Starting at $98.00 a year
Doomed Planet

Climate-Change Idolaters

Peter Smith

wind turbineDon’t know why. There’s no sun up in the sky. Stormy weather. Ah! Gaia is very, very, angry.

Windmills providing expensive, intermittent and unreliable power — the idols of our age — must be built to appease Gaia. Deplorables are dispensable. Those without base-load power in developing countries, plus coal miners, the old, the infirm, the poor must all be sacrificed. Only then will Gaia smile on us again.

I told some ‘warmist’ friends about a Category 4 hurricane hitting Galveston in Texas, generating a fifteen-foot tidal surge, and killing an estimated 8000 people. The deadliest natural disaster in US history. I let it stew for a moment or two before revealing the time: September 1900. I don’t think it made an impression. The climate change ethos has etched itself so deeply into the minds of disciples that it is impervious to clashing information.

Effectively, climate change has become an idolatry masquerading as science. Destructive climate events, however commonplace historically, cause much wailing, finger-pointing and scapegoating. High priests in the guise of climate gurus, like Gore, Flannery, Mann and Suzuki, come into their own. Reason succumbs to superstition.

Take hurricanes.

The latest information, sourced from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), indicates that hurricane activity has not increased by either frequency or scale during recent decades – so far as can be determined. The data going back is patchy and unreliable; as, in fact, is all climate-related data.

I looked at the hurricane data from the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA for the Atlantic Basin for the period from 1851 to 2016. In the ten years to 2016, there were 28 “major” hurricanes recorded. In the previous ten years 39 were recorded. This is relatively high when compared with the whole period from 1851. However, 39 major hurricanes were recorded for the ten years to 1956 and 32 for the ten years to 1966, before dropping to 17 and 16 in the next two succeeding decades. So, what to say? Hurricanes come and go.

There is nothing markedly unusual happening. But, you wouldn’t think that if you suffer the unfortunate experience of tuning into widespread alarmist commentaries and news bulletins. Those who claim to believe in science are quick to dispense with it when it doesn’t suit their storyline. They point to the latest hurricanes as yet more evidence of climate change. And you can bet your life that every storm, drought and heat wave from now on will draw the same response.

They suffer no embarrassment in making such outlandish claims. They are impervious to any factual rebuttals. They have a higher calling.

I understand that the current scientific theory is that warmer water tends to engender more airborne turbulence. Maybe it does. I don’t know. I am not a climate scientist, just an ordinary Joe. But what I do know is that warmer water is not necessarily man-made. Maybe the climate is just warming as it has in early periods of time; and, in any event, maybe it is not warming as much as the high priests tell us. This brings me to a recent climatologist recantation.

A well-publicised study in the journal Nature Geoscience[i] by ten notable scientists, all shackled to the global warming thesis, issued a mea culpa. Well, a mealy-mouthed sort of mea culpa from those still very much wedded to the faith. Apparently, the global temperature, despite being rigged (homogenized) to exaggerate warming, has stubbornly refused to obey the models. Is a bit more rigging required? Wink-wink nudge-nudge, say no more.

Look at this weaselling by two of the authors, trying to make the best of it, as reported in The Times.

Michael Grubb, professor of international energy and climate change at University College London and one of the study’s authors, admitted that his previous prediction had been wrong. “When the facts change, I change my mind, as Keynes said.” The only problem with this is that the facts of temperature haven’t changed. The facts are the facts. They exist in real life not in highly-simplified and compromised models. His prediction was wrong. Now that’s a fact.

Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford said: “We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models. We haven’t seen that in the observations.” He was further reported as saying that the group of about a dozen computer models, produced by government research institutes and universities around the world, had been assembled a decade ago, “so it’s not that surprising [referring to predicted warming] that it’s starting to divert a little bit from observations”.

What should be surprising to Professor Allen, if he were scientifically minded, is that all of the models err in one direction only: “on the hot side,” as the authors concede. The reason for this is clear to us ordinary Joes.

The models were not developed independently. They come to the same result because they input the same data, use the same variables and parameters and are built by like-minded people pursuing the same global-warming-oriented research grants. It is a scam of more enormous proportions than the world has ever seen, and its seen a few.

We are in the hands of climate zealots whose incantations (the science is settled – catastrophe nears) have infiltrated and warped the minds of nearly all politicians and all governments. Otherwise normal ordinary people have been sucked in. They’ve been robbed of their ability to think straight. A hot day these days isn’t just a hot day. It’s a harbinger of doom. More idols required.


