Category: Uncategorized

Autopsy Of An Excuse

Autopsy Of An Excuse

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Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach Well, Dr. James Hansen, the man who invented the global warming scam and our favorite failed serial doomcaster, recently addressed the cratering of a 30-year prediction he made in 1988. Back then, he said the globe would warm up by two to five degrees by 2018 with five degrees being…

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July 22, 2017 at 01:01PM

50-Year Sea Level Trends At Newlyn & North Shields

50-Year Sea Level Trends At Newlyn & North Shields

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By Paul Homewood

As promised, I have also run some charts showing 50-year trends for sea level rise at Newlyn and North Shields.

As any half competent oceanographer will tell you, you need to be looking at trends of at least 50 years, as Bruce Douglas points out:

It is well established that sea level trends obtained from tide gauge records shorter than about 50-60 years are corrupted by interdecadal sea level variation.

 

As with the 10-year trends I presented yesterday, the charts below give 50-year trends on an overlapping monthly basis:

image

image

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Both stations show accelerating sea level rise culminating in 1970, before dropping away, and then recovering again in the 1990s.

There is a subtle difference though. The trend at Newlyn is slightly higher now than its peak in 1970, whereas at North Shields it is still well below.

Newlyn is of course heavily influenced by what happens in the Atlantic, so that may be a factor.

Either way, there is no evidence of anything alarming happening to sea levels at these two stations at least.

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July 22, 2017 at 12:18PM

Caught Red-Handed: Google Search Suppresses Climate Realism

Caught Red-Handed: Google Search Suppresses Climate Realism

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Claims that Google Search improperly downranks some websites are frequent but not always correct, and they’re hard to prove even if they are. But the latest available (May 2017) Google Search Quality Evaluation General Guidelines provide conclusive proof of intentional, severe, and malicious suppression of climate realist views.  A quote:

High quality information pages on scientific topics should represent well established scientific consensus on issues where such consensus exists. (Section 3.2)

But the allegations of “scientific consensus” are made only in one field – climate alarmism!  “Scientific consensus” is almost an oxymoron.  Consensus is a decision-making method used outside of science.  This language is inserted in the guidelines with only one purpose – to eliminate climate realism websites from the results, shown to Google Search users.  This discrimination is exacerbated by classifying “news about important topics such as international events, business, politics, science, and technology;” as Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) Pages, for which Google claims to have especially high quality standards.  Classification of news as Your Money or Your Life Pages (which includes medical, legal, financial, and safety advice) is obviously intended to suppress political information that differs from the opinions of the leftstream media and Wikipedia, which Google considers the guardians of truth.  That is why WUWT and other climate realism websites are so well hidden by Google Search.

I anticipate some readers will defend this behavior as an exercise of freedom of speech.  But this is a clear case of fraud (or worse), not speech.  Google Search is a technical system for finding information on the Internet, just like a computer network with modem-routers and operated by an ISP is a technical system for accessing that information.  At least this is how Google positioned and advertised Google Search.  And this is what the majority of Google users believe they get when they use it.  Google repeatedly denied subjectivity and editorial discretion in assigning page ranking and producing search results.  This is in contrast with many specialized search engines, including my Non-Fake Media Web Search and Climate Realism Search.

Just like every other corporation, Google owes customers and prospective customers an accurate description of the services it offers.  Misrepresentation is a fraud.  It is time for state attorneys to investigate Google. It also seems that every Google user in the U.S. is entitled to sue for damages caused by this fraud.

Google’s actions have likely violated many other laws.  Deceitful and malicious promotion of websites, defaming or inciting hatred against scientists who testified in official proceedings against interests of climate alarmism governance is an example. This might qualify as witness tampering or retaliation.

———————

The Guidelines require a reviewer to evaluate Reputation, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and/or Trustworthiness (FEAT) of web pages. The recommended sources of the information confirm that a strong leftist bias of Google Search is by design. Incredibly, the Guidelines require the reviewers to use Wikipedia as the main source of information to evaluate FEAT of the web pages!  In its best days, anybody could write in Wikipedia whatever they wanted.  But now Wikipedia is controlled and ruled with an iron fist (in a velvet glove) by the leftist Wikimedia Foundation.  Other sources that Google recommends as reliable are The New York Times, The Guardian, CNN, and Snopes.

