Science Humor

Canada announces new climate change goal: increase meetings by 88%

Posted on by Ron Clutz

 

Amazingly, it has become possible to do satire of political climate change activism.  CBC has always promoted climate alarm and has been for many years a platform for alarmist environmentalist David Suzuki.  Just recently however, 22 minutes and CBC comedy have been unleashed, demonstrated by the video above and the fake news release below.

Canada announces new climate change goal: increase meetings by 88% by the year 2019  (here)

“There are many ways we can take concrete action to fight the reality that we have to fight global warming,” Trudeau explained to reporters Friday. “Meetings, for example. Summits. Conventions. Assemblies. Commissions. Oh, and talks.”

Increasingly desperate David Suzuki staples left nostril shut to cut carbon emissions by 50%

“It’s not going to be easy, but Canada really has to be a leader on this,” he continued. “We as a nation have to challenge ourselves to nearly double the number of climate change meetings we’re currently having, and truly commit ourselves to leaving it at that. I have faith that this government has what it takes to meet endlessly and never actually take any meaningful action to mitigate the inevitable and impending disaster we all know is looming.”

Trudeau went on to explain that other nations are surpassing Canada in the number of meetings they’re having – and that that is unacceptable.

“Look at the Chinese leaders – they meet like every week,” he said. “American leaders used to meet every day, though that’s definitely about to change. I heard their new targets involve reducing climate meetings by 100% by the year 2017.”

Trudeau concluded his remarks by emphasizing the undeniable reality that time is quickly running out.

“The glaciers are melting. Our winters are getting warmer every year. Smog is out of control. We can’t afford to just sit around and do nothing. We need to sit around and talk about how we’ll do nothing.”

Welcome to the new world of free speech on climate change.

Footnote for those not familiar with the Canadian scene:

Characters in the video are

Catherine McKenna, Minister of Environment and Climate Change

Dr. David Suzuki, Environmental Scientist

Elizabeth May, MP and Leader of the Green Party

green-party-may

 

Climate Alarms LOL

Posted on by Ron Clutz

We skeptics enjoyed immensely the expert satire of Yes Prime Minister directed at the foibles of climate hysteria.  That clip was available at my post Laughing at Climate Change.  (That video is also now blocked, but I have added the transcript (here).

Now we find there was another even more skewering into the soft underbelly of the beast.  H/T Global Warming Policy Foundation (here).

“Computer models are no different from fashion models: seductive, unreliable, easily corrupted, and they lead sensible people to make fools of themselves.” –Jim Hacker, Yes, Prime Minister

The video was blocked by BBC in my country (Canada), but GWPF helpfully provides the transcript of the juicy bits:

Later in Act One, Scene Two
The phone rings. They all look at it.

Claire Hello? It’s the BBC again. I see. Thanks. (She hangs up.) Piling on the agony. A big new story about global warming has just broken, they’re adding that to the Sunday programme too. Global warming computer models have been proved wrong.

Humphrey How shocking!

Claire The new models show that it’s even worse than previously thought. Much more severe. And happening faster.

Jim Is that supposed to be my fault too?

Claire Everything is at the moment. They want to know why the government is dragging its feet on CO2 emission controls.

Jim (losing it) Do we have to deal with that tonight? As well as …(much has gone wrong for Jim earlier in the play)… Is there anything else, anything else we can pile on me tonight? Oh yes! Global bloody warming, thank you very much!

Claire It’s just that they’re going to add it to the catalogue of your failures. (He gives her a look.) Alleged failures, I mean.

Humphrey Meanwhile, may I suggest that you don’t worry too much about global warming?

Jim Right. I can’t do anything about that tonight, can I?

Humphrey Tell me, how do they know we’re all going to drown in years when the weather forecast was so wrong last Friday?

Jim Because all the scientists agree.

Humphrey So they say. So do the computer models. I know. But why should global warming computer models be any more accurate than financial ones?

