…
The Australian Academy of Science (AAAS) updated their “Science of Climate Change” document. It’s more glossy unscientific propaganda.
Garth Paltridge wonders in The Australian if the Academy will come to regret it. As usual, it’s what they don’t say that matters. They don’t mention how badly the current models have failed, and they hide that climate models give contradictory rainfall projections and just cherry pick one that gives the answer they want. They repeat the meaningless argument that their models don’t “work” without CO2. Perhaps they should let the taxpaying voters know that their models don’t “work” with CO2 either? None of the models can explain what caused the Medieval or Roman warming when CO2 was “ideal”. They conceal that the model forecasts rely on assumptions of feedbacks that the empirical evidence shows are wrong.
“Basically the Academy has fallen into the trap of being no more than a conduit for a massive international political campaign ”
Climate of cherry-picking
- Garth Paltridge The Australian
The problem is that, after several decades of refining their story, the international gurus of climate change have become very good at having their cake and eating it too. On the one hand they pay enough lip service to the uncertainties of global warming to justify continued funding for their research. On the other, they peddle a belief — this with religious zeal, and with a sort of subconscious blindness to overstatement and the cherry-picking of data — that the science is settled and the world is well on its way to climatic disaster. The Academy document fits neatly into the pattern. It is a sophisticated production that tells only one side of the story.
For instance it does not say, or illustrate with a diagram, that all the mainstream climate models have over-estimated the general upward trend of global temperature for the last 30-or-more years by a factor (on average) of at least two. Nothing is said about the distinct possibility that the models include feedback processes which amplify far too much the effect of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Instead, the document talks about an apparent pause in global warming since 2001. It attributes the pause to some temporary fluctuation in the internal behaviour of the ocean. It does not mention that climate scientists have for many years deliberately played down the contribution of natural oceanic fluctuations to the rise or fall of global temperature. The possibility of naturally induced rises seriously weakens the overall story of human influence.
The document makes much of the belief that climate models can correctly replicate twentieth century global warming only if they include human influences. It fails to make the point that this says very little for the skill either of the models or the modellers. Recent research on the Roman and Mediaeval warm periods indicates that both had temperatures and temperature changes very similar to those of the present. Both periods came and went without the benefit of significant human emissions of carbon dioxide.
Cherry picked rainfall projections:
The document mentions that long-term regional rainfall predictions are uncertain. It doesn’t say that they are probably nonsense. The various model forecasts of the average Australian rainfall for the end of the century range from a doubling to a halving of the present 450mm/year. It smacks of cherry picking to display a map of the output from one particular model that indicates a future reduction in rainfall for most of Australia of the order of 20%.
There has been a goodly amount of arbitrary selection (of data, of statistical technique and of display) in an illustration of the distribution of the change in observed rainfall over Australia the past 100 years. The southeast and southwest of the continent are shown as a sea of red suggesting there has been a frightening decrease over the period. No mention is made that a more traditional presentation of the data gives an entirely different picture. In the southwest, the recent annual-average rainfall has simply returned to something close to its value for the 15-or-so years before about 1905. In most of the southeast, there has been no statistically significant change at any time.
Paltridge wishes the Academy of Science would focus on real problems like “group think”, the lack of polite debate, and the failures of bureaucratized “peer review”.
Maybe the Academy could use the resource of its overall fellowship to identify those situations where scientists have too much skin in a political game. President Eisenhower foresaw that problem many years ago in his retirement speech to the nation: “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present — and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, …… we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite”.
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Garth Paltridge is a former CSIRO Chief Research Scientist and Director of the Antarctic Cooperative Research Centre. He wrote The Climate Caper, reviewed here.
All my posts involving Garth Paltridge.
Jo, I think a remedial course on what constitutes propaganda and the various techniques employed would be worthwhile. Young people around the world need to have that education. And soon! Very soon!
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The downward slide, thankfully with exceptions, has been underway since the 1970s in Australia, public schools education and Teachers Union agenda, universities and a higher level of the same agenda. The present federal government wants to return to the basics, with permission from the state governments responsible for public schools, but the hurdles are numerous, including finding younger teachers who learnt the basics and can teach them. I have heard of laws graduates who cannot dictate a letter properly, I have experienced young people who cannot work out change without a calculator or a cash register that works it out for them. And as for uncommon sense !!!
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Dennis,
Are you refering to the US or Australia? I’m aware of the common core iniciative in the US. If there is a similar project going on in Australia, could you post a link describing what’s going on.
Abe
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Just a guy –
google ACARA National Curriculum , and australia national curriculum review
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Diogenes,
Thanks for the info.
Abe
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Hi Mark, Joseph Goebbels is alive and well in the Academy of Science which is a blight on all science practitioners.
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That seems apparent Geophil.
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Any large government institution has a ‘communications’ section which adapts all documents which are to go public. Invariably they are media types with virtually no understanding of the underlying material. The results are predictable.
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O_o I guess a media studies person happened to read my post.
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Mark,
Way back in my dim dark past, 1st year at RMIT (equivalent to today’s yr 11 I think, I was only 16). One of the humanities subjects I had at the start of my Diploma of Applied Chem. was called “Clear Thinking”. It was exactly what you are advocating. It has stood me in good stead for over 50 years BUT one of my friends (maybe ex-friend) from those student days did not as he has fallen for the AWC scam hook-line-and- sinker.
R-COO- K+
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Ron Cook, I remember a class that covered propaganda in the media sometime at age 15 or 16 too. This being in the US. That together with a keen sense for it (it isn’t always obvious) have kept me in pretty good shape. The trouble with many youth, and some olders is they can’t get their heads out of social media long enough to learn anything deep. Shallow intellect, shallow thinking, little wisdom and worse they don’t even care.
The net effect is that they are very vulnerable to “expert authority”.
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Ron, Clear Thinking was a component of English in my year 11 and / or 12 school studies along with precis writing. Both were my favourite components and, 55 years later, I often make use of both, refer them to friends and bemoan their absence from “modern” education.
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Australian Academy of policy based Science?
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Talking of propaganda, I see there is a cyclone approaching Australia.
So I want to be first to say, “This cyclone is further proof of global warming.”
Now I is a real climate scientist.
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Last year I couldn’t even spell the word pilut, but now I are one.
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Jon,
mon man! should be: but now I R 1.
word up.
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Just have them turn on the television, open a magazine, newspaper, textbook, mass fundraising mailer or their favorite web site and then ask “How do you know this is the truth.” That might be a good start as it seems the entirety of communications media in all its forms are following the Progressive’s bouncing ball and singing the exact same tune… all propaganda, all the time.
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It’s a truly massive Science Fraud, easily shown up by Professionals. The fact that these ’eminent people’ haven’t worked this out leads to just one conclusion: terminal incompetence.
The Arrhenius Enhanced GHE, pushed by Sagan then the IPCC does not exist, easily proved by experiment. That experiment is to measure mean temperature drop from Earth’s surface to its local ~30 m atmosphere. To thermalise the difference between mean surface Emittance and OLR, the EGHE claim, would need about 15.5 K, lower atmospheric temperature than any time in the past 444 million years.
The real temperature drop is set by Lapse Rate at ~0.2 K maximum. The people who push the EGHE are charlatans. And before you dump on me ‘peer review’ and ‘denier’, Sir John Houghton himself in Figure 2.5 of ‘Physics of Atmospheres’, shows the underlying Lapse Rate theory.
As for the real GHE, the non-enhanced version, it cannot exist in our climate because the water cycle automatically sets it to zero, apparently proved empirically by 18 years 3 months no warming according to RSS. The final proof of my thesis is here: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/abs_temp.html
NASA set out to measure the temperature drop but gave up, ‘preferring to model it’. I take that as meaning after the only real experimental proof of the EGHE failed, they set out to deceive. As i state at the outset: A TRULY MASSIVE SCIENCE FRAUD..
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I wish I knew how to get it to them, Mark. These days the problem is so entrenched I doubt we can do it.
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Roy Hogue,
Thumbs down was mine. Not on you personally but on the content.
The day you decide the war is lost, is the day the war is lost.
Abe
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The war may not be lost. I just think it will be won by the older generations finally exerting their strength at the ballot box, which started in November by the way. Otherwise we’re headed for violence in my estimation of things.
I don’t think you can go back and un teach what has been tolerated as critical thinking in our schools and universities.
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Roy, if you are right we are doomed. It’s an up hill fight maybe but we have to figure out how to reach them.
Abe, I wouldn’t have used the red thumb but I agree with what you are saying. It’s lost only when we have no more fight left.
I still have some.
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Excellent effort by Garth Paltridge and kudos to the Oz environment editor. Should someone inform Greg Hunt that he’s on the wrong side of history?
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Very good point el gordo. Those high profile individuals promoting the “CAGW Rubbish” will indeed “end up on the wrong side of history” in due course – the imminent GM/LIA will seal their fate – I would like to see all their names & job descriptions listed in a future “CAGW Infamous Hall of Shame”.
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Malcolm Roberts sent Greg Hunt a 14 page letter in March 2014.
If Greg Hunt read it all, which I rather doubt, he should be in no doubt that the Climate science of the BOM and the CSIRO is weak.
However to find out if he is on the wrong side of history might take a little more time.
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Malcolm also travelled down to Canberra to meet with Greg for an hour and told me Greg listened intently to him.
Honestly, what do you think would happen if the Environment Minister came out with doubts about CO2 causing global warming? He’d be hounded by the MSM and the left as being a hypocrite of the first order!
