Climate Heretics, Great and Small

Remember back when the Pope had Galileo taken before the Inquisition?  You probably weren't there but have heard the tales. Galileo was a scientist and of course those  Catholic religious oppressors of the Truth locked him up.  Banned his books. Tortured his toes. Burned him at the stake. Actually, they didn't.  Far from it. But the whole affair pushed scientists forward as the new religion and has given a host of excuses for the anti-Catholic brigade ever since. But more about him later.

Today we have scientists ruling the roost and dictating what is true and what isn't. We 'trust' them, because... well... they have a 'method' innit? And they speak a strange argot and write runes that only the illuminated understand, innit? They is Modern and Enlightened. Not like Popes and Bishops who are just after your money.

We wish !

Truth is, 'scientist' is a blanket term for some quite clever and useful chaps who 'break new ground', some modest plodders who are about as insightful as a glo-worm, and many, many con-men who take your money in shiploads, far more than any Pope did way back or megachurch bullshitter does now. And the most public and successful? Climate wallahs. Probably.

Phenominal amounts of taxpayers' monies are not only funnelled to 'climate scientists' but as much again to political wallahs (lefty ones, of course), to NGOs (lefty again), to high-tech companies, to advertising agencies, and to almost anyone seeking a place for their nose in the trough who can work the phrase into a grant application. More lefties. Climate science IS a lefty religion and must not be critiqued or questioned.

Tim Blair downed a glass and told the crowd...

Outside of standard religious texts, there is no place on Earth more clogged with fantasy, fable and folklore than a climate activist’s mind. You name it and the climate crowd are into it, from starving polar bears and deadly coal to sinking Pacific Islands and friendly wind turbines... etc, etc.

Perhaps though, the tide is turning. President Trump has rubbished the idea and has pulled out of the 'Paris Agreement'. Now the new PM of Oz  has dared to speak some sense, while oddly still supporting that agreement.

Asked if Australia would be held to the target to reduce emissions by 26% to 28% from 2005 levels, Morrison said: “No, we won’t … we’re not held to any of them at all. Nor are we bound to go and tip money into that big climate fund. We’re not going to do that either. I’m not going to spend money on global climate conferences and all that nonsense.”

I am not holding my breath on that. No turning blue here. Sense has a struggle to get heard these days.

It is Heresy to even question 'Climate science'. The most prominent heretic is the aforementioned President Trump who is a multidextrous heretic against almost everything the 'conventional lefty wisdom' dictates. 

But the young and perhaps niaive have a place. One such was introduced in the bar by Joanne Nova, no stranger here. She is a such a trojan, holding back the hordes. Her friend is Dr John McLean, who, as a PhD student decided to take a close look at 'The Data'

Shock, horror. Burn him !!

What he found is staggering. Not that you are going to hear much of it.

#DataGate! First ever audit of global temperature data finds freezing tropical islands, boiling towns, boats on land

The fate of the planet is at stake, but the key temperature data set used by climate models contains more than 70 different sorts of problems.  Trillions of dollars have been spent because of predictions based on this data – yet 

even the most baby-basic quality control checks have not been done.

 http://joannenova.com.au/2018/10/first-audit-of-global-temperature-data-finds-freezing-tropical-islands-boiling-towns-boats-on-land/

The HadCRUT4 dataset is a joint production of the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre and the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia.

 And we all know (or should) about the University of East Anglia's absolutely appalling and corrupt 'scientists' who have systematically destroyed data and the reputations of other scientists. 

HadCRUT4 is a global temperature dataset, providing gridded temperature anomalies across the world as well as averages for the hemispheres and the globe as a whole. CRUTEM4 and HadSST3 are the land and ocean components.

The CRU data covers 10,295 stations, but 2693 – more than a quarter – don’t meet the criteria for inclusion described in Jones et al 2012, which is considered to the best description of what should and shouldn’t be included.