Jim Um…

Humphrey Wall Street computer models were designed to prove sub­prime mortgage derivatives were low risk. These computer models are designed to show global warming is getting worse.

Jim Come off it, Humphrey.

Humphrey Remember mad cow disease? Computer models for that proved that we’d be dying in our hundreds of thousands by now. The only thing is, virtually nobody died, did they? Same with the salmonella-in-eggs computer models. Same with swine flu.

Jim You’re suggesting … what, exactly?

Humphrey Global-Warming models leave out nearly all the other possible causes except CO2. And then they say ‘Look, CO2 has caused all this climate change.’

Jim What other causes are there?

Humphrey If the earth were actually getting warmer, one might start by looking at the sun. Solar activity, water vapour, cosmic rays, sunspots, underwater volcanoes –

Jim If? The world is getting hotter, the science is overwhelming, everyone knows that.

Humphrey There’s been no rise in temperature since 1998.

Jim Really? But it was rising, wasn’t it?

Humphrey From 1975 to 1998, yes, absolutely.

Jim That’s what I mean.

Humphrey But it fell from 1940 to 1975. Even though that was a heavily industrialised period, when CO2 shot up. And overall the temperature isn’t rising at all: the hottest year in the twentieth century was 1934.

Jim I read that two thousand five hundred top climate scientists contributed to the last IPCC survey and they all agreed that man­made global warming is a proven fact and trapped greenhouse gases are the cause.

Humphrey Nearly fifty of them agreed. The others didn’t, actually. But their views were left out of the summaries given to the press.

Claire Haven’t you seen that film of the melting icebergs in the Antarctic?

Humphrey Yes. Beautiful, aren’t they?

Claire That’s caused by CO2.

Humphrey No, that’s caused by warm water masses from the Pacific.

Claire Why are the polar bears becoming extinct?

Humphrey Are they?

Claire The computer models say they are.

Humphrey But the people who actually go and count them have found more than there were thirty years ago.

Jim For heaven’s sake, Humphrey! If it’s all such nonsense why does everyone believe it?

Humphrey (amused) Hard to understand, I agree. But some scientists believe it, lots of others want the billions of pounds you can get for research that seems to show that global warming is caused by greenhouse gases, and most of the scientists who disagree can’t get published. Journalists love shock­horror stories, governments want to look virtuous to the voters, lefties want a way to rubbish big oil, and it makes the tree-huggers, whale-savers, anti-capitalists and everyone at the BBC feel holier than thou and warm and fuzzy inside. What’s not to like?

Jim Why hasn’t anyone else said all this?

Humphrey They have. No one wants to hear it.

Jim So wind farms don’t make sense?

Humphrey (chuckles) They certainly do, for all the businessmen who are getting enormous government grants for them. But there isn’t enough wind to be practical. The total output of all the UK wind turbines put together is one-fifth of one decent sized coal-fired power station.

Claire You don’t believe in global warming?

Humphrey My job is not to believe or disbelieve. My job is to weigh up arguments and produce answers. That’s what the Civil Service is for.

…

Jim I really think you must be misinformed somewhere. Al Gore got the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global Warming.

Humphrey So did Dr Kissinger for his work on the Vietnam War.

Jim has no answer to that.

…

Jim You think it’s all a scam? I can’t get my head around this.

Humphrey For some people it’s a scam. For most, it’s just the greatest outbreak of collective hysteria since the witchcraft trials in the seventeenth century.

Footnote:

Apologies to anyone who didn’t know LOL is an internet reference meaning “Laughing Out Loud.”  Apparently that number includes Vladimir Putin who recently ended an interview with LOL, but he meant “Look Out Latvia.”

PS Further Wit and Wisdom from Sir Humphrey

Opposition’s about asking all the questions.
And government is about not answering them.

The less you intend to do about something, the more you have to keep talking about it.

“Open government” is a contradiction in terms. You can be open or you can have government.

