From the Australian report on Doha (coming up next week)
Firstly — there is the usual nonsense, the must-have-caveats, the litany, that allows a brave journalist to write something that’s pretty obvious, but political incorrect. So first we-the-reader apparently needs to know (again) that: 1/ CO2 has hit record highs, 2/ Some large government report tells us that is awful and 3/We’re not doing enough, and 4/ Sandy the big-storm is “widely cited” by some unnamed sources (which means activists, not scientists) as evidence of climate change will make storms worse.
Then, good news, the MSM can admit that things are not accelerating (or even rising) as planned:
[Graham Lloyd] “…the most recent global temperature record, released this week, shows the average global temperature fell last year for the second year.
In short, there is agreement that the rising trend has stalled.
Many scientists accept there are natural processes at work that are not properly factored into the global temperature models.
German environmentalist Fritz Vahrenholt, a former Social Democrat Party senator, founder of wind-energy company REpower and president of the German Wildlife Foundation, has been particularly outspoken.
“According to the IPCC climate models, there should be an increase in global temperature of 0.2C per decade,” he says.
“But if you look at the data series of satellite-based temperature measurements and the data from the British Hadley Centre (HadCRUT), you find that since 1998 there has been no warming; the temperature has remained at a plateau. We know how mainstream climate scientists would answer this question: 15 years is not a climate signal; it must happen for 30 years,” Vahrenholt says, “But there must be an explanation for the unexpected absence of warming.”
Vahrenholt’s answer is that the exclusion of solar activity and decadal oscillations from climate models leads to erroneous results. Vahrenholt’s point is not that climate change shouldn’t be addressed but that fear-driven energy policy works against the interests of nature, the poor and economic good sense. He says there is time to find solutions that work.
This is the background against which governments will meet in Doha…
Give Vahrenholt a medal.
PS: PERTH people — come and meet David and I, and David Archibald tonight at the Floreat Athena Football club in Mt Hawthorn for a relaxed event with like-minded people. Use the code word Nova to get a $10 discount when booking. 7pm start 🙂
Looks like we’re the only two bloggers bothering to mention Doha.
What is supposed to be the big aim at Doha, is agreeing some sort of continuation of the Kyoto agreement, which runs out this year. Things are not looking too good for that.
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2012/11/23/the-real-doh-about-doha/
Pointman
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I like your writing style Pointman. Couldn’t stop reading once I started. Unfortunately for Oz we are like a shag on a rock, what with having our very own warming destructive carbon tax and Combet having committed us to Kyoto renewal. One day I hope to wake up from this nightmare. Hopefully before Emerson does another rendition of ‘Whyalla Wipeout’.
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A shag on a rock sounds like a very mixed blessing …
Pointman
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Do not be distracted by the smoke and mirrors of COP18. The really important attempt to control free speech by controlling and monitoring internet usage is being done by the UN.
Write to your local representative! This is important!
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Writing it now Truthseeker. My local MP will soon be receiving my letter. Last time I wrote I requested he didn’t vote for the carbon tax. A one line letter. The reply I got was full of untruths and appeal to precautionary principle. My reply was pages and pages long with scientific references. Needless to say I did not receive a reply to my reply.
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What people must realise is that there can be no CO2-AGW because the IR supposed to cause it, the ‘black body emission’ for the Earth, is a pyrometer artefact. In reality, thermal IR from the atmosphere annihilates it and all the other GHG bands.
This is standard heat transfer physics that only we process engineers seem to understand, the knowledge having been displaced by stupid Trenberth in climate related areas. This attempt to change basic physics has even started to alter mainstream subjects so I’ll show why I am right and the rest are wrong!
If the net IR did not go to zero at equal temperatures for two bodies in radiative thermal equilibrium, there could be no radiative thermal equilibrium and we would have already vanished in a puff of smoke.
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Expect Vahrenholt to drummed out of the Brownies anytime soon – for making honest, forthright statements like this!
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I doubt he’ll be any worse off than he was a year ago, following the publishing of his book.
