Tuesday 17 May 2011

Climate agit-prop in the Listeria

LIST14MAY11_LA visitor to New Zealand responds to the Listeria magazine’s lurid climate porn appearing as a cover story in a recent issue. Feel free to help the response go viral.

From:
Rupert Wyndham [mailto: xxxxx.xxxx]
Sent: Saturday, 14 May 2011
To: letters@listerner.co.nz
Subject: Attn. Editor
Dear Ms. Stirling
    I am a visitor to New Zealand, and only yesterday had sight of your 14 May edition of the New Zealand Listener with its entertainingly fanciful lead story, accompanied by appropriately lurid
graphics.
    Since this is a topic which raises much controversy, let me try and see if I can encapsulate in a few lines what it is that you would wish you readers to believe.
    You propose, it would seem, that marginal increases in the concentrations of what is no more than a trace gas, amounting in total not to 10% of the earth's atmosphere, not even to 5% - nay, not even to 1%. can bring about cataclysmic changes in global climate.
    So, what exactly is the percentage concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere? Why, to be sure, it
is a gasping, asphyxiating 1/27th part of a single percentage point.
    But even that's not the complete picture, is it? After all, as someone (such as you) who has addressed the data for herself will know, even human induced climate change proselytisers acknowledge that, by itself, the radiative potential of CO2 (vanishingly small anyway) fails to account for the "scenarios" promoted by them and by unquestioning and compliant organs of the media - such, indeed, as The New Zealand Listener.
    So, to get over this this little inconvenience, what should be done? Why, to be sure, invoke another critical life affirming compound (dihydrogen oxide) to provide a "positive forcing", thereby adding to the so-called greenhouse effect. Regrettably, the very scientists (well, anyway, let's call them that for the sake of convenience) can't actually tell you whether the forcing resulting from atmospheric water vapour is positive (so allegedly bringing warming) or negative (so allegedly bringing the opposite).
     Clouds, for example, have a cooling effect. Have these 'climate scientists' with their rinky dinky computers ever managed to incorporate them in their so-named General Circulation Models? Answer - the heck they have!
    And neither still is that the whole story, is it? For, while CO2 might have some modest radiative potential, that potential is governed by a relationship to concentration that is logarithmic not linear. In
simple layman's terms, the more you shove in, increasingly less do you get out.
    In other words, the system is self limiting - well, well, fancy that!
    So, to you, let me pose a multi-part question. Even at first sight, does this seem plausible? Possible? Or, is it, perhaps, just stark barking?
    Finally, let's pause briefly on your Gotham City phantasmagoric cover photo. This, from its appearance, could quite easily be a fictional montage designed, of course, to promote a propagandist scaremongering
agenda to an ill informed public. In any event, and as far as New Zealand is concerned, as a journalistic professional dealing with a matter of major public importance, you personally should be fully aware that the Flinders University, Adelaide, trans-Pacific tidal buoy project, after ten years of careful monitoring, was wound up a year or two ago after failing to find evidence of any increase whatsoever in rates of sea level rise. These data have since been confirmed by satellite readings - much disliked by AGW propagandists, since
they usually undermine the party line. Neither are such contra-indicative findings confined to the S. Pacific. If, in the face of such scientific findings, you have published your story, then you are guilty of lying. If you
were unaware of such data, you are guilty of professional negligence, and I speak as a one time journalist myself in publications somewhat more elevated (or, at any rate, more globally celebrated) than the New Zealand Listener.
    Actually, let's be candid. Your piece is not journalism at all, is it? It is mere agit-prop. In essence, as between what you have published (and, I suspect, publish routinely) and what your counterparts disseminated in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, Maoist China any difference is negligible.
    Rupert Wyndham

10 comments:

SylviaM said...

Pamela Stirling is taking the Listener down (in terms of market share) slowly into its death bed. If I was the owner, I would have sacked the bitch a few years back. I used to subscribe, but I have dropped it 2 years ago due to its bad quality and tabloid bullshit sensationalizing stories that they published regularly.

I think that the owners of Listener should sack the bitch now.

Rimu said...

Is the CO2 effect saturated?

Rimu said...

What affect clouds have on warming

gazzamuso said...

This entire post has little, if any, scientific backing. For a start, clouds have multiple effects, one of them being the entrapment of gases in the atmosphere. Also, saying that C02 is only comprising a certain level of the atmosphere without stating what it is supposed to be is just plain unscientific. It doesn't matter if the levels SOUND small, the fact that they have risen at a catastrophic rate is having adverse effects on the earth.

Kiwiwit said...

Bloody brilliant!

BTW, gazzamuso, clouds are made up of water vapour - that's H2O to you - not CO2. And incidentally, your last sentence doesn't even make sense. I assume you are saying "[CO2 levels] have risen at a catastrophic rate is having adverse effects on the earth." What "adverse effects" and what evidence is there of any cause and effect?

And interesting comments in response to the study you quote Rimu "The figure in this article is out going radiance but is only part of the actual figure from the Harris 2001 paper. It has been manipulated to highlight the drops in radiance CO2 and CH4. I'm not trying to suggest dishonesty it's just a way to present the data."

The usual story.

Anonymous said...

Rupert just ripped Pamela's toy away from her.

Anonymous said...

Skepticalscience.com is skeptical science... as much as the Catholic Church is a skeptical scientific institution. The both offer homilies for the faithful to use in defence of the word of Mann/God.

Onward climate soldiers marching as to war, with the hockeystick of Mann going on before...

Dave Mann said...

This excellent article puts it far better than I could have done... but I have been saying on blogs and on talkback for years that it is absolutely ridiculous to think that small changes in the amounts of an already infinitesimal trace gas (CO2) could have a disasterous effect on climate. It just makes no sense at all. Its what is more politely called 'counterintuitive' - or in other words 'stupid'.

This proposition alone should be sufficient to laugh the warmists out of business. But WHY on earth has almost the whole population of the western world embraced this stupidity to almost religious levels? I don't get it.

Elijah Lineberry said...

Excellent email, and I am in complete agreement with the points contained within. However *wink* I want a certain question answered because it is very important (and clarifies I debate I have been having with my offsider most of the afternoon) and it is this: who the f**k names their child "Rupert"??!?!?!!?! ha ha!

Anonymous said...

@Elijah

Who the f**k names their kid "Elijah"?!

Or "Lineberry"?!


Go Rupert is all I'll say!

The Listener used to be a good read. I've stopped reading it a few years ago fir the same reason as Sylvia. It's turned to tabloid trash.

Rufus