It’s not going to happen. Greg sacked Flannery, has approved over a trillion dollars of projects and has neutralised the warmists with the DA legislation…for the time being.
Anyone who believes the government is going to change its balanced position is living with the Greens at the bottom of the garden!
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Maybe,
If Greg Hunt listened to Malcolm Roberts for one whole hour Greg must be pretty doubtful about the whole alarmist caper by now.
Politicians are reactive to public opinion, and I have to accept that. But I would like to see Greg Hunt, or someone else actually testing what the public opinion might be.
I think, and hope that if a party was to say that they were going to shut down the Green industry on Climate Change because it is all “load of Crap”, they might actually be successful.
A suitable toe in the water might be to shut down the Climate Change Authority, comprising: Mr Bernie Fraser, Prof. Ian Chubb, Prof. David Karoly, Prof. Clive Hamilton, Prof. John Quiggin.
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I sense Paul Barry (ABC Media Watch) and others protesting loudly over their morning (extra-weak) lattes, particularly after last night’s edition.
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I wonder if the Minister has yet discovered that the BOM climate change conmen have been releasing false information to the media on hottest day/week/month/year and other scary stuff?
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We rarely if ever see engineers, those guys and gals who actually make things work and work reliably and who are the ones that keep civilisation steadily ticking over, out there in the public media touting for their pet projects and lots more money while smarmily self advertising as so many climate scientists and science based organisations seem to do.
We never see self promoting seismologists on the media every day touting for more funding because their “models most likely predict” that a scale six earthquake “may occur” in the next century and wreak disaster upon the world somewhere so we “must do something”.
We never see cabinet makers and carpenters in the public media every day because they have “modelled” that they “will most likely” might run out of the wood type they use sometime in the next century so “we must do something.”
In fact most every other proffessions outside of science are more essential to to the running and survival of our civilisation than maybe as much as 80% or more all of science is.
Science on the scale we now have in our western nations is a luxury we can only afford because we are now wealthy far, far beyond the wildest dreams that mankind has ever had or has ever experienced.
Each of these professions plus each and every one of all those other myriad’s of professions that are essential parts and parcels of our civilisation have skills and problems and public flow-ons in their specialized fields equal to and just as high as any individual scientist or groups of scientists.
But unlike science and scientists they certainly don’t have the luxury of the very generous tax paying public’s funding that is an expected and demanded of the public by scientists in support of science but have to earn and pay their own way through life.
The past very respected profession of science and it’s scientists has sometime in the not very distant past, decided to go down the road of a high profile, media promotion advocacy and open public promotion of it’s own particular brand of belief and ideology regardless of the possible severe consequences that their advocated and politically based policies would impose on large parts of humanity.
This utter self righteousness of the humanity destroying scientific advocacy is one of the most notable characteristics of climate alarmist science advocacy.
Politicians have traditionally filled that approximate role as they seek policies acceptable to the voting public.
In doing so politicians since the dawn of human history have aroused great passions both for and against the policies and course of action they are advocating and promoting with often serious conflicts emerging between the various factions if there is not a large measure of flexibility and compromise inherent within the various specific policy advocating or policy counter groups.
Unlike open media promoted advocacy science by scientists, politicians are entirely reliant on the will of the public if they are to remain in power.
So unlike public climate advocacy science and it’s often arrogant self promoting, pseudo science policy and advocacy promoters who appear to be responsible to no one and act and sound like it, politicians are very sensitive to the mood of the voters and citizens and usually react accordingly when they become convinced their policies won’t wash with most of the public.
Invariably politicians with their inherent politically inspired policy advocation have come to be regarded as shifty, unreliable, wrong, insensitive, arrogant, simplistic and etc by large sections of the public who don’t agree with the politician’s advocated policies or who hold a different view on the course of society.
In their ignorance of the political implications and in their self promoting advocacy role many scientists in their little tin god arrogance have enthusiastically entered the political advocacy and policy role without ever thinking through the consequences of the longer term public reaction to their participation in their hard line advocacy of a particular policy, particularly when that policy is based on unproven pseudo science such as anthropogenic catastrophe science.
Consequently the public are increasingly perceiving much of science and many so called self promoting scientists as just another batch of very dubious, untrustworthy, self promoting, catastrophe predicting politicians who, using a thin veneer of another more respected profession, science in this case, are arrogantly advocating and promoting some dubious and unproven supposedly science based policies which an ever increasing proportion of the public are coming to believe are designed so that they and their associates will invariably derive very large benefits from, all at the public’s very considerable expense.
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Rom, excellent comments. Thank you. From what you say, and most engineers, geologists, etc. agree with wholeheartedly, is that traditional science is setting up a failure trajectory for themselves in their lust and greed for money and power.
That trajectory, based on scientific failures and unethical behavior, is trending downward and will reach the low esteem that the public has for welfare chiselers, shady used car salesmen, career politicians, ambulance chasing lawyers, etc.; and then when that happens, they will scream and ask for even more taxpayers’ money.
The really sad thing about this is that societies now, more than ever, need good strong science to help them face real threats in the future and for the general benefit of mankind. Good, basic science has always had a return on investment much greater than 1. I know that the ROI to society in general and taxpayers in particular of climate science is now well below zero. The work they do is exceedingly harmful and has no benefits to the taxpayers.
Once science is no longer seen as good for humanity, it will loose its luster and we will all pay the price for that in our health, wellbeing, knowledge, understanding,and general welfare.
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(1) Because we engineers know the entire Climate Change premise is total BS and don’t want to risk our reputation.
(2) Because unlike those
activists with academic credentials“climate scientists”, we have to entice investors to fund our projects and put our reputations on it. We have to deliver tanglible solutions with competence. They don’t. They can sprout any BS they want and will still get taxpayer’s money regardless. Those “climate scientists” must keep the BS going to fund their retirement.(3) Because we engineers have to tell the truth. If someone dies because we messed up, we go to jail. (In the aero industry, everything is written down. If anything goes wrong, there must be a paper trail. This is to find out what happened and to prevent bad things from happening again). When a “climate scientist” continues to push propaganda and outright lies, NOTHING happens to them; despite robbing the taxpayer their money. (The very money that could pay down a Nation’s debt, build new schools, hospitals, etc.)
More simply, those who promote Climate Change have already made up their minds about it. With words like “the science is settled” providing the public the most obvious hint. They don’t care for science. Its just a tool to be used for political advantage and secure taxpayer money. Really, its easy money.
…All of it has a risk though. They risk their reputation and their long term funding. (It’s basically a one-shot deal. So they have to succeed in the BS.)
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We engineers also don’t get to be wrong every single time and still have our clients pay us or have our companies employ us or (for those who have them) keep our Professional certifications. We get sued and lose when we mess up. When they mess up they get more of our money.
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I can only agree with this post by an unhogenised 110%.
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Thank you Garth.
Tony Jones did massive damage to Australian civil discourse and facilitated billions in unmitigated waste, while arrogantly and pretentiously treading into science to spew his nonsense and poison reason, with zero remorse or apology for his amazing unmitigated buffoonery. He soooo needs to be b****-slapped to oblivion.
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The press release and youtube video are worth a look.
Also the the quiz is interesting…question 11 especially curious: It claims that the following statement is false:
“Since the industrial revolution, volcanoes have made the largest contribution to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”
The correction talks about INCREASE in GHG levels due to emissions, but perhaps in the last 170 years, volcanoes have contributed more to the baseline. This would be to consider the gross contribution of volcanic sources to atmospheric GHG during this period. This statement would be true if volcanoes contribution most of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. Can anyone confirm this?
See image of the correction on this selection here:
https://enthusiasmscepticismscience.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/volcanoes.jpg
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The Australian Academy of Science website proudly says:
Based on the contents of this document, the members of the Executive Committee should all resign immediately.
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We are supposed to believe computer models which have failed in every prediction? Temperature obviously but also the hot spot above the equator, rising sea levels, no arctic ice, no snow in Europe, vanishing glaciers, drowning populations, steadily rising global temperatures.
Now the proponents of such utterly failed climate models insist that they actually know why they were wrong. What does that matter? They were wrong. There was no crisis. It did not happen.
Worse they insist that being wrong was not their fault as they had not accounted for ocean variations, but the predictions are still going to come true regardless of the current facts. How certain can they be that they are right now when they were certain before?
If you cannot get the simplest prediction right over 20 years, why would you be right over 100 years? After all temperatures always go up or down so getting a temperature rise right is a 50:50 bet, like two up.
No, the predictions were utterly wrong. Global warming from increased CO2 and CO2 alone was wrong. No, we the people paying $1Bn a day for a problem which does not yet exist are not interested in why it was all utterly wrong. Why would the explanation in hindsight be any more correct than the original prediction? What is far more likely is that the whole idea is wrong.
Why was there a little ice age? Why was there medieval warming? Why was there Roman warming? Why cannot these models get anything right in the past and why should we believe their predictions for the future.
How can Brian Schmidt insist that the science is right when the science predictions are all wrong? It is not just that people disagree with being told what to think, being told what is right. They object to lies and theft and political manipulation by extremist communist groups attacking Western democracies with faux science.
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Ah yes, but don’t forget that economics department computer models are predicting doom and gloom based on the climate change predictions, and local government are acting on that advice too to make stupid decisions that cost ratepayers lots of money, and in some examples business opportunities and even homes.
Words fail me.
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I would be inter5ested which “Economics department computer models” you’re referring to: I have not seen any economic modelling of climate change that goes beyond hand-waving. The economic-impact stuff that I have read, has been the most absurd hand-waving nonsense imaginable.
