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Top Advisor To Australian Gov't Says Climate Change is a UN Conspiracy
An anonymous reader writes: Maurice Newman, the top business advisor to conservative Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, today published an opinion piece (paywalled) in which he claims, "It's a well-kept secret, but 95 per cent of the climate models ... have been found ... to be in error." He goes on to write "This is not about facts or logic. It's about a new world order under the control of the UN." While Newman's 'skeptical' views have long been on record, it's unclear when he came to believe in this vast global conspiracy. Last year, the Abbott government removed Australia's Emissions Trading Scheme, and recently gave $4 million in funding to contrarian Bjorn Lomberg, while cutting hundreds of millions of dollars from science across the country.
There is no doubt that politicians love to use this a leverage to gain more power and control over the lives of the people.
I've worked in a university and I know full well that getting 3 academics in a room generally means having at least 4 opinions on any given topic. Getting academics to agree on anything is like herding cats. I would almost like there to be a grand conspiracy of thousands of academics. It would be the proof I require that they _can_ be induced to agree on a topic ;p
-- Gaxx
...even if it was all wrong. What's the side-effect of reducing pollute? We're all less likely to die of cancer?
Woe is me--such a terrible world! Why did not we do the rational thing and spend all of that money on bombs?! Hindsight, I stab at thee!
"It's a well-kept secret, but 95 per cent of the climate models ... have been found ... to be in error."
Ha ha ha. He used the notorious passive voice: "have been found". I wonder why?
Clues:
1. Does not specify who did the finding.
2. Provides no link to any actual information.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
I'm all for more sustainable industry and living, but what annoys me greatly is when some rich oligarch tells us that we should start living more sustainably. Yet he flew from his third house in the south of France, in his private jet, to said conference to give the speech. Those scientists, politicians, and their associated cronies are never subject to the brunt of their legislative powers.
You'll especially never see a fortune 500 C-level exec taking the sustainable route when it comes to their living.
I'd be more inclined to take a lot of their positions if they actually practiced what the preached. A lot of what I actually see from these people is, "austerity for you and not for me." Why should I live like a pauper so my neo-feudal Lord can consume more nice things for less?.
Can I make an appeal that the comments NOT become dominated by the crazies from both sides? Everytime an article like this comes to Slashdot, the prophets of doom come on decrying how anyone not sufficiently panicked and desperate is an insane denier like the bonafide loonie in the article.
After that it devolves into 'proving' the other side is wrong by pointing at the false claims made by the nuts on the opposite 'side'.
sigh, I know it's naive, but it needs saying.
The UN is a menace, and before long you will have to take your Mark on the forehead! Read your Bible!
-proud AR-15 owner.
...It's a well-kept secret, but 95 per cent of the climate models ... have been found ... to be in error....
Yes, most, if not all, of the climate are in error. They do not forecast the global climate with 100% accuracy.
.
They never will forecast the global climate with 100% accuracy. So they will always be in error.
However, they currently are accurate enough to forecast a future climate that has problems, and time is running out to prevent those problems from growing so large that they are all but irreversible.
The question is, do we start to address global warming now? Or do we wait until the models have 100% accuracy, at which time it will be too late to do anything about the problem.
Deniers will apparently just claim that "95%" of science is bogus if it disagrees with their pre-determined world view, causing cognitive dissonance.
95% is the number they always 'quote', for some reason - presumably because they know it sounds daft to say 'I don't know how much, but I'm sure it's a lot'. Nice, round numbers like 95 don't often turn up as the result of a genuine investigation; real, statistical results are much more awkward, of course - for probabilitic reasons, actually: if you could potentially get any number between 0 and 100 as a result, with 2 decimals (which is quite common), then there are about 10000 possible outcomes, and any number would, on the outset, have a probability of just 10E-4 (this is where those who actually understand probability will come and correct me, no doubt).
Apart from that, he is actually right, although he underestimates the number: it should be 100%. All climate models are wrong, we know that. This is because we are dealing with science, where we make observations, construct a model to explain them, make predictions, find that we are not quite right, change the model, and so on. You can even make a joke about this: Scientists know their theories are not The Truth, and what do you call people that tell something that they know isn't true? Yes! All scientists are liars!! (OK, I didn't say it was a GOOD joke)
If the President tried to set up something like that, Congress would refuse to fund it, Russia would Veto it, and the French would be against it just because the US was for it.