[i] “Emission budgets and pathways consistent with limiting warming to 1.5C,” September 2017.

22 thoughts on “Climate-Change Idolaters”

  • Keith Kennelly says:
    26th September 2017 at 2:39 pm

    The forecast for today in Brisbane by the BOM was for highs of 37degrees.

    I’m sitting in the sun, right now, and it’s a cool 25 degrees.

    I watch the Southeast Trade winds, off the ocean, kick in late yesterday. I watched them building up from the synoptic charts for the past week yet the BOMwas only looking at the hot air and temps on the centre of Aust and was predicting they’d move into Brisbane today.

    Why didn’t they understand the SE Trades are the prevailing winds for this region and would always trump the air moving in from the west. They would blow that air north west. Pretty simple really. The Tradewinds occur because it is cold air moving from the cooler lower latitudes to fill the gap caused by rising warmer air in the tropics and sub tropics.

    Take a look at the huge amount of cold air across Southern Australia at the moment. Where is it to go? North via the SE Trades.

    What is the matter with the BOM?

    It’s full of global warmers predicting global warming temps. We should unfunded it.

  • ian.macdougall says:
    26th September 2017 at 8:44 pm

    What is the matter with the BOM?
    It’s full of global warmers predicting global warming temps. We should unfunded [sic] it.

    Following a definitive statement from Peter Smith, High Priest of the Ostrich School of Climatology, we have our old mate Keith joining rather ungrammatically in the Ostrich Chorus.
    I am also surprised that the most powerful denialist argument of all has been left in a drawer somewhere. Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) could not possibly be happening, because if it was, it would be bad for established business; particularly for the coal business.
    I have said this umpteen times before, but I accept that members of the Ostrich School have a hard time with everyday facts. Also I can’t escape the feeling that they point to and focus on temperatures precisely because those mask what is really going on: because while ever we have ice at the poles the heat being absorbed by the Earth will ultimately go into melting that, and not into atmospheric or ocean temperature rise. But that heat has to go somewhere; it can’t just disappear. It shows up as sea-level rise.
    https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/
    There is a very well established conservation law covering this. It says that matter-energy can neither be created nor destroyed.
    I have also shown that the climate change denialism found on this site also in rather bizarre fashion extends to an entrenched hostility to renewables: solar, wind, etc. This forces me, albeit reluctantly, to the conclusion that the people maintaining such are, wittingly or unwittingly, shills for the coal and fossil-fuel industries. Like the coal barons they consciously or otherwise support, they apparently want the fossil carbon dug up as quickly as possible and used to turn water into steam in conventional power stations, and from there into dollars. No other explanation fits those facts. IMHO.
    The inconvenient factual truth that the carbon dioxide produced by the oxidation of fossil fuels like coal traps and absorbs heat and passes this heat on to other chemical species in the atmosphere has to be bluntly denied, or just ignored.
    The Earth has a one-off supply of fossil carbon, laid down over millions of years, and which we can safely assume will never be renewed. Burning it to heat power station boilers is about the most short-sighted and hare-brained use we can put it to.
    IMHO again.

    • jabdata@bigpond.com says:
      27th September 2017 at 6:56 am

      It seems most people realise they do make a mess on earth. It keeps some people employed cleaning it up.
      To help clean up the mess would it not be prudent to phase out dirty habits such as cleaning up the atmosphere.
      Two such replacements for gas, oil and coal were developed during the 60’s and are coming to fruition now.
      The first is a nuclear fission device built by Alven Weinberg in USA. It burns up spent nuclear fission fuel rods and actinides. Indonesia are is examining one such device by Thorcon Company for mass production in modulised form and which may be available in less than 5 years.
      The second device, used by Gemini space craft uses Hydrogen and Oxygen(from atmosphere). This device has been developed by Ballard Company and others, including our own CSIRO and available now off the shelf. Modulised units up to 200KW can be purchases. In fact South Korea has a 50 MegaWatt complex working.
      Why can’t Australia phase out the dirty power gradually in favour of these types of installations?
      Nuclear power caused deaths are much less than coal/oil powered disasters.
      AlanIO

      • ianl says:
        27th September 2017 at 9:08 am

        > ” … cleaning up the atmosphere”

        Cleaning it up from what … exactly ?