There are basically 2 models in Australian university think tanks that could do anything like a decent job of assessing long-term effects of climate on the economy (as Garnaut’s review pointed out):
1. MONASH (especially MONASH MMRF – the multi-regional forecasting version) and
2. ABARE’s GIAM (the overwhelming bulk of the staff of which, were trained at CoPS/MONASH – and which is woeful at forecasting anything).
I know a bit about this: the preliminary work for my PhD thesis – presented at a Masters seminar in 1995 – involved a scenario called GREEN, where the MONASH model was used to model the impact of policy changes that served to reduce the global demand for coal (my work did not investigate the direct putative effects of ‘climate change’, in the same way as I did not model the effects of the Second Coming: both are nonsense).
GREEN was one of 17 scenarios that were implemented at a range of ‘strengths’ about a base forecast, with the idea of obtaining some idea of the distribution of forecast paths.
Models of this nature are nonlinear (ergo have a non-constant Jacobian) and non-bijective (so they’re potentially many-to-one mappings from input space to output space).
What this means, in turn, is that if you forecast using the expected value (or the expected path) of the exogenous variables, it will not result in an output that is equal to the expected value of the output variables: this goes N-fold when you’re only looking at a subset of the entire range of output variables (e.g., final output by sector).
What I found, was that for a small number of scenarios (17) the forecast distributions at the 2-year horizon became almost ludicrously wide (GDP was 3.7% ± 1.4%; Employment Growth was 2.4% ± 1.5%; Consumption Growth was 4% ±2%; Investment Growth was 4.9 ± 1.8%).
Bear this in mind: the ‘stochastic simulation’ mechanism that I proposed, did not involve varying every exogenous variable and parameter: I was varying sets of exogenous variables, and only a very few parameters (some tech change and taste parameters in 4 of the scenarios). As such, the overwhelming majority of the uncertainty in the model, was not being investigated: the uncertainty in forecasts is far wider than the results detailed above suggest. (However the model comports well with stylised facts: some industries are far less volatile than others; terms of trade affect different industries as would be expected given their trade exposure; and so on).
By ’99 I had kinda lost faith in the modelling paradigm: it was clear that forecasting out more than 2 years was a fool’s errand, and nobody did genuinely systematic sensitivity analyses.
NOTHING HAS CHANGED, and CLIMATE MODELLING IS ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE HARDER. Sorry for caps, but it needs to be said.
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Dammit… should have made clear: the ± numbers are the standard deviations – point being, that zero lay within a 95% confidence interval for some of the forecasts.
I also omitted one interesting thing that just snapped back into my brain: at the time, the media was awash with notions that Australia was headed for recession and rising unemployment – but by my modelling, a recession was 3 standard deviations from the base forecast (ergo, highly unlikely in the following years) and an increase in unemployment had less than a 2% chance of occurring.
Also – I forgot to mention (I just cast an eye over the original paper): Industry 1 (Pastoral Zone agriculture) is one of the most volatile industries in MONASH: the estimated standard deviation of output growth for the sector was almost 8%. Run a stochastic simulation out 100 years with an instrument with 8% volatility, and you get a forecast range that is not significantly different to (-∞,+∞).
Thanks for your info – This (and the previous) are very useful comments. – Jo
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It makes you wonder why anyone quotes climate models with any confidence. My favorite simulation would be projecting the path of a sock in a washing machine and predicting where it will be in five minutes. At every point it is subject to forces which are largely understood, but that does not mean with the greatest amount of computer power, you can predict its position over even a short time from first principles. In climate modelling there seems to be a blind faith that computers can do anything, but even in a very constrained and limited situation, you have no hope. For climate modelers to say oops, made a mess of the oceans which cover 66% of the planet to a depth of 3.4km and receive therefore 66% of the solar energy, is unbelievable. Do climate modelers even begin to understand the action of the oceans? Can they predict El Nino or La Nina which are related clearly to ocean warming as either cause or effect? No.
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TdeF
My little bit of exposure to climate modelling.
In 1988 I was at a range science seminar at Colorado State University. I don’t recall the presenter or the subject but DEFINITELY recall this bit which came in discussion.
He had just seen some of the latest climate modelling (didn’t say where but NCAR was just down the road).
And he was horrified. Being the place of the water cycle in these efforts and the contribution of plant evapotranspiration. This was handled by a model of ONE plant stomata that was extrapolated to the world.
Fast forward to around the mid 2000’s and I told that story at a meeting that included people close to similar efforts in Australia and said that I hoped that things had got better with bigger computers and more knowledge.
Imagine my surprise to be told that, if anything, things had got worse!
So the purveyors of these models better forget “commercial in confidence” and ‘fess up to what they actually have in their coding or I will remain a rejector.
I am reminded of Chiefio’s efforts with Gisstemp
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/gistemp/
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You need a TL:DNR section Krak! Here, I will do it for you.
TL:DNR – even the best macroeconomic models are rubbish.
Corollary of the TL:DNR – you can ‘prove’ anything you want with a macroeconomic model.
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What we need is a computer model which leaves out CO2 as a factor, then we should get a better grasp of what’s coming. A lot of negative feedback.
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How flippant is the explanation that the oceans ate my temperature rise? No one is actually saying that with this simple addition to the models, the incorporation of the oceans in the model, the models are now correct and everything is right again.
No, it is just a throw away excuse, a Flannerism. There is the real suspicion that no one has even a new model which incorporates this new, vague idea, so it is one of those random thought bubbles without a real clue as to what is going on. Then if someone missed an effect so big that the basic predictions were completely wrong, how can they be sure that there are not other unknown effects or many of them or that this is even right?
In such a huge and complex multivariate system as a giant planet’s weather, what is far more likely is that nothing at all is happening on a human time scale, that the 1980’s rise was simply a relatively rapid change of instrumentation from mechanical to electronic. That does perfectly explain the obvious 20 year plateaus either side. If the BOM can say that just moving a Stevenson’s Box can utterly invalidate all the data, so can changing the method of measurement. Having more decimals places does not make a reading right. You cannot correct for a different technology with homogenization software which has an inbuilt assumption that any increase in temperature is reality because your theories said so.
Everything we have seen makes it seem likely that despite the hopes of the Green warmists, no global warming has happened and so explanations for nothing happening are not only unproven, they are unnecessary. Consider the temperature increase has been pitifully small, down with the error bars. Even the Europeans quote it in as 0.9F, as it is so small in centigrade at 0.5C. That used to be the margin of error.
So we have to consider man cannot change the weather on a planetary scale and there is absolutely no need for a UN IPCC. Perhaps it would pay to study the failure of the CSIRO rain making program over 50 years for a clear example of how a single wrong idea can gobble money and lives and achieve nothing.
Run the sky is falling. The IPCC says so.
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The funniest part of this is that they have no hope whatsoever of ever explaining how CO2 “back radiation” could magically stop warming the atmosphere and then reverse cycle the whole ocean/atmospheric coupling and begin warming the oceans.
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If they could scientifically explain and codify that ridiculous “back radiation” bunk they could make a fortune building industrial CO2 lasers for machining using a heating element, two mirrors and regular air… instead of expensive high power RF or DC power supplies, precision optics and near vacuum exotic gas mixes and woefully poor efficiencies. The should be able to make a laser running on a couple of “D” batteries that could cut through 6″ thick steel if CO2 could actually do what they say it does. It’s all about that forcing thing… OK, and ignoring the laws of physics, thermodynamics and atomic energy states as well.
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Brain Schmidt in the SMH yesterday,authoritarian,arrogant,ignoble,any other epithets?
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On reflection, Brian’s comments were odd, even devious. You could not in fact quote Brian Schmidt as saying in his opinion man made CO2 produced Global Warming but rather that some vague others thought so.
As a Nobel laureate astrophysicist, you would think he would say, “in my expert opinion” and talk about his understanding of the likely impact of increased CO2 in the atmosphere and the validity of the computer models. However he just used the old argument from authority, that most (other) scientists thought, the sort of argument you would expect from a non scientist or someone with no authority of his own. He certainly did not throw the weight of his expertise as a scientist behind it all.
So he took the path made famous by Admiral Poindexter advising Richard Nixon, “plausible deniability”. It actually indicates strongly that Brian and his reputation have been enlisted to the Global Warming cause, without believing it at all.
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The modellers work with great zeal,
To deliver the data they feel,
Will further their cause,
In explaining the ‘pause’,
But what they produce isn’t real.
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Garbage in, garbage out.
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Ruairi, you really should get Jo to create a spot on this site where we can find all your little limericks. They are glorious and would form a wonderful, poetic, history of this farcical time. I love them, keep it up!
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Many thanks PeterPetrum for your kind remarks.I hope to keep it up till I run out of steam,or till the warmists come to their senses.
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I’ll let you know when my pigs start flying as well.
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When “the warmists comne to their senses” they won’t be warmists.
Doug
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I wish I had scribbled them all down as they appeared! It would be wonderful to have them as a collection, maybe with a cartoon or three from Josh. Ruairi’s Climate Collection of Limericks …or somesuch. 🙂
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Its difficult to believe there was a time I thought the AAS was an organisation worthy of respect.
240
Richard Feynman,the late great physicist noted that when he was a member of the American Academy of Science ,the meeting agenda were taken up with discussion about who they were going to let into the group,not much about science more about selecting members with the right attitudes. The copper dome in Canberra is even more isolated from genuine enquiry than the US Academy.
230
Maybe the dome acts as a kind of Gaussian sphere that keeps out sceptical thoughtwaves?
40
An Australian Academy of Science – the way it is structured as an “organisation” is a joke.
