Saturday, March 16, 2019

Who's the Climate Liar?

Did Patrick Moore, a Doubter of Anthropogenic Climate Change, Co-Found Greenpeace?
 
President Trump thinks so.
Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace: “The whole climate crisis is not only Fake News, it’s Fake Science. There is no climate crisis, there’s weather and climate all around the world, and in fact carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life.” @foxandfriends Wow!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 12, 2019
Greenpeace USA‏Verified account;@greenpeaceusa
Replying to
Patrick Moore was not a co-founder of Greenpeace. He does not represent Greenpeace. He is a paid lobbyist, not an independent source.
Snopes says:
Moore’s anti-climate-change statement on “Fox and Friends” is a bad-faith argument, and attributing such statements to a “Greenpeace co-founder” is factually inaccurate.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/patrick-moore-climate-doubter/
However,  a web page quote directly from the Greenpeace website list Patrick Moore as a co-founder

http://web.archive.org/web/20021119050900/http://www.greenpeace.org.au/aboutus/founders.html

So who is caught in this lie?:

Saturday, March 9, 2019

Time to Get Scientific About Climate Change

Guy Sorman recently interviewed Judith Curry for the City Journal(1).  In it Curry talks bluntly without all the political spin about the real status of Climate Change. Curry is the former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  Specifically, she states:

“There is warming, but we don’t really understand its causes. The human factor and carbon dioxide, in particular, contribute to warming, but how much is the subject of intense scientific debate.”

"Even if all the states respected this commitment [Paris Climate Accord]—an unlikely prospect—the temperature reduction in 2100 would be an insignificant two-tenths of a degree. And this assumes that climate-model predictions are correct. If there is less future warming than projected, the temperature reductions from limiting emissions would be even smaller."

"Since the Paris Climate Accord was concluded, no government has followed through with any serious action. India is effectively ignoring the agreement, and France “misses its goals of greenhouse-gas reduction every year. The accord is unenforceable and carries no sanctions—a condition insisted upon by many governments that wouldn’t have signed on otherwise. Most economists suggest that the only effective incentive to reduce greenhouse-gas levels would be to impose a global carbon tax. No government seems willing to accept such a levy."

"Almost half of the warming observed in the twentieth century came about in the first half of the century, before carbon-dioxide emissions became large. None of the climate models used by scientists now working for the United Nations can explain this older trend. Nor can these models explain why the climate suddenly cooled between 1950 and 1970, giving rise to widespread warnings about the onset of a new ice age."

"Sea level is rising, but this has been gradually happening since the 1860s; we don’t yet observe any significant acceleration of this process in our time."

"Climatology has become a political party with totalitarian tendencies. If you don’t support the UN consensus on human-caused global warming, if you express the slightest skepticism, you are a ‘climate-change denier."

"Climatology is becoming an increasingly dubious science, serving a political project. The policy cart is leading the scientific horse.” 

"In 2005, Rajendra Pachauri, the Indian railway engineer, who remade himself into a climatologist and became director of the IPCC told me, without embarrassment, that, at the UN, he recruited only climatologists convinced of the carbon-dioxide warming explanation, excluding all others."

“We’re always being told that we are reaching a point of no return—that, for instance, the melting of the Arctic ice pack is the beginning of the apocalypse. But this melting, which started decades ago, is not leading to catastrophe. Polar bears have never been more numerous and less threatened by the melting than by urbanization and economic development in the polar region."

Read whole interview at

(1) https://www.city-journal.org/global-warming 

Wednesday, March 6, 2019

What is the MOMO Challenge?

      The Momo Challenge and the Blue Whale Game are part of a folkloric tradition of what’s called a fear test - will teens be brave—or scared—enough to complete the challenge, even if they know it will end in their deaths?  The ultimate test is one that instructs the teen to commit suicide.

      However, there is little evidence that these games have actually led to teen suicides. For the most part the stories about suicides are nothing more than media caused panic paticularly in parents who may not be as tuned into the activities of their children as they should be. Its another form of stranger danger that have created a generator of helicopter parents who envision a threat around every corner.

     According to Benjamin Radford, a scientific paranormal investigator, a research fellow at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. "It’s easy for grief and moral panic to override critical thinking. The evidence for the Blue Whale game and the Momo Challenge is built largely on rumor and conjecture instead of solid evidence. This is only the latest in a long series of similar moral panics and outrages shared on social media and aided by sensationalist news media"  Click here to read his whole article

John Oliver Takes on PSYCHICS



While on the subject of psychics here is another video.  https://youtu.be/faBIIFA5wng 
It wouldn't be such a big deal except - 40% of Americans believe in them - and THEY VOTE.