Bob's blog - the realm of threalm

" The fight for freedom begins with free speech " Aung San Suu Kyi, The Observer, Sunday 11 March 2012 Aung San Suu Kyi was not saying this specifically in response to the report published 11 days earlier by the Honourable Ray Finkelstein QC on 28 February 2012 of his "Independent Inquiry into the Media and Media Regulation", but she could have been. Mr Finkelstein says in his report to the Australian Federal Labor government, who commissioned it, the following: 11.44 To rectify existing and emerging weaknesses in the current regulatory structures it is recommended that there be established an independent statutory body which may be called the "News Media Council", to oversee the enforcement of standards of the news media. ... 11.55 The News Media Council requires clearly defined functions. It is not recommended that one of them be the promotion of free speech. There are other ample bodies and persons in the community who do that more than adequ...

Dr David Evans, formerly a full time consultant to the Australian Greenhouse Office and a PhD from Stanford, has written a brief Skeptics Case which was been republished recently on WUWT . It is a succinct and well argued case essentially making many very similiar, if not identical, points to those made by Professor Richard Lindzen in his presentation to Westminster about the exaggeration of CO 2 forcings in the CAGW climate models. Here's Dr Evan's take: ... This is an unusual political issue, because there is a right and a wrong answer and everyone will know which it is eventually. People are going ahead and emitting CO2 anyway, so we are doing the experiment: either the world heats up by several degrees by 2050, or it doesn’t. Notice that the skeptics agree with the government climate scientists about the direct effect of CO2; they just disagree just about the feedbacks. The climate debate is all about the feedbacks; everything else is merely a sideshow. Yet hardl...

What's Up With That has directed me to a  tutorial in physics and science contained in a comment by Professor Robert Brown of the Duke University Physics department on a post on WUWT about Climate Science and Special Relativity . I enjoyed Professor Brown's post as much for its excellent exegesis on the nature of scientific certainty in physics ,as for its application of scientific principle to the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. This is Professor Brown's take: You compare the predictions of their “catastrophic” theory five, ten, twenty years back to the actual data . If there is good agreement, it is at least possible that they are correct. The greater the deviation between observed reality and their predictions, the more likely it is that their result is at least incorrect if not actual bullshit. That’s all. Accurately predicting the future isn’t proof that they are right, but failing to predict it is pretty strong evid...