Monday, January 30, 2012

Hook, Line and Stinker

AS THE tide of warmist alarms recedes it is becoming increasingly obvious how the settled science's leap onto the bandwagon has done so much damage to credibility. For example, the Age has a long article about over-fishing and the rapid depletion of jack mackerel stocks. Every word may be true, every statistic accurate and its call for action inarguable.

Trouble is, the scientist ringing the bell is a certain Daniel Pauly, whose body of published work is replete with dire projections of the steamy fate awaiting not just mackerel but cod and other finny creatures. He is an alarmist of the first order and, inevitably, a champion of computer modelling.

While climate change is not mentioned in relation to the mackels' woes, how can we now invest the slightest faith in anything Pauly has to say? It will take many years of good behaviour and academic rigour to wipe the stain of climate careerism -- a hard road for science and, quite likely, jack mackerel as well.

UPDATE: It is not only earth sciences that have been harmed

16 comments:

  1. "AS THE tide of warmist alarms recedes" - except for the ABC and/or the Bureau.

    For years now the ABC has been tenuously weaving exaggerated and alarmist (“extreme weather”) claims into their news and featuring its various catastrophic effects. Warm spells are highlighted and cold ones ignored.

    Through recent years of cooler than average summers and colder than average winters there is scant, if any, mention of averages.

    Yesterday, though, on one warmer than average Tasmanian summer day, we hear the announcer editorialise that “Temperatures were as much as 14 degrees above average and mostly 10 degrees above average”.

    The temperatures listed on the accompanying map were as follows:

    Burnie 10 25
    Devonport 15 25
    Flinders Is. 19 30
    Hobart 15 31
    King Is. 15 30
    Launceston 13 31
    St Helens 17 25
    Strahan 9 32
    Swansea 14 26

    Just try subtracting 14 degrees (or even 10) from the above figures and you’ll end up with some pretty strange average temperature statistics for mid-summer Tasmania.

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  2. Elizabeth (Lizzie) B.January 30, 2012 at 4:23 PM

    Earth sciences? Scientific research? That row of bottled Gingseng pic is pure poetry Prof. Nearest thing to Donne's Mandrake root I've seen for a long time.

    "Go and catch a falling star,
    Get with child a mandrake root,
    Tell me where all past years are,
    Or who cleft the Devil's foot,
    Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
    Or to keep off envy's stinging"

    The mannikin-like Mandrake root was believed to scream when pulled up, and was said, like women really, to be the Devil's spawn. Take care, dear Bunyip, you are in dangerous territory, what with bewitching doctoral sirens and all calling you as well. Something metaphysical is going on. Gaia is rousing?

    Whatever happened to empirical lab coat research? Instead we've got bottles of gunk and playing around with computer games (sorry,projections).

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  3. You know Bunyip, just the other day I read a small provincial article hidden away from scoffing climate alarmists, the ABC news team and Flannery styled doom-soothsayers shaking their bone-rattling climate-wands at us, how Port Lincoln Tuna fisherman were overjoyed in 2012, having had the best season catching Blue Fin Tuna since 1982! A bumper harvest in fact! No Doom and Gloom rubbish here:

    http://www.portlincolntimes.com.au/news/local/news/general/best-since-82/2411791.aspx

    So whom am I to believe a scientist looking into his computer saying there's no fish in the sea or the blokes doing high fives and reeling them in?

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  4. Prevention is better than cure, Prof. That is the threat natural medicine and therapies pose to Official Medicine and the nexus of Big Food/Big Pharma making you sick and selling you the treatment for your ongoing symptoms.

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    1. Elizabeth (Lizzie) B.January 30, 2012 at 5:51 PM

      As far as I am concerned Mr. A you can stick your natural therapies, and especially your natural medicines, right up your natural exit. Give me some evidence-based medicine any time I'm feeling a little bit cancerish or have a tiny flutter of a heart attack, or if someone discovers my blood just isn't doing its thing the way it should. I don't mind paying and pill popping to properly stay alive. The demography, by the way, is with me. The plague was awfully natural and there were some gruesomely interesting natural cures for it. Natural dentistry was just great too.

      Prevention is for the lucky few who escape fate's claw. Some will have been, as they feel, firm friends with nature, but she is often a difficult old bitch who bites regardless and laughs at being fed ferret droppings. The rest of us have costly and scientifically developed cures.

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    2. Tiny flutter of a heart attack?
      Cayenne Pepper.

      Feeling a little bit cancerish?
      Hmmm.
      Maybe a chemical reaction between an enzyme which presents only among cancer cells in our body, and a certain mineral/vitamin found in high quantity in a select few fruits/herbs, is required. Whaddya reckon?

      No what we really need is Peer Reviewed Science! and Evidence! to find a cure so we can do away with this stinking disease and the attached multi-multi-billion dollar industry.

      Then after that, and when we have raised sufficient awareness, and attracted funding and resources, a cure for my paranoid schizophrenia, your sleepwalking, and the Prof's sex addiction can be furiously sought. I'm telling you, Mental Health is where the future is at.

      Cheers.