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We seem to have gone directly from the end of the beginning to the beginning of the end. And we didn’t even pass “GO” and we didn’t get to collect our $200.
This Doha conference would be a good time for the other silent pragmatists in politics, to be silent no more.
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“we didn’t get to collect our $200.”
Don’t worry. It has been collected for you several times over by the carbon traders, bankers, electricity companies, oil price speculators, producers of wind turbines, Tim Flannery, sundry hangers-on, and the government. Your $200 is in safe hands.
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Without a hint of irony Fritz Vahrenholt will be branded a “climate change denier” for pointing out that the evidence contradicts the theory.
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Doha. Just another talkfest junket I fear. When no one goes to these things I’ll be satisfied that this fraud has come to an end.
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What is really worrying is that the manipulated, inflated temperature data, which has been adjusted upwards and which has been significantly raised by the UHI effect is showing some cooling.
The true cooling is probably quite significant over the last 10 years, and we should be worrying about that!
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Yes, that’s an interesting point. May I C&P this comment with the link over to a thread in the Daily Telegraph?
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What concerns me is that the IPCC has not been invited. It sounds too good to be true, but no one has yet offered an any explanation for it, even the IPCC don’t know why. It cannot be that the IPCC setup by the UN is now abandoned by the same UN. This would be schizophrenic! There must be more to this than we know. Any insights?
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The permanent UN agency responsible for matters climate, is the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). That is the body that discusses the politics, and “agrees” the policy. The IPCC’s role is to collate the science, and to produce an assessment report as input to the UNEP discussions.
Could it be that the consensus within the UNEP is that the IPCC has done its dash, and has nothing further of interest to add. The IPCC has proven to be a bit of a loose cannon, and a liability in the past. Perhaps they are quietly setting it adrift, in the hopes that nobody will notice.
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Could be they view the IPCC brand as tainted, and an obstacle to selling the meme rather than a benefit. It’s not like their opinion is wanted or warranted, since it is entirely a political question, the Science is just the tool to implementation, superfluous otherwise.
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so many pollies with CAGW conflicts of interest – think Turnbull in Oz – u have to wonder if the IPCC had a hand in their SELECTIONS:
23 Nov: ThisIsMoneyUK: Tamara Cohen/Matt Chorley: Top Tory who earns thousands from green energy firms says it is ‘reasonable’ for bills to rise by £2-a-week to pay for wind farms
Battle of wills between George Osborne and Ed Davey sees cap on carbon emissions dropped
Green energy strategy will treble costs from £2.35billion to £7.6billion
By 2030, average fuel bill will rise from £1,249 to £1.427 a year
Energy Secretary says bills would rise even more without green power
But Mr Yeo insisted it was not a problem. ‘I personally think that a couple of pounds a week – maybe rising to almost £3 a week – is a reasonable price for Britain to achieve a degree of energy security to reduce its total dependence on fossil fuels and to honour its commitments to cut green house gases,’ he told BBC Radio 4.
However Mr Yeo, who earns almost £140,000 from green energy companies, faced criticism from Conservative colleagues.
Douglas Carswell, Tory MP for Clacton, said: ‘The average constituent in Clacton is already paying between £10 and £20 extra for their electricity as a direct consequence of these hidden green surcharges…
John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace, said: ‘By failing to agree to any carbon target for the power sector until after the next election, David Cameron has allowed a militant tendency within his own ranks to derail the Energy Bill.’