30
If you want a summary of the poor breadth of the document:
Clouds are only mentioned 3 times in the body of the document.
1 of these relates to reflecting sunlight and one on aerosol effects on could formation. (Both giving cooling).
Nowhere is it even mentioned, that less cloud cover due to a stronger sun during the last ~150 years could have influenced the warming that has been observed, and this is therefore an area of uncertainty, yet it is duly acknowledged that cloud cover is a major area of uncertainty in the future.
Their uncertainties during different times have been cherry picked to suit a pre-conceived argument.
Hubris anyone?
220
Jo, the same fall of excellence, relevancy, and honesty of the Australian Academy of Science has also happened in the American National Academy of Sciences, and to the UK Royal Society. What they built over the centuries and decades they are now destroying.
I believe it is time to selectively cut government funded science by significant amounts and to zero in many cases.
The social scientists and policy types (based on social science)are awash in money in the US under Obama. You can not pick up a newspaper or read a news blog that doesn’t daily tout a ‘New study” that shows something I was taught in elementary school. And, a lot of the global warming projects are given to persons and groups with no training or knowledge in science.
Keep speaking the truth to power. It is having significant impacts.
171
The AAS cannot even write proper English when they say:
“If greenhouse gas emissions
continue to grow rapidly, it is
expected that, by 2100, the global
average air temperature over
the Earth’s surface will warm by
around 4°C above mid-19th century
temperatures. ”
The air can warm not the temperature. Temperatures can go up or down. Temperature is not a physical entity that can be warmed or cooled.
260
It’s all symptomatic of the general dumbing down of the education system. They don’t teach English Language anymore.
80
Nor science, it would seem.
40
Nice pickup Chris, alas the factual details matter not in a post-modern scientific world, it’s a blurring of the physical and metaphysical to reach a consensual acceptance.
90
To me, the problem is modernist thinkings’ grand narratives, not post-modern thinking. In modernist thought you have to attach everything together to make a complete narrative of experience, a so-called grand narrative. So, if climate change causes higher temperatures and higher temperatures cause crop failures and crop failures cause starvation, climate change will starve people. And since climate change also affects the entire globe, climate change will starve all of the people. If A+B=C than A=C and B=C, and A+D=C+D (my apologies to any mathematicians. 🙂 ). If you deny their grand narrative, they ascribe you a different grand narrative, one that’s easy for them to combat – you can see this in their whole-sale rejection of ‘luke-warmers’. They are the enemy because they don’t share the grand narrative and, in many cases, they are ascribed to another grand narrative: the “denier.” That grand narrative is the opposite in every way to their own. They can’t conceive of a person rejecting only part of their narrative because it all has to fit together for the grand narrative to work. If a piece is wrong, then a large portion of the grand narrative is wrong by function of how it needs to fit together.
Post-modernist thinking, on the other hand, doesn’t necessarily link things together in this way. You can, taking the example from above, see that crop failures cause starvation. But when you “pick up” the idea about crop failures you look for contextual details about a particular situation. You don’t look at “all” crop failures, you look at crop failures for that particular situation. If you have a poor year in the Midwest, for instance, you don’t necessarily assume the same reasons and conditions exist for crop failure in the Congo. The two don’t have to be linked to a generalized narrative to fit into the world view, e.g. the crop failures in the Midwest didn’t cause mass starvation while the one in the Congo did. One can also concede that a part of the view is wrong and move on without having to reconstruct an entire world view because the contexts tend to be situational.
30
So when a butterfly moves its wings in Siberia … ?
40
Then a Siberian butterfly is moving its’ wings. You might also surmise that, at this time of year, that butterfly is indoors, possibly part of a nefarious mouse duo’s plans.
20
I didn’t expect to be taken literally. I was merely alluding to a common “grand narrative” used in explaining chaos theory, where, “The movement of a butterfly’s wings in Siberia, can cause a storm in Seattle”.
That is why I always avoid both Siberia and Seattle.
50
Honestly, I didn’t take you seriously. I linked to an animated children’s show, after all. 🙂
20
Ah,
Not having a television, I failed to see the importance of the link. 🙂
40
But Arsten, wasn’t that link to the IPCC’s office of professional conduct?
40
Rereke … ummm you do realise you can watch TV and associated programmes on a PC, right?
20
When is this scam going to be completely exposed ! Where are the real Scientists going to stand up and denounce this nonsense !! Over 10 billion already spent on Desal plants in Australia , all mothballed and costing millions each year to maintain !
130
Desalination plants dont really have anything to do with this. Droughts happen all the time and fresh water runs out. Desalination is a new technology that can ensure water supply for the worlds population as it grows. You sir have no idea what you are talking about. People consume water regardless of a +/- temperature increase and the more people we have the more water we need to go around. Get a life you.
114
I think that you asd, in your haste to vilify, missed the part about these plants which cost BILLIONS being MOTHBALLED at a cost of MILLIONS/year
140
I am starting to hear the word “Illions”, being used. It apparently means, a large indeterminate number that is bigger than you could ever possibly imagine.
50
I always thought that was “squillions”…..
40
It would be my guess that a “squillion” is probably at least three orders of magnitude less than an “Illion”, but I am happy to be proven wrong.
40
Here’s a helpful visualisation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PSHV5B5pxY
10
How about Zapto-tillions?
10
Another ignoramus.
The Desal plants were built because idiots like Tim Flannery led the Labor governments, in a time of drought, into the delusion that the dams, because of anthropogenic (get that word ignorant person)climate change would never fill again. Of course they did very quickly once the drought passed. A far more cost effective way of supplying enough water to cities to cover growing populations and cyclical droughts would be to build more dams.
40
asd, they represent wasted money due to a scare that’s failed to materialise.
The decal plants are mothballed, doing nothing, not used, not useful, it’s dead Jim.
40
Allan, what really annoys is that they are not used at all. Firstly they can use waste power, power which is unused when everyone’s sleeping but big generators cannot stop. So no cost there. Then they use sea water, so no cost there. Finally, they are publicly owned which means we have to pay for them anyway.
Take Victoria where 30% of all fresh water used goes into cooling power stations in Gippsland. The desalination plant is, of course, next door. During the height of the drought, a report was commissioned on using sea water to supply the power station. The final report was that it would have to be rebuilt.
Now we have no drought, the fresh water still goes into the power plant and 50 full time people maintain a $28Bn desalination plant which will likely not be used.
So why not turn it on? Free up the water and sell it. Pump it North through the $800million North South pipeline which is also unused.
Agriculture is H2O + CO2 = plants. CO2 is abundant. Farmers only need H2O and they can sell the H2O as plants. In fact Chicken is a conversion of 100kg of grain + chicken = 50kg of chicken. More water means more plants, more grain, more to sell overseas, more chickens, more of everything.
Why are the desalination plants turned off? You do not have to drink the water for it to be useful, but no one is thinking. Free fresh water is liquid gold.
The panic is over so we will pay $28Bn in Victoria for absolutely nothing as it will cost to generate fresh water. Utter Green madness. Like our $2Bn East West link to put the traffic underground and off the streets of the inner city. Under the new Labor governemnt we will pay $1.2Bn to build nothing at all. Now they plan to start an $11 Bn railway line for the next government to implement. Will these people ever stop throwing our money away?
Turn the desalination plants on! Living in Victoria feels like a scene from the film Total Recall. Start the reactors. Sell the water.
60
Interesting post TdeF. Now that the majority (if not all) of the expensive infrastructure is already built, it would certainly be worth the cost of a REALISTIC feasibility study. Worst case scenario is another lazy million or so down the chute.
20
There’s lots omitted or simply stated incorrectly in it.
For instance, re: paleo-climate, it states that ‘past changes in temperature align with changes in CO2’ but omits to say that temperature leads the CO2 by ~800 years.
Also that ‘over the past few thousand years when civilisations developed climate was usually stable’ but the accompanying proxy graphs exclude the past ~10,000 years (highly smoothed) which would contradict that assertion.
There’s lots more.
80
Such precision !
From Q8
“Uncertainty works in both
directions: future climate
change could be
greater or
less than present-day best
projections.”
100
Pure Chicken Little – the sky might not be falling, but just in case…
140
Fact is only half the story is because rotating members attending UNFCCC Kyoto Climate Change deliver the message of their political masters of the day. Government go not research the contributing issues of anthropogenic climate change. Europeans for 400 years stripped ME and AU of heat and CO2e absorbing vegetation resulting in serious heat reflection and CO2e CH4 emissions. In the problem is the low to zero cost multi benefit solution. 2-4 % of Earths vegetation sequesters CO2e to become soil soil-carbon meeting UNFCCC 100 yr storage rule. Well planned Australian Government could engage 400,000 reverse its global debt selling UNFCCC certified offsets to USA EU PRC all whom have pledged to offset the national emissions by 2020. How is in Charge in Canberra missing these opportunities and support of the voters Robert Vincin
21
Instead of sitting around like stunned mullets why doesn’t the Abbott Government (including the Nationals), which I assume is still opposed to any form of CO2 taxing or pricing, commission the NIPCC to go through the document and expose it as the blatant propaganda it obviously is?
That’s what the ALP would do in government if there was an equivalent document on say government expenditure and debt which was a challenge to its policies.
130
Too much talk about “weather” and it being passed off as “climate” – IMHO.
60
Absolutely!
50
BOM are at it again with their tropical ‘cyclone’ baloney!
They claim this withered thing is a cat 2 (recent visible image), the US Navy NRL claims its Dvorak equivalent to be ~55kt.
