Martin Meenagh blog

Global Cooling 50-50? I have for some time been very suspicious of the lobbies, social groupthink, and research grants available to the man-made carbon-based global warming community. Arguments about cosmic rays affecting the development of cloud cover, sunspot activity, and methane 'burps' , and the heating or cooling of the pacific ocean , by contrast, have been and are being presented clearly across the internet. Such reporting is being done not only by nutters but by sane scientists and researchers as well. These arguments have the virtue of being clear, and for a non-scientist such as myself, they also are defended by people who do not resort to exasperated, pseudo-religious style attacks but who instead take refuge in data. Here is a link to the interesting Fabius Maximus site . As with all sites I link to, the authors and I do not necessarily agree and nor should we be expected to. Fabius Maximus reports that some are now talking of global cooling in terms of coming fam...

Global Cooling It's a perennial theme of this blog that the global warming which may or may not have been evident in the 1980s and 90s ended in 1998. I think that the arguments for the warming being related to things like the Pacific Oscillation and, especially, the sun, are convincing. I don't, of course, think this as a scientist, because I'm not, but because human-based global warming, or human and carbon-based warming is so obviously silly. As Lyndon Johnson said to George Wallace once, 'Never bulls--t a bulls---tr', and I am world class at that sort of thing. My blog is but a pale, platonic cave-style reflection of my talents in non-dishonest bovine scatology. Anyway, every serious scientist I know also tells me that the greenhouse mechanism cannot work chemically in the atmostphere. I noticed three non-zany stories this morning that made me sit up and take notice, however. Firstly, as the inimitable SolarCycle24.com points out, the solar cycle does not seem t...

Abiotic Oil and Global Cooling There are two scientific debates picking up strength on the internet which the mainstream media seems scared to report. One--that over abiotic oil--has been one that I have posted about from time to time. As a non scientist, I think that the evidence for peak oil, if oil is a fossil fuel, is robust and persuasive. I was very worried by it this time last year. It could be that most oil on this planet is the consequence of fossil fuel, but that some is not. It could be that the petrochemical establishment in the west has been completely wrong for a hundred years about oil; they were about ether, for instance, and that didn't stop the discovery of radio. Now, we may have the beginnings of an evidence-based debate. I hope I am wrong, and that we are not about to run out of energy because oil at viable prices is past peak flow. This site , were it to be shown to be based on proof, would suggest I am wrong. Anaconda, who has left an interesting comment on a...

The Heliosphere and Solar Cycle 24 I have, from time to time, been posting on the apparent quiet of the sun. I should make clear why. I am in no way convinced by the collection of 'consensus' and lobby-driven groupthink we have all experienced in the past fifteen years when it comes to global warming. I know very able chemists who inform me that the suggested process by which carbon dioxide becomes a greenhouse gas is not in conformity with any idea of atmospheric science they have. I can see that climate does vary and change over sweeps of time. Explanations based around the cosmic wind, cloud cover, thermohaline currents, or even the solar system's passage through the galactic plane and the possible presence of dark matter seem to be valid. I can't tell. I'm not a scientist. I note, however, how hysterical the proponents of carbon-related global warming shut people down who raise the issue. Such behaviour raises my suspicion, because I do know about how herds deve...

Global Cooling I like contrarians . I also like science, though I am not a scientist and certainly not a devotee of the cult of scientism that holds that whatever theory is possessed of a loud or majority voice is absolutely true. As you know, my one sole reader, I am also far from convinced that climate change has much to do with man-made global warming, that it is unnatural, or that anything can be done about it. I am very suspicious of the science, driven by lobby groups and funded by governments, that links carbon dioxide intimately to global warming. A certain sort of western liberal at the moment is very prone to slightly psuedoscientific stances. For example, the recent rush to ban plastic bags on environmental grounds runs up against quite a few difficulties. My pal Lou has sent me an indication of some here . I think that a campaign to limit oil-based products and plastic as the oil begins to run out, allied to a nuclear and clean coal energy system would be a good idea. Moder...

North Pole Ice It's not up to me to disprove or approve of every piece of pseudoscientific nonsense that comes out of the global warming media. I have, as my one demented reader in the maximum security special library will know, other things to be irresponsibly alarmist about. I do note how the media-political class now say 'climate change' rather than 'global warming' to make themselves feel a bit more sophisticated. This also keeps the story going without making them look like chumps. It is a bit like the way they insist on saying 'stem cell' rather than 'adult' or 'cord' stem cell rather than 'embryonic' stem cell, but that observation should be left for another post. Still, I was struck by this story in the ever-rational 'Watts Up With That' site. In it, pictures and newsreel from the past sixty-odd years of the north pole are contrasted to show periodic thinning and thickening of the ice. My only quibble would be that th...

