The Madness of Prince Charles

Charleses have not had the best of luck on the English throne.  And the current Prince of Wales does not seem to be doing much to change that tradition.  The other day he said:

“Well, if it is but a myth, and the global scientific community is involved in some sort of conspiracy, why is it then that around the globe sea levels are more than six inches higher than they were 100 years ago?

“This isn’t an opinion – it is a fact.”

He added: “And, ladies and gentlemen please be in no doubt that the evidence of long-term and potentially irreversible changes to our world is utterly overwhelming.”

Here is the deal with sea levels.  Yes, they were rising in 2009.  And they were rising in 2000.  And they were rising in 1950.  And they were rising in 1900.  And they were rising in 1850.   In fact, sea levels have been rising (due to thermal expansion of water and perhaps some melting land ice**) since the end of the little ice age  (and longer, see WUWT)

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In fact, I would argue that this extended sea level rise helps disprove, rather than prove, the strong anthropogenic hypothesis.   The influence of manmade CO2 had to be small from 1850 to 1900 or even 1950.  Therefore, for the 1950-2000 sea level rise to be due to man, it means the natural warming had to stop at the exact same moment that anthropogenic effects took over.  Occam’s Razor says a better answer is that the end of the little ice age around 1800 has led to a general recovery of temperatures ever since.  We see the exact same pattern in glaciers melting

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So many people are obsessed over whether or not current temperatures are the highest in the last 100o years or not, they forget that the temperatures in the little ice age were in fact lower than at any time in perhaps the last 5000 years.  It was very cold.

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Postscript: By the way, I love the carbon footprint for me, but not for thee angle of the Prince Charles story:

Charles spoke after arriving in Manchester by Royal Train pulled by a coal-fired steam locomotive, named the Tornado, which was rebuilt from a 1948 design.

** Footnote: We know glaciers around the world have retreated since 1850, as shown above, but 90% of the world’s land ice is in Antarctica and we don’t fully understand what has happened there.  Some climatologists believe that warming weather actually increases the ice pack in Antarctica because it never will cause much melting but it increases  snowfall.

23 thoughts on “The Madness of Prince Charles”

  1. Prince Charles has such a track record of believing in woo that him stating that he believes something almost qualifies as a reason not to.

  2. Prince Charlie should be condemning steam locos, not riding them.

    In the 40s CPR listed coal usage of modern locos at 100lbs per 1000 ton-times. Compare 45kg to a diesel loco’s 4.2kg. When you look at per-passenger CO2, steam is about the same as modern aircraft consuming 3L kerosene per 100km.

  3. Who the hell cares what Prince Charles – never known for his swift intellect in the first place – says?! For that matter, who cares what ex-weatherman Watts says either? I say cage match: the Bonny Prince vs. the Weather Wannabe!! Could be billed as “The Tempest in the Teapot!”

  4. Dumb question but…if the globe is warming and if CO2 is contributing to it and if that’s bad, can’t we just plant a gazillion trees? It has to be cheaper than the alternatives, especially since a good chunk of people in the world could do it on their own without government subsidies/taxes. Then Prince Charles could take the coal-fired train to China and back, guilt-free. The serious question I have is, how many additional trees would it take to make a real difference in atmospheric CO2 ppm?

  5. According to the Daily Mail (which has some pictures too) – http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1248513/Prince-Charles-hits-climate-change-sceptics-scientist-calls-critics-provide-evidence-views.html – the locomotive produces 90 times as much CO2 per mile as a family car. I don’t know where they get this figure from.

    OT: I posted this question on a previous thread, hoping for a range of answers – but since I was a late arrival, I only got a couple (interesting answers though they were). Question: : For the purpose of this question imagine a world in 20 years time when global warming has not happened – perhaps the world has even become cooler. There are two guys in a pub, educated, with science backgrounds, but not climate scientists. One guy says “we should have known all along that global warming was never going to happen because of X” – what would X most likely be?

  6. Woohoo, the retarded cunt speaks again.

    “Sea Levels Have Risen At A Fairly Constant Rate Since The Little Ice Age”, you say, capitalising every word like a twelve-year old working on a school project. 1.7mm per year, according to your graph. Over the last 15 years, the average rate of sea level rise has been 3.1mm per year. An 80% increase != “Fairly Constant”.

