Scottish Sceptic

Just as I thought global warming stories were going out of fashion, along comes sunspots. And strangely, all the people who used to write about doomsday global warming are suddenly writing about doomsday lack of sunspots.
I personally think its all part of survival instincts … humanoids on the African plane possibly spent their time watching the big hunters and then swooping in to steal their kill. So, we just can’t help be interested in death and destruction, hence the “car crash” syndrome whereby drivers can’t help watching the pile-up on the other lane helping create a new pile up on their own.
Likewise, when the biggest, most ugly planet-eating predator in town (the sun) decides to change its spots, in kicks 1,000,000 years of evolution and we just can’t help watching this predator strut its stuff.
The bigger the disaster, the bigger the casualty count, the more compelled our natural car-crash-goggling instinct  kicks in!

Seems like the chickens are coming home to roost for the Australian PM who went into her election campaign promising not to implement carbon taxes. And I may be wrong, but I seem to recollect that she only got the job because the previous incumbent was likewise obsessed with taxing carbon:

Support for Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard is now even lower than that of her predecessor whom she ousted almost a year ago, driven down by her government’s push to impose a deeply unpopular tax on carbon emissions.
The next scheduled election is not for two years, but media have begun speculating that Gillard could also be dumped by nervous backbenchers unless her Labor Party manages to engineer a rapid turnaround in the next few months.
Her approval rating has shed five points in just a fortnight to 30 per cent, lower than former prime minister Kevin Rudd’s rating when Gillard replaced him in a partyroom coup ahead of last year’s dead-heat election, a Newspoll in The Australian newspaper showed.
(Source: http://www.stuff.co.nz/timaru-herald/world/5149985/Gillards-ratings-slump-after-carbon-tax)

The following comments were taken (without permission … hopefully no one minds) from the article on sunspots at WUWT mostly in order of writing  (except the first!):
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/14/all-three-of-these-lines-of-research-to-point-to-the-familiar-sunspot-cycle-shutting-down-for-a-while
steven mosher says:June 14, 2011 at 5:32 pm

“funny how skepticism about models and predictions all fly out the window.” Continue reading →

Science has a very simple rule: you have to be certain of what you say. It doesn’t allow arguments based on opinions. Science requires evidence and deductive reasoning. Something that is infuriating for those who want to use science to say something it can’t or shouldn’t say.
That is why the “precautionary” principle has proven so useful. Continue reading →

For years we were told: “nothing other than manmade warming can explain the late 20th century rise in temperature”. To which the sensible sceptic asked: “what about natural variation”. To which the alarmist replied: “there is no such thing” or if they were more informed “the hockey stick proves that natural variation is too small and could not affect global temperature”.
Now of course it hasn’t warmed for over a decade and there’s only so long that you can hide such an obvious fact before even the most gullible start asking: why? So how do they explain this?
If natural variation is so small that it cannot have been responsible for the 20th century, then it is too small to have stopped the “warming”. If natural variation is big enough to cause sufficient cooling to cancel out the warming, then it is clearly big enough (when working in the opposite way i.e. to warm) to explain all the apparent warming in the 20th century.
The reason we got this doomsday cult, is because they managed to argue from a small and scientific warming of around 1C due to CO2 doubling up to as much as 6C due to what I can only say are entirely mythical “feedback effects”. Feedback effects, with no scientific proof, but which “conveniently” multiply the real science by whatever number they needed to “prove” that all the (apparent) 20th century warming was due to CO2. They did this by saying: “it has to be CO2 that caused the 2oth century warming because nothing else can explain the change, therefore the relationship between CO2 and temperature is whatever number we need to make the increase in CO2 cause the (apparent) increase in global temperature.”
It’s not science, but it certainly fooled a lot of people into believing it was “science”. They managed to justify this nonsense scaling up of the known effects to suit their political agenda with what I call the Sherlock Holmes defence: “when you have eliminated all possible causes, what remains, however illogical, must be the cause”.
That is why the debate was so heated: they needed to “prove” that nothing else could explain the 20th century upswing. That is why they ruthlessly attacked anyone working on solar or suggesting natural variation. That is why they were forced to manufacture the hockey stick to “prove” that there was no medieval warm period, because if there had been significant warming in the past without CO2, then there could be significant warming in the present which was not caused by CO2, and did not necessitate mythical “feedback” multipliers and did not require the destruction of western economies to “save” the world.
They could do that with past climate, because they controlled how they interpreted the tree rings. The could decide how much warming they could attribute to any given change in tree ring size. In short they could remove the medieval warm period by scaling down the temperature change for any given change in tree ring size … except for the inconvenient fact that this bogus temperature record no longer matched the real record when we had actual temperature measurements hence the infamous “hide the decline” scandal.
So, it is now impossible for them to explain the 21st century pause without admitting that there is significant natural variation similar in magnitude to the change they say must be due to CO2. They cannot simultaneously argue that CO2 is the sole cause of climate change and therefore climate must “continue to change” as it did in the 20th century “due to CO2” AND explain why it hasn’t changed in the 21st century!
Gotcha!
Addendum
… what am I talking about? “they can’t argue both black and white” … I’ve talked to warmist for years and they do it all the time. Logic defies them: that is why they are warmists!

Some newsbytes from Dr. Benny Peiser at the GWPF

At Last: UK Industry Demands Government Rethink On Unilateral Climate Policy

The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) confirmed today that it will ask government to rethink conflicts of interest between low carbon and industrial policies.
I’ve posted this as it relates so directly to what I just posted, but I really can’t add much to what Anthony Watts says so I suggest you read the rest there

In the last post I asked when we will know the climate wars are over. I might change my mind, but I’m beginning to doubt there is any real way of declaring an “end” to this stupid scare. Because how can you measure the return of “common sense”?
So, although winning would be nice, it seems a fruitless ambition. So let’s instead think about what really is important? I think it is to stop the worst aspects, so let’s examine the facets and see which are worst: Continue reading →

This is really a note to myself in the hope that I can refer back to it and say: “yes it’s over”. The question is: “what evidential base can we use to claim: ‘the war is over’ given that it is more than likely this scam will just fade out of public interest leaving a small but vociferous bunch of nutters trying to cry wolf at every new weather event”.
Global temperature drops
This would be a clear undeniable end to “global warming”, but it isn’t a good measure Continue reading →