Respected skeptic of his country’s institutionalized climate alarm, Malcolm Roberts, makes public hard evidence of disturbing bias by his alma mater, the University of Queensland, Australia. Readers are provided with a complete body of written correspondence that appears to show university staff engaged in systematic misrepresentation and false claims to the press and public.

Posted prominently at www.climate.conscious.com.au/empiricaloh.html  Roberts insists:

This page aims to help restore integrity and objectivity to science and to the rule of law.

Objectivity is vital. Without it, we invite the powerful to rule using physical force, financial and industrial might, emotional intimidation, propaganda, lies, corrupt politics, …

History shows that science’s objectivity is essential for freedom, efficiency, prosperity, progress and fairness.

My complaints present conclusions from the statements and claims of university staff and from observations of their behaviour. My complaints raise allegations discussed in various ‘complaint forms’ and supporting documents.

Jump down to each complaint:

• Board of Professional Engineers of Queensland
• University of Queensland Complaint Management System/Queensland State Ombudsman
• Australian Research Council (ARC)
• University of Queensland Chancellor and Senate

Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg’s behaviour became a concern after he misrepresented science on ABC-TV in October 2010. My concern deepened after his email replies.

It deepened further in 2013 after learning that he manages the university’s John Cook who helped make up a false claim that there is a consensus of climate scientists sharing his boss’ misrepresentations of human carbon dioxide.

My concern deepened considerably after learning of Professor Hoegh-Guldberg’s testimony under oath/affirmation on 7 April 2015 in the Queensland Land Court and in which he contradicted empirical evidence.

It further deepened as a result of subsequent correspondence with our university’s Vice Chancellor.

I sincerely believe the impacts of their misrepresentations include serious damage globally to our natural environment and to humanity, particularly in poorer nations.

I believe that Australians will suffer from damage to industry, our economy and prosperity unless we hold such behaviours accountable.

A new peer-reviewed study refutes Gov. Jerry Brown’s assertion that global warming is behind California’s drought, indicating that climate change neither makes droughts more likely to occur nor exacerbates them. 

The study, published this week in the Journal of Climate, shows that the “net effect of climate change” has made California’s agriculture drought “less likely” to happen and that the “current severe impacts of drought on California’s agriculture” has not been exacerbated by long-term climate changes. This is another stinging indictment that Gov. Brown’s belief that global warming is causing California’s drought is bordering on wish fulfillment.

As first reported here, two earlier studies also show that natural variability, and not global warming, are behind California’s four-year-long drought. An untimely combination of natural events is occurring, but unfortunately for Brown, they have nothing to do with global warming.

This hasn’t stopped Gov. Brown from blaming the drought, and wildfires, on climate change and making it one of his key talking points during press events and educational summits. More puzzling, Brown’s drought statements have gotten more forceful and extreme, even as the science is telling a far different story. Even the NY Times jumped on the bandwagon,quoting one climate scientist who said global warming has made the drought even worse, but admitting that without climate change, it would be a “fairly bad drought no matter what.”

This most recent study looked at how global radiative forcing (the difference between how much sunlight is absorbed by the Earth and radiated back to space.) influences long-term climate change in California, specifically on its drought. Using observations and computer models, the simulations show that increased “radiative forcing since the late 19th Century induces both increased annual precipitation and increased surface temperature over California.” This, they write, is consistent with observed long-term changes (what is actually measured) and previous computer model studies (what is expected to happen).

What the authors found was “no material difference in the frequency of droughts” defined using various, multiple indicators of “precipitation and near-surface (10 cm) soil moisture.” That’s because shallow soil moisture is more responsive to “increased evaporation driven by warming,” which makes up for the “increase in the precipitation.” Conversely, when using deep soil (~1 meter), “droughts become less frequent” because deep soil moisture is more responsive to “increased precipitation.”

Put simply, the study shows how different land surfaces and depths respond to climate changes, which is most pertinent for “near-surface moisture exchange and for root zone moisture availability.” Moisture availability for roots is the most important as the deep layer determines “moisture availability for plants, trees, and many crops.” In the end, it shows that “climate change has made agricultural drought less likely, and that the current severe impacts of drought on California’s agriculture has not been substantially caused by long-term climate changes.”