Friends of the Earth’s executive director Andy Atkins added: ‘The coalition has caved in to Osborne’s reckless dash for gas and banged the final nail in the coffin of Cameron’s pledge to lead the greenest Government ever.’…
A generation of nuclear plants will be built and Mr Davey’s department is committed to thousands more wind turbines, despite opposition from local communities and more than 100 Conservative MPs
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/news/article-2237135/Top-Tory-Tim-Yeo-earns-thousands-green-energy-firms-says-reasonable-bills-rise-2-week-pay-wind-farms.html
some background:
Yeo fights for his right to trough
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2012/7/23/yeo-fights-for-his-right-to-trough.html
Yeo works late
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2012/9/1/yeo-works-late.html
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Following Vahrenholt’s famous declaration, Germany went for 23 coal-fired power stations each 2200 MW. That is 50,300 MW. Merkel, who is also a PhD in physics and therefore understands well the science, did not go for 10,000 5MW wind turbines, but for coal-fired power stations. I stand to logically conclude that Germany has thrown wind turbines to the wind and are now silently and subtly dumping green energy and going back to conventional. Germany is trying hard to aoid the fiscal cliff, it needs cheap energy as we all do. Doha will be either another big meltdown or a complete turnaround.
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Perhaps you missed my posting in a previous thread:
WWF study calls for urgent new builds of fossil-fuelled power stations.
In an article in Germany’s Handelsblatt discussing imminent power shortages because of lack of real generating capacity I read what translates roughly to:
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Oh yes, its stalled, just like its stalled many times in the past – but, surprise surprise, after each stall it just keeps rising. Much like this undead “skeptic” argument.
Very disappointing to see this blog running such infantile stuff.
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.
YEAH!!
We should be concentrating on the reaaallly reeaaaallly scientifical stuff like THIS
.
(From the AlGoracle hisself, so you just know it’s gotta be pure science)
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Our kiddie scientist struck the jackpot, albeit unknowingly, at 2’:00” – “the choice between the dirty energy of the past and the clean energy of the future is a no-brainer”.
Bingo, Kiddo! You need no brains to make this unsupported assertion.
Dirty energy, forever!
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Yes, that’s the problem with natural climate cycles, they tended to occur many times in the past. No doubt they’ll occur many times in the future as well.
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Yeah sure, and between each “stall” it goes up. Doesn’t look like a natural cycle to me. But of course, we are coming out of the little ice age, how silly of me to forget.
The argument, “There has been no warming since xxxx”, is dead. Actually, I have an offer you can’t refuse. The start date – lets fix it at 1995. You know, the date some “skeptic” used to get Phil to say, “There has been no statistically significant warming since 1995”. Yeah, lets use that year.
So feel free to use “There has been no statistically significant warming since 1995” whenever it next happens to be true. But don’t hold your breath waiting.
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You’re probably doing a Michael Mann and looking at the graph upside down.
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Ben Santer says 17 years is a good enough signal. We’ll stick with that for now. Just a couple to go, to be on the safe side.
Separating signal and noise in climate warming
‘LIVERMORE, Calif.
— In order to separate human-caused global warming from the “noise” of purely natural climate fluctuations, temperature records must be at least 17 years long, according to climate scientists.’
https://www.llnl.gov/news/newsreleases/2011/Nov/NR-11-11-03.html
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JB is touting for people to read his useless blog. Academics. Can’t really trust them. After all they are all on welfare. i.e. Taxpayer funded.
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John, please stop the whining. Sounds like a little kid that isn’t getting his way
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⚔ WARNING ⚔
⚠ Internet bridge troll ⚠
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Good one! 🙂
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John,
regardless of your statement (unsupported) re it going up after recent stalls.
It definitely appears the modelling that has used ACO2 ‘forcings’ was incorrect.
Also don’t forget the mantra was it was going down unnaturally in the 70’s.
Looks like ‘natural’ has no interest in conforming to stat projections.
Looks like that human signal is being totally swamped by the real drivers of global climate/weather.
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Interesting that 15 years of warming was enough to ‘prove’ AGW/Climate Change was true, but that 15 years is not enough to disprove it… oh no, we have to have 30 years!
Can we therefore also insist on having 30 years of warming before JB et al come back and start squawking about how “Global Warming is real!!!!!!eleven!!~!!!”
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I agree, there is no evidence the temperature rise has “stalled”. Stalled implies that we know it will resume again. We don’t know this at all – it may, but just as likely, it may not.
You see, John, unlike you, I make no pretense at knowing what the climate will do in the future. The only thing I do know for absolute certain is that you don’y know either!
