Daily Archives: March 27, 2011

Not confident this is really a good thing

Posted on March 27, 2011 | Leave a comment

Obsession with weight is distinctly unhealthy and I’m unconvinced keeping growing kids pencil-thin is universally in their best interests. I’d be a lot happier if they hadn’t kept messing with “ideal weight” ranges, specifically constantly defining them downwards. I take these claims of obesity and overweight percentages with extreme caution.

Obese kids on the decline
Deakin University

A Deakin University study has revealed that rates of obesity and overweight in Victorian preschool children are declining.

The study by researchers with Deakin’s WHO Collaborating Centre for Obesity Prevention analysed Victorian maternal and child health service data on a total of 225,430 children aged 2 and 3.5 years between 1999 and 2007.

The researchers found that the rates of overweight and obesity dropped by 3.1 per cent for 3.5 year olds (18.5 per cent in 1999 to 15.4 per cent in 2007) and 1.1 per cent for 2 year olds (13.5 to 12.4 per cent). The results are published online in the International Journal of Obesity.

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Posted in Health care

Will eliminating plastic bags really do anything for the environment, or you?

Posted on March 27, 2011 | Leave a comment

A Punching Bag No More
By Kenneth P. Green

The traditional, thin plastic bag, though increasingly demonized and taxed, has better environmental performance and is likely to be considerably safer for human health than alternatives.

Two recent studies might end the great grocery bag debate. The debates over which type of grocery bag is best break down into two issues: which are better for the environment, and which are better for your health.

The first study, in June 2010, looked at the question of cloth bag contamination. It’s well-known that though they appear clean, supermarkets offer many opportunities for people to pick up contaminated food: other shoppers contaminate shopping carts, stockroom clerks contaminate containers, and fruit and veggies come from farms pre-equipped with things like salmonella, e.coli, and other dangerous microbes. When shoppers put such things into cloth bags, they can contaminate the bag, and then wind up contaminating uncontaminated foods on their next shopping trip. In “Assessment of the Potential for Cross Contamination of Food Products by Reusable Shopping Bags,” Charles Gerba and his colleagues at the University of Arizona and Loma Linda University studied reusable bags and found that a goodly percentage were indeed contaminated:

Large numbers of bacteria were found in almost all bags and coliform bacteria in half. Escherichia coli were identified in 12% of the bags and a wide range of enteric bacteria, including several opportunistic pathogens. When meat juices were added to bags and stored in the trunks of cars for two hours, the number of bacteria increased 10-fold indicating the potential for bacterial growth in the bags.

Washing the bags might help, but Gerba et al surveyed people who use cloth bags and found that “reusable bags are seldom if ever washed and often used for multiple purposes.”

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Posted in Pollution, Propaganda

Roger Pielke Jr. highlights interesting info on ‘quakes

Posted on March 27, 2011 | Leave a comment

Roger Bilham on Honshu Earthquake and Tsunami

Roger Bilham, a professor of geology here at Colorado and a world expert on earthquakes, is just back from Japan and has put up a report on the earthquake. The image above, from his report, shows the planet’s largest earthquakes from 1900. Of the notable 40-year gap starting in the 1960s Roger writes:

The Honshu earthquake is one of 5 earthquakes in the world to have exceeded Mw=8.4 since 2004. Initial estimates of its magnitude (Mw=8.9) have now been superceded by its Mw=9.0 status. The recent 5 mega-quakes were preceded by a four decade gap that followed a cluster of megaquakes between 1950 and 1964. No significance to the gap has been established although there appears to have been a reduction in global energy release after the 1960 cluster

Of the effects of the earthquake and tsunami on the Fushima nuclear power facility he writes:

Read on at Roger Pielke Jr.

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Posted in Natural disasters

Two very different views of Fukushima

Posted on March 27, 2011 | Leave a comment

Lawrence Solomon: Avert Chernobyl-style hysteria in Japan

Turn down the dial on radiation fears

Next to Chernobyl, the Fukushima accident is the worst nuclear power calamity in history. To minimize damage in Fukushima’s aftermath, the Japanese — and all of us — need first learn the lessons of Chernobyl, whose casualties numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Chernobyl’s great calamity in 1986 — a total meltdown in a reactor designed with no containment that ejected astounding amounts of radiation over a 10-day period — came not from the radiation it spewed but from fear of radiation. (Financial Post)

One Country’s Disaster, Another’s Boon

By Michael J. Economides and Xiuli Wang

Continue reading →

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Posted in Energy, Nuclear, Radiation

Bishop Hill on Beddington’s propaganda exercise

Posted on March 27, 2011 | Leave a comment

Lawson jousts with Beddington

The Guardian carries a report about the correspondence between Nigel Lawson and Sir John Beddington over Lawson’s book, An Appeal to Reason.

This is fascinating stuff and the whole article needs to be read.

Update on Mar 27, 2011 by Bishop Hill

The story was sourced from here, and from where the original correspondence can be seen. I would recommend reading it. (Bishop Hill)

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Posted in Activists, Propaganda

It’s hard to make predictions – especially about the future

Posted on March 27, 2011 | Leave a comment

Andy @Revkin Points To The End of The Line For The IPCC And Its Lot

Thanks Andy!

Beginning in the 1980s, [University of Pennsylvania Professor Philip] Tetlock examined 27,451 forecasts by 284 academics, pundits and other prognosticators. The study was complex, but the conclusion can be summarized simply: the experts bombed. Not only were they worse than statistical models, they could barely eke out a tie with the proverbial dart-throwing chimps. [...] The least accurate forecasters, [Tetlock] found, were hedgehogs: “thinkers who ‘know one big thing,’ aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains” and “display bristly impatience with those who ‘do not get it,’ ” he wrote. Better experts “look like foxes: thinkers who know many small things,” “are skeptical of grand schemes” and are “diffident about their own forecasting prowess.”

