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April 17, 2017 2:00pm by David Farrar

Blunt on Climate

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Why is disagreeing with the “official government approved science” on climate change a respectable and normal position for most Kiwibloggers

yet

disagreeing with the “official government approved science” on water fluoridation will see the commentator disparged and labelled “anti-science” by most Kiwibloggers?

Not meant as a criticism, but rather a curiosity I’ve noticed over the past few days….
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April 17, 2017 2:25pm
- Paulus Gnome
  
  That’s odd as you have commented on this perceived disparity for quite some time and not just in the last few days . . . .
  
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  April 17, 2017 2:32pm
- Peter
  
  The problem is that “climate change” (AGW) is a left wing political movement.
  
  Many of us would rather focus on the science.
  
  The science says climate has always changed
  The science says man most likely plays a part in warming
  The jury is still out on whether the amount of warming caused by mans activity is cause for concern
  It is certainly valid to still be asking questions
  It is not “settled”
  
  Once you get rid of the corruption, selective sampling and utterly tedious left wing agenda, that is what the science says.
  
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  April 17, 2017 3:13pm
  - jonar
    
    You missed a bit. The climate has always changed – but not at the rate we’re seeing now.
    
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    April 17, 2017 3:52pm
    - All_on_Red
      
      Bullshit
      From IPCC AR 5 WG1
      ‘Confidence is low for a global-scale observed trend in drought or dryness (lack of rainfall) since the middle of the 20th century, due to lack of direct observations, methodological uncertainties and geographical inconsistencies in the trends. Based on updated studies, AR4 conclusions regarding global increasing trends in drought since the 1970s were probably overstated.’
      ‘AR5: Confidence remains low for long-term (centennial) changes in tropical cyclone activity, after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities.
      
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      April 17, 2017 3:55pm
    - burt
      
      jonar
      
      I bet your the sort of guy who watches the traffic flow on a motorway for 5 minutes and concludes that traffic in this motorway travels between 85-105 kph and then sets taxes and fines on any variance outside of that ‘settled statistical’ analysis of traffic flow.
      
      Fuck me, we’ve been on this planet for such a spec of time in the context of the climate and we think we know it all. FFS we can’t even explain the blindly obvious cycle we see here in the Ice cores yet we claim we know what drives modern climate. What a total crock AGW is!
      
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      April 17, 2017 5:14pm
- Liberty
  
  Warmist , anti fluoride are in the same ilk as deluded chemtrail devotees.
  Basically are bit challenged.
  
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  April 17, 2017 3:29pm
  - jonar
    
    Um, try again, science is on the side of climate change and fluoridation.
    
    5 17
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    April 17, 2017 3:57pm
    - All_on_Red
      
      Ok.
      “Climate Alarmists,anti fluoride are in the same ilk as deluded chemtrail devotees.
      Basically are bit challenged.”
      
      There you go.
      
      10 4
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      April 17, 2017 4:06pm
    - UrbanNeocolonialist
      
      Science on on the side of small water vapour feedbacks (that 10-20 years ago was the great unknown in CO2 linked warming). That makes ‘catastrophic’ warming and large sea level rises extremely unlikely. Additionally some warming has net benefit to the world increasing plant growth rates and slightly increasing area of land that can be cultivated.
      
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      April 17, 2017 4:59pm
- jcuk
  
  EAD,,,,
  …… over the past decades I think.
  
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  April 18, 2017 9:54am
gump

First we got punished with Stringer’s lousy cartoons, and now we’re getting tortured with Blunt’s efforts.

What have we done to deserve this?
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April 17, 2017 2:37pm
- David Garrett
  
  gump: Well at least it sounds as if you understand it…I don’t…something about climate change and crying wolf, is it??
  
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  April 17, 2017 2:40pm
- RRM
  
  ‘Blunt’ seems like someone who would really benefit from smoking and actual blunt, and calming the fuck down.
  
  Sigh.
  
  Facepalm.
  
  This is why we can’t have nice things.
  
  https://cdn.meme.am/cache/instances/folder375/61709375.jpg
  
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  April 17, 2017 9:37pm
dad4justice

Are H1 and H2 a type of giant maneating wolverine?
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April 17, 2017 2:39pm
fernglas

Read and absorb the enormous subtlety. By omitting the first three letters of the word ***ageddon, the cartoonist is pointing, with the cockney-esque dropping of the letter “H”, to a “harmless” contemporary news policy. The real cleverness comes with the way he has deliberately messed up the plurals in both “year(s)” and “confirmation(s)”. Here he is tipping his hat to the supposed Russian fake news mills, hinting that the author might be one of them. The juxtaposition of the cute puppies with the man with the paedophile moustache crying a blood red “wolf”, is to show younger readers that climate change naysayers are not to be trusted; that the harmless ones are the media, represented by the spaniels, who are loyal and faithful to those whom they serve.

