This Is Why You Can’t Reason With ‘Climate Sceptics’

knmi logoYesterday Bob Tisdale published the blog post titled ‘Open Letter to the Honorable John Kerry U.S. Secretary of State‘ (archived here) on the blog Watts Up With That (WUWT). He also published it on his own website.

My opinion of that letter from Tisdale is that it doesn’t accurately represent the IPCC and their latest release. There are a lot of reasons of why I hold that position and what I wrote for ‘No, Global Warming Hasn’t Stopped‘ gives a good introduction about his mistakes about climate models. I can also recommend the article ‘The new IPCC climate change report makes deniers overheat‘ by Michael Mann for a better understanding of how the latest IPCC report often is misrepresented.

When I started on my open letter to Tisdale I knew we would never reach any sort of agreement on his points about climate research or the IPCC. That’s why I focussed on the following in his letter:

Continue reading This Is Why You Can’t Reason With ‘Climate Sceptics’

An Open Letter To Bob Tisdale

knmi logoDear Mr. Tisdale,

I noticed your recent contribution to the blog Watts Up With That titled ‘Open Letter to the Honorable John Kerry U.S. Secretary of State‘ (archived here). In it you criticize the IPCC and the scientific findings they presented with their latest report.

My opinion is that you’re not accurately representing the IPCC and their latest release. The reasons for that are numerous, and if you want to get a better understanding of what I mean by that I can recommend reading ‘No, Global Warming Hasn’t Stopped‘.

But we will probably never reach agreement on that point so I’m not going to focus on it. However, what I am going to focus on is the following that you said in your letter:

Continue reading An Open Letter To Bob Tisdale

IPCC Scientists Explain Their Findings

On YouTube I found a couple of videos about the new IPCC report that I found interesting. Especially since in 3 of the 4 videos we have the scientists that worked on the report explain what is in it.

In the first video we have several scientists explaining the context and meaning of the slow down in surface temperature increases. It’s a good and short rundown on what is happening, why, and what this all means.

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The Lorax

dr. seuss the lorax

For me Dr. Seuss wasn’t a big part of my childhood. Not that strange considering I grew up in The Netherlands and English is a foreign language for us. Which means that his materials aren’t as widely spread here as they are in the United States.

You do come across Dutch translations of his books and of course the odd movie from the United States. But that’s just noise compared to Dik Trom, Puk van de Petteflet or Kruistocht in Spijkerbroek. Now those are big and recognizable parts of my childhood (yeah I’m old, shush).

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Piers Corbyn: The UN IPCC And All It Stands For Must Be Destroyed

Piers CorbynEver since I’ve been aware of Piers Corbyn I’ve found him extremely confusing. Simply because what he says is so at odds with what we know in science, and because he’s very secretive about how arrives at his conclusions.

What I’m referring to are the weather predictions he makes via his company WeatherAction. What his company does is make long-term weather forecasts based on solar activity, the earth’s magnetic field, and the moon’s orbit. He calls it the Solar-Lunar-Action-Technique, or SLAT for short. He claims he gets a high rate of success with this technique and can predict the weather up to a year in advance; but I’m not convinced.

The problem is that what he uses for his predictions, like the sun, has at best a minor effect on weather and our climate. This is well known in the scientific community, yet he claims it has a big effect. But it’s also Corbyn that claims this high accuracy, there’s actually very little out there that hints at there being any skill to his predictions.

Continue reading Piers Corbyn: The UN IPCC And All It Stands For Must Be Destroyed

Why The Dutch Party For Freedom (PVV) Doesn’t Support Freedom

Wilders-2010-cropped

Sometimes I’m dismayed at what happens in Dutch Politics. Especially since the founding of the Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV), which is Dutch for Party for Freedom.

This is the party that Geert Wilders founded, and is basically his response to some problems we have in our country with certain immigrant groups. These issues are a legacy of these groups not fully integrating in our culture. These issues are then worsened by the response from those of Dutch decent to these immigrant groups. What basically is happening is people from both groups are being reactionary towards each other and are creating a downward spiral.