In US terms everything below 74 Kt is a tropical storm, and 55kt is a fairly weakish tropical storm. But according to good ol’ BOM, its instant Cat 2, at 10 AM! They even jumped right over Cat 1, altogether with that poor scrawny looking thing! It barely has a closed circulation, almost nothing in the mid-level and until about an hour ago almost no high tops, at all (!), which are only now beginning to form on the northern side.
Where are the high tops? Composite radar.
But BOM have it down for about 7 hours now cat a Cat 2, heading towards severe! Believability scales with the size of the lie, so if you want to be ‘believed’, you have to go big, early!
How incredibly farcical and embarrassing this is! The meteorologists in the US must just roll their eyes, they are doing this year after year now – do you have no shame BOM?
391
This very recent visible image shows it even more clearly, the system is still struggling to build a band of storms around the core, it is emaciated, no central dense over cast yet! … and BOM reckons its a Cat 2 Tropical cyclone.
Good Grief! Make it stop! The classifiers at BOM don’t even seem to know the basic features of cyclone formation and development … mind blowing! If you tried to do this in the US you’d be laughed out of the profession!
220
And btw, the Dvorak classification on that more recent image actually drops the predicted wind speed to 45 kt!
110
Vis just off the sat and still struggling to build a storm wall around a core. Dvorak is still hanging around ~55kt, and outflow remaining weak
140
I want to log these images and details here as a record of the divergence between what BOM is claiming and what satellite images are showing. Firstly, it’s ~2:00 AM EST and the eye on radar is still not closed, there is still little build up on the East and SE arc of the storm. As a result the system is unable to build and spin up, and what passes for an eye wall is visibly spinning quite slowly on radar, much like a tropical storm does. The significant weather is in the NW arc with sustained winds around 59 kt being recorded.
BOM’s track prediction map is still claiming it’s close to becoming a Cat 3, and may reach cat 4 by landfall. But the system is barely looking like it’s a Cat 1.
The most recent IR satellite imagery. And and this one, both depict a weak system, that’s continues to failed to get its act together and begin to spin up. The outflow remains visibly surprisingly weak while the central pressure remains ~980 +/-2, and the wind remains ~60 knots (Dvorak).
Latest BOM warning just released :
“Details of Tropical Cyclone Lam at 12:30 am CST: Intensity: category 2, sustained winds near the centre of 100 kilometers per hour with wind gusts to 140 kilometers per hour.”
Since when do sustained winds of only 100 km/hr define a “Category 2” cyclone?
BOM are not even being consistent with their own cyclone category classification scheme! So this requires a formal explanation from BOM’s senior management as to why this is being claimed when it is plainly not so?
A mere 100 km/h sustained winds with a partially closed eye can barely even be classified as a cyclone – at all.
Certainly it’s at the very bottom of sustained cyclonic wind strength, at best, and thoroughly inconsistent with BOM’s claim of TC LAM being a CAT-2 system, at this time, or at any time since 10 AM CST this morning (~15 hrs ago at this time).
As far as I can tell the system is currently stronger than at any other time so far, and yet on radar the eye-wall still has not fully closed and filled in within the SE Quadrant, so it’s not a true cyclone at all as yet.
This is an embarrassing farce of gross incompetence that requires explanation and inquiry as to why year after year this is happening.
Why is BOM calling a tropical storm a category 2 cyclone, and why is the scientifically defined wind scale that describes cyclone categories simply not being used at all?!
This is the most shameful and incredible nonsense, by a public-funded organization that’s supposed to uphold basic observational and scientific classification and standards so that the warnings issued actually match the storm as observed and that the records of storms reflect the storms observed. This is another case of this not happening, the BOM processes simply do not work and do not reflect reality – not even close.
Sloppy, disgraceful and contemptible BOM.
—
Only heads on a platter will put an end to this thoroughly incompetent and unacceptable farce, once and for all.
281
THE COURIER-MAIL FEBRUARY 18, 2015
PARTS of Brisbane and the Gold and Sunshine coasts could receive up to 400mm of rain for the three days from tomorrow as a Coral Sea low tracks towards the coast.
Flash flooding is expected, with the low an even money bet to form into a cyclone.
~ ~ ~
What did the BoM say SMH December 3, 2014:
Bureau reveals extent of record hot spring as dam levels plunge
“With the bureau forecasting a 70 per cent possibility of an El Nino weather event being declared within months, conditions are likely to continue to favour drier and hotter than average conditions.
During El Nino years, rainfall patterns tend to shift eastward, often resulting in droughts over southern and eastern Australia.
The Bureau of Meteorology detailed the extent of the extreme heat during spring, issuing a Special Climate Statement.
“We could have written 40-50 pages of records,” David Jones, head of climate analysis at the bureau, said.
The report “wraps up a pretty significant period of exceptional warmth”, Dr Jones said.”
~ ~ ~
Thank goodness the Newman LNP didn’t listen to the BoM’s doomsday drought scenarios again:
26th Nov 2014
Early-release strategy for Wivenhoe Dam to prevent flooding
The early release of water has been introduced to prevent a repeat of the 2011 flooding disaster in Ipswich and Brisbane, and has been in planning since April.
Wivenhoe Dam is currently about 80% full, and Somerset Dam sits at 96.5%.
Mr McArdle warned the early release of water from Wivenhoe and Somerset dams would not prevent all floods.
130
Unmentionable…………BoM did the same thing with ITA in 2014…….GDACS predict Tropical Cyclone LAM-15 as barely making CAT 2..
http://www.gdacs.org/Cyclones/report.aspx?eventid=1000144&episodeid=3&eventtype=TC
70
Same thing within 2013 – 2014
TC Mitchell
Duration 27 December – 1 January
Peak intensity 75 km/h (45 mph) (10-min) 990 mbar (hPa)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012%E2%80%9313_Australian_region_cyclone_season
PEAK 75 km/h = 40.49 kt
Farcical
Approximately 12 hours after being named, the storm made its second landfall north of Kowanyama with winds of 65 km/h (40 mph) and the final advisory was issued by TCWC Brisbane.
Duration 17 January – 28 January
Peak intensity 65 km/h (40 mph) (10-min) 987 mbar (hPa)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Oswald
PEAK 65 km/h = 35.0 kt
High farce!
I’ve been through many cyclones, the weakest one was a Cat-1 with sustained winds of 120 km/hr and gusts to 160 km/hr. I have been trough the eye of a 925 Mb 160 knot sustained monster 10 degrees across on the Pilbara coast. When I was a teen I worked on fishing boats for a bit over a year and we used to knock off when the offshore winds from high pressure systems reached 25 to 33 kts. And frankly, I think we worked through that quite a few times too, I know we steamed through it.
But 2015 BOM is now trying to tell me a tropical cyclone occurs with peak winds of 65 km/h? So they either don;t know a thing about the topic, or they do and are systematically hyperbolicly exaggerating and misrepresenting every tropical storm swirl they see and thoroughly misleading the public and perverting the cyclone record and their statistics.
Frankly they have become Orwellian in intent, to pervert meteorological records, and the current and recent cyclones are just the more visible tip of that re-writing history iceberg.
BOM are a shameless international laughing stock, constantly calling wolf, Wolf!
130
Bom’s current track map claim.
“Details of Severe Tropical Cyclone Lam at 1:30 pm CST:
Intensity: category 3, sustained winds near the centre of 120 kilometres per hour with wind gusts to 165 kilometres per hour.”
120 km/h sustained defines a Cat-3 now – world’s best practice before your eyes.
No attempt to use a scientific measure of wind to scale its category, just make it up as you wish, any old slap-dash nonsense will do.
The radar loop shows that the SE quadrant of the eye-wall remains non-existent and open, thus this cyclone still has still not reached even the structural development and competence of a convincing Cat-1, and it is only just reaching Cat-1 sustained wind strengths in the NW arc of the partial and malformed ‘eye’.
The recent vis satellite imagery remains much less than impressive or convincing as well, as the structure and outflow look probably even more dismal than yesterday.
The only clear visible improvement is that the core storms have now built high-tops and extend most of the way around the core, but the outflow looks weaker if anything, and structure indistinct.
Standard Navy/NRL satellite image Dvorak classification predicts the current images are statisically consistent with 974 millibars and 65 kt, which in the US classification of cyclonic storms is 9 kts lower than the weakest of hurricanes. But the fact that the approx 1/3rd of the eye remains open with not eye-wall means they would not classify it as a hurricane, even if the Dvorak was indicating 9kt’s faster
Black is the new white
Up is the new down
Wrong is the new right
And a tropical storm with an incomplete eye-wall, that is rotating on radar at the lower bound of cyclone wind strength, is BOM’s new Cat-3 standard for Australian tropical cyclones.
It’s beneath contempt.
121
At present time, 3:45 PM EST on BOM’s own radar loop about 50 to 60% of the eye-wall storms are completely absent and the eastern side of the storm is almost not there at all. How anyone in their wildest dreams can call this a cyclone, of any category, is beyond me. It is visually and on radar looking more like a decaying tropical storm.
Cat-3 … on steroids kids.
130
Been a slow season – they need to boost the cyclone stats for the alarmists.
40
4:30 PM EST ‘eye-wall’ (if we can call it that) is now down to about 120 degrees of arc of storms (again almost all in the NW quadrant) and the these are seen to be dissipating as the core structure flounders over water and a very minor land interaction.
The most recent visible satellite image is showing the entire system is collapsing and little left of a core. the biggest build ups are now at the periphery to the west. (and storms happen in that location at this time of the day every day in Summer, btw, so not like that’s indicative or significant)
So much for the Australian Commonwealth’s Bureau of Meteorology, and its staff of abject professional alarmists and exaggerators.