The cartoonist is conveying a subtle but telling message; do not believe the sweetie-offering climate change sceptics, but instead look into the melting eyes of the mainstream media and trust them.

Thanks DPF, for posting this.
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April 17, 2017 3:33pm
holysheet

PLEASE MAKE IT SO WE CAN DOWNTICK A WHOLE TOPIC POST. 30 AND THIS CRAP WOULD BE GONE
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April 17, 2017 3:43pm
All_on_Red

So here we have ‘Inhabit.com’ talking about a 10 Year tipping point on 31/05/2007
‘ NASA and Columbia University Earth Institute’s recently conducted study that verifiably asserts that “with just 10 more years of ‘business as usual,’ it becomes impractical to avoid disastrous effects.” The forecast, as articulated by the study’s lead author, James Hansen of NASA, sounds like the worst parts of the Bible, predicting everything from “increasingly rapid sea-level rise, increased frequency of droughts and floods, and increased stress on wildlife and plants due to rapidly shifting climate zones.” The 10-year timeframe shows other recent climate studies to have underestimated the urgency of the window in which we can make significant changes.’
http://inhabitat.com/nasa-puts-global-warming-tipping-point-within-10-years/

In a stunning lacking of self awareness they print this just the other day.

‘Time is running out to protect Earth from the disastrous effects of climate change. An international team of eight researchers said we have just 10 years to save the planet. But their news isn’t all bad: they’ve come up with a model for balancing carbon dioxide emissions with carbon sinks, like forests, to keep temperatures from passing the 1.5 degree Celsius mark widely considered safe for life as we know it.’
http://inhabitat.com/scientists-say-we-have-10-years-to-save-earth/

Great isn’t it. What’s the bet in ten more years they will be saying ‘ten more years’?
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April 17, 2017 3:53pm
JIV

Strangely the CAGW skeptics are the ones telling you to go and investigate the methodology and the science and make your own mind up. The Alarmists are the ones telling you to just believe what they say.
I was interested in the “science” but once I discovered the methodology relied on tree rings and ice cores and the nothing was repeatable I started questioning the whole theory.
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April 17, 2017 5:55pm
- mikenmild
  
  Those tree rings and ice cores are notoriously difficult for morons to understand.
  
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  April 17, 2017 6:26pm
  - Maggy Wassilieff
    
    Yes, it is such a pity that Michael Mann didn’t read the original paper his bristlecone treering data was taken from.
    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252598029_Detecting_the_Aerial_Fertilization_Effects_of_Atmospheric_CO2_Enrichment_in_Tree-Ring_Chronologies
    
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    April 17, 2017 6:52pm
    - mikenmild
      
      If only he had, maybe he would have demolish the whole scientific consensus on global warming. As it is, it’s been left to a handful of nutters to try and achieve that.
      
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      April 17, 2017 7:41pm
    - projectman
      
      Simple really. If you don’t read the science you don’t have to admit to not understanding it.
      
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      April 18, 2017 5:14am
      - mikenmild
        
        It’s lucky we have people like you who understand so much more about climate than Michael Mann.
        
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        April 18, 2017 6:40am
    - Ed Snack
      
      Mikenmild, you are relying heavily on the argument from authority, and treating Mann as an “authority” is a problem.
      
      The Bristlecone Pine issue is an old one and the records in question were used in his 1998/99 and 2008 papers on paleoclimate. There are many issues with this data which are glossed over by Mann’s supporters.
      
      The data was originally collected by Gray and Idso around 1985-1990 or so and comes from a series of BC trees in California at high altitudes. They used this data to publish the study above “proving” that the increases are due to CO2 fertilization. It is thus improper to assume the increase is temperature driven. Using simple statistics on the detrended data shows that they correlate better with precipitation than temperature anyway.
      
      The major issues can be summarized as being that the apparent increase in ring measurements seen in the 20th century does not represent temperature. There are many reasons to suppose this and without wanting to write a multi-paragraph screed the primary reason is almost certainly centred around the fact the G&I selectively sampled “strip-bark” examples of these trees. That is a phenomena where most of the bark around a trunk dies off (usually due to harsh conditions) leaving just a relatively small continuous piece of bark protecting the living part of the tree trunk on one side. This strip of bark is what was sampled in many cases.
      