Among the children of the immigrants (third generation) this translates in some rejecting Dutch culture and values. One expression of this is them identifying more with the faith of their parents, which then translates into things such as hatred towards gays (the children are often far more conservative than their parents are).

Continue reading Why The Dutch Party For Freedom (PVV) Doesn’t Support Freedom

This Is Why We Need Better Science Education

Sometimes you come acros something that just makes you ask “is this for real?”

This time it was a letter sent to the Sydney Morning Herald that made me ask this question:

stick with facts, not sci-fiI do wish that the Herald editorial team would stop presenting Carl Sagan science fiction gibberish dressed up as if it were fact (‘‘The little spacecraft that could’’, September 14-15). It occurred over the weekend, when we were fed a far-fetched story about a space vehicle named Voyager and interstellar exploration.

This is the same type of pseudo scientific mumbo jumbo that exploiters of the public purse have been doing with climate change over many years. It is arrant nonsense and has to stop right here and now. The Herald does itself no favours by printing it, pretending that the sci-fi exaggerations are factual.

Bill Thomas, Cabramatta

As this letter mentions it is a response to the article “The little spacecraft that could“, which is an article telling readers that Voyager 1 has left our solar system. A very important moment in our history as it is a first for mankind.

Continue reading This Is Why We Need Better Science Education

No Turning Point For The IPCC

Dr. Roy SpencerThis time I noticed a blog post called “A Turning Point for the IPCC…and Humanity?” written by Dr. Roy Spencer that I think needs addressing.

Although the article is quite hard to address as he barely mentions any sources for what he’s basing his claims and arguments on. And he does make a lot of claims about climatology and the IPCC.

To show I’m not taking anything out of context his entire blog post is quoted by me, with my responses to the point he’s making below the quote. I’ve kept my responses as short as possible, which means I’ll be referring you to a lot of other sites/pages for further information.

But before I begin I’d like to point out that any bolded or emphasized text in the quotes is by Dr Roy Spencer. I copied the text as is from his blog so that I don’t distort what he’s saying. That being said lets begin:

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97% Climate consensus ‘denial’: the debunkers again not debunked

moncktonOn Watts Up With That (WUWT) another attempt at discrediting the scientific consensus paper by Cook et al. was made, this time by Christopher Monckton (archived here). An attempt I’m not exactly impressed by. But before I go into that I’ll provide some context about the Cook et al. paper.

What the Cook et al. paper did was examine 11,944 abstracts from papers that were published from 1991 to 2011 that included the words “global climate change” or “global warming” in their abstract. What they found after analysing these abstracts is that among those that expressed a position on global warming, 97% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.

They also contacted 8,547 authors to ask if they could rate their own papers and got 1,200 responses, which meant that 2,142 papers were also rated by their authors on their endorsement level. The results for this again found that 97% of the selected papers stated that humans are causing global warming. This was done to determine that there wasn’t any sort of inherent problem in the rating system used and this seems to indicate that.

Continue reading 97% Climate consensus ‘denial’: the debunkers again not debunked

The Label It Yourself Campaign

label-it-yourselfAs my regular readers will know I try to keep tabs on what is happening on social media in regards to climate change and global warming. Sometimes because of that I (eventually) notice other odd things that are doing the rounds on social media.

This time it was a Tumblr post talking about the Label It Yourself Campaign that my Facebook friends were sharing. If you’re wondering what the Label It Yourself Campaign is the original tumblr post explains it well enough:

The Label It Yourself (#LIY) campaign is a decentralized, autonomous grassroots campaign born out of our broken food system. We have been asking our government to label food products so we can make educated decisions about what we eat. The government has ignored our requests and so we are taking matters into our own hands.

Get your labels at www.labelityourself.org or create our own!

I’m utterly against what they are trying to do with this campaign. Not because I think they aren’t allowed to know what is or isn’t genetically modified, but because of how they’re attempting to get this information to the consumers.

Continue reading The Label It Yourself Campaign