Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is a scam, with no basis in science.
As regards global warming, my view is essentially the same as yours: Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is a scam, with no basis in science.
It is obvious that anthropogenic global warming is not science at all, because a scientific theory makes non-obvious predictions which are then compared with observations that the average person can check for himself. As we both know from our own observations, AGW theory has spectacularly failed to do this. The theory has predicted steadily increasing global temperatures, and this has been refuted by experience. NOW the global warmers claim that the Earth will enter a cooling period. In other words, whether the ice caps melt, or expand — whatever happens — the AGW theorists claim it confirms their theory. A perfect example of a pseudo-science like astrology.
In contrast, the alternative theory, that the increase and decrease of the Earth’s average temperature in the near term follows the sunspot number, agrees (roughly) with observation. And the observations were predicted before they occurred. This is good science.
I no longer trust “scientists” to report observations correctly. I think the data is adjusted to confirm, as far as possible, AGW. We’ve seen many recent cases where the data was cooked in climate studies. In one case, Hanson and company claimed that October 2008 was the warmest October on record. Watts looked at the data, and discovered that Hanson and company had used September’s temperatures for Russia rather than October’s. I’m not surprised to learn that September is hotter than October in the Northern hemisphere.
Another shocking thing about the AGW theory is that it is generating a loss of true scientific knowledge. The great astronomer William Herschel, the discoverer of the planet Uranus, observed in the early 1800’s that warm weather was correlated with sunspot number. Herschel noticed that warmer weather meant better crops, and thus fewer sunspots meant higher grain prices. The AGW people are trying to do a disappearing act on these observations. Some are trying to deny the existence of the Maunder Minimum.
original here:
http://www.urgentagenda.com/PERMALINKS%20IV/DECEMBER%2008/22.P.WARMING.html
Also, more here:
2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a “scientific consensus” in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world’s most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that “consensus” which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.
Marilynn Robinson: Paris Review interview, quotes
I read “Housekeeping” years ago, and knew I was in the hands of a great writer. Since I’ve learned you can be a great artist yet an execrable person, in my cynicism I didn’t form an interest in her on account of just one brilliant book.
Now comes this interview, with the comment in the preface that she is a “Christian”. In this day and age that tells us little about her actual dogmatics, and the interview doesn’t help us much on that score, but she is a factory of contemplation-inducing quotes.
The Paris Review – The Art of Fiction No. 198
I don’t like categories like religious and not religious. As soon as
religion draws a line around itself it becomes falsified. It seems to
me that anything that is written compassionately and perceptively
probably satisfies every definition of religious whether a writer
intends it to be religious or not.You have to have a certain detachment in order to see beauty for yourself
rather than something that has been put in quotation marks to be
understood as “beauty.” Think about Dutch painting, where sunlight is
falling on a basin of water and a woman is standing there in the
clothes that she would wear when she wakes up in the morning—that
beauty is a casual glimpse of something very ordinary. Or a painting
like Rembrandt’s Carcass of Beef, where a simple piece of meat
caught his eye because there was something mysterious about it. You
also get that in Edward Hopper: Look at the sunlight! or Look at the
human being! These are instances of genius. Cultures cherish artists
because they are people who can say, Look at that. And it’s not
Versailles. It’s a brick wall with a ray of sunlight falling on it.
