Saturday 27 October 2012

Where's the hockey stick gone? New study (by hockey stick contributor) says 'tree ring data was biased'

I feel like a storyteller here. Once upon a time a bunch of scientists got together, and between them made a potion of figures and measurements which when put together made a hockey stick. The trouble was when anyone tried to use it it changed shape and wouldn't work, but no one else could replace it and everyone was forced to try and use it even though it never seemed to be stable enough to work.

Many years later, although one of his tricks was required to create it, by casting a spell over hundreds of tree rings to make all but a few disappear and use them to both raise the tip of the hockey stick, and then vanish in a tangle of lines when it started heading the wrong way, Keith Briffa saw the angry clouds of fate heading his way, threatening to rain on his chips and make his hockey stick so soggy it could melt away. To quickly get out of the path he and two colleagues went back to the spell and took out all the funny incantations, such as 'abracadabra and alakazam, make these rings for Michael Mann' or 'by the powers of Greyskull make these threes into sevens' and the like, leaving only the boring stuff like 'one and one is two, two and two is four' etc, which is deadly dull but impossible to question.

And then they concluded the trick was only an illusion and should not be relied on. He is probably going to be awarded a halo for this redeeming action, and had they not been part of the same illusion a Nobel Prize. I may even send him a Christmas card myself now.

Where's the beef?

Here be the summary:

We describe the analysis of existing and new maximum-latewood-density (MXD) and tree-ring width (TRW) data from the Torneträsk region of northern Sweden and the construction of 1500 year chronologies. Some previous work found that MXD and TRW chronologies from Torneträsk were inconsistent over the most recent 200 years, even though they both reflect predominantly summer temperature influences on tree growth. We show that this was partly a result of systematic bias in MXD data measurements and partly a result of inhomogeneous sample selection from living trees (modern sample bias). We use refinements of the simple Regional Curve Standardisation (RCS) method of chronology construction to identify and mitigate these biases. The new MXD and TRW chronologies now present a largely consistent picture of long-timescale changes in past summer temperature in this region over their full length, indicating similar levels of summer warmth in the medieval period (MWP, c. CE 900–1100) and the latter half of the 20th century. Future work involving the updating of MXD chronologies using differently sourced measurements may require similar analysis and appropriate adjustment to that described here to make the data suitable for the production of un-biased RCS chronologies. The use of ‘growth-rate’ based multiple RCS curves is recommended to identify and mitigate the problem of ‘modern sample bias’.

Michael Mann, the official owner of the hockey stick, has yet to answer the revised decision, although it is only but hours old. My bet is he isn't going to though, and for the double no one's going to ask him. Not even Keith, he's already off the hook.

Sunday 21 October 2012

Wind power? Not quite.

Although I knew the basics the details were very hard to find in one place online, so someone on my Facebook group did the full accounts so the total can be easily shown to demonstrate wind turbines use as much power as they create, ie they do not do anything at all.
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Yaw mechanism to turn the rotor into the wind. 20kW
Pitch mechanism to adjust the blade angle to the wind 15kW
Lights, controllers, communication, sensors, data collection, etc. 10kW
Heating the blades during winter. 250Kw
Heating/cooling and dehumidifying the nacelle. 10kW
Oil heater, pump, cooler and filtering system of the gearbox 25kW
Hydraulic brake to lock the blades when the wind is too strong. 5kW
Thyristors for power conditioning and connection. 25kW
Magnetizing the stator to keep the rotor speed constant 25kW
Using the generator as a motor to help blades start to turn when wind speed is low or, as many suspect, to create the illusion the facility is producing electricity when it is not, particularly during site tours. It also spins the rotor shaft and blades to prevent warping when there is no wind. 50Kw. 
TOTAL Installed. 435kW.
Not all items will be used at the same time, although they may be. However, we can generously assume 50% usage, for a parasitic consumption of approximately 215 kW.

Turbine rated wind speed is 12 mps. Cut in speed is 4 mps. Rated power is 2 mW. Power varies as cube of wind speed.
Therefore Power at 4mps is 2,000,000/3x3x3 = 74kW 
Nett output is â??141kW
Power at 5mps is 144kW Nett output is -71kW
Power at 6mps is 250kW 
Nett output is +35kW
This shows that the machine does not start to produce useful power until wind speeds reach around 6mps, assuming that 35kW from a 2mW machine can be considered as useful. 
Published figures for average wind speeds locally (Banbury area. It will vary depending on actual location) at masthead height are 6mps. 
There are subsequent losses such as transformer inefficiencies and transmission losses to take power from turbine to grid. We can assume approximately 6% to 15%, depending on the type of equipment and transmission line lengths.

