tomo,
I like Homburg's delivery style too, though I'd not mind if he added a little Tony-Helleresque dry sarcasm.

As for the awards, they're getting to a Zimbabwe level of inflation. Like Obama's Nobel for not being George Bush, Mann getting a medal for most lurid internet abuse in support of The Cause means we'll look askance at all such gongs.

The Drax stuff — just such idiocy. A very lateral thinking way to save the environment.

The Pfizer payments to doctors might also be traceable in Pfizer tax returns (assuming they claimed it as a business expense). Should get straight to the figure (probably quite a large one). OTOH, maybe they're using the sort of accountants used by Disaster Area in Hitchhikers (chief accountant made a Professor of Neomathematics).

Looking in at Jo Nova's today, someone's posted a graph of the various estimates of ECS, showing how they're all over the place, lack of consensus, etc. One of the regulars didn't even recognise the term ECS. I was going to comment there on one of my usual gripes: the "C" stands for "climate", but for some reason the mean global surface temperature is all you need to know. I decided not to post there, instead to waffle on here on what might make something like ECS plausible. Mostly just thinking with mouth flapping, so reading is very optional.

I have two *big* objections to ECS. Firstly, surface temperature ignores the 3D atmosphere and oceans. How well does the mean surface temperature reflect the energy that actually drives the weather? Secondly, how is ECS nailed down to greenhouse gases *only*? Can we really ascribe any change in energy to a change in CO2 concentration?

Looking at the first objection...

*IF* surface temperature is a strong indicator of the energy contained in the Earth's weather systems, it should be a continuous value. It might go up and down during the daily cycle as ocean and land are variously exposed to the sun, but it won't take large jumps. Over time we might see the figure trending and ascribe causes to CO2 or whatever.

The current estimate of the mean surface temperature comes from averaging various surface stations in various ways. One that I'd like to see is an average of *instantaneous* values, say hourly, one-by-one through the day. IOW: longitude-based, so that we get the temporally closest sample right around the globe at the 2pm, 3pm,... GMT clock ticks.

If the climatologists are right, this should provide a very interesting picture of how the energy arrives on Earth as it presents various faces to the sun. If *my* hunch is right, it'll be pretty chaotic, as weather systems and clouds affect the absorption. Today's pattern will differ greatly from yesterday's and from the same day last year. But that's only my hunch.

It would be interesting to see. Something for a budding PhD to work at (who knows, maybe it'd help The Cause).

The picture I have of the current ways they arrive at global surface temperature is like averaging lotto numbers. You average the winners of the last 500 weeks and that group average will be very smooth and won't generally be too far off the average of any given week's numbers; its predictive value is zero. There will be "trends"; also meaningless.

As for my second objection — nailing down the drivers of weather — well, that's a toughie.

tomo,
That drag queen ... what to say? It's straight out of Flying Circus, with a very sober sounding Graham Chapman in completely over the top getup.

You were thinking of attending a special screening of Brazil a little while ago weren't you? It's a closer match to our dystopia than was Brave New World or 1984. Animal Farm might be second closest (the windmill!).

Gold medal for Mann eh? Definitive fool's gold.

From comments at Jo Nova's there was this address by Stefan Homburg (apparently at an AFD get-together). His thesis: the whole pandemic was pantomime. That's the way it always seemed to me; maybe more people will listen to him.

Mailman,
Good to see you getting into the spirit of this modern information age, a step on the path to our glorious AI future.

On that point, I saw this clothing pattern mentioned at Jo Nova's. The claim is that it disrupts facial recognition software (more subtly than going around in a Guy Fawkes mask, I guess) and the second-last photo in the article shows the lady has indeed been unpersoned by the algorithm. Do they not realise that wearing such clothes will make you fair game for being mown down by driverless cars?

tomo,
Last night a friend of mine was saying how weird the world has become, with politicians being scientists, and scientists being politicians. Of course the politicians are only playing at being scientists — lab coats, waffling about energy and all that — but the scientists really *are* being politicians. And of course grand scientific institutions, like James Cook University, have also turned to politics. You'll be pleased to hear that Oona Lonnstedt has been cleared of research misconduct in much the same way as Michael Mann. A paragon of modern science.

Well Ive just learnt you can get up to 6 tyres in to the boot of a new Prius and you can also get "a lot" of vacuums in to that same boot Robbo! :)