        I have no opposition to nuclear power per se, but the assumption that CO2 is an atmospheric pollutant belongs to the resident trollster. Disposal of nuclear waste from power stations is a point often brought up as a scary-bear but France (amongst others) has managed that for about 40 years now.

        A recent paper in Nature Geoscience (http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo3031.html?foxtrotcallback=true) finally admitted that the predictive models are strongly exaggerating the effects of 400ppm of atmospheric CO2, although this paper contains the routine methodology of moving the goalposts forward a century or two, which by now isn’t even tiresome, merely insipid.

        Maintaining Aus’ current base load (this term is two separate words, despite our illiterate MSM) of 1800 GWh is extremely unlikely now as reliable backup for the intermittency of windmills and sunbeams is made hopelessly uneconomic by design. People will die unnecessarily over the next few years because of this. There is no accountability.

    • mburke@pcug.org.au says:
      27th September 2017 at 9:55 am

      You know, Ian Mac, if I were you I’d take a serious look at the like-minded company I was keeping. They’re an impressive bunch (not). Maurice Strong, Rajendra Pachauri, Michael Mann, Kevin Trenberth, James Hanson, Tim Flannery, Paul Steffen, John Cook, Stefan Lewendowsky, and a supporting caste of dozens of like-minded people with more baggage than the Sydney Railways Lost Property Office. By your friends shall ye be known.

    • Peter OBrien says:
      27th September 2017 at 2:23 pm

      “I am also surprised that the most powerful denialist argument of all has been left in a drawer somewhere. Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) could not possibly be happening, because if it was, it would be bad for established business; particularly for the coal business.
      I have said this umpteen times before…..”

      Indeed you have and one has to wonder why. Since no-one in this forum has ever made that claim it can only be a projection of what you wish had been said, so that you could make a better fist of defending your position. It would give you something that you can argue against rather than your usual tactic of simply avoiding the specific points made by contributors and falling back on sea level rise.

      • ian.macdougall says:
        27th September 2017 at 5:53 pm

        Peter,
        There is no rational or credible reason why the Ostrich School so brilliantly represented at this site should be against renewables. The gravamen of what I said in that post (September 26, 2017 at 8:44 pm is:

        I am also surprised that the most powerful denialist argument of all has been left in a drawer somewhere. Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) could not possibly be happening, because if it was, it would be bad for established business; particularly for the coal business.
        I have said this umpteen times before, but I accept that members of the Ostrich School have a hard time with everyday facts. Also I can’t escape the feeling that they point to and focus on temperatures precisely because those mask what is really going on: because while ever we have ice at the poles the heat being absorbed by the Earth will ultimately go into melting that, and not into atmospheric or ocean temperature rise. But that heat has to go somewhere; it can’t just disappear. It shows up as sea-level rise.
        https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/
        There is a very well established conservation law covering this. It says that matter-energy can neither be created nor destroyed.
        I have also shown that the climate change denialism found on this site also in rather bizarre fashion extends to an entrenched hostility to renewables: solar, wind, etc. This forces me, albeit reluctantly, to the conclusion that the people maintaining such are, wittingly or unwittingly, shills for the coal and fossil-fuel industries. Like the coal barons they consciously or otherwise support, they apparently want the fossil carbon dug up as quickly as possible and used to turn water into steam in conventional power stations, and from there into dollars. No other explanation fits those facts. IMHO.
        The inconvenient factual truth that the carbon dioxide produced by the oxidation of fossil fuels like coal traps and absorbs heat and passes this heat on to other chemical species in the atmosphere has to be bluntly denied, or just ignored.
        The Earth has a one-off supply of fossil carbon, laid down over millions of years, and which we can safely assume will never be renewed. Burning it to heat power station boilers is about the most short-sighted and hare-brained use we can put it to.

        “Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) could not possibly be happening, because if it was, it would be bad for established business; particularly for the coal business.”
        Nobody may have said that explicitly, but I suggest that to be the subtext of all the antiscientific and denialist posts to be found at this site, whose political favourite has ever been Tony “the future is coal” Abbott. A pretty full list of the anti-renewable threadstarters is to be found at my next post. Being against renewables makes no sense at all out of that context.

    • pgang says:
      28th September 2017 at 10:55 am

      Oh look, the NIMBY rears his head again. How’s that gate going Ian? Still locked I presume?