But even assuming it was possible for the UN to run a conspiracy, his own statements contradict him. Errors do not equal "Conspiracies", they equal incompetence. Conspiracies would involve intentionally falsified data - such as his personal statement that the UN is running a conspiracy.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
From http://www.smh.com.au/national...:
Newman has long sold himself as an intellectual maverick and independent thinker. "He gets mileage out of his climate scepticism," says a former senior Liberal. "It suits him to sustain it."
Newman's assertions - climate scientists call them "zombie arguments", because they keep on popping up - have all been comprehensively debunked, repeatedly and in detail, by national academies of science around the world, including the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Geophysical Union, the Royal Society of London and the Australian Academy of Science. Andy Pitman, a climate scientist from the University of NSW, tells me that, "Newman's arguments are so wrong they are inconsistent with some fundamental laws of physics."
an old saying goes "if you are right 95% of the time, why argue about the other 3%?"
math: "its hard!"
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
the moldy old texts DO have relevance today!
the need to control, scare and dominate people has never changed; we needed it thousands of years ago and we still 'need' it today.
at least, that's WHY religion has not died. its the great lie told to the poor to stop them from overtaking the rich. "you'll get yours later; just let us have what we have and you'll be rewarded later."
mankind's biggest lie, I think. meant only to control and keep people in their place.
its not useful as a book of fact, but as a book of scary stories, its as 'relevant' today as it ever was.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
They have not shown them to be wrong. They have shown them to be inaccurate. Nobody can predict a system as complex as weather and temperature with 100% accuracy.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Seeing as actual measurements show a steadily increasing temperature, I'd say it's only a question of accuracy of the predictions as to how fast temperatures are rising, not the fact that temperatures are rising.
But the deniers like to play word games and nitpick over whether the models are 100% accurate, implying that they're completely useless just because they aren't perfect. Now THAT is "cognitive dissonance."
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
There is a distinction there surely. Rejecting something because of ignorance isn't scepticism nor is it denial. It's more like idiocy. A person isn't sceptical of atomic physics if they don't know anything about it, they are ignorant on the topic. A person isn't sceptical of climate change if they don't know anything about it, they are ignorant on the topic. If they reject science while being ignorant of it, they are not a denier but rather an idiot, because only an idiot would reject something he hasn't even understood.
When they take the current climate models and plug in the variables (solar insolation, atmospheric gas mix, albedo, etc.) appropriate to Venus, Mars and Titan they get results very close to the actual climates. In other words, the models have been tested and shown to be fairly accurate. Carl Sagan was able to do this with some of the first models back in the late 1970s, and the science and the modeling processes have only gotten better over the last four decades.
In reality, climate modeling has likely saved our civilization if not our entire species once already. It was while playing with those models that the 'Nuclear Winter', the result of a nuclear war, was discovered. Ronnie Raygun and his band of lunatics would likely have launched nukes against the Soviets in eastern Europe if it hadn't been conclusively demonstrated to them that there was no way for anyone to come out of it a winner.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Take the better models. Apply them with the variables appropriate for Venus. They work. Apply them with the variables appropriate for Mars. They work. Apply them with the variables appropriate for Earth ten million years BCE. They work. Are the models "proven" to be 100% accurate? No, of course not. Are they shown to be accurate with >90% reliability? Yep.
Now take those models and apply them with the variables appropriate to Earth in 100 years with current rates of anthropogenic emissions. The result is something catastrophic for our current model of civilization. Of course the only way to know for sure if the model is 100% accurate is to wait around a century and see if reality deviates noticeably from the model, so I guess we'd best twiddle our thumbs for a few generations.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Not sure what your idea of recent is, but I have some pretty old books on mathematical astronomy dating back to the 70's that all refer to the Earth as an oblate spheroid.
Usually, you divide the "recent" time by the lifetime of the object in question. So, if we're talking about Mayflies then recent is anytime within the last 18 minutes. Since we're talking about the Earth, then you divide the time since the very early 70s (45 years) by the age of the earth (6000 years) to get 0.7%, so, yeah. That's recent.
~Loyal
I aim to misbehave.
So thinking that doubling the carbon dioxide and tripling the methane in an atmosphere will cause more heat to be retained is "wild speculation"? It's not a hard experiment to do, honors science classes do this in high school. In every single case the result has always been that more heat is retained. Always. This has been known for a century and a half, what is "wild speculation" about it? Or is your position that there is something magical about Earth's atmosphere that will make carbon dioxide and methane violate the laws of physics? And why would that be, when those gasses function as would be expected on Venus and Mars?