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Yes, Peter, we both have little idea. But there are people who bet on these things, and they agree with me.
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John
Just exactly who would they be? And if they are foolish enough to bet on the kind of climate astrological predictions you find convincing, where can I get some of the action? Give how sure you are of your crystal ball, there must be some pretty good odds on offer – I need some easy money.
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Some good advice, John:
Don’t bet your pants. You may end up very embarrassed. When your hand consists of just a statement of faith you really ought to fold and leave the game to better players.
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Are they at the TAB, or do you “bet on these things” together online?
Another possible interpretation of the ‘stall’ is that it is a peak in the process of being revealed as we move into a 20 to 30 year cooling cycle.
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The infantile, ie. simplistic viewpoint is yours, since after this stall the only direction for temperatures to move is downwards as the sun has in this solar cycle delivered a half height high and most solar pundits are expecting the sunspot count in the next cycle to be even less.
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Oh dear!
I went looking to see how many people Australia are sending to this Doha round of the UNFCCC.
I, umm, stumbled across the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, (yes Anna Rose’s little project) and they have sent 8 delegates to Doha.
Nice to see some action from them, eh!
I noticed something at their site that was interesting. As you might expect, those delegates are blogging all the important stuff back to Australia so they can show us they are making a difference.
So here’s a short excerpt from one of the blogs at their site.
Flat out like lizards drinking.
8 people to compose four sentences, and all day to do it in, Day 3 no less.
Hmm! I might have thought a submission would have been nutted out before they left.
Oh please tell me that they paid their own way.
Tony.
I, umm, could be making it up, so here’s the link to the area of their site that says this.
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What really shocks me is the blatant sex imbalance – two blokes to four sheilas.
Sexists!
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What.
UN territory.
And Allen Ford, it’s 6 women and 2 men. Here’s the link to their bios, and only one of them actually admits to being a Muppet.
Tony.
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Sounds like good odds to me.
Even better.
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Umm, MV, you might like to take into account the orientation of those sheilas – it might not be as good as it looks…
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As long as you’re limber enough……
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I liked this quote:
❝ In the evening, once it cooled down, we ventured to the “ancient” souq- an Arabic market place-…❞
☀
Apparently ‘man made cO2 green house global warming‘ can only be fought during the day, when the sun is out. ☀
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That’s what happens when your whole world is run by ‘the precautionary principle’.
Writing 4 sentences would be seen as an enormous potential risk 🙂
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Tony have you considered organizations such as Oxfam
Google “oxfam australia doha round climate change activists”
you might also substitute “rio+20” for “doha round”
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Maybe they sent lizards. The level of intellectual activity certainly matches.
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“Just like its stalled many times in the past” John huh?
Many times in the recent past the temperatures have fallen off a cliff and don’t forget John – we’re in the midst of a glaciation, the Pleistocene and geologically speaking we will soon enter another ice advance.
Why can’t you see it mate? CO2 and the puny amount mankind produces is neither here nor there – there are other enormous forces at work here namely; the Sun, the heliocentric orbit and Oceans and volcanicity – it just ain’t MMCO2.
To my mind John,
Jo Nova is a very open minded gal.
Sentiments advocating the opposing view would be excised on equivalent [sorry Jo] alarmist blogs. However John, your puerility is excused here – we are big enough to give air to your adolescent thoughts.
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Why can’t you see it mate?
Good question.
Wouldn’t have something to do with ideological/political/quasi religious faith by any chance?
If real time data is not matching the hypothesis, I don’t think the real time data is at fault.
Blind faith in statistical modelling is not unique to climate science.
It has caused unrealistic expectations and behaviour in other disciplines too 🙂
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Naah. The reason I can’t see it is temperature graphs that keep going up. But it seems that you guys can’t see them. Go check out “the escalator” at Skeptical Science. Its fun.
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John, the moment you suggest linking to SkS, you lose all credibility. Or you would if you had any to lose.
The reason we choose 1995 is quite simple, its as far back as one can go and get no significant warming. And it has been for a long time. Because it hasn’t warmed for a long time.