Time will Reveal All The painting is by Heeremans, and depicts a winter scene on the walls of Amsterdam. I like the Dutch painters, and would happily direct readers not just to this site on Heeremans--who was a dealer-entrepreneur as well as a painter-- but to Jonathan Israel's great works on the Dutch republic and the Enlightenment as Christmas reading. As I and many other bloggers have been writing for some years now, the dogma of global warming is just that. Dogma. A belief system, and not a particularly impressive one at that, upheld by scientists whose grants and incomes depend upon toeing the line and a vociferous group who are more than prepared to play the game of personal destruction. Those many scientists who have expressed serious doubts about the mechanism of carbon-dependent anthropogenic global warming have been traduced, ignored or dismissed. In part, that has been because mainstream journalists are what EU Referendum has called 'parti pris' to the warmist...

Global Cooling after all? The picture depicts an ice cave ceiling in Bavaria and can be found at this site. The University of Alabama in Huntsville seem to have come up with this graph, which I found on the excellent watts up with that science website. UAH have been previously questioning the 'globality' of global warming by the simple expedient of looking at the figures , and they were one of the first to actually question the sloppy statistics of the International panel on Climate Change, albeit indirectly. They looked at real numbers. The IPCC and the global warming crowd, by contrast, depend upon highly unreliable temperature recordings from stations often situated near air conditioning outlets or, in one notorious case, which are defunct. There is an accumulating body of evidence that, just as we are committing billions of dollars, euros and pounds to the very poor faith-based reasoning of global warming, the earth is cooling and the sun is going through a minimal phas...

The International Sea Bed Authority We're very used by now, in the west at least, to breathless media reports detailing how 'the arctic is shrinking'. This is despite many surveys over the past few years showing that it is not. The ice at the top of the world is falling back in comparison to previous seasons in some areas, but it seems actually to be growing in others, as do some glaciers . A simple explanation for all of this seems beyond the wits of clever men and women. Some have suggested a change in the salinity of the ocean ; some have suggested the influence of undersea volcanoes . Interestingly, given that solar sunspots are slow in appearing these days-- solar cycle 24 is overdue, and overdue or inactive solar cycles historically correlate with cold periods --some have suggested that we might be in for a spot of global cooling anyway. None of this has stopped stories about the 'North-West passage' opening up . This has had policy effects. The idea that t...

Can He? Herbert Hoover was a hope-filled and inspiring public leader once. He won a landslide, based in part upon his reputation as the man who saved and rebuilt Belgium after the Great War, his status as a political outsider and engineer, and his general emphasis on competence. Jimmy Carter had a similar, if less weighty appeal in 1976, though he was obviously far less helped by the Ku Klux Klan than Hoover was. Barack Obama is being treated as though he were some sort of superman whose policies were substantially different from most of the American political class. They are not. Mr Obama appears to be a much smarter and more pliable version of the sub-class of American academics who step into politics, a sort of electable combination of Dan Pat Moynihan and Woodrow Wilson. I think that the challenge before him is being vastly underestimated. Within half a year, he could very well find himself up a creek. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, the Democrats in Congress--the peop...

The Global Warming Hypothesis continues to unravel.... The best bet for the future is global cooling, not warming. It is, however, one of the curiosities of our time that a vast pile of intellectual deadwood, held together by money and social consensus, has created an intellectual orthodoxy that we are in a period of global warming and polar melting. The hard evidence for this is sparse and diminishing. The real evidence of temperature anomalies, and satellite data, and a growing number of serious scientists, goes against it. Despite this, governments everywhere are using global warming, which cannot be caused by man-made carbon dioxide emissions on the scale proposed, as an excuse to invade lives, regulate households, raise taxes, and coddle the thaumaturgic fetishes of anti-christian but not post-religious secularists. The problem is multifaceted. To a large extent, there are far too many computer models which are crude, apt to go wrong, and upon which too much weight is placed. The ...

Global Temperatures and the Sun The picture is of course one of my old favourites--Christ as Sol Invictus . One of the most suspicious things about the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, from a science layman's point of view, has been the insistence of some of its adherents that it is simply a product of a perfectly natural gas and of a mooted process in the atmosphere. Real scientific debate has been set to one side; consensus has been elevated as some sort of proof; and truly mad, and misinformed policy decisions have eaten away at liberty and public spending as a consequence. Many in the media and political class seem to have gone for the extrapolation of temperature from the 1990s to an expectation of imminent doom. This has a consequence of dramatising their lives, and articulating the combination of narcissism and Lacanian breakdown to which the official mind of our society seems to be heading, under pressure of money and intellectual collapse. However, this breezy ...

The first taste of peak oil The first taste of the problems with oil that are to come seems to be over. Oil is falling to an historically high level as I write. It is, if it is a fossil fuel, still past its peak as it does so, and I'm fairly sure that it's past peak flow. I say 'if' because there is some small argument at the minute (I'm not convinced but you might like a look) that it isn't, thanks to one of my commenters--a hedge fund trader-- who provided this link . 'Demand destruction' which is not yet showing up in the lagged GDP figures for this and other countries, is taking place. So, hooray--we are in a recession, global trade is falling rapidly, and energy and plastics have become progressively more affordable, but at least oil won't run out tomorrow. Oh, and solar cycle 24 has still not started . Here is a link to a fantastic site monitoring the driver of earth's climate, which I got from the Devil's Kitchen today. The devil has...