    “The influence of manmade CO2 had to be small from 1850 to 1900 or even 1950”

    Had to be, did it? Let’s see now. CO2 concentrations in 1850, 1900, 1950 and 2000 were 285.2, 296.7, 312.0 and 368.8 ppm (Law Dome data for the first three; global for the last one). Approximate CO2 forcing is given by 5.35 ln (C/Co). So, forcing from 1850-1900, 1950 and 2000 is 0.21, 0.48 and 1.38 W/m2. You seem bizarrely fixed on the notion that CO2 was not a greenhouse gas until 1950. This is because you are completely clueless about maths and basic science.

    “the end of the little ice age around 1800 has led to a general recovery of temperatures ever since”

    You seem to think that low temperatures could cause warming. This is because you are stupid beyond belief. Temperatures don’t just rise because they were low; the climate never “recovers”. You have been told this time and time again. I’m not sure what’s most pathetic – your inability to understand how stupid you are, or your infantile habit of simply bleating the same bullshit again and again as if it will eventually become true. Your understanding of science is childlike, but perhaps not as childlike as your understanding of how to argue a case.

    No doubt it will be only a matter of days before you write the same shit yet again. Showing off your intellectual inadequacies really is a bizarre habit.

  7. It must be at least somewhat satisfying when some troll spewing spittle cites arguments, complete with data no less, that actually confirm exactly the position the troll insults one for taking.

    Sweet!

  8. The best comment yet about our leading trolls, (crazy)hunter and Waldo:
    “Showing off your intellectual inadequacies really is a bizarre habit.”
    NewPoster,
    Good question. I htink ‘X’ will turn out to be the realization that the feedbacks were not as AGW predicted, and the the power of the CO2 forcing was over stated by the AGW theory.
    Which happens to be emerging, as the link I posted from the Lawrenceberkely website, and the link regarding the vastly overstated positive feedbacks I provided last week, demonstrate.
    Another layer of ‘X’ will be that the data, its collection and interpretation, was too often collected by people who got caught up in a self-reinforcing feedback loop, confirming each others commonly held biases, plus a little bit of book cooking, to help make the ‘big picture’ clearer.

  9. INBRED NAZI SPAWN OF SATAN BUTLER SHAGGER PRINCE CHARLES ON CLIMATE CHANGE: GLOBAL WARMING SCEPTICS ARE ALL LIARS

    Charles spoke after arriving in Manchester by Royal Train pulled by a coal-fired steam locomotive, named the Tornado, which was rebuilt from a 1948 design.

    If climate change is a myth, why are sea levels are more than six inches higher than they were 100 years ago?
    “This isn’t an opinion – it is a fact.”

    Charlie Boy you talk out you fat ass – it is a fact.

    Daly’s last great battle with the “science-is-settled coalition” was over a small line and arrow carved into a rock on the shoreline of the Isle of the Dead, at Port Arthur, Tasmania. It was placed there by the Antarctic explorer Captain James Clark Ross in 1841 to mark the Mean Sea Level in Tasmania.

    The marking venture was approved, curiously, by the Governor of Tasmania at the time, Sir John Franklin. Franklin was later to become the Arctic explorer who died trying to find the Northwest Passage.

    Daly’s research uncovered flaws in claims made by scientists that the Isle of the Dead base-line mark proved a rapid rise in sea levels. Daly showed this to be wrong. Scientists then tried to claim that Ross was marking the high tide level. Again Daly proved this to be wrong. The latest claim by climate scientists is that the Isle of the Dead is “Rising” up out of the sea, so the mark is misleading. Really!

    http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2009/11/john-l-daly

  10. MET Office Relying On Amateur Forecaster

    UK Daily Express
    Friday, February 5th, 2010

    A COMPUTER that cost £30million was supposed to improve weather forecasting at the Met Office.

    But after a few blips, including last year’s “barbecue summer” that never was, officials are instead relying on an amateur, it was revealed yesterday.