If 17 years is not long enough to draw any conclusions, can you explain why 20 years (the length of the preceding warming period) IS enough? Whereas the previous cooling period lasted about 35 years, from 1940 to 1975(ish).
How come you alarmists are allowed to cherry pick your periods and we cant? The obvious conclusion is that, when end points make that much difference, what you are actually looking at is noise.
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JB,
5 times in the last thousand years the sun has “gone quiet” i.e. reduced sun spot numbers, reduced solar wind strength.
5 times it has been followed by 30 years or more of cold weather.
This has been deduced from proxies for the 5 periods of raised C14 or Be10 levels to infer weaker solar strength, and O18/16 ratio for temperature change. The proxies are considered fairly robust, as we have temperature measurements and sunspot counts for the last 2 periods to correlate with them. Further, the proxies are used by Climatologists for reconstructing past climate changes.
The sun has shown reduced activity since the 1990’s; slowly at first but reducing more lately. Over the same time period those ‘temperatures’ you consider accurate have shown an increase of 0.03 ℃ in a decade, at best. As a reader of this and other sceptical blogs, you may have seen various articles about inaccuracies/adjustments in those ‘temperatures’. Even you must concede that there is some doubt as to their verity, or that extrapolating 0.27 ℃ increase by 2100 isn’t quite the predicted coming end of the world. And if you are honest, you would have to think that the next 30 years are likely to be cooler that any since the last downturn in the 50’s & 60’s, and possibly worse.
So what will you call this downturn, given that you have highjacked Climate Change to mean something else?
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JB.
That would be this debunked escalator
You should give up the cherry picking – it’s unseemly.
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JB has said in a recent comment/reply to me that 20 years of no warming would be an issue for him. I don’t have time to dig out the link.
But to his credit – he has given a number.
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Graham Lloyd appears to be moving towards the sceptics side, slowly. He has taken an enormous risk by quoting the evil Dr Vahrenholt (evil in the eyes of Greens, especially in Germany). Indeed he could well be cast out of that paradise that enviro-journos inhabit.
Why, I suspect next time he is enjoying a cool natural spring water in some bar he will actually be ferociously snubbed by Mr Black, Mr Monbiot and Mr Cubby.
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Lloyd was like most environmental journalists and used to uncritically pump out the usual alarmist articles on this topic. I wonder if he got sick of being hammered by sceptic comments (myself included) calling him uninformed. He went really quiet on the topic for many months. I suspect that in that time he must have started doing some research and in the process very likely found some unsettling information.
Lately he has come out with some good articles critically attacking wind energy for example, and articles, which demonstrate he now knows the difference between scary computer model projections and what the observational data is saying. Very recently he wrote a piece explaining earth history detailing previous warmer periods than now as well as the LIA.
To his credit, it seems he took the feedback on board and no doubt did some soul searching. I’ve seen him receive some complimentary letters as a result of investigative and critical articles.
Of course, as I’ve said before, the alarmists will be spewing as what he is now writing is more educational and shows more balance and contains the kind of information that is exactly what the alarmists don’t want the general public knowing. A more informed public are harder to manipulate with scaremongering!
Once this climate alarmist BS has been dealt with then perhaps the likes of Lloyd can get back to real stories around conservation. For example, I watched a documentary a few months back and it was talking about this remote area in Northern Australia where there are small species that are only now found in that one small area because pests such as feral cats have wiped them out elsewhere. I remember watching the program and being relieved that at no point did they try inject climate change propaganda, ‘it’s our entire fault because we’re evil energy users’, BS to get attention and engender guilt. It was refreshing to watch.
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He is actually a nice bloke and he is a good listener.
He also now would appear to be a good learner.
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Moving towards? He writes for the Oz, and wouldn’t get a guernsey there if he plugged anything but the “skeptical” line.
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Well John I admit he isn’t as extreme a CAGW person as Mike Steketee who also writes for the Oz, and who is not a pollie like Emerson and Beattie who also write for the Oz. Or Megalogenis and van Onselen who are lefties and who write for the Oz.