It is impossible to know exactly which sites are included in the final temperature analysis, and whether a site’s records have been adjusted. (If only we could do our tax returns like this?)

The sub-parts of the datasets contradict each other. The land set and the sea set should combine up to be the global set, but they don’t always match. Which one is right?

“It seems like neither organization properly checked the land or sea temperature data before using it in the HadCRUT4 dataset. If it had been checked then the CRU might have queried the more obvious errors in data supplied by different countries.  The Hadley Centre might also have found some of the inconsistencies in the sea surface temperature data, along with errors that it created itself when it copied data from the hand-written logs of some Royal Navy ships.”  – John McLean

Thanks to Dr John McLean, we see how The IPCC demands for cash rests on freak data, empty fields, Fahrenheit temps recorded as Celsius, mistakes in longitude and latitude, brutal adjustments and even spelling errors.

Why. Why. Why wasn’t this done years ago?

So much for that facade. How can people who care about the climate be so sloppy and amateur with the data?

In probably the worst systematic error, the past is rewritten in an attempt to correct for site moves. While some corrections are necessary, these adjustments are brutally sweeping. 

Thermometers do need to move, but corrections don’t have to treat old sites as if they were always surrounded by concrete and bricks.

New original sites are usually placed in good open sites. As the site “ages” buildings and roads appear nearby, and sometimes air conditioners, all artificially warming the site. So a replacement thermometer is opened in an open location nearby. Usually each separate national meteorology centre compares both sites for a while and figures out the temperature difference between them. Then they adjust the readings from the old locations down to match the new ones. 

The problem is that the algorithms also slice right back through the decades cooling all the older original readings – even readings that were probably taken when the site was just a paddock.  

In this way the historic past is rewritten to be colder than it really was, making recent warming look faster than it really was. 

Thousands of men and women trudged through snow, rain and mud to take temperatures that a computer “corrected” a century later.

The Chiefs of Met offices get paid around 180,000 a year. UK Pounds, that is.  That's around $325,000 AuD. To sit on their arses and fail miserably to ensure such screw up don't happen. But of course its just taxpayer's money and it 'fits' with the 'conventioanl lefty wisdom'.

We’ve seen the effect of site moves in Australia in Canberra, Bourke, Melbourne and  Sydney. After being hammered in the Australian press (thanks to Graham Lloyd), the BOM finally named a “site move” as the major reason that a cooling trend had been adjusted to a warming one. In Australia adjustments to data increase the trend by as much as 40%.

In theory, a thermometer in a paddock in 1860 should be comparable to a thermometer in a paddock in 1980. But the experts deem the older one must be reading too high because someone may have built a concrete tarmac next to it forty or eighty years later. 

This systematic error, just by itself, creates a warming trend from nothing, step-change by step-change.

Worse, the adjustments are cumulative. The oldest data may be reduced with every step correction for site moves. Ken Stewart found some adjustments to old historic data in Australia wipe as much as 2C off the earliest temperatures. We’ve only had “theoretically” 0.9C of warming this century.

When a thermometer is relocated to a new site, the adjustment assumes that the old site was always built up and “heated” by concrete and buildings. In reality, the artificial warming probably crept in slowly. By correcting for buildings that likely didn’t exist in 1880, old records are artificially cooled. Adjustments for a few site changes can create a whole century of artificial warming trends.

While each national bureau supplies the “preadjusted” data. The Hadley Centre is accepting them. Does it check? Does it care?

 The Hadley Centre for Climate Change — named in honour of George Hadley — is one of the United Kingdom's leading centres for the study of scientific issues associated with climate change. It is part of, and based at the headquarters of the Met Office in Exeter.  Taxpayer funded of course.

McLean’s report could scarcely have come at a more embarrassing time for the IPCC. On Monday, it will release its 2018 Summary for Policy Makers claiming that the global warming crisis is more urgent than ever. But what McLean’s audit strongly suggests is that these claims are based on data that simply cannot be trusted.