The word consensus appears 18 times in both the current (May 2017) and the previous (March 2017) versions of the Guidelines.  It was not used in the March 2016 version at all.  Here are a few examples from the current version (red highlighting is mine):

For news articles and information pages, high quality MC [MC – Main Content] must be factually accurate for the topic and must be supported by expert consensus where such consensus exists.” (Section 4.2)

“… high quality news articles and information pages on scientific topics should represent established scientific consensus where such consensus exists.” (Section 4.5)

“… for news articles and information pages on YMYL topics, there is a high standard for accuracy and well established medical/scientific/historical consensus where such consensus exists.” (Section 5.1)

“Some topics demand expertise for the content to be considered trustworthy. YMYL topics such as medical advice, legal advice, financial advice, etc. should come from authoritative sources in those fields, must be factually accurate, and must represent scientific/medical consensus within those fields where such consensus exists.” (Section 6.5)

Before using the Fully Meets [user’s needs] rating for queries seeking a very specific fact or piece of information, you must check for accuracy and confirm that the information is supported by expert consensus where such consensus exists.” (Section 13.2)

“All of the following should be considered either lowest quality MC or no MC [MC – Main Content]:

  • No helpful MC at all or so little MC that the page effectively has no MC.
  • MC which consists almost entirely of “keyword stuffing.”
  • Gibberish or meaningless MC.
  • “Autogenerated” MC, or MC which was otherwise created with little to no time, effort, expertise, manual curation, or added value for users.
  • Misleading or inaccurate informational content about YMYL topics.
  • Pages or websites which appear to be deliberate attempts to misinform or deceive users by presenting factually inaccurate content.
  • Pages or websites with factually inaccurate content which may harm or deceive users, regardless of their purpose or intent.
  • MC which consists almost entirely of content copied from another source with little time, effort, expertise, manual curation, or added value for users.

Pages with lowest quality MC should be rated Lowest.” (Section 7.4)

Thus, pages containing what Google considers inaccurate content are rated as the lowest quality pages, “regardless their purpose or intent,” and regardless whether the allegedly inaccurate content does supposedly harm or just supposedly deceive the users!  Given Google’s opinion in the climate debate, most pages on this website have no content at all. I guess, the same logic applies to the pages that “deceive” the viewers to vote for Republicans.

There are also references to additional documents, not included in the Guidelines and not available to the public: “Website Reputation : Links to help with reputation research will be provided.

Also, the Google policies reflected in the Guidelines create vicious informational spirals.  Google endorses leftstream media content. Then the reporters and editors of that media use Google and see results that confirm and amplify their biases, and so on.  The YMYL policies have the effect of decreasing political diversity and increasing political uniformity.  Even if the manual reviews according to these Guidelines do not directly impact the ranking of websites, the Guidelines reflect the principles and aims of Google Search.

Google consumes as much or more energy as the entire city San Francisco, and falsely claims that 100% of it is renewable energy.  Remember last year’s headlines like Google Says It Will Run Entirely on Renewable Energy in 2017 (NY Times) and Google to be powered 100% by renewable energy from 2017 (The Guardian)? Now Google claims it has achieved that goal.  Of course, this is a lie – Google gets electricity from the grid, and the energy it consumes is generated from the local mix of coal, natural gas, nuclear, and some hydro-power.  But it pays “renewable energy” ventures, in some of which Al Gore and his buddies are investors, and calls this operation “energy purchase.” It looks to me more like a fraud, possibly even a bribe.  Well, Google management might think it buys virtual energy.

Google directly sponsors Inside Climate News, which is a part of the Rockefeller Brothers/Family Fund’s attempt to shut down U.S. energy industries!.  Google’s Eric Schmidt also supports climate alarmism with pre-tax money through his “charitable” foundation.