Citizens don’t have a right to know, theirs is a right to be ignorant. Knowledge only means complicity and guilt, ignorance has a certain dignity.

If people don’t know what you’re doing, they don’t know what you are doing wrong.

“Under consideration” means we’ve lost the file. “Under active consideration” means we’re trying to find it.

US Students Improving Math

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Breakthrough in Math Literacy could have implications for understanding climate science.

WASHINGTON—In what experts are describing as the most marked improvement in American academic performance in decades, a study released Friday by the U.S. Department of Education has found that the majority of the nation’s students have attained the skills necessary to recognize math.

“We were encouraged to find that when presented with a series of numbers, mathematical symbols, or even fairly complex equations, more than half of our young people were able to correctly identify math as the academic subject before them,” said Undersecretary of Education Ted Mitchell, who noted that for the first time on record, over 50 percent of the country’s first- through 12th-grade students are readily able to distinguish math from other areas of study when it appeared alongside English, social studies, foreign languages, or history on a standardized test.

“While our schools should feel proud of this accomplishment, let’s remember that we must keep striving to do better. Too many Americans still graduate high school without learning to recognize any math beyond basic arithmetic, and our nation’s children still lag far behind students in other developed nations in their ability to identify geometry, algebra, and calculus as math.”

A related Education Department study found that a majority of American eighth-graders are now able to look at a map of the earth and point to where the world is.

This was a Sunday funny from the Onion

 

Brad Keyes, Climatism Fortune Teller

Posted on by Ron Clutz

It is a wickedly satirical look into the future of the climate debate by Brad Keyes (here). The comic relief is welcome as a refreshment from pushing back against the relentless fictional claims and alarms. Lots of inside jokes and sceptics’ wish dreams concerning future misfortunes of leading alarmist figures.

The post covers a lot of ground as Keyes looks into his crystal ball and reports on happenings he sees from 2017 up to 2052. Everyone’s funny bone is different, but these were especially entertaining, IMO:

2017 – Michael Mann’s courtroom loss decried as “a death knell for free speech.”

2018 – ECHR agrees “Holocaust denier” is an intentionally demeaning reference to climate denial.

2018 – James Hansen blames eclipse on global warming, but others hesitate to attribute any specific EAE (extreme astronomical event) to carbon emissions.

2019 – The Trenberth Travesty is captured by satellite imagery.

2020 – Psychiatric Manual of Mental Disorders updated to deal with Weather control delusional disorder, Munchhausen’s by proxy and Medieval global warming denial.

2023 – Weary of the emotive, polarizing nature of the debate, scientists will now refer to global warming as “climate 9/11.”

2024 – Drawing heavily on the principles of the Delphi Technique, Naomi Oreskes changes the scientific method to the Delphi Technique.

2025 – In simultaneous media releases around the globe, every scientific body of international or national standing announces that the only safe atmospheric CO2 concentration is zero ppm. They explain: “Lowballing” is the only way to achieve 300-400 ppm.

2027 – The first climatically-correct chemistry textbooks appear in Australian high schools. The dioxide anion has been renamed ‘pollution’; chemical symbol C now stands for ‘cancer.’

2028 – It’s official: reputable science website SkepticalScience quietly removes “Consensus levels have plateaued” from its list of myths.

2031 – A Climateball stadium becomes the scene of ugly rioting today after a supporter of the denier (pro-cancer-pollutionist) side is overheard using the hate term “w_rmist.”

2034 – Spring is silent this year after a wind turbine kills the last American bald eagle.

2037 – As sea level rise continues to defy expectations, tracking almost 1m (3ft.) below ensemble model projections, science’s newest fear is that the Earth’s surface will be completely dry by the year 51000.

2038 – An attempt to replicate the Doran and Zimmermann [2009] consensus survey instead finds most of the scientists now deny the science, with almost 85% endorsing the statement that “According to the weight of the data, the evidence is wrong.”