Maths aren't Life.... I've been very struck this past week by the ongoing capacity of the social sciences to fail. I am not, as it were, a disbeliever in their insights. I think that societies and peoples have from time to time been advanced by the discipline that a requirement to model and assess policy and action have placed on decision makers. However, I've always been very suspicious of what I see as the pretensions of political scientists or econometricians. Building unreal models of the world and then judging people or developments against them seems to me precisely what most of the new philistines think Catholicism is--a platonic effort to hold reality to an unreal standard. We've had three decades now of 'scientific, evidence based' policy making. The wreckage of the derivatives industry, and of the global warming cult are two of the most interesting consequences. The two ideas are linked in numerous mathematical ways. Derivative markets, for instance, r...

Science and Doubt There are an awful lot of people currently puffing themselves up as experts on science. That is to say, there are those, usually atheists from the social sciences, who will brook no dissent whatsoever about things like global warming, abortion for social reasons, HIV-AIDS, or the MMR vaccine and its putative links to autism. I think that an intelligent person could make up his or her mind on the basis of the preponderance of doubt, and the provable falisifiability of evidence. That reads as quite a pompous thing to write. What I mean is that it should not be beyond citizens in a free country, whether in Europe, South Africa, or the USA, to raise valid questions about the orthodoxies of the day. It should of course also not be above people, once their mind is made up, to say 'I am right until I'm proved wrong'. On the balance of doubts, and in the face of clear evidence, it should also be possible to say to contrarians sometimes, 'you are wrong, step as...

Mad Cow Disease Causes Global Warming According to Shub Niggurath's cheerfully named 'total distortion of the facts' climate site . I did like that. It's still true, and has been for the past three years, that both hemispheres have been registering cooling, that global warming ideas do not pass a null hypothesis, that no reliable mechanism for global warming can be found, that cyclical cooling linked to the sun has proven robust in terms of predictive validity, and that anyone now going on about global warming as a reality must be by definition either malign or silly. It's also clear that a bunch of middle class types high on themselves and their own thanatic busyboots drama--and desperate for research grants and camera time--have been making up figures to appeal to ex-hippies and wannabe Dylanites in the political class right life and centre. People should get back to conservation and the challenge of dealing with peak oil--by building up nuclear and coal supplies-...

Straws in the Wind 1 Even the New York Times and Nature --hardly mad, right-wing 'denialists' of the sort normally decried by global warming believers--have started placing articles about global cooling. It seems that we are now nearly a month and a half into a 'delayed' solar cycle 24 , and it seems quieter than predicted, though scientists are rightly reluctant to make great assertions. We face the dawning realisation that the sun is much more important than so-called 'greenhouse gases' in the temperature of the earth than many have allowed themselves to see. Day after day, questions arise over the placement and effectiveness of global temperature monitoring stations and over the consequent statistics. Yet still we do not launch ourselves on the effort to develop nuclear fusion, clean coal, and a clear view of exactly what is happening to the climate. Instead, a vast political lobby funded by activists and executed by people without proper science background...

The Story of Our Coming Times The picture is Sustermans' Galileo The world is full of lies, late and soon. It opens your eyes, to consider how much deceit and self-deceit is practised, however. Sometimes, just following government figures for 'apparent deficits' and balances of payments and then realising that they don't count public-private investment or the effective underwriting of banks does it for people. At other times, an assessment of whatever the conventional wisdom happens to be and the ferocity of its proponents when questioned is the thing that brings illumination. I think that there are two themes--not necessarily exclusive ones--which will shape the history of our times when it comes to be written. The credit crunch, bizarrely, in itself might not; most people today don't remember or have never learned about the panics of 1819 , 1837 , and 1873 (The first 'Great Depression') that helped shape America and the British Empire, let alone that of ...

NASA schedules a press conference on the state of the sun Global cooling cycles linked to a slight diminution in the activities of the sun have been explanations of periods of cold in the past for some time. Indeed, the New Scientist last week carried an interesting story which wondered if stone age men caused a slight global warming that helped stave off an ice age. The solar cycle has been linked to agriculture, and to the rise and fall of civilisations. I am coming to the belief that, if the history of the hysterical last gasp of premillenarianism in our societies ever gets written, man-made global warming will be seen as a colossal diversion from the study of the sun's influence on our climate. But, hey, carbon-credits have become a business, and environmentalism proves one's credentials with the western middle classes as an autonomous yet engaged individual. So that's alright then--or at least it will be until the carbon traders go down with their ship . Something i...

Thermageddon! Oh, hahahaha. Wattsupwiththat alerted me to this piece in Australia. It points out something that I and many many others started saying last year, at first quietly and then with more confidence; the global warming scare is in retreat. We are at stable temperatures and, if anything, facing global cooling given the apparent correlation of a quiet sun with periods of cold in the past four hundred years . Welcome to what the anti-alarmists are calling 'Thermageddon'. Now, let's reopen the mines, fire up the fusion plants, and get ready for the real challenge--managing the end of oil at viable prices, the end of crazy global markets, and the world food crisis before it is too late. We can have a rational, local, sensible and human set of values rooted in law, respect, and the worthwhile things of this world if we want. Patience and reason and love and faith will win through! Here are some muppets singing 'Always Look on The Bright Side of Life'.