This should come as good news to Gov. Brown, who fundamentally believes that climate change is causing the severe drought in his state, even though historical records indicate that long-running droughts have occurred in California for millennia. The last multi-year drought happened in 1976, except climatologists blamed that drought, and the subsequent wildfires, on global cooling, not global warming.

The current drought, though, has been made worse by one thing that nature has little control over: man-made interference in the state’s poorly regulated water system that favors agriculture over availability. Another factor is the much-hyped delta smelt, a tiny fish that environmentalists claimed was endangered and successfully had it listed on the Endangered Species Act in 1993. Since that time, many scientists have concluded that listing the delta smelt was premature and not based on factual evidence.

According to Examiner.com’s Lorraine Yapps Cohen, “Legislation that diverted water into San Francisco Bay was intended to protect the delta smelt mini fish from water pumps.” Because environmentalists were able to get the smelt listed as an endangered species, millions of gallons of agricultural water are dumped into the ocean, in a misguided attempt to save a fish at the expense of people’s livelihoods.

This new study was led by Linyin Cheng of the University of Colorado/Boulder and published in the Journal of Climate, a publication of the American Meteorological Society. Other authors listed are from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences/Boulder, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)/Boulder, and the University of California/Irvine.

Read more at www.examiner.com

Outspoken Australian academic publishes telling new book exposing the Vatican for promoting junk science claims about man-global warming.  The Encylical Letter of Pope Francis Laudato Si “care for our common home” was influenced by atheists, communists and green activists, claims Professor Ian Plimer, a world-renowned climate critic.

In Heaven and Hell Professor Plimer, a successful geologist and long-time critic of climate alarmists, takes Pope Francis to task, looking purely at the science rather than the theology.  Plimer shows the failure of the current Pope in his understanding of the real issues causing poverty, especially in Third World countries.

Plimer’s is a trusted voice in the heated climate debate and, as in his previous books, his new publication again shows that ‘anthropogenic global warming’ is a dangerous, ruinously expensive fiction, a ‘first-world luxury’ with no basis in scientific fact.

“The hypothesis that human activity can create global warming is extraordinary because it is contrary to validated knowledge from solar physics, astronomy, history, archaeology and geology,” says Plimer, and while his thesis is not new, you’re unlikely to have heard it expressed with quite such vigour, certitude or wide-ranging scientific authority.

 Professor Plimer tells Principia Scientific International that he “hops into Naomi Klein in this book.” (Klein is a trumpeter for the alarmist movement and recently admitted that man-made climate change is not about the science). The book is on general release from October 23, 2015.

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Joseph Fourier’s discovery of the greenhouse effect is discussed and is compared to the modern conception of the greenhouse effect. It is confirmed that what Fourier discovered is analogous to the modern concept of the greenhouse effect. 

However, the modern concept of the greenhouse effect is found to be based on a paradoxical analogy to Fourier’s greenhouse work and so either Fourier’s greenhouse work, the modern conception of the greenhouse effect, or the modern definition of heat is incorrect. The solution to this problem is not feigned to be given here.

Interview The life of physicist Freeman Dyson spans advising bomber command in World War II, working at Princeton University in the States as a contemporary of Einstein, and providing advice to the US government on a wide range of scientific and technical issues. 

He is a rare public intellectual who writes prolifically for a wide audience. He has also campaigned against nuclear weapons proliferation.

At America’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Dyson was looking at the climate system before it became a hot political issue, over 25 years ago. He provides a robust foreword to a report written by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change cofounder Indur Goklany on CO2 – a report published[PDF] today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).

An Obama supporter who describes himself as “100 per cent Democrat,” Dyson says he is disappointed that the President “chose the wrong side.” Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere does more good than harm, he argues, but it is not an insurmountable crisis. Climate change, he tells us, “is not a scientific mystery but a human mystery. How does it happen that a whole generation of scientific experts is blind to obvious facts?”

When NOAA announced today that a global bleaching event is occurring, scientists took notice. When they wrote that it was the third-worst global coral bleaching event, headlines started blaring “devastating” and “dramatic.” But the facts about coral bleaching are usually set aside in the rush to make headlines, and when it comes to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), you really do have to pay attention to what they are declaring. Especially under this current administration.

