Learning my way

Landed a job in a foreign country.  Because it deals with shipping, I am finding my lack of geographical knowledge in regards to Canada is lacking.  The city of Winnipeg is in Manitoba, I had no clue.  Sure some smaller fare is understandable. But, others not so much.

So I know that Truro is in Nova Scotia, and that the contraction for Nova Scotia is NV.  PEI is Prince Edward Island. and Newfoundland and Labrador are linked.

Saskatoon is in Saskatchewan and Thunder Bay is in Ontario.

The closer to the southern boarder the more towns and people.  So population wise the country is a large stripe.

Oh and PM Harper is NOT the head of state.  That would be Queen Elizabeth and or the Governor General David Johnston.

Thou shalt not tolerate opinions or facts not your own...

Amazingly daft that a noted scientist would be pummeled for suggesting that climate models should reflect observation.

Original

On Monday, Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson took a tilt at climate skeptics. “The assumption that the vast majority in a scientific field is engaged in fraud or corruption is frankly conspiratorial,” Gerson wrote. As a non-scientist, he decided that the answer to the question of whether humans had warmed the planet was to trust scientists.

The article’s timing was unfortunate. Three weeks ago, Lennart Bengtsson, a leading Swedish meteorologist approaching his 80s, announced that he was joining the avowedly skeptical Global Warming Policy Foundation think tank. In an interview with Spiegel Online, Bengtsson spoke of the need for climate-model predictions to be validated against observations. “Since the end of the 20th century, the warming of the Earth has been much weaker than what climate models show,” he said. 

Hadn’t the IPCC covered this in its recent report? “Yes,” Bengtsson replied,

the scientific report does this but, at least in my view, not critically enough. It does not bring up the large difference between observational results and model simulations. I have full respect for the scientific work behind the IPCC reports but I do not appreciate the need for consensus. It is important, and I will say essential, that society and the political community is also made aware of areas where consensus does not exist.

One of the most telling features of climate science is just how few climate scientists changed their minds as the evidence changed. The pause in global temperature in the last 15 years or so has been unexpected. Now we know why: Yesterday, Bengtsson dropped a bombshell. He was resigning from the think tank. In his resignation letter, Bengtsson wrote:

I have been put under such an enormous group pressure in recent days from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me. If this is going to continue I will be unable to conduct my normal work and will even start to worry about my health and safety. . . . Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship etc. I see no limit and end to what will happen. It is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy.

Especially significant was a tweet from Gavin Schmidt, a leading climate modeler at the NASA Goddard Institute, who for many years worked alongside James Hansen. “Groups perceived to be acting in bad faith should not be surprised that they are toxic within the science community,” Schmidt tweeted. “Changing that requires that they not act in bad faith and not be seen to be acting in bad faith.”

Evidently the right to practice and discuss climate science should be subject to a faith test. It is an extraordinarily revealing development. Fears about unbelievers’polluting the discourse, as some academics put it, illustrate the weakness of climate science: The evidence for harmful anthropogenic global warming is not strong enough to stand up for itself. 

Inadvertently Schmidt’s tweet demonstrates how far climate science has crossed the boundary deep into pseudo-science. Karl Popper observed of the trio of pseudo-sciences prevalent in 1920s Vienna that their followers could explain why non-believers rejected their manifest truths. For Marxists, it was because of their class interests. For subscribers to Freudian psychoanalysis and Alfred Adler’s psychology, non-belief was evidence of unanalyzed repressions crying out for treatment. So it is with climate science. Only the pure of heart should be allowed an opinion on it.

Science regresses if it becomes intolerant of criticism. At the beginning of her reign, Queen Elizabeth I of England spoke words of tolerance in an age of religious strife, declaring that she had no intention of making windows into men’s souls. Unlike religion, science is not a matter of the heart or of belief. It exists only in what can be demonstrated. In their persecution of an aged colleague who stepped out of line and their call for scientists to be subject to a faith test, 21st-century climate scientists have shown less tolerance than a 16th-century monarch.

There is something rotten in the state of climate science.

Global Coolings 100% consensus in 1961

Link to story:  Those who are skeptical about those Man Made Global Warming zealotry, tend to note the mid century global cooling.  Increasingly we are starting to see the following from those not dissuaded by the abject failure of the weather models and the increasingly inaccurate predictions made 10, 20, 30 years ago.  To whit:"Global cooling was just one article in Newsweek. It’s a myth the anti-science deniers just made up, while they were taking money from Exxon-Mobil, watching Fox News, and helping the tobacco companies deny lung cancer."

Yadda yadda fallacy...

Kukla warned President Nixon

Those who rewrite the history of climate science to suit the man-made global warming hypothesis hate to be reminded that global cooling and the threat of a new ice age rang alarm bells in the 1960s and 1970s. In the Orwellian manner they try to airbrush out the distinguished experts involved, and to say it was just a scare story dreamed up by stupid reporters like me.

No, we didn’t make it up. I [Nigel Calder] was present in Rome in 1961 when global cooling was already the main concern at a conference of the World Meteorological Organization and Unesco (see the Unesco reference). The discussions were led by Hubert Lamb of the UK Met Office, who went on to found the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

A persistent concern of Lamb and others was that the world might return to a Little Ice Age like that of 300 years ago. But the improving knowledge of glacial history, and especially the apparent brevity of warm interglacials, prompted anxiety about a full-blown ice age. George Kukla, together with Robert Matthews of Brown University, convened a conference in 1972 entitled “The Present Interglacial: How and When will it End?”, and reported it in Science magazine.