      Supporting this view is the fact that a more recent set of samples was taken and processed by one Linah Ababneh in the late 1990’s as a PhD thesis. These did not selectively sample strip-barks to the same extent and also used a more standard set of calibration adjustments. This study was initially published and the samples do NOT show a “hockey stick” shape. Unfortunately you cannot find this sample any more because it has been blocked by “legal privilege” of some sort. The PhD was granted and the work accepted and published, but it is not now publicly available for unstated reasons.
      
      The mathematical and statistical tricks employed to use the original G&I data is also completely unsound (wrong matrix used for the Primary Components extraction, the correct use makes the data used by Mann only the 4th most important component accounting for only 8% of the variance) and there is nothing physical to link this to temperature, plus the fact that using the statistics actually calculated by Mann shows that the results even with all his jiggery-pokey are not statistically significant before the 16-17th century or so (see the replication Wahl & Amman 2007 that, unlike Mann’s original, was forced by the reviewers to show all their statistical results).
      
      The most likely explanation is that the original G&I samples are not representative and show a mechanical effect resulting from the strip-bark phenomena. That the Ababneh study failed to replicate the results is a very strong indicator of this. Quite why Mann (and many others) don’t use the more modern, comprehensive, and conventionally detrended data from Ababneh is a puzzle unless one assumes that the G&I data is preferred because of it’s “shape” and what they pretend to “prove” by using it.
      
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      April 18, 2017 11:19am
      - mikenmild
        
        You, by contrast, are making a different mistake, arguing that the flaws you perceive in one study upset a wide-ranging scientific consensus. It is a mentality of clutching at straws that is pervasive among the so-called ‘skeptics’.
        
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        April 18, 2017 11:25am
      - Ed Snack
        
        Mikenmild, no I’m not. In that post I am merely pointing out the flaws (which I am glad you appear to accept) in several paleoclimate studies. Those studies though are at the heart of the so-called climate consensus.
        
        What puzzles me is why people continue to defend those studies although their defects are large and easily demonstrated. Take Mann’s 2008 paper on the same topic. That paper re-sued the same Bristlecone data and ignored the more modern data. It also included a number lake-sediment series collected in Finland. However those sediment series were used incorrectly (upside down in 2 out of three cases, Mann assumed thicker was warmer whereas the original author demonstrated that thicker was colder) and were used at times that they were invalid. The original author noted that agriculture started in the area (or restarted possibly, as the climate warmed enough) in the late 18th century and that the ground disturbances caused by agriculture meant that the data was contaminated and unreliable past that date – Mann used the entire record.
        
        So what happens if you remove that sediment data as one must given the contamination, well that invalidates one of the primary claims made by the paper. In fact the results only retain their iconic “hockey stick” shape if the original G&I Bristlecone pine data is also retained. Remove that and the entire shape is changed. So the result is utterly sensitive to the inclusion of a single piece of badly flawed data. Replace the G&I data with the Ababneh data and the results would show no hockey stick at all. And that result would seem to be the “scientific” one.
        
        So why don’t people like yourself reject the obviously flawed studies. If the evidence is so strong, why do you need this manufactured stuff, why not rely on solid, properly conducted, work instead ?
        
        If you rely merely on authority to say that these studies are actually OK you are doing yourself a serious disservice. I don’t know if you have any scientific training and background, but I do. I made a point of following this debate when it started, initially just because it seemed like a typical “storm in a teacup” but when I went seriously into it and studied the various source data I was able to confirm, to my satisfaction anyway, that the skeptics in these cases have a far stronger case. They have much weaker political political clout however, and politics is where this is at; it isn’t a scientific debate now.
        
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        April 18, 2017 11:58am
  - pentwig
    
    I would say that a moron with no brain would understand them easily.
    
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    April 17, 2017 7:33pm
    - Maggy Wassilieff
      
      Feel free to explain the divergence problem to us then.
      
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergence_problem#cite_note-6
      
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      April 17, 2017 7:38pm
  - JIV
    
    So if I sent you a nice piece of pine you could tell me the average temperature for the entire year to the nearest tenth of a degree? Actually hundredth of a degree would be better. Can you do that too??
    
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    April 17, 2017 9:10pm
  - JIV
    
    And another thing… Can you explain why these climate geniuses spend millions of dollars on satellites, explain to the world how amazingly accurate they will be, then ignore them completely because they dont fit their theory.
    Also, why spend some much money on 4000 Argo floats to ignore their data and accept ship data from buckets of water?
    