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Since all the institutes puslishing their version of the temperature records have published the very specifics of why, how and where they have "manipulated" the records, you could start with those. If you choose instead to follow a newspaper columnist who has been caught making stuff up time oafter time, you're free to do so. Just don't pretend that you try to be objective. After all, the "alleged adjustments" are well understood and written out clearly, from the very beginning of the publishing of the temperature data. There's nothing nefarious going on, quite the contrary. In the offert of making the temperature data consinstent and comparable, that is. Mr. Booker's continous efforts to smear science and scientists, on the other hand, seem at least to me be something else than honest.
Yes. The Earth has recently been shown to not be sphere-shaped (it's more of an oblate spheroid), so if you have data that shows it's actually a sphere that would indeed need a citation.
Strictly speaking, it's not even an oblate spheroid, but very slightly pear-shaped.
For more details, read this excellent essay by Isaac Asimov.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
People like you must think that climate changes for magical reasons that are impossible to understand. Scientists on the other hand understand that in any physical system there are physical reasons for the changes they observe. For most scientists their whole reason for doing what they do is to better understand the physical processes that affect our world. It is a truism to say that climate is always changing but it's hand waving to say we can't understand why. Our whole civilization is built on our increasing understanding of the physical world based on the knowledge science gives us.
If you think what climate scientists tell us is a conspiracy to mislead us then it shouldn't be that hard scientifically to destroy their argument. The fact that after over 25 years of intense attention to the issue that hasn't been done is telling.
Multiple studies have shown that the climate models are wrong.
So will you accept science, or is the cognitive dissonance giving you problems if it disagrees with your pre-determined world view?
George Box famously said (not an exact quote) "All models are wrong but some are useful."
Your 2nd cite to the Nature article does not support your argument that models are wrong. There are a lot of quasi-cyclical phenomena that are unpredictable ahead of time (with our current state of knowledge but maybe never) but that show up as emergent properties with random timing in climate model runs. The article shows that when you pick the model runs where by chance the emergent Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation timing matched the real world that the model matched real world temperatures much better. That is solid evidence that the models do a good job of modeling the real world.
Well, actually since they quote 95% they're being conservative. 100% of the models are KNOWN to be in error. The questions are always "How much in error?" and "In which direction?". And nobody really knows the answers to those questions, though sometimes there are reasonable estimates.
What he's really saying is "I don't like your answers, so you're wrong. And I don't need to prove it." Since he's politically well connected this is actually largely correct. The only error is logically evident (from my phrasing of "what he was really saying").
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
There is a (in my opinion) intriguing difference between what the books of the Bible say, and what is taught about them in fundamentalist churches. The disparity is actually very large. But the fundamentalist tendency to reject the facts, even about their own Bible, is truly amazing.
Here, for example, are some fun, readily-proven, facts about what the Bible says:
The word "Trinity" (a core theological concept to Fundamentalism) does not occur in the Bible ever, in any translation. The verses from which this concept is inferred are both scant and sketchy.
The "Holy Spirit" is a mistranslation of "Holy Breath," and in the Greek texts it is *never* referred-to as a person (the words used can equally well mean "it"). The translation to English of "He" is very dubious.
The word "Lucifer" (another core theological concept) doesn't occur *at all* in most translations of the Bible. It should not; it is a Latin word, which doesn't make sense in an English Bible. The relevant text was written in Hebrew, and is a prophesy about the fall of a clearly-identified human king (this is obvious to anyone who reads the whole chapter rather than two verses taken out of context). The popular English translation of "Morning Star" is particularly interesting, since in the book of Revelations, Jesus directly states "I am the Morning Star." Figure THAT out!
Jesus, being famous (in part) for establishing the doctrine of Hell in Christian theology, never once uttered the word "Hell". Aramaic, the language he spoke, didn't even have such a word. He did spend some time making metaphorical references to the valley of Gehenna, which Jerusalem used as the city dump, and which was later mistranslated as "hell" by very dubious logic.
So, the most foundational and distinguishing characteristics of Christian theology aren't even in the Bible...one must translate it strangely and make strange inferences on top of that to arrive at something sort of like what mainstream Christianity teaches.
This group also loves to insist that the Bible never contradicts itself, despite the fact that it clearly does in numerous places. They have a neat trick for resolving these contradictions....whenever two verses seem to say opposite things, one is "interpreted in the context of the other," such that one verse is seen as not really saying what it plainly says. Once you change what a verse says to what you think it actually means, then the contradiction is resolved. For example:
1 Timothy 4:10 "...we have put our hope in the living God, who is the Savior of all people, and especially those who believe."
It does not say "who only saves believers." It clearly says the opposite....until you change it to resolve a contradiction.
I'll stop now. Flame on.