As we first reported here, NOAA announced in early July that coral reefs are dying off at an unprecedented rate, even though a recently published paper showed that these statements are more alarmist than accurate. Coral reefs can turn white when the algae that surrounds them dies off from too warm (or too cold) water, and the satellites detect that thermal stress. But the paper published in Marine Biology showed that while even though some corals appear bleached, it doesn’t mean they are dead or even dying. Why?

Conventional tracking methods (like NOAA’s 5-km Coral Reef Watch Satellite Monitoring) can’t distinguish between white and bleached (dead) colonies. The paper, by Cruz et al, showed that “although bleaching leaves the coral skeleton visible under its transparent tissue, not all white coral colonies display this feature,” which “raises the question as to whether all ‘white’-shaded colonies are indeed bleached.” To determine whether bleached coral is actually dead, Cruz et al actually sampled coral off the east coast of Brazil, and found that white corals exhibited the same lifelike features as their multi-colored cousins.

Campbell and Ōmura win for their work on a therapy against roundworm, sharing the prize with Tu for her work on a therapy against malaria. 

 Three scientists from Ireland, Japan and China have won the Nobel prize in medicine for discoveries that helped doctors fight malaria and infections caused by roundworm parasites.

Tu Youyou discovered one of the most effective treatments for malaria while working on a secret military project during China’s Cultural Revolution.

The 84-year-old pharmacologist was awarded half of the prestigious 8m Swedish kronor (£631,000) prize for her discovery of artemisinin, a drug that proved to be an improvement on chloroquine, which had become far less effective as the malaria parasites developed resistance.

Two other researchers, 80-year-old Satoshi Ōmura, an expert in soil microbes at Kitasato University, and William Campbell, an Irish-born parasitologist at Drew University in New Jersey, share the other half of the prize, for the discovery of avermectin, a treatment for roundworm parasites.

Explaining his shocking resignation from the American Physical Society, Professor Emeritus of physics Hal Lewis of the University of California at Santa Barbara wrote:

“It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist.” 

The renowned physicist further wrote:

“Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club.”

Dr. Lewis, who was also a former department chairman at the University of California, had been a member of the American Physical Society for 67 years.

The full resignation letter is as follows:

Sent: Friday, 08 October 2010 17:19 Hal Lewis
From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society
6 October 2010

An excellent webcast{jcomments off} from the LaRouche group posted last week.  An absolute must-see! 

Scientists have seen huge, extra-powerful particles shooting out of the sun, in what they have described as a brand new solar phenomenon. 

Researchers have for the first time ever spotted what they describe as “large-scale” waves being thrown out of the sun, together with energetic particles that seem to be thrown out by the waves. The scientists have long known that such particle emissions were happening — but couldn’t explain how they were making their way into space.

The sun is continually throwing out huge, violent bursts of emissions into space. Some of those are well-known, such as coronal mass ejections, but the new waves are of a new and are little understood.

“The new phenomenon is like a kind of explosion,” said Radoslav Bucík, who led the research team.

Those waves are likely bringing with them particle flows that are much more rich in a light form of helium, helium-3, than normal.

“We believe that the blast waves accelerate the helium-3”, Davina Innes, from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS), said in a statement.

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Anon: “From your latest”:

“Do you want to take down scientific materialism, the scientific anti-philosophical paradigm?  Do you want philosophy to use mathematics and physics better than science can, and to make philosophy once more reign supreme in intellectualism and to assert its supremacy over science?  Perhaps something more current, more part of the social zeitgeist, will help.  Unless you have an event more interesting.”

Anon:  “So I came across this reference to Pythagoras:”

As I have stated publicly on many occasions, there is no definitive scientific proof, through real-world observation, that carbon dioxide is responsible for any of the slight warming of the global climate that has occurred during the past 300 years, since the peak of the Little Ice Age.  If there were such a proof through testing and replication it would have been written down for all to see.

The contention that human emissions are now the dominant influence on climate is simply a hypothesis, rather than a universally accepted scientific theory. It is therefore correct, indeed verging on compulsory in the scientific tradition, to be skeptical of those who express certainty that “the science is settled” and “the debate is over”.