You should all be sacked with 2-weeks notice and required to re-apply for your job again, and be vetted by a panel of actual international experts on cyclonic storms, from the USA, Japan, Fiji, India, etc., because the Australian Bureau of Meteorology administration is clearly far too incompetent to even be trusted to perform such a basic task as vetting the professional standards and competence of new-hires in such fundamentally important areas of their responsibilities to the general public – or else they simply don’t bother.
How on earth did we end up here.
70
This Bureau of Meteorology extravagant farce begs a suitable anthem.
Johnny Diesel & The Injectors – Cry In Shame 1989
60
Note that the peak wind gust recordered at Cape Wessel (now in what remains of the ‘eye’) as the most intense part of the NNW inner ‘eye-wall’ crossing of this very scary “Severe Category 3”, which crossed directly over the recording site was a terrifying 70 kilometers per hour, at its peak:
Latest Weather Observations for Cape Wessel
18/01:35pm 26.6 – 26.8 – – SW 70 89 38 48 971.4 – 40.0
http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDD60801/IDD60801.94147.shtml
That’s a BOM Cat-3 PEAKING! In the inner ‘eye-wall’!
70 km/hr = 43.49 mph = 37.7 knots
And no one will even blink at this at BOM, nor dare to think or say that anything is catastrophically wrong with the entire organization, and it’s abject failure to public and to science observation. On the contrary, they will defend this staggering gross forecasting incompetence – to the hilt!
10
The PEAK gust so far recorded, of 122 km/hr, occurred at Cape Wessel at 11:30 AM CST when BOM’s then warning was forecasting PEAK winds up to 160 km/h, whilst simultaneously pretending they were talking about a Cat-3.
Weather Observations Cape Wessel
18/11:30am 25.6 – 25.8 – – WSW 122 156 66 84 980.1 – 35.4
http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDD60801/IDD60801.94147.shtml
That gust is consistent with a borderline tropical storm to a very weak category-1.
But like the temperature record debacle, the BOM’s systematic forecasting ‘error’ for cyclones curiously only occurs in one direction, their cyclone warnings never drastically under-estimate wind speeds by two or three whole cyclone categories.
Reality just keeps getting it wrong!
__
“Why is it so?” – Professor Julius Sumner Miller
30
TOP PRIORITY CYCLONE WARNING 9, Issued at 5:42 EST
__
The Bureau of Meteorology have just upgraded the name of Tropical Cyclone Lam.
It’s now been renamed Tropical Cyclone Lame.
__
That is all.
110
Latest late afternoon visible image is finally showing clear visible signs of outflow increasing (radial spray/spokes on the upper level clouds near the core), indicating some intensification finally occurring.
Radar is showing that an eye-wall is again trying to fill-in the south eastern side of the system. The radar is also indicating some apparent increase in rotation speed of the NW eye wall cloud. Trying to get organized again, after almost falling apart.
The Navy/NRL TC page is indicating steady strengthening until landfall. Their track and intensity prediction has been spot on so far.
—
And a correction: I referred above in two places to PEAK wind gusts, when I meant PEAK sustained winds.
50
To cap it off BOM are now calling TC Lam a Category-4 cyclone!
The current closest (working) weather recording site is Milingimbi, currently a mere 33 km from the western inner eye wall cloud’s boundary on radar as I write this (inside the core that is) and the wind readings at that site are little more than a breezy tropical night:
19/09:30pm 24.5 21.8 23.3 93 0.8 SW 43 78 23 42 991.3 – 43.4
19/09:00pm 24.8 22.1 23.4 92 1.0 SSW 43 69 23 37 991.7 991.7 39.2
19/08:30pm 24.9 22.6 23.3 91 1.1 SW 41 67 22 36 992.2 – 35.6
19/08:00pm 24.7 23.5 23.3 92 1.0 SSW 35 59 19 32 992.8 – 33.2
19/07:30pm 24.8 23.5 23.2 91 1.1 SSW 35 59 19 32 992.8 – 30.4
19/07:00pm 25.2 23.7 23.4 90 1.2 SSW 37 69 20 37 992.7 – 28.8
19/06:30pm 25.4 24.3 23.5 89 1.3 SSW 35 59 19 32 993.7 – 27.8
19/06:00pm 25.2 24.7 23.6 91 1.1 SSW 32 54 17 29 993.8 993.8 27.4
So the current max sustained winds are only 43 km/h, and the max gust speed so far is a mere 78 km/h!
BOM’s most recent warning:
“Details of Severe Tropical Cyclone Lam at 8:30 pm CST: Intensity: category 4, sustained winds near the centre of 165 kilometres per hour with wind gusts to 230 kilometres per hour.”
See a small 150 km/h divergence between the wind data and the incredible hyperbolic farce that BOM is claiming for this storm?
00
At 11 PM EST with about 75% of the eye still over water and open eye less than 30 km from the recording site, and the innermost core storms less than 10 km from the Milingimbi anemometer the latest data shows …
Well, not much at all, 52 km (28 knots) sustained, and max gust of 83 km/h (45 knots)
19/10:30pm 24.3 19.7 23.1 93 0.8 SW 52 83 28 45 988.7 – 52.2
Sad …
Gusts so far recorded are 147 lower than predicted.
Put another way, the winds observed so far are only 36.1 % the speed of those predicted by BOM’s current forecast.
So why are BOM predicting 230 km/h? Because the lower bound of a Cat 4 gust has been dropped by BOM down to only 225 km/h! When I was a boy a gust had to be over 250 km/h to be classed Cat 4. Every one knew that. So why did BOM change (lower) this? Same reason BOM is constantly exaggerating the strength of every cyclone (or rather, tropical storm) that forms these days.
So I’m sure they’d know the reason.
Given BOM apparently has no intention of attempting ever again to make the observations even fit its asserted scientific categorization of cuclones, I guess they can make up any claims they want.
Who’s going to call them liars? It’s not like the National Broadcaster or professional ethics bodies will ever investigate or call for a formal inquiry. So who even cares, the BOM can make up any anti-scientific fantasy they like and yank the public’s chain at will, and nothing even happens!
The Government in Canberra simply does nothing at all about it!
Australian Tropical Cyclone Intensity Scale
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/saffir_simpson-vs-aus_hurr_scale.png
The latest data at posting time, with the core storm band directly impinging directly on the eastern side of Milingimbi:
19 / 11:00pm 24.3 19.3 22.9 92 1.0 SW 54 89 29 48 987.0 – 56.4
38.7 % of forecast max gust speed, with the weak eye literally dissolving on radar at this time, when only about 30% of it on shore so far.
__
TC LAM is and has been a giant nothing-burger.
00
And then there is;
U.N. Official Reveals Real Reason Behind Warming Scare
Economic Systems:
The alarmists keep telling us their concern about global warming is all about man’s stewardship of the environment. But we know that’s not true. A United Nations official has now confirmed this.
At a news conference last week in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism.
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said.
Referring to a new international treaty environmentalists hope will be adopted at the Paris climate change conference later this year, she added: “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”
The only economic model in the last 150 years that has ever worked at all is capitalism.
The evidence is prima facie: From a feudal order that lasted a thousand years, produced zero growth and kept workdays long and lifespans short, the countries that have embraced free-market capitalism have enjoyed a system in which output has increased 70-fold, work days have been halved and lifespans doubled.
Figueres is perhaps the perfect person for the job of transforming “the economic development model” because she’s really never seen it work. “If you look at Ms. Figueres’ Wikipedia page,” notes Cato economist Dan Mitchell:
Making the world look at their right hand while they choke developed economies with their left.
______________
Climate alarmist science and climate alarmist scientists are totally implicit in this pseudo science, society destroying, anti human charade as promoted by intellectually, ethically and morally insolvent and beneficence bereft figureheads such the UN’s Christiana Figueres.
170
OT but heartening. Went to see the movie “Kingsman” this afternoon. The villain is a Silicon Valley super rich evil bastard who devises a way to make people kill each other en masse, which plan he tries to carry out in order to reduce the human population which he considers a virus on the Earth endangering its health, one of the symptoms of which is global warming.
Spoiler alert: The good guys stop him.
However when people who believe in global warming are the villains in a Hollywood movie I think there may be a glimmer of hope that we are winning. I think a lot of people will see this movie.
Oh yeah, in what looked like a complete pisstake of 10 – 10 the baddies did suffer from en masse exploding heads.
90
Mike we saw this also and loved it, I was quite surprised at the open distain directed at an environmental, globalist, eugenicist agenda, and the Richard Branson styled villain was unmissable with a close semblance of the Virgin logo to boot.
I decided to see it after reading the whiny complaints from leftist reviews/news and thought this has to be good. 🙂
90
Darn; Hit the wrong button.
We really do need a five minute review period for posts like the Weatherzone Forum has.
Bottom line correction to post # 19
“Climate alarmist science and climate alarmist scientists are totally implicit in this pseudo science, society destroying, anti human charade as promoted by intellectually, ethically and morally insolvent and beneficence bereft figureheads such the UN’s Christiana Figueres.”
[I made the change for you, ROM, and the numbering system has changed, so it is now comment #21, and not #19 -Fly]
40
Thanks Fly;
You Mods are darn good value
40
Hi,
Sorry if this comment/question is in the wrong spot.
Posted on Tim Blair’s blog is this PBS video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2euBvdP28c
It claims ‘355th month of higher temperatures in a row’.
Is that correct?! I wonder what/where/how the measurements they are taking. Where is that data?
