Archive for the 'hoaxes' Category

The scientists are falling! The scientists are falling!

Have you heard of the famous greenhouse scientist, Dr. David Evans? If you’re familiar with the environmental movement, you probably have. From 1999 to 2005, he was consultant to the Australian Greenhouse Office. Recently, he joined a long list of skeptical scientists who question the global warming hysteria. Two weeks ago, he wrote a bombshell of an article called “No smoking hot spot“. Here’s a snippet:

We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.

But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

1. The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.

2. There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None. There is plenty of evidence that global warming has occurred, and theory suggests that carbon emissions should raise temperatures (though by how much is hotly disputed), but there are no observations by anyone that implicate carbon emissions as a significant cause of the recent global warming.

3. The satellites that measure the world’s temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6C in the past year (to the temperature of 1980).

4. The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect.

None of these points are controversial. The alarmist scientists agree with them, though they would dispute their relevance.

So far that debate has just consisted of a simple sleight of hand: show evidence of global warming, and while the audience is stunned at the implications, simply assert that it is due to carbon emissions.

In the minds of the audience, the evidence that global warming has occurred becomes conflated with the alleged cause, and the audience hasn’t noticed that the cause was merely asserted, not proved.

What does this mean for the rest of us???

Fixin’ the Linky Love

One of the effects of PayPerPost has been in trying to get bloggers to increase the page ranking of their sites. One way is to leave comments on a site that has a higher page ranking than your own. As I found out several months ago, many sites automatically insert code that defeats this link love arrangement. So I started this site, I was pleased to learn that it didn’t insert the nofollow code — or so I thought.

Tonight is the first night that I have had a chance to do some work on my websites and to make some entries. With the recent concern among my fellow posties about “page rank thievery”, I want to make sure that my sites allowed the link love that they so crave. This is especially important since a couple of days ago all of my blogs have had an increase in their Google page rankings. I’m happy to say that “What’s All This Then” has gone from zero to three! In any case, tonight I went through the comments to my posts. To my dismay, though some allowed following, I discovered that some did not. I have immediately install a wordpress plug-in that now removes all nofollow code. As soon as I can get a chance to analyze the PHP code, I want to put an explicit “rel=follow” tag on every comment. I’ve done so on my blogspot site in hopes to force the Google bots to make note of all links to my sites. For now, you can rest assured that Google is not blocked into following your comments.

Of course, the question arises if this matters to you. I very much welcome your thoughts and ideas. So bring them on …. :)