But there is certainty beyond any doubt that CO2 is the building block for all life on Earth and that without its presence in the global atmosphere at a sufficient concentration this would be a dead planet. Yet today our children and our publics are taught that CO2 is a toxic pollutant that will destroy life and bring civilization to its knees. Tonight I hope to turn this dangerous human-caused propaganda on its head. Tonight I will demonstrate that human emissions of CO2 have already saved life on our planet from a very untimely end. That in the absence of our emitting some of the carbon back into the atmosphere from whence it came in the first place, most or perhaps all life on Earth would begin to die less than two million years from today.

Some dentists use Laughing Gas for its analgesic effects instead of local anaesthetics. It’s supposed to prevent pain when they get close to your nerves. I’ve never had the pleasure of such a treatment and my dentist prefers the modern “slight discomfort” version of the poke and needle variety. 

Of course, that’s miles ahead of the procedure I experienced in my early years when the dentist appeared to use a hammer drill to lay bare the live nerves of my teeth—without any analgesic at all.

But I’m getting sidetracked. This post is about the newest menace to the globe: Laughing Gas. Believe me this is not a laughing matter. Some activists think that this gas is another villain causing “climate change,” “global warming,” polar ice melting, rising ocean levels, droughts and floods, and all other calamities.

Obviously, the claims of carbon dioxide (CO2) causing every conceivable misfortune is running into some difficulties; it must be high time to find another culprit.

Laughing Gas

Laughing Gas (LG) is a simple chemical, composed of two nitrogen (N) atoms and one oxygen (O) atom, hence the chemical notation of N2O and name nitrous oxide. Of course you know that molecular nitrogen gas (N2) and molecular oxygen (O2) make up 99{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the atmosphere on earth (disregarding water vapor). That new villain, LG, is present in the atmosphere at approximately 330 parts per billion, or 0.00003{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} in the atmosphere. What a menace!

Not only is LG a natural trace constituent of air, mainly arising from soil bacteria and lightning, it is also commercially produced and used for a variety of purposes, some of which – I frankly admit – are beyond my comprehension. For example, Wikipedia mentions uses that include rocket fuel or additive, internal combustion engine fuel additive, propellant for such food items as whipped cream dispensers, recreational and medicinal uses.

Scientists have discovered a hitherto unknown cooling process which may pose a serious threat to man-made global warming theory. 

According to a study by the Institute of Catalysis and Environment in Lyon (IRCELYON, CNRS / University Lyon 1) and the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS), the oceans are producing unexpectedly large quantities of isoprene – a volatile organic compound (VOC) – which is known to have a cooling effect on climate.

Isoprene is a gas that is formed by both the vegetation and the oceans. It is very important for the climate because this gas can form particles that can become clouds and then later affect temperature and precipitation. Previously it was assumed that isoprene is primarily caused by biological processes from plankton in the sea water. The atmospheric chemists from France and Germany, however, could now show that isoprene could also be formed without biological sources in surface film of the oceans by sunlight and so explain the large discrepancy between field measurements and models. The new identified photochemical reaction is therefore important to improve the climate models.

The oceans not only take up heat and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, they are also sources of various gaseous compounds, thereby affecting the global climate. A key role is played by the so-called surface microlayer (SML),  especially at low wind speed. In these few micrometers thin layer different organic substances such as dissolved organic matter, fat and amino acids, proteins, lipids are accumulating as well as trace metals, dust and microorganisms.

The not-quite-planet-but-jolly-big-for-an-asteroid Ceres continues to give up its secrets under the unwinking gaze of NASA’s Dawn probecraft, now in orbit about the planetoid.

New developments include the naming of various features on Ceres and the detection of a mysterious particle blast from the enigmatic dwarfworld.

“Ceres continues to amaze, yet puzzle us, as we examine our multitude of images, spectra and now energetic particle bursts,” said Chris Russell, Dawn’s principal investigator.

One new map of Ceres includes more than a dozen officially approved names for features.

The names, all eponymous for “agricultural spirits, deities and festivals from cultures around the world” include a mountain near Ceres’ north pole, with a diameter of 12 miles (20km) which has been dubbed Ysolo Mons, “for an Albanian festival that marks the first day of the eggplant harvest.”

A full list of features’ names is available here, and includes a crater dubbed Vinotonus, after the Celtic Briton god of vines, and another named Jaja, after the Abkhazian harvest goddess.