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    April 17, 2017 9:25pm
Boris Piscina

I’m genuinely puzzled by some of this.

I mean it’s a no-brainer that the climate has always changed. But until the hysterical element can tell me how and why it changed between colder and warmer and colder and warmer again, without humans around, I remain unconvinced that we in fact have anything to do with it. As for rapid change, perhaps they could also explain the woolly mammoths found frozen solid with green food still in their mouths.

Then there’s the fluoride thing. It’s another no-brainer that topical applications of fluoride help strengthen tooth enamel. That’s why I use fluoride toothpaste, and at three score years and ten I still have my own teeth. But until the fluoridators can explain to me how drinking water with fluoride in it is of benefit to my teeth, without swilling the stuff round my mouth for the requisite several minutes at a time required for such a topical effect to be achieved, given that there is no internal pathway between the digestive system and the enamel of the teeth, I remain unconvinced. I do note that in many jurisdictions dental caries rates have fallen at a comparable rate since regular brushing was heavily promoted in the late sixties and early seventies, regardless of whether said jurisdictions had fluoridation or not. I note that as an observation.

And there’s the vaccination thing; another no-brainer, germ theory is very easily understood, and fortifying the immune system by giving it a head start on otherwise potentially deadly diseases by exposing it to a weakened version of such diseases so that the necessary antibodies may be prepared beforehand is long proven and one of the greater advances of modern medicine. But I struggle to understand why some people would think that their children, who have been vaccinated, are at greater risk of contracting a disease against which they are supposedly protected to a degree, because they are in contact with children who are not similarly vaccinated.

Unless I’m missing something, of course. I have asked these questions here before, and suffered a storm of downticks but received very little in the way of explanation. Some explanation would be much appreciated.
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April 17, 2017 9:36pm
Ed Snack

Boris, the vaccination thing. All vaccines only offer partial coverage and protection, typically it is good but not 100%. Therefore the more people are exposed to the disease causing pathogens the greater the risk that they may develop the disease regardless of vaccination status. Though note that vaccinated people should (and generally are) less likely to contract the disease. But the risk is never zero.

Contagious diseases typically need to be present at a certain level to “survive”, that is if a typical, say, chicken pox sufferer infects at least one other person then the disease remains extant. If it is less than one the disease will typically die out locally until re-introduced. Thus the pool of unvaccinated people is important as these people allow these diseases to more easily remain extant. If this pool can be made small enough the diseases will indeed go extinct locally and ultimately (like smallpox and {almost} polio) extinct globally.

So vaccination protects but not absolutely; but absolute protection could be achieved if the disease can be eradicated. That of course assumes that there is no non-human infection vector pool, many influenza viruses as an example would be extremely difficult to eliminate because they exist in other species (birds and pigs) and can mutate and cross infect.

Fluoride is harder in that there is no one accepted theory of how fluoride is absorbed and incorporated into dental enamel. Statistical studies though do seem to show a sound basis for having Fluoride available at low levels to strengthen enamel and help prevent dental caries.

The studies though that attempt to show an association of Fluoride presence in water supplies with any specific diseases are not, at least in those studies I have looked at, statistically valid. If I study two areas, one with and one without Fluoride in water supplies, I will be able to find at least one serious complaint that is over -represented and apparently significantly so, in the Fluoride area. However this is not actually significant because there will be others over-represented in the non-fluoride area and data mining of this type needs to be evaluated using the appropriate statistical methods. By sheer chance it is likely that one in 100 diseases will be over-represented in one area over the other at the one in one hundred odds of occurring.

A good example of this is the surveys and analysis done around Dioxin residues in Taranaki. Some researchers quickly pointed out that certain cancers (for example) were “significantly” more common in those with a higher exposure to dioxin. However they neglected to point out that other cancers were “significantly” less common. If the data is analyzed properly I believe that no specific illnesses were shown to be more prevalent as a result of the Dioxin exposure
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April 18, 2017 11:40am
- Maggy Wassilieff
  
  The other thing with vaccination is that some folks in the population will always be susceptible.
  Young babies do not receive their first whooping-cough vaccination until 6 weeks old and their MMR jab at 15 months.
  http://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/preventative-health-wellness/immunisation/new-zealand-immunisation-schedule
  There are immuno-compromised folk in our society also, who through disease or medical treatment can’t be vaccinated.
  
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  April 18, 2017 11:50am

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