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    3. PhillipGeorge(c)2012January 30, 2012 at 9:58 PM

      Quite right Mr A......,
      Andrew Bolt and Bunyip seem to be smitten with the Ivory towers of the tenured medicine men.
      One only needs a casual knowledge of how long it took for Helicobacter Pylori to get proper recognition.
      No doubt Lizzie would have had adrenalin injected or her bleeding stomach half cut out or been put on Zantac for years.
      Cloistered medicine not only get it wrong, it gets it criminally wrong.
      HRT should be banned yesterday - end of shameful cancer ridden story. etc etc etc
      Those men in white coats have got em by their double blind meta studied gonads and ovaries.

      ah, I'd bore you all.
      Anonymous @6.28 - I'm still lazily churning that "pretentious" claim. Anonymous - I'm not "pretending" to be opinionated - I am very opinionated.

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    4. Natural Medicine didn't do Steve Jobs much good, as he recognised too late and with fatal results. Similarly an acquaintance's wife was treated for breast cancer by natural medicine clinics in Mexico and died in agony.

      Natural medicine is great if you're merely one of the worried well. If you're actually ill it's a death sentence.

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    5. Elizabeth (Lizzie) B.January 31, 2012 at 10:19 AM

      Last word from me now, PG and others above.

      Helicobacter Pylori - good evidence-based medicine; advancing from earlier paliative treatment to finding cause and cure.

      HRT - good evidence-based medicine; cancer risk reviewed in recent meta-study and shown to be far less than thought (original 'fear' study design now questionned as femi-lefty-naturo influenced). All treatments carry risks, it is a question of degree, vs the benefits obtained.

      Alternative medicine tends not to tell of the risks, even when evidential medicine has confirmed them, for example:

      St. John's Wort - beloved of 'natural' therapists, causes destruction of the liver.
      'Natural' HRT Black Cohosh (Amerindian remedy)induces liver disease and cancers.

      Why rely on products that have never been chemically analysed, standardised and tested. Why be bluffed by hocus pocus? Certainly, be alert to over-medication and injudicious prescribing or unwarranted intervention. Take responsibility for your own health in this regard. No excuses now we have the internet.

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  5. When I lived in Singapore a Chinese doctor said this to me: "First the locals try traditional cures and then they come to me."

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  6. The same copy of the Age trumpeted record harvests by the primary industry sector. Funnily enough, the opposite was predicted by climate change alarmists and their computer modelling. When will nature learn to sing from the same song sheet?

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  7. Radio Australia broadcast a piece today about a publication (WSJ?) which quoted 16 scientists who believed there was no reason to be alarmed about AGW.

    Wow. Here's one for the books I thought. But no, who was I kidding? To a statement from one of the scientists that the world had stopped warming, the ABC hack argued that the last decade was the hottest ever and 2010 was the hottest year ever. The hack couldn't be convinced otherwise.

    This was followed by back up from, of all people, Tim Flannery. Flannery was introduced as the Grand Poohbah Climate Change Commissioner. Flanners proceeded to slander the 16, claiming that they weren't all scientists - some were engineers, astronauts and retired scientists. The hack was absolutely convinced by this and must have forgotten to question Flanners on his own Climate Science credentials.

    This article was followed by a detailed interview with a couple of oceanographers whose recent study found that ocean currents have been affected by...can you believe it?...anthropogenic climate change!

    jupes

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    1. The crux for this scam to get off the ground was the selling of it to the Left exclusively. This is why Al Gore was used for the big sales pitch. Not that he is a Leftoid mind you, that is just part of the facade. He serves his masters, and gets to make a pretty penny in the bargain.

      You see it plays perfectly to the Leftoids' mindset and ego that the symbiosis between the greedy capitalists/industrialists and the mindless horde of uncultured plebian consumers is conspiring to imperil the planet.
      Whether or not the science is accurate is of secondary concern to the Leftoid. They want to believe in it because it gives them the high moral ground, with which to indulge their intellectual pride, their smugness and sneer. Think Jon Faine and you have it.
      The fact they are nothing more than useful idiots for the globalist bankers, and other assorted riff-raff with Orwellian plans, at the top of this temporal food-chain, escapes them obviously.
      I mean look at Mal 'property of Goldman Sachs' Turnbull, the lone warmy Liberal, and extrapolate and join some dots from there. He's nothing more than a plant on the conservative side of the house.

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    2. Exactly. That's why my professional association, CPA Australia, has long been in the tank for global warming. It's a nice little earner for accountants.

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  8. There's only one natural remedy for the Daniel Paulys and Mr Apocalypses of this world and that's to smear themselves all over with marine curcurbit poo for Gaia's sake-
    http://www.smh.com.au/environment/conservation/sea-cucumbers-may-save-great-barrier-reef-20120130-1qowc.html
    And never forget the little battler's motto under the banner of a Rising Sun-
    Save the krill! Flense the whales!

    observa

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  9. "... how can we now invest the slightest faith in anything Pauly has to say?"

    Well Prof, a staggering litany of absolute howlers doesn't seemed to harmed the 'credibility'that idiot erhlich, for example.

    Or dim flummery or just about every other settled scientist to wandered, dinosaur like, on the face of this earth.

    Anyway, they're good for a laugh, if nothing else - except when I receive my utilities bills...

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