More at Greenfyre's. Nicely done indeed.
Holmes: Inspector Lestrade, I hear you have arrested Mr Algore .
Lestrade: Indeed I have Holmes. Once again the Yard brings the miscreants to justice, thank you very much; and without your … ‘assistance’, I might add.
Holmes: Quite so, quite so. May I enquire as to the nature of the evidence?
...
Lestrade: Very well. It seems your Mr Algore has been defrauding the widows and orphans of London with some sort of lantern show which he calls ‘Discomforting Verities’ or some such nonsense.
He was convincing people that the weather would change because of vapours from the coal mines. Ha ha, imagine the thought of London’s air being bad from coal! The things some people conceive. No doubt he is an opium addict on top of it all.
Holmes: Quite so, quite so, pray do go on.
Lestrade: Yes well, he would do his lantern show and then he was selling people carbon bathing machines, bonnets, caps, and offsets, whatever the Devil those are. Some sort of undergarment I suppose. ...
Thursday, January 15, 2009
New Sherlock Holmes Story Discovered
Quite an interesting one, to say the least:
A neat parody but, of course, a parody is an untruth. Apart from anything else, the effects of coal in London was obvious to everyone although it failed to wipe out the entire population as would have been forecast by 'Green War', 'Enemies of the Earth' and such like had they existed then. It also had huge benefits. It was cheap and therefor kept poor people warm in winter, so whilst the smog and the fog terminated some too early, it allowed others to live longer.
ReplyDeleteNot the least of the advantage of living in those smokey, grimy times was the relative absence of constant lamentations from alarmists warning of the end of the world.
Incidentally, Michael, if you are still determined to ignore the increasingly awkward fact that the globe does not appear to be warming after all, you should worry about Mt. Chaiten which, according to all the experts (heh, heh!) is about to blow its top. Apparently, this could inject about 10 square kilometres of ash into the stratosphere inducing a huge chilling effect round the world with equally chilling (in a different sense) effect on world agriculture. And that's quite apart from the fact that 'the sun has NOT got his hat on and is refusing to come out and play' which is almost certainly likely to create even more cooling. Even your very own Yellowstone Park might produce a firework display, to add to the Big Freeze.
My advice: go long on long Johns!
Though that ash will rain down in a couple of years. CO2 tends to stay up there much longer, because it's a gas.
ReplyDeleteHence the problem is quite different.
Also, I don't think IPCC is claiming that the entire population of the Earth will be wiped out.
This is a reminder to one of my more valued participants to please be civil.
ReplyDelete"Slightly more polite than you actually want to be", it says right by the comment box.
I don't flush much, but I'm afraid your last didn't amount to much beyond growling.
(McIntyre is wise to give more leeway to opponents than to allies in CA; I will follow his example.)
If you'd care to explain to Mr. Duff exactly why his last paragraph makes no sense and save me the trouble, I'd appreciate it.
I think David is hardly the worst of our opponents and indeed has shown me such personal kindness as an online acquaintance permits on more than one occasion. Consequently I rather like the fellow despite his flaws. He has been misled, yes, but yelling at him will not fix it.
Aw shucks, Mr. Tobis, you say the cutest thangs!
ReplyDeleteMichael, was that directed at me or someone whose comment you didn't put through?
ReplyDeleteAnyway, for David, the solar influence theory has problems, quite well illustrated by this graph:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solar-cycle-data.png
From what I gather(I'm not a climatologist), it hasn't made it through in a scientific sense (a well cited article and lots of independent confirmations). Not because there is a conspiracy, but because it seems unlikely to be correct.
As for the "globe des not appear to be warming after all", that is either not true, but it would take kinda long to explain why a month or even a year doesn't enable one to say such things in a climate sense. And if you look at longer term trends, they show warming.
If you look only at short term trends or a difference between some two individual years, months or days, your results are going to vary wildly all the time. That already should tell you that if your measure tells that today the earth is warming and tomorrow that it is cooling, and the day after tomorrow that it is warming again, that it's not a very good measure.
Tamino has more here:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/what-if/
It wasn't directed at the comment you posted, GL, it was directed at a submission that I moderated out.
ReplyDeleteDavid, I would add at least that a sudden volcanic cooling would not in any way rule out a persistent background warming. You seem to think this is all about the global temperature.
Warming is only the most likely symptom.
The problem is too much carbon, and one of its main drawbacks is that it changes the radiative balance of the atmosphere. The radiative balance point is not speculative, and will be about as hard to dislodge as anything in science. If that isn't true, pretty much the whole of physical science comes crashing down with it.
That was me, apologies. Ahem.
ReplyDeleteif you are still determined to ignore the increasingly awkward fact that the globe does not appear to be warming after all
This is incorrect.
Here is a neat graphic for trends.
GISS datasets showed 2007 tied for 1998 as second-warmest.
Websites that start at 1998 (statistically incorrect starting point) seek to deceive you. People should not get their information from ideological sites that couch their argumentation in talking points, dog-whistle phrases, etc. We all know who they are. Note the places I got my graphics; of course, if one chooses to believe in a conspiracy, these won't do much for you except pass their data to the aforementioned sites.
Best,
D
The fallacy of inferring long term global climate trends from a weather event are very well illustrated in this "blog":
ReplyDeletehttp://ifglobalwarmingisrealthenwhyisitcold.blogspot.com/2009_01_01_archive.html