Matt Ridley. Gamechanger...

...Courtesy of eco-warrior Bishop Hill... The text of the Angus Millar Memorial Lecture. Delivered by Matt Ridley (author of The Rational Optimist) in Edinburgh 31st October 2011.

...My topic today is scientific heresy. When are scientific heretics right and when are they mad? How do you tell the difference between science and pseudoscience?
Let us run through some issues, starting with the easy ones...

... I am now going to plunge into an issue on which almost all the experts are not only confident they can predict the future, but absolutely certain their opponents are pseudoscientists. It is an issue on which I am now a heretic. I think the establishment view is infested with pseudoscience. The issue is climate change...
Read the full text here>>

Essential.

Our extinguished Poet Laureate...

...writes often in the NZ Herald as Jam Hipkins. His witty and self deprecating columns pierce the PC pretence that abounds here in NZ. Hopkins is an iconoclastic rebel with a fortnightly column and produces politically incorrect satire with bite. Today he's at his very best, brightening our Friday mornings with a column headed Dodgy science gets us all off the hook...

...The other (example of monetary muckiness) concerns a gaggle of Newton's heirs, scientific geezers beavering away, recording data, analysing statistics and reporting only what is provable and true. Except these crooks haven't. They've cooked the books. They've lied. They've falsified the facts to induce needless panic and alarum in the bosoms of the groundlings. Along the way, they've blackened the reputations of others who challenged their conclusions, whilst earning for themselves great renown and large amounts of dosh.There's supposed to be an absolute rule in science: if the facts don't fit the theory, the theory must be wrong. But these beneficiaries of massive research grants have adopted a more creative approach. In their world, the First Law of Prestige and Avarice applies; when the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts...But these egregious boffins have done more than remind us that the purest of research is prone to the corruptions of ambition and income. What they've done is wilfully attempt to influence public opinion - and political outcomes - around the world. For these data-bodgers weren't investigating the mating habits of the Lesser Crested Gobsnot. No, they were climate scientists. Or, more precisely, pseudo-scientists, twisting the truth to produce results which they and their employers desired...more here...

As with other MSM, the NZ Herald has reported the scandal around the CRU as a breach of security rather than a gross and grotesque scientific fraud. Jim Hopkins, God bless him and reward him, has shone the spotlight on the elephant in the room. We wait now for further news and comment re NIWA, CRU and Jim Salinger as posted yesterday. The s*** has now hit the fan..

...AND, because it's Thanksgiving...

...and from the usually very unexcitable Bishop Hill...On the code thread, James Smith has just posted this comment:
From the file pl_decline.pro: check what the code is doing! It's reducing the temperatures in the 1930s, and introducing a parabolic trend into the data to make the temperatures in the 1990s look more dramatic.
Could someone else do a double check on this file? Could be dynamite if correct.

Maori welfare slavery/dependency...

...is under the media spotlight once again, but it doesn't require any patronising nanny state "tough love" as the NZ Herald sub-editor suggests. What is needed is a much, much different remedy. For crying out loud, welfare slavery/dependency cries out for political leadership...can you hear me Pita Sharples ?

Lindsay Mitchell writing in the NZ Herald has pointed out the elephant in the room. It's a big hungry beast, we feed it regularly, and it's thriving and it certainly makes a huge noise and stink, yet we manage to avoid talking about it, for fear of appearing insensitive and (gulp,horror) right wing and racist.

Pita Sharples and Tariana Turia know Mr Dumbo is there, but close their eyes and hold their noses because they don't have the political courage to face up to him...

...It is a fact (says Lindsay Mitchell) that the more that is done for people, the less they will do for themselves. That includes caring for and nurturing their families. Until voters and politicians recognise this, New Zealand is going to keep on fighting a battle with childhood deprivation, transience, physical and mental ill-health, educational under-achievement, and crime - all disproportionately affecting Maori.
Distributing taxpayer funds into poor, and increasingly not-so-poor, homes has been going on for decades and every year there are people advocating for more. They claim to be trying to solve the problems associated with poverty when, in reality, they are worsening them....more here
...and why are politicians making the problem worse, year by year ? Simply because they know that the subtle slavery of welfare dependency guarantees them votes from the slaves...

Addendum: further to the broken hockey stick saga below, some random comments...
...Almost daily the credibility of the scientific community is being trashed by those prepared to manipulate data to ‘prove’ their predetermined outcome to support the AGW/Climate Change agenda of alarmism – in addition those scientists not prepared to speak out against the totally unproven hypothesis should be ashamed...
...Even those of a non-scientific bent can understand this and see that the scientific methodology has been seriously abused by the climatology community...
...this quality of reporting and whistle-blowing would have been common-place in our mainstream media only a few years ago. The fact that it no longer is, (indeed, the Guardian is actively censoring any public mention of this story), is depressing. But perhaps what we are witnessing is the slow and painful death-throes of the dead-tree press (no pun intended), to be replaced by a far more alert, honest and responsive reporting on the web - of which your writing here is a prime (and hopefully, historic) example...with grateful thanks to Bishop Hill.. who has translated the story into Laymanese. See below...