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Add to that the additional costs of feed in tariffs, guaranteed profits for land rental (including by the British Royal Family, whose leaked correspondence showed they had changed their position on them once they were offered this deal on their own land), and compensation payments for each 'off' day. That sends it well into the red and without said subsidies wind farms simply wouldn't exist in the first place, as all they actually do is redistribute cash mainly on government orders.

Wednesday 10 October 2012

Breaking the illusions


In the bible the devil was not an openly evil person, as everyone would turn against him and he'd have no power at all. Instead he had to offer everything, deliver enough to gain trust and then screw you up the arse. By then you'd think he was the messiah and may even defend him as it would be impossible to have meant to do something like that and must have been a mistake.

So as our current politicians, who pretend to help and four years later you look back and wonder where your money and rights went, and why so many innocent people abroad are dead.

The current system is built on illusions, but if you learn to recognise them then they are no longer going to be able to work. Here are the major ones I have unpicked to save anyone else having to work it out themselves.

BIG OIL IS AGAINST CLIMATE CHANGE LAWS

I have dealt with this already, so will summarise again. There is no such thing as 'big oil'. What you see as 'oil companies' like Shell or BP are energy companies and also diversify in many other areas. Economics works on supply and demand, so if you restrict supply and keep the same demand the prices rise. So restricting all fossil fuel exploration and production will simply raise the prices of what they have and make it last a lot longer. Not to mention the subsidies to diversify into renewables and free carbon permits they sell for millions. Maybe that's why the Climate Research Unit was partly funded by 'big oil'.

 GLOBAL WARMING


This is so complicated and hard to decipher it takes a statistician and knowledge of the original, often secret data, Luckily every so often someone is good enough to admit the truth directly to save everyone else the trouble. Like the chief IPCC economist Ottmar Edenhoffer who said in a 2010 interview with 'Bild' magazine:

"...one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore..."
Although stated openly well before that by Margaret Mead in 1974:

"What we need from scientists are estimates, presented with sufficient conservatism and plausibility but at the same time as free as possible from internal disagreements that can be exploited by political interests, that will allow us to start building a system of artificial but effective warnings, warnings which will parallel the instincts of animals who flee before the hurricane, pile up a larger store of nuts before a severe winter, or of caterpillars who respond to impending climatic changes by growing thicker coats"

Otherwise the material is freely available online besides the secret figures we are not allowed to see due to 'commercial sensitivity'. Now since when were weather reports a commercial issue? The answer is since man made global warming became an issue. The fact there are climate change investment funds all over the world tells you most of what you need to know in itself. If it was to save the world it wouldn't be a worldwide business opportunity. Carbon trading, one of the mainstays, was what got the board of Enron convicted for fraud, yet is now used in most countries, and compulsory within the EU. Before it was made legal carbon trading and anything similar was fraudulent. Why would there be so much of a trillion pound business on the back of what was supposed to be environmental unless it was actually designed with that in mind originally?

UN AGENDA 21


This looks like a worthy attempt to protect the environment, so needs a full translation into truth. It was developed back in the 70s by such luminaries as Margaret Mead and the late Stephen Schneider, who, like Edenhoffer, saved people the trouble of investigating too far by stating their aims openly. The bottom line there is the overpopulation problem, which most reasonable people would accept, would be solved not by education but any means they could, ie deliberate depopulation. You can work out what that means yourself. Other implications are means to make the previously rich and polluting countries so poor as to no longer pose such a threat to the environment. There are lists of how to carry these measures in ICLEI, the local implementation rules for councils. These have been adopted in nearly 200 countries.However, such individuals are proud of their beliefs, so if you find their own quotes then they are happy to translate what had since been sanitised into plain English, and once you know the routine can then convert any part or whole of Agenda 21 into the same intentions. Here are some of the actual sentiments which created it:

The Club of Rome's 1991 publicly available report 'The First Global Revolution'

The common enemy of humanity is man.
In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up
with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming,
water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these
dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through
changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome.
The real enemy then, is humanity itself." 