Kukla and Matthews alerted President Richard Nixon, and as a result the US Administration set up a Panel on the Present Interglacial involving the State Department and other agencies. None of us knew then that the mid-century cooling was about to be punctuated by a warming spell from the late 1970s to the mid 1990s….

Nigel Calder who wrote the above and reported on these meetings graduated from Cambridge University, and spent two years as a research physicist for the Philips Group. He was a science writer on the original staff of New Scientist in 1956 and became editor in 1962. He wrote books, articles and TV scripts winning the UNESCO Kalinga Prize for the Popularization of Science.

The resulting 1974 CIA report: A Study of Climatological Research as it Pertains to Intelligence Problems

Pg 7
In 1972 the Intelligence Community was faced with two issues concerning climatology:

* No methodologies available to alert policymakers of adverse climatic change

* No tools to assess the economic and political impact of such a change.

“… Since 1972 the grain crisis has intensified…. Since 1969 the storage of grain has decreased from 600 million metric tons to less than 100 million metric tons – a 30 day supply… many governments have gone to great lengths to hide their agricultural predicaments from other countries as well as from their own people…

pg 9
The archaeologists and climatotologists document a rather grim history… There is considerable evidence that these empires may not have been undone by barbarian invaders but by climatic change…. has tied several of these declines to specific global cool periods, major and minor, that affected global atmospheric circulation and brought wave upon wave of drought to formerly rich agricultural lands.

Refugees from these collapsing civilizations were often able to migrate to better lands… This would be of little comfort however,… The world is too densely populated and politically divided to accommodate mass migration.

[Page 18 talks of coming glaciation]
Scientists are confident that unless man is able to effectively modify the climate, the northern regions… will again be covered with 100 to 200 feet of ice and snow. That this will occur within the nexy 2,500 years they are quite positive; that it may occur sooner is open to speculation.

page 22
The climate of the 1800s was far less favorable for agriculture in most areas of the world. In the United States during that century, the midwest grain-producing areas were cooler and wetter and snow lines of the Russian steppes lasted for longer periods of time. More extended periods of drought were noted in the areas of the Soviet Union now known as the new lands. More extensive monsoon failures were common around the world, affecting in particular China, the Philippines and the Indian Subcontinent.

The Wisconsin analysis questions whether a return to these climate conditions could support a population that has grown from 1.1 billion in 1850 to 3.75 billion in 1970. The Wisconsin group predicted that the climate could not support the world’s population since technology offers no immediate solution. Further world grain reserves currently amount to less than one month; thus any delay in supplies implies mass starvation. They also contended that new crop strains could not be developed over night… Moreover they observed that agriculture would become even more energy dependent in a world of declining resources.


So yes there was concern about a cooling planet and what it would mean to food production. This is also the time period Holdren and Erhlich were writing “Population Bomb”, “Ecoscience”, “Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions” and other doom and gloom books. This is the time when Maurice Strong hosted the UN First Earth Summit. Strong invited activists and paid their way and then told them to go home and raise He!! thereby shifting political power from the adults to easily manipulated spoiled teenagers.

Elaine Dewar wrote in Toronto’s Saturday Night magazine:

It is instructive to read Strong’s 1972 Stockholm speech and compare it with the issues of Earth Summit 1992. Strong warned urgently about global warming, the devastation of forests, the loss of biodiversity, polluted oceans, the population time bomb. Then as now, he invited to the conference the brand-new environmental NGOs [non-governmental organizations]: he gave them money to come; they were invited to raise he!! at home. After Stockholm, environment issues became part of the administrative framework in Canada, the U.S., Britain, and Europe.

So it would seem that by 1972 the powers behind the UN already knew the climate was cyclical and took advantage of it. In 1944 W. Gleissberg published A Table of Secular Variations of the Solar Cycle

The 80- 90 year solar cycle was detected by Gleissberg (1958, 1965) and the 200 year cycle was found by (Suess 1965, 1980) The Milankovitch cycle theroy was already under discussion and by 1976 Shackleton, Hays and Imbrie had published the paper confirming the Milankovitch cycles. “Variations in the Earth’s orbit: Pacemaker of the ice ages”


However you can not use variations in the sun to beat the sheeple over the head with to lend “legitimacy” to the need for a world goverment. Former Director-General of the WTO laments The reality is that, so far, we have largely failed to articulate a clear and compelling vision of why a new global order matters — and where the world should be headed. Therefore the political necessity of ignoring the sun’s effects on the climate while CO2 is made the boogeyman. After all it is for our own good.

Oh Canada....

So now I am immigrated.

Due to a series of events I am now living and working in a different country.  There are many differences and many things the same.  Actually, extricating those things which are alike has brought about several complexities.

Living in the Pacific North West has its own peculiarities. These abide no arbitrary boarder.  Attitudes about weather, driving mountains, vehicle preference and clothing choices all ring true.  The Hunter culture is very similar with a few stark contrasts.

Those joint Canadian and US similarities go much deeper then language and entertainment.  The USA provides the bulk of the worlds entertainment. With quite a dip in the UK and Canadian talent pool.

Then you get the differences and even prejudices as well. I have been "called out" as an American because of my rather strong accent.  Of all the experiences, that has to be among the more uncomfortable.  I would much rather be noticed as an individual in a group then outside of one.

I find the food choices to be fun and interesting.  I will hit up the Triple O for a lunch or Donair etc. Poutine is always on the menu and where have you ever seen a pierogi restaurant?

So I am learning to say Zed, and what province Winnipeg is located, how to spell Centre, colour and cheque.  I can curl, ice skate and ski.  Hoping to find a senior rugby and or lacrosse team at some point.

All in all I am liking my adopted country.