So there we have it…experts of the “big thing” called “climate change”, aggressive (to the point of hiding declines, preventing publication of competing ideas, inserting unsubstantiated critiques in the IPCC report, etc etc) and definitely “impatient” with us little humans wondering aloud about their certitudes (any post at RC, Connolley, Deltoid, Romm, etc etc keeps confirming this point).

Note how none of the above can be defined as “gross negligence” or “conspiracy”, and yet despite all the whitewashing by the Climategate inquiries, there is a scientific consensus, and the best of our scientific knowledge demonstrates, that all that bunch, and pretty much all the bigwigs around the IPCC, they ARE “least accurate forecasters”. QED. (Maurizio Morabito, OmniClimate)

Dan Gardner: Future Babble

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Posted in IPCC, PlayStation® climatology

Retreating to the final redoubt?

Posted on March 27, 2011 | Leave a comment

John O’Sullivan: Desperate Climate Scientists File Second Lawsuit Against Top Skeptic

Dr. Tim Ball received the second of two libel lawsuits from North Vancouver law firm of Roger D. McConchie on Friday (March 25, 2011). Global warming doomsaying professor Michael Mann files the latest writ.

Professor Mann, the infamous creator of the now discredited ‘hockey stick’ graph was once the darling of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a tax hungry government funded organization that blames mankind for raising global temperatures by 0.7 degrees during the 20th Century.

The IPCC plucked Mann from total obscurity after his problematic and “rushed” Ph.D was granted. His viva voce examination was in 1996 and he was required to make corrections. Such a two year delay suggests substantial errors and corrections which would normally require a second viva, but this was strangely not recorded. Then, despite no reputation whatsoever in the field of tree ring proxy research Mann was bizarrely appointed not only as an expert by the IPCC but as Lead Author for the 2001 Third Report.

Several fellow academics, including Dr. Judith Curry smelt something most fishy at once and their fears were confirmed when Canadian statistical experts, Steve McIntyre and Professor Ross McKitrick found a string of ‘errors’ in Mann’s work. All the errors skewed the data in favor of the man-made global warming hype.

It transpired Mann and his secretive clique of climatologists who ‘pal reviewed’ his junk science benefited to the tune of millions of dollars in government research grants. Since the Climategate revelations public support for the IPCC has nose-dived. (Climate Realists)

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Posted in Activists, Climate change, IPCC

Bob Carter on the Australian Government Climate Commissars

Posted on March 27, 2011 | Leave a comment

Climate Commission shirks debate

by Bob Carter
March 27, 2011

The Climate Commission: science communication is what it’s all about

Last Friday night, five of Australia’s six Climate Commissioners participated in the Commission’s first public consultation meeting in Geelong. They were Tim Flannery, Will Steffen, Lesley Hughes (all scientists), Roger Beale (environmental policy analyst) and Gerry Hueston (businessman); Commissioner Susannah Elliott (science communication) was not in attendance.

Australia already has an expensive federal Ministry of Climate Change, so why do we also need a new Climate Commission? Good question.

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Posted in Cap and tax, Climate change, Propaganda

The “carbon fight” down-under

Posted on March 27, 2011 | Leave a comment

While not exclusively about the watermelon government’s wished-for carbon [dioxide] tax this proposed tax loomed large in the near-annihilation of the political Left in this weekend’s elections in Australia’s most populous state.

New South Wales Premier-elect Barry O’Farrell has an unchallengeable majority in both houses of state parliament and a clear, nay enormous, mandate from a significant chunk of the Australian population to “Just say, ‘No’” to the Federal minority governments destructive plans.

Implicitly rejected too were the idiotic misanthropic policies instituted by Suzuki acolyte Bob Carr because the one-third of voters abandoning the socialist Labor Party failed to support the Greens but rather ran for the safety of the conservative Liberal and National Parties.

Expect New South Wales to join Western Australia and victoria in reopening for business, with other states and the nation federally soon to follow.

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Posted in Cap and tax

Still terrorizing the children

Posted on March 27, 2011 | Leave a comment

Under the Cloak of ‘Climate Change’: childhoods sacrificed for political gain

‘When asked to choose the 3 biggest threats to the world from a list of 9, the most common answer is terrorism, chosen by more than half (59%), followed by climate change (49%).’

Extract from the results of a BBC survey of some 329 schools, with 24,000 respondents aged 11 to 16 years, published 24 March, 2011 (hat-tip: Bishop Hill ).

So, if the survey has been well-conducted, approximately half of secondary-school children in the UK regard ‘climate change’ as one of the biggest threats facing the world.  How can that be, given that nothing at all unusual has happened to any weather phenomena, including air temperatures, rainfall, storminess etc, and nor to commonly associated phenomena such as polar ice extents?  The answer, of course, is clear enough: very successful lobbying and publicising of the results of computer models programmed to give CO2 a large effect as a driver of climate using positive feedbacks.  Given that CO2 levels have been rising, and are confidently expected to rise further, there is clearly the makings of a good scare story here.  However, neither the atmosphere itself nor many leading climate scientists, have been sufficiently convinced by these stories to, in the case of the atmosphere, display unusual behaviour, and in the case of the scientists, display alarm.  Yet many others are alarmed, or find it convenient to act as if they are for the sake of political and other advantages.  Finance houses, political parties, environmentalists, and development organisations have all seen substantial boosts to their incomes and/or their influence thanks to the widespread publicity given to such as the IPCC.  Many well-intentioned individuals and groups have no doubt been persuaded to ‘do something’ by all of this, and are even trying to get schoolchildren involved in political actions. (Climate Lessons)

Remember this?

And this?

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Posted in Activists, Propaganda