"At Bucharest it was affirmed that continuing, unrestricted worldwide population growth can negate any socioeconomic gains and fatally imperil the environment…. The earlier extreme views that social and economic justice alone can somehow offset population increase and that the mere provision of contraception can sufficiently reduce population—were defeated"

"Unless the peoples of the world can begin to understand the immense and long-term consequences of what appear to be small immediate choices—to drill a well, open a road, build a large airplane, make a nuclear test, install a liquid fast breeder reactor, release chemicals which diffuse throughout the atmosphere, or discharge waste in concentrated amounts into the sea—the whole planet may become endangered…."

This quote is a perfect mixture of truth (waste and chemical discharges) and dark forces (oil wells, roads, planes) but happily merged them seamlessly as does today's 'environmental' movement.  

Margaret Mead, 1974

http://inthesenewtimes.com/2009/11/29/1975-endangered-atmosphere-conference-where-the-global-warming-hoax-was-born/

"Global cooling—the coming of an ice age—had been in the headlines in the 1970s, but it could not easily be used to sell genocide by getting the citizens of industrial nations to cut back on consumption. Something more drastic and more personal was needed."


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"The mantra of radical environmentalists is that humans are parasites, as seen in this clip of an unwashed David Suzuki comparing humans to fruit flies and maggots.
David Suzuki is an environmental activist who is big especially up in Canada, and has for years been preaching about how humans are a cancer to the earth."

"After they break from a comfortable egg, the human maggots move in two dimensions and become second-level maggots who crash other maggots in proportionality with their own weight, who defecate all over the environment, and who eat the defecation from the other, usually larger maggots.
Some of these humans become tenth-level maggots who are big wheels. That's what the consensus environmentalist and global warming science knew about the humans and their co-existence with the environment at least since 1972."

http://thesecretsofvancouver.com/wordpress/is-our-beloved-david-suzuki-still-a-eugenicist/environment

LOW INTEREST RATES

What's that- low interest rates help people as it keeps repayments down? Let's analyse this using basic economics. Interest rates are for two types of loans, mortgages and others. Mortgages are more or less compulsory for anyone not rich enough to buy a home for cash or too poor to buy one at all, so cover the majority of people. But then you must look at the difference (the 'spread') between the nominal interest rate, currently 0.5% in the UK, and the actual one. In fact the interest rate is what the banks themselves and the government borrow at. Not you and me. They do track them up to a point, especially when saving, but borrowing rates tend to change only a small amount when they go down and the difference between what they borrow and lend at increases, giving them more (like oil) for doing exactly the same thing, or in the case of giving them money to lend you some, absolutely nothing. Nope, they didn't even earn it, they just lend out investor's money, and then pay them for doing so at the low side of the spread. Therefore when rates are low they borrow at next to nothing, do deals overnight on commodities which go up 1p and they make a million or so as they can invest half a billion (and in the process put the price up simply from their own bid), while again doing no more than press a few buttons. The spread between borrowers and investors increases, so the savers get less but the borrowing rate barely falls, and their profits go up, for doing, well, nothing.

And what about the lucky homeowners? They at least cancel out the losses by the worthy savers who have spent years working for their retirement and now can't pay the bills. They are younger and just starting out in life and really need the help. Well, not exactly. In fact the house prices are related directly to the interest rates. The estate agents use a rough formula of monthly repayments. If a house is £150,000 and rates are 10% then the monthly rates are similar (pardon my maths, it doesn't exist, so only a token example rather than an accurate one) to 5% and £200,000. The customer does not pay any less, at least when buying initially, whatever the interest rates, as the lower the interest rate the higher the price of the house, so the customer ends up paying the same every month regardless as it's the market rate. The worst off are new buyers, as when they buy it's at the highest possible price, and although the current payment is the same for the house regardless of the interest rate, if you buy when they are higher they can go either way, but now they can only go up, so you have paid the most, the savings are temporary, and if you sell after the rate goes up the price will usually go down and you are likely to be in negative equity. No one benefits from low interest rates except the banks and the government, and property developers. A government applying quantitative easing does so to keep interest rates down, but as they are creating cash without increasing the assets with no growth they are only creating future inflation, something we all suffer with except those borrowing at base rate and lending, as they will have their debts eroded away by inflation if already in place, while everyone buying new will pay the higher amounts. And beware savers, many savings rates are below inflation, especially when low.