OR …
is it what the Climate Models are saying.
Bob
20
Anybody who puts the lame opinions of Garth Paltridge above the evidence from expert Australian scientists, is living in a sci-fi fantasyland.
In the OZ he stated that Roman and Medieval warming was warmer than today, parroting the same unsubstantiated claims made by Ian Plimer and later George Pell (who also stated, in a senate submission, that Nitrogen was a greenhouse gas).
He downplayed the rainfall pattern for Australia when the BOM/CSIRO State of the Climate report of 2014 provides all the evidence to the contrary.
And as for this idiocy:
The document makes much of the belief that climate models can correctly replicate 20th-century global warming only if they include human influences. It fails to make the point that this says very little for the skill of the models or the modellers.
it a claim he has never substantiated nor ever will. That such a perverse and disgusting ad-hom on the AAS gains prominence is a travesty of journalism and of scientific integrity.
246
I note that sillyfilly complains about an Ad Hominem in disrespect of the AAS, by using no logic and little fact, other than misdirection, a non-sequitur, and three other Ad Hominem. Perhaps this is now de rigueur logic in climate catastrophy circles?
420
Also,
I notice that you did not respond to my comment 19.7, in response to your comment 19 on the previous thread. Perhaps that comment too pointed for you to devise a suitable answer?
200
So RW you have not been able to argue at science on the errors of Garth. Certainly this is now de rigueur logic in the fallacy that AGW has no impact on climate. Garths cloud theories are not tested at science and he appears to have no intention of doing so.
In doing interviews for the AAS he stated:
“The thing that warms the Earth is the sun shining on it. The amount of sunshine that actually gets to the surface of the Earth and does the heating is determined almost entirely by how much cloud there is between the surface of the Earth and the Sun. Clouds are a very dominant control on how hot the world will be”.
Partly true but implicit is a sensitivity calculation a la Monckton, which is patently rubbish.
On Nuclear: I agree with SA on a new and thorough analysis of the life cycle. I have problems with the capital costs of construction and long term storage problems for the half-life of nuclear residues and their safety. Maralinga comes to mind, Fukushima, Chernobyl also.
Hope this makes it past the mods before tomorrow
04
You have no dodgy links, so why should it take time to get past the mods? this isn’t the ABC/SkS/RC censorship show.
Given your concerns about nuclear waste, how about reading on the Oklo reactors?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor
In particular note this:
Not bad considering 1.7 billion years have passed.
30
Also, please explain why someone with a vast experience in climate-related science would have a lame opinion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garth_Paltridge
Is it because he is retired? Therefore his brain must now be kaput? Having said that, perhaps I should defer to you because you have far more experience with lame opinions than me.
40
sillyfilly,
Typical reply we would expect from you on Nuclear Power Generation. Yes ….. but no.
Maybe you should actually read outside the box you live in for information on nuclear power generation.
The waste fuel rods at the end of the fuel cycle have less enrichment than the existing ore in the ground.
As for storage, perhaps a better option would be reprocessing.
As for that stand by crock on Fukushima, I suggest you read this linked article very carefully. It’s not written by the leftist journalists you trust for your news on something like this, but by an actual nuclear physicist. I recommend this article not just for you, (because I feel sure you’ll find a put down as usual) but for everyone else, and this is very well worth your while reading.
The lesson of Fukushima — Nuclear energy is safe
Tony.
20
Tony,
My company has conducted some desk-research into Fukushima, and came up with some interesting facts.
Some radiation was released, as a result of the Tsunami. Not from the reactors, which shut down perfectly as designed, but from spent fuel rods held permanently on site.
The spent rods were held in storage pools, cooled by circulating water, which was driven by electric pumps.
The pools were originally intended to only hold the spent rods for a short time, until they could be loaded onto specially designed trucks to be taken away, for safe disposal.
However the Japanese environmental movements managed to get a stay on the transportation and disposal of “toxic nuclear wastes”. The matter was still laboriously working its way through the Japanese legal system, at the time the Tsunami struck.
Of course, with the electrical generators being knocked out, the water circulation was not possible, so the water in the pools started heat up, and evaporate off, leaving some rods exposed to the atmosphere. This was the exact pin-point source of the radiation signature visible in the satellite imagery. It was almost entirely from caesium and iodine isotopes created as a reaction by-product.
Once fire trucks could get on site, their pumps were used to replenish the water in the pools by using sea water, and the risk abated.
If the site had been allowed to operate as designed, there would have been no radiation leak at all.
00
Oh, and sillyfilly, that other usual standby of the capital construction costs is also a crock.
When you have a 50 year life span, which can be extended out to 60 years and beyond, the ability to run 1300MW generators, (one per reactor) and a Capacity Factor of almost 95%, the electricity generated is humungous and that cost is recovered, as you rightly know, over the unit cost for the electricity generated.
That unit cost for the power generated makes nuclear power the cheapest method of generating electrical power that there has ever been, and is far and away cheaper than any form of renewable power.
And please, don’t quote that crock LCOE at me. Even you know that’s rigged.
Tony.
30
TonyfromOz,
I read somewhere, (too lazy to search for it all over again [insert embarassed smiley here]), that Australia has been conducting research into Thorium Liquid Cooled reactors. What’s your take on those?
From what I can recall, they’re much safer than current nuclear reactors and can even burn a good part of the nuclear waste that’s currently just sitting around all over the place.
Abe
10
Where are the bloody scientists at the AAS?, when anyone that identifies as a scientist throws out the very core values of their profession are they still scientists?
Is a surgeon that decides they can use a kidney for a heart transplant and personally attack others who question their methods still a surgeon?
240
You sound a bit screechy SF.
Has Paltridge’s article got too many uncomfortable truths for you?
170
Uncomfortable have truths are usually met with a neigh rather than the screeching of the trained parrots around here!
05
sf,
Don’t let the door hit you on the ar$e on the way out.
00
We know they are competent because their mates says they are, and we know their mates can be trusted, because other mates also have trust. So as long as they all sing from the same song sheet, and support each other, they can all be trusted? Yeah, right!
The problem that I have, with climate science, is that it is the only sub-branch of science that does not appear to be highly competitive, with people earnestly trying to demonstrate that other people are wrong. Climate science is all terribly chummy. Nobody wants to rock the boat. Perhaps they are afraid that it could easily capsize if they did.
250
The best teams I’ve worked with over the years, we appreciated work being criticised and nitpicked. It improves the product. And it makes the work day more entertaining. Actually there wasn’t always a clear work day or week – what’s that saying – “real work doesn’t happen 9 to 5”. Maybe that’s where it’s all gone wrong. Do these government employees knock off with the 5 o’clock donger and always take lunch at the same hour? That’s what’s wrong.
110
I’d hate the think what the phrase, “5 o’clock donger”, means. This is a family blog, you know?
30
Rereke,
there was an old joke about that phrase.
Back in the sixties, the Russian Communist Party Secretary for Employment was visiting Australia to see how well the Unions were running things here. He was taken to a large workplace for the day, and was interested to see the conditions for the workers. All day, he furiously took notes as he walked around the huge complex.
At morning Smoko, the bell went off, and all the workers stopped and went off for a break. The same bell signalled Lunch, with the same result, then for afternoon smoko, and then at knock off the bell went again, and all the workers stopped and went home.
The Australian officials were impressed with all the notes he had taken, and during the meeting to discuss matters around a cup of tea, they asked the Russian what was the most pertinent thing he took out of the day.
The Russian pulled out his now full note pad, referred to his notes, and then said ….. “Where do I get one of those bells?”
Tony.
100
Silly Filly, I have a question for you.
In view of your very strong comments against and denigration of anybody who does not agree with your own personal beliefs on the catastrophic global climate warming and are therefore in your personal belief “Denialists”, do you sympathize with and share Gary “Bluecloud” Evans Guardian comments and sentiments that one or more prominent skeptics should be beheaded for their out spoken denial of Anthropogenically created Catastrophic Global Warming.?
Of course you realise that a non answer from you to this question immediately implies you are in agreement with Gary “Bluecloud” Evans demands that some prominent skeptics should be beheaded for their denial of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming.
So what is your personal attitude and answer to this above question?
150
It is now over 12 hours since I asked Silly Filly the question above in post # 25.6
“do you sympathize with and share Gary “Bluecloud” Evans Guardian comments and sentiments that one or more prominent skeptics should be beheaded for their out spoken denial of Anthropogenically created Catastrophic Global Warming?”
A simple “no” from Silly Filly might have been enough to at least provide the reassurance that “it” is still rational and perhaps still has a modicum of intellectual analysis despite “its” apparent inflexible and total fixation on the CAGW meme.
As I also point out above, failure by Silly Filly to answer that question on “it’s” attitude to the demanded beheading of skeptics by the Greenpeace activist Gary “Bluecloud” Evans in the Guardian very definitely implies that Silly Filly is sympathetic to the Greenpeace activist “Bluecloud” Evans beheading of skeptics demands.
A point it would be well to remember whenever Silly Filly attempts to denigrate another skeptic on this blog.
If Silly Filly has not yet read my question then “it” still has an opportunity to correct my still forming understanding of “it’s” attitude towards the Greenpeace activist’s demands for a prominent skeptic’s beheading as published in the Guardian.
60
Sillyfilly, it is obvious from the way you write your posts that you have an education of sorts. With a real education the goal of the educator is to teach you to teach yourself. Thus most of higher education is teaching yourself, this includes believing nothing of what you read, nothing of what you hear and only half of what you see. This way it is possible to sort the chaff from the bran in your brain and arrive at the closest possible truth with the information you get.
