.
As for the politicians …. they are as ever, like some Gadaffi madman, sitting in their bunker broadcasting the delusion that their forces are winning, that the rebels are a few isolated individuals …. still clinging to the words of their hand picked special advisers that victory is inevitable … but somehow all those so learned advisers now seem to have left the country and want nothing to do with the noble leader.