Well, here we are on Monday, and 'our' ABC had a lengthy piece on the News which was simple scare and gloom propaganda.  Bollocks science. No mention of this news. 

For two years the entire Southern Hemisphere temperature was estimated from one sole land-based site in Indonesia and some ship data. We didn’t get 50% global coverage until 1906. We didn’t consistently get 50% Southern Hemisphere coverage until about 1950.

McLean’s findings show there almost no quality control on this crucial data. 

The Hadley Met Centre team have not even analyzed this data with a tool as serious as a spell checker.  

Countries include “Venezuala”,” Hawaai”, and the “Republic of K” (also known as South Korea). One country is “Unknown” while other countries are not even countries – like “Alaska”.

The real fault of the modern day institutes is not so much the lack of historic data, but for the way they “sell” the trends and records as if they are highly certain and meaningful.

And, of course, the punishment for Heresy, which is to be burned at the stake in Whitehall.

The Hadley data is one of the most cited, most important databases for climate modeling, and thus for policies involving billions of dollars.

McLean found freakishly improbable data, and systematic adjustment errors , large gaps where there is no data, location errors, 

Fahrenheit temperatures reported as Celsius, 

and spelling errors.

Almost no quality control checks have been done: outliers that are obvious mistakes have not been corrected – one town in Columbia spent three months in 1978 at an average daily temperature of over 80 degrees C.  

One town in Romania stepped out from summer in 1953 straight into a month of Spring at minus 46°C. 

These are supposedly “average” temperatures for a full month at a time. 

St Kitts, a Caribbean island, was recorded at 0°C for a whole month, and twice!

Temperatures for the entire Southern Hemisphere in 1850 and for the next three years are calculated from just one site in Indonesia and some random ships.

Sea surface temperatures represent 70% of the Earth’s surface, but some measurements come from ships which are logged at locations 100km inland. Others are in harbors which are hardly representative of the open ocean.

Gory details of the worst outliers

For April, June and July of 1978 Apto Uto (Colombia, ID:800890)  had an average monthly temperature of  81.5°C, 83.4°C and 83.4°C respectively.

The monthly mean temperature in September 1953 at Paltinis, Romania is reported as -46.4 °C (in other years the September average was about 11.5°C).

At Golden Rock Airport, on the island of St Kitts in the Caribbean, mean monthly temperatures for December in 1981 and 1984 are reported as 0.0°C. But from 1971 to 1990 the average in all the other years was 26.0°

So, a pint for the persistent and meticulous lad and a fine lady's bevvie for Joanne.

Am I shocked? Not a bit. What can we expect from a branch of science that cannot predict weather three days hence yet badgers and cajoles governments into stealing hard-working peoples' tax monies with threats of weather in 50 years time. Can we be shocked that this information by Jo and from Dr McLean is not front-page news? No again.

There is too much money flowing into too many crooked pockets: trillions which could be doing far more good in the world.

Frankly there should be many, many people charged with 'heresy'. Heresy against Truth. They deserve the Stake.

And I said (above) 'probably', when looking at climate wallahs being the most egregious takers of monies. Quieter but simply superb money launderers are the Physicist Priesthood. Physicists are far quieter and possibly more successful in keeping the money to themselves in their underground, circular temples where they whizz insubstantial entities around looking for God.

And what really did happen to the heretic Galileo?

I take this for you from Wiki. You take it as you may.

Although Galileo seriously considered the priesthood as a young man, at his father's urging he instead enrolled in 1580 at the University of Pisa for a medical degree. However, after accidentally attending a lecture on geometry, he talked his reluctant father into letting him study mathematics and natural philosophy instead of medicine.

In the whole world prior to Galileo's conflict with the Church, the majority of educated people subscribed either to the Aristotelian geocentric view that the earth was the center of the universe and that all heavenly bodies revolved around the Earth, or the Tychonic system that blended geocentrism with heliocentrism. Nevertheless, following the death of Copernicus and before Galileo, heliocentrism was relatively uncontroversial; Copernicus's work was used by Pope Gregory XIII to reform the calendar in 1582.