    Keith Davis, 48, collates rainfall, temperature and humidity readings from a homemade weather station in his garden in Tavistock, Devon. The Met Office contacts him for updates, despite its own modern technology.

    Mr Davis said: “My information is very accurate, especially the barometer readings.”

    Last night a Met Office spokesman said: “We use his measurements more as a guide rather than part of our observation network.”

  11. Prince Charles single handedly does more for the republican cause in the UK than anyone…

    As regards AGW, he is a leading example of someone who holds strong environmentalist views and so pushes the warming agenda without question at every opportunity irrespective of whether he really understands it, or lives the life he recommends for the rest of us, which as regards the latter at least, he plainly does not – see also Al Gore et al. I agree with David Bellamy (a noted English conservationist) when he laments the death of traditional conservation in favour of political campaigning on behalf of AGW, they are rarely complimentary and certainly conservation is suffering in the process.

    No wonder the Queen is still hanging on in there and apparently hoping to out live him.

  12. Ad hominem attacks against the Prince of Wales are not terribly helpful, nor do they show those who disagree with AGW in a good light. I am very proud to be a supporter of the concept of Constitutional Monarchy while quite happy to disagree with the views of the heir apparent when it it come to climate change. Prince Charles has fallen victim to a number of popularly held views on the environment and alternative (to be blunt bogus) therapies. On the other hand I agree totally with him in his ideas on aspects of modern architecture. Unlike Al Gore, Prince Charles’s views and advocation of environmental issues are not based on personal gain or comparatively recent conversion to “green politics”. Rather they are based on the embodiment of tradion and conservation in its true sense in the personailty of the Crown. In other words an institution that takes the long view (over decades at the least) rather than looking to the next election. So back to the subject. I think that what we see here is another example of a well meaning person totally disregarding the facts and being taken in by the message promulgated by the media and the IPCC. Just like most polictians.

  13. Oops. I’ve just looked back at my post and seen all the typos. Sorry. The thoughts still stand.

  14. Newposter’s X = just by looking at the people gagging to fire up their get rich quick carbon casino’s rather than invent new means of generating electricity and making oil.

  15. Hunter,

    “Over the last 15 years, the average rate of sea level rise has been 3.1mm per year. An 80% increase != “Fairly Constant”.”

    That is, until about 2006:

    http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_ib_global.jpg

    Funny thing about statistics, they tend to HIDE changes in information until they hit you in the face!! Sorry but it’s gonna HURT Bro!!

  16. @Greystead

    I don’t disagree with Prince Charles on every issue, I can go along with your architecture comment for instance and, as a matter of fact, I’m quite pro the idea of the monarchy in the British constitutional situation at least. However, and with all due respect to your opinion, the strident comments he makes about AGW are not about conservation and not in the best interests of the the monarchy continuing – it’s one thing for politicians to get behind these things, quite another for an unelected head of state. Whatever he believes (and I’ve no doubt at all he is sincere in his beliefs) it’s a very high risk strategy given the real changes society would have to make to satisfy the demands of the warmists. He’s stood up and used his status and position to make statements, we’re entitled to be critical of both the statement and (in my opinion) the misuse of the position without being sent to the Tower.

    Compare and contrast to the Queen. No doubt she holds strong views on many subjects but it wise enough to keep them to herself.

    It’s a great shame that public figures (of any kind) feel the obligation to pontificate at all on these matters. The whole AGW thing couldn’t have come at a worse time in our history as regards the present obsession with celebrity and attention paid to the (usually completely irrelevant) views of those celebrities.

  17. cloneof,
    The rules are that AGW true believers and opinion leaders get to call skeptics anything they want, and skeptics are to politely respond.

  18. Dear blogger,
    For the benefit of clarity can you please produce (or re-produce) graphs with the vertical axis clearly labelled. A graph is strictly meaningless unless it is fully labelled. If you take the time to produce (or re-produce) a graph it is presumably to stop us all having to follow links away from your site to the original material. Appreciated.

    Alarmists have problems with basic science (like explaining things that fluctuate chaotically) and it would be a shame if more grounded people shot themselves down by such basic an omission as the failure to label a graph.

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