But I also remember plenty of CAGW drivel coming from the wordprocessor of Mr Lloyd. Which again I admit would be hard for him to avoid dribbling out given the vast torrent of crap which decends on enviro-journos from the likes of WTF, Redpeace and the I Print Crap Climatology. And UWA.
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Perhaps only marginally off-topic:
There is some degree of symbiosis between CAGW and CAGMP. Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Management Pandemic.
Ok – I know pandemic usually means global. Anthropogenic because it is people doing it (not necessarily the computer management systems or whatever). Catastrophic because it pervades all levels of enterprise – except perhaps small businesses.
If your local Council is large, or has been amalgamated with others for “sustainabiity” purposes, you may well be experiencing CAGMP. If your shire chief is still a one-man-band, eg also still drives the backhoe etc, you may not, but then (like small businesses) you probably have other problems.
This nasty outbreak of management is first apparent when the numbers in management and administration begin to climb relative to the technical stream. 20% M to 80% T used to be the norm? Once it gets to 60% M 40% T, the tail is wagging the dog. Then the Ts either have to keep quiet, join the club, or leave.
IMHO, Ms are more likely to go with the flow on AGW, hence the decline in the previously excellent status of CSIRO, BoM etc. Large private enterprises and corporations are the same. Few dare to oppose.
In recent years I haven’t met many managers who could organise a [redacted] in a [redacted] but that is another issue.
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I once went to a [redacted] in a [redacted].
Three distinct crowds.
The young guys upstairs. (then downstairs, then upstairs, then downstairs, then…..)
The clever guys near the Keg.
The heads watching the oil slide show on the wall.
The beer was good, Melbourne Bitter, my favourite at the time.
Tony.
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The HADCRUT data since the cherry picked year of 1998.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1998/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1998/trend
Up or Down? You decide!
Oops, no you don’t. This is science I almost forgot. The data shows warming continues upward, even despite cherry picking 1998, a year with an unusually strong El Nino.
Since the satellites went up: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1979/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1979/trend
No sign of cooling unless you cherry pick more recent years that hide the long term trend.
Which year will “skeptics” choose in future years? 2001 wont’t last long, perhaps 2002 is a better choice for “skeptics”?
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You’re not getting it Nice One.
That’s actually the point.
All ‘modelling’ is subject to ‘cherry picking’.
All modelling is reliant on start and end calendar points.
All modelling makes assumptions that allow certain variables to be switched on or off.
All modelling can only really take ‘snapshots in time’.
They are not magic crystal balls.
You have also implied that ‘the other side’ claims signs of cooling.
Rubbish.
The argument is clearly about the mismatch with empirical evidence or emerging real time data and the role played by ACO2.
You will find yourself arguing with yourself on the ‘cooling’ hypothesis.
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Naturally fluctuating analogue events cannot be emulated (modelled) by digital means without loss of precision. The greater the number of variables that are identified in describing the events, the lower the overall precision of the result becomes.
Thus, the more you dissect and analyse a problem in the natural world, the less certain you become in understanding how it works. D Weston
Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future. Niels Bohr
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Nice One: Take a look at the graph you link to end then explain why the green line starts where it does in 1998. I defy you to come up with an explanation for that as the starting point.
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“David and I” no Jo should be “David and me” 🙂 [PS: PERTH people — come and meet David and I, and David Archibald tonight at the Floreat Athena Football club in Mt Hawthorn for a relaxed event with like-minded people. Use the code word Nova to get a $10 discount when booking. 7pm start ]
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After a statement like this,
I would feel much better about it if the question was, what is really happening, not why can’t we find what our models predict?
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Of course Roy!
Well said.
We all need to learn to ask better questions.
If nothing else, it appears that Graeme Lloyd is learning to do just that.
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Der,4.5 billion of climate change and these clowns are worried about 20 or 30 years, wake up and get a life.CLIMATE CHANGE is NATURAL.
00