  • Warty says:
    26th September 2017 at 11:56 pm

    NOAA somehow reminds one of Noah, and the forty days and forty nights (code for a long, long time) of uninterrupted rain. But it is interesting the shift in terminology from ‘Global Warming’ to the current ‘climate change’. Indeed, we still hear people talking of global warming, but I suspect the green brigade feel they’ll get greater leverage out of ‘climate change’, because one can then attribute cyclones, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, whale beachings, Kim Jong Grunt and the assassination of JFK to man overheating the planet.
    Jordan Peterson, the now famous clinical psychologist, takes a far more humble approach to understanding the human mind, creation, nature and God, in suggesting we know only a fraction of what is out there. Climate models wouldn’t even recognised a well-rounded backside, never mind the reasons for a succession of famines in subSahara Africa. But the modern trend is to allow science the last word with regards to explanation for everything that does or doesn’t move. Science cannot abide a mystery and in doing so has adopted an overweening arrogance, fully embraced by the Greens who know even less about the science behind things than the models they like to refer to, perhaps even less than I do, and that’s saying something.

  • Keith Kennelly says:
    27th September 2017 at 1:21 pm

    The forecast.from the BOM, 37 degrees.

    Current temp. 23 degrees.
    Same SE Trades blowing only gentler today and overcast as well.
    It might even get to 27degrees!

    ‘When will they ever learn?’

    Ian address the statement rather than attack people. You’d gain a little credibility … well no … that’s right … it was you who claimed cearm came from the cold.

    Hahahaha

    ‘When will you ever learn?’

    Interesting articles about the artic and Antarctic about at the moment. You’d better not read them. You might become a frightbat!

  • Keith Kennelly says:
    27th September 2017 at 1:25 pm

    Ian daily temp readings are facts as are the bom extravagant forecasts. Well you’d hardly call being off by 50% a forecast twice in two days. They would be more of a guess.

    Hahahaha

    The poor old bom.

    • ianl says:
      27th September 2017 at 1:52 pm

      I have to admit that the trollster’s defence of the BoM is innovative: “temperature measurements don’t tell us much, if anything at all, so what the BoM records can’t matter. Stop criticising them, baa boo sucks !”. Wunderbar …

      I see Figueres is in Aus at the moment, telling us we can get by on spasmodic power supplies, we don’t need reliable base load 24/7/365. “Become even more of a backwater … then feel the luv !”.

      No other developed country in the world is sliding down as fast as Aus. Since this is deliberate, I suggest it is happening without much real resistance because the population has no history of actual revolt. A good, long weekend with shallow celebrity poo-bahs in a new TV “reality” programme will do it. In short, the self-described “elites” are not scared of the general populace. They *know* nothing unpleasant will happen – to them.

      • ian.macdougall says:
        28th September 2017 at 10:57 am

        Then give the antitrollstering forces a lead in a more Venusian direction. Aux armes! Get out in the streets and DEMAND that Australia get out of the Paris accord!!!
        No time for dithering… What are you waiting for?

  • ian.macdougall says:
    28th September 2017 at 11:22 am

    My comment (originally posted September 27, 2017 at 6:04 pm) is still awaiting moderation, censorship or whatever you might call it.
    And to think that this thread began with such a righteous proclamation: “The recent wave of hurricanes that lashed the US had no sooner done their worst than all the paid-up and grant-fed members of Climate Catastrophe Inc., were crying ‘We told you so!’ Yes, they have told us, repeatedly. And just as often they have been wrong, as they are now and once again.”

    “Yes, they have told us, repeatedly….” And where’s ‘us’ now?
    Hiding down some wombat hole?

  • Keith Kennelly says:
    28th September 2017 at 1:43 pm

    Ian

    Back to the Catastrafarian BOM.

    They revise the forecast temps for Brisbane today.

    35 degrees they bleated. Down from 37degrees they with which frightened everybody.

    I’m sitting on my yacht having a beer.
    The temp is 27 degrees.

    I don’t know how they can keep a straight face, as they spruik their catastrafarian nonsense.

    Why won’t they ever learn?

  • Keith Kennelly says:
    28th September 2017 at 1:45 pm

    Oh and the wind has switched to the north, as expected, and it is blowing off the cooler ocean and not the red hot centre.

Leave a Reply

Related Articles

Doomed Planet

Their ‘Truth’ is the Agenda, Facts go Hang

  • Peter Smith
  • 7th January 2023
Comments (25)
Doomed Planet

False notes and the Suzuki Method

  • Roger Franklin
  • 18th September 2013
Comments (0)
Doomed Planet

Minister, please reconsider

  • 10th April 2011
Comments (0)