Galileo defended heliocentrism based on his astronomical observations of 1609 (Sidereus Nuncius 1610). In December 1613, the Grand Duchess Christina of Florence confronted one of Galileo's friends and followers, Benedetto Castelli, with biblical objections to the motion of the earth. According to Maurice Finocchiaro, this was done in a friendly and gracious manner, out of curiosity. Prompted by this incident, Galileo wrote a letter to Castelli in which he argued that heliocentrism was actually not contrary to biblical texts, and that the bible was an authority on faith and morals, not on science. This letter was not published, but circulated widely.

The essay also included four theological arguments, but Ingoli suggested Galileo focus on the physical and mathematical arguments, and he did not mention Galileo's biblical ideas. In February 1616, an Inquisitorial commission declared heliocentrism to be "foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture." 

The Inquisition found that the idea of the Earth's movement "receives the same judgement in philosophy and... in regard to theological truth it is at least erroneous in faith". (The original document from the Inquisitorial commission was made widely available in 2014.)

Pope Paul V instructed Cardinal Bellarmine to deliver this finding to Galileo, and to order him to abandon the opinion that heliocentrism was physically true. On 26 February, Galileo was called to Bellarmine's residence and ordered:

... to abandon completely... the opinion that the sun stands still at the center of the world and the earth moves, and henceforth not to hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatever, either orally or in writing.

The decree of the Congregation of the Index banned Copernicus's De Revolutionibus and other heliocentric works until correction. Bellarmine's instructions did not prohibit Galileo from discussing heliocentrism as a mathematical and philosophic idea, so long as he did not advocate for its physical truth.

For the next decade, Galileo stayed well away from the controversy. He revived his project of writing a book on the subject, encouraged by the election of Cardinal Maffeo Barberini as Pope Urban VIII in 1623. Barberini was a friend and admirer of Galileo, and had opposed the condemnation of Galileo in 1616. Galileo's resulting book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was published in 1632, with formal authorization from the Inquisition and papal permission.

Earlier, Pope Urban VIII had personally asked Galileo to give arguments for and against heliocentrism in the book, and to be careful not to advocate heliocentrism. He made another request, that his own views on the matter be included in Galileo's book. Only the latter of those requests was fulfilled by Galileo.

Later, after more controversy over the matter, from many quarters, he was sentenced to formal imprisonment at the pleasure of the Inquisition. On the following day, this was commuted to house arrest, which he remained under for the rest of his life.

His house arrest was in Vatican property where he enjoyed almost palatial quarters, a laboratory, a study and great encouragement to study and write. He was allowed to return to his villa at Arcetri near Florence in 1634, where he spent part of his life under house arrest. Galileo was ordered to read the seven penitential psalms once a week for the next three years. However, his daughter Maria Celeste relieved him of the burden after securing ecclesiastical permission to take it upon herself.

It was while Galileo was under house arrest that he dedicated his time to one of his finest works, Two New Sciences. Here he summarised work he had done some forty years earlier, on the two sciences now called kinematics and strength of materials, published in Holland to avoid the censor. This book has received high praise from Albert Einstein. As a result of this work, Galileo is often called the "father of modern physics". 

He went completely blind in 1638 and was suffering from a painful hernia and insomnia, so he was permitted to travel to Florence for medical advice.

Galileo continued to receive visitors until 1642, when, after suffering fever and heart palpitations, he died on 8 January 1642, aged 77.

No Prisons. No torture. No burning at the stake.

'Science' has all the authority that the Church had in Galileo's time. But far greater clout. I doubt young McLean will get 'house arrest'. There is little chance of him getting fully equiped papal apartments or even a $325,000 Top Job courtesy of the taxpayer.  He has incurred the wrath of the IPCC.

Expect to see him sometime soon as a foreman on a building site. If he works hard.


Meanwhile drink to his continuing good heath.


Pax.