Thus I and many others have a rather poor opinion of the science and models of the AGW crowd, as it always reveals to all who think that it is agenda driven by politics of a highly obnoxious kind that is anathema to anyone who values freedom of thought and action.
So sillyfilly I would very much like you to answer ROM’s question honestly.
160
Daftmule ,
You say
How many moons can You see in the sky where Your brain lives ? Because If prof Paltridge doesn’t qualify as an expert Australian Scientist then nobody does .
Garth William Paltridge BSc,PhD,DSc ,
born 24 April 1940, Brisbane, Queensland
Atmoshperic Physicist ,
Senior Research Scientist for the Radio and Space Research Station at Ditton Park, Buckinghamshire, England 1967-1968
Consultant to the World Meteorological Organization in 1975
Senior Visiting Scientist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 1979
Chief Research Scientist at CSIRO 1982-1989
Senior Visiting Scientist at the National Climate Program Office from 1989-1990
Professor and Director of the Institute of Antarctic and Southern Oceans Studies 1990-2002
310
Byron
Silly filly is a classic troll. As far as knowledge on climate matters is concerned, it is.a clear case of, “bought for a fortune, going for a song.”
In other words, the value of his/her/its opinions are almost nil.
My guess is that he/she/it is someone who should be pitied for their loneliness,rather than argued with as a sentient being.
60
But he/she got the first part of his/her name right, and we can’t be sure that the second part isn’t right too.
On the other hand the annoying, repetitive droning sound makes me wonder whether it is not a genetically modified mosquito.
30
Peter Miller,
Children seek attention. It’s basic to human nature. Well adjusted children learn to seek out the attention they require through positive means (i.e. actions and words). This is what enables them to mature emotionally.
Some children learn to seek out the attention they require through negative actions. Negative actions naturally elicit negative responses. This leads them to growing up accepting and posibly even deriving pleasure from negative attention from others.
They grow up physically without maturing emotionally. The clear sign of a mal-adjusted child.
Don’t feed the Trolls!
Abe
50
Peter,
I usually ignore the trolls but the “expert Australian scientists” line really was a “When I nod My head , You hit it” moment…..
20
Could you provide a link to the comment from Cardinal Pell (I assume that is the George that you refer to)?
He is a sceptic because of the propaganda, not the science.
Just-a-guy – Silly is a shill rather than a troll. You are replying to someone who might have mistakenly thought that there was something to her comment, not her.
10
I’ll keep saying it over and over. The real problem is not with politicians or even the people. It’s with the majority of “good” scientists who are still silent on the AGW hoax and scam that’s now clearly riddled with lies and corruption of the data. Given the real data, AGW and its associated models and predictions should be debunked by now beyond any reasonable doubt by the only people who have a real say in it, but it isn’t. Shame on the scientists as a group, even though we do recognize many who are skeptics or disbelievers of the hoax.
250
PeterS,
I agree with your observation. I even gave it a thumbs up.
However, the reluctance of people engaged in science for a living is more complex than your statement might suggest. The quote attributed to President Eisenhower in Jo’s post on the Australian Academy of Science . . .
. . . shows why these people are reluctant to come forward.
If we all step back for a moment and look at that quote, it’s clear that Predident Eisenhower’s warning has already occured on a global scale. The scientific endeavor is not practiced by individuals who can do so without having their livelihood jeopardised. For the most part, the people who are recruited to do scientific research, and those that are entrusted to communicate the results of that research to the general public, are dependent on the results of their endeavors being in line with the wishes of their employers in order to support themselves and their families.
That’s not to say that all these people are dishonest or morally weak, there may be some. What I think is more prevalent is that the people who are doing science today already have a predominantly socialist outlook are they are the ones who are gravitating towards those key positions.
It doesn’t even really matter if those jobs are in government agencies or in academia because both are funded by the same people and therefore reflect a common policy.
It is that policy which has been increasingly influenced by the whims of the scientific-technological elite to which President Eisenhower was refering. That elite is now represented by the UN and all of its many offshoot organizations.
Abe
60
I agree with that line of thought. In other words it shows scientists are human like the rest of us. The problem though is it also takes away the illusion that they are “better” than the rest of us. So I suppose in the end it does come back to the people – they need to engage their brains and stop being so gullible. I doubt that will ever happen.
10
PeterS,
Which is why education is so important.
It’s often said that “Human beings are social creatures.” I agree with that statement, but that’s not what defines us as human beings. We are all, each and every one of us, individuals. We have the capacity for independent thought. I mean, think about it. Ants are social creatures too. But their societal structure is based on the socialist view of society. There’s a queen, and then there’s the worker/drones. The drones’ only purpose is to maintain the nest. This setup is what the left/green adherents would like to impose on all of us.
Western societies flourished because of the focus on the indvidual. That’s what human rights and freedom are all about. We cannot allow socialism to take that away from us. Education is the only way to prevent that from happening, one individual at a time.
I guess what the take-away should be here is: Don’t doubt it will ever happen. It has in the past, and it can do so now.
Abe
10
Based on results so far, talking about climate change does halt the temperature rise considerably which is if you think about it quite a conundrum because I would assume you would exhale more CO2 talking, but perhaps not. I’m not a scientist.
But this AAS paper talks about the pause? I keep getting told there is no pause and sworn at for being so, well… denialist.
100
Nathan,
The pause is caused by the lack of appreciable warming over the last x number of years, when the climate scientists assured us that it would get warmer. And technically it has gotten warmer, even if only by a few hundredths of a degree over that same period.
In most disciplines, scientists will avoid making predictions, because there are usually an unknown number of unknowns (science is really about finding some of these). So pays to listen carefully when any scientist makes predictions, because it is a) usually done to generate funding, and b) there is always some wriggle room, or escape clause, built into the prediction, that acts as a “Get Out of Jail Free”, card, if the prediction does not eventuate.
100
Rereke,
Unfortunately climate science is nothing but predictions, it’s their bread and butter convincing the rest of us that the end of the world is nigh unless we give money.
SF and the like are dupes, blindly following without understanding.
SF reads an article by Muller (Berkeley Earth 21303) and picks out the sentence or two that seems to collaborate with the catastrophy meme, but doesn’t comprehend the point of the entire piece which was warming is happening in steps as it has done historically, could be good could be bad, it may have plateaued or it may eventually begin to rise another step.
Hardly conclusive stuff, more sci-fi than reality, but seems enought to build a quasi- religious cult system upon, I mean to say, L.Ron Hubbard did the same thing and his followers use the same tactics as the believers in man-made global warming : shut down debate, divert questions, use of trolls, threaten dissenters, manipulate believers, force tything, ridicule/intimidate and excomminicate former believers.
It’s a classic religious indoctrination process that removes the inductee’s ability to think freely, that’s why you regularly find them trolling, they are attracted to the “forbidden fruit” and use trolling to satisfy an ‘abnormal'(to their way of thought) need and at the same time justify this ‘abnormal’ attraction to their peers by trolling faux-outrage.
After a number of engagements with other extremist cults, I am reasonably well qualified to comment that the approaches and operational models of ‘climate trolls’ are no different to approaches and models used by other extremist organisations.
That is why they really can’t name a single sceptic who has become an alarmist whilst large numbers of alarmists have become sceptics.
71
I agree with you, James.
Which is why I try to point out that predictions are more aligned with wishful thinking, than with fact.
SF demonstrates the cognitive dissonance and compulsive tendencies that are symptomatic of “conditioning” and “indoctrination”. I have no allusions regarding my lack of ability to change that. What is done, is done.
But He/She/It does act as a useful foil to send messages to other folks, who may just be fellow travellers, along for the ride.
By not letting SF get off scot-free, in ignoring direct questions, we weaken the message, and make a useful counter point.
50
Rereke,
The main differences between those who ultimately become sceptics and those who remain believers seems to be the sceptical ability to firstly have an open mind.
Probably most who post here began as something other than ‘sceptics’ and looked at the global warming situation at face value as presented by our government and its advisors, but we looked at it with an open mind, and when we noticed discrepancies or explanations that didn’t make sense we asked questions. We went from asking questions to individually researching the topics when we were met with the ‘settled science’ brick-wall.
Believers accept the meme blindly just as they accept the explanations placed in front of them. They seem to lack the capacity of an enquiring mind and the ability for independent thought. They seem afraid to step out of the security of the global warming religion then continue to spout nonsense rather than question the science they merely look for the bits that support their beliefs.
They all denied the ‘pause’ because it didn’t fit the modelled predictions until the pause could no longer be denied less the models be scrutinised a little more closely then they all clamoured to explain the ‘pause’.
The “heat is hidden in the deep oceans”, really, and this was accepted by believers as peer reviewed, cutting edge climate science as was a further 59 explanations, all peer reveiwed and cutting edge.
Some, like SF are beginning to doubt so to shore up their beliefs they troll, becoming angry and abusive when asked for facts, petulant and threatening when their propaganda is affectively dismantled by simple observations and logical reasoning along with hard physics.
Julias Sumner-Miller must be rolling in his resting place.
40
James,
That is an interesting perspective.
It had not occurred to me that SF might be motivated by doubts about the religion of climate change, and so be probing the boundaries.
I have always assumed the motivation was to shore up their beliefs, or offer them self up as a form of sacrifice for a noble cause.
You have got me thinking … Thank you.
30
How could anyone with a modicum of scientific pride even put their name to this document? Perhaps the Academy has lowered itself to such a level it no longer cares that its committees regurgitate and endorse such material?
90
In design terms most of the diagrams