Google (Alphabet) pays income tax at the effective rate 19%, instead of 41% combined federal and California tax rate it is supposed to pay.

By the way, even the famous Google’s motto “Don’t be evil” is evil.  It suggests that most other businesses are evil, which is false.

Disclosure: I hold short positions in GOOG.

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July 22, 2017 at 10:30AM

Is Our Sun Slowing Down in Its Middle Age?

Is Our Sun Slowing Down in Its Middle Age?

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
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The Sun, now halfway through its life, might be slowing its magnetic activity, researchers say, which could lead to permanent changes in the sunspots and auroras we see.

Spotless Sun

The spotless Sun of July 21, 2017.
NASA / SDO / HMI

The Sun has changed its figure, researchers say, and might keep it that way.

The structure of the Sun’s surface, where sunspots live, appears to have changed markedly 23 years ago. That’s when solar magnetic activity might have started slowing down, Rachel Howe (University of Birmingham, UK, and Aarhaus University, Denmark) and collaborators speculate in paper to appear in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (full text here). Such a structural change might help explain the Sun’s mysteriously weak cycles in recent years.

The Sun is currently at the peak of Cycle 24, the weakest solar cycle in 100 years.
The Sun is currently at the peak of Cycle 24, the weakest cycle in 100 years. D. Hathaway / NASA / MSFC

The interior of the Sun pulsates as rhythmically as a human heart. But while the heart pulses at one fairly steady frequency, the Sun reverberates at thousands of different frequencies. Pressure changes inside the Sun create these reverberations, just like pressure changes in the air create sound. The sound waves inside the Sun are outside the range of human hearing — they’re too low frequency — but if we sped them up, we could hear them just like any other sound.

Some of these sound waves come from deep within the Sun, while others come from shallower layers. Since these sound waves can tell us about the structure of the solar interior, scientists measure them constantly using instruments like the Birmingham Solar-Oscillations Network.

Howe and colleagues collected 29 years of data on these sound waves, and they measured how much the waves’ frequency changed over time relative to a four-year period spanning 1988 to 1992. If the Sun were to stay pretty much the same, researchers would find no real difference between this four-year period and any other period. Instead, they were surprised to find that, since 1994, low-frequency sound waves have changed quite a bit compared with their behavior during the four-year benchmark. While higher-frequency sound waves changed too, it was by a much smaller amount. This confirms previous research, which has indicated a possible structural change in the surface layer of the Sun.

Then, the researchers compared the change in higher-frequency sound waves, which reverberate in the shallowest layer of the Sun, with the number of sunspots. In general, the two tracked each other pretty well over the years: the change in high-frequency sound waves went up and down with the number of spots during the Sun’s 11-year cycle of magnetic activity.

But over the last two solar cycles, the change in high-frequency sound waves exceeded the number of sunspots. This shift, the researchers reasoned, could mean that the waves were picking up on sunspots so small that they weren’t even recorded. If there are a lot more tiny sunspots than there used to be, and they’re all confined to the shallowest layer of the Sun — well, maybe the Sun’s surface is thinning and its magnetic activity is slowing down.

There is evidence that Sun-like stars slow their magnetic activity after reaching middle age. And the Sun is, in fact, at just that age. But while we might be seeing some evidence of a slow-down, the process will likely happen over thousands, if not millions, of years. Furthermore, this is not the first time that the Sun has deviated from previous behavior. During a 70-year period in the 17th century, the Sun shed all but a few of its sunspots, only to right its course again.

Sunspot Record Over 400 Years

This graph shows the number of sunspot groups over the past 400 years. The Maunder Minimum, when sunspots were scarce between 1645 and 1715, is clearly visible, and the more regular changes of the 11-year solar cycle are also clearly seen. WDC-SILSO

And maybe we’re not seeing a slow-down at all. While the strongest sunspot cycle rises and falls over the course of 11 years, there are other sunspot cycles that rise and fall over longer timespans.

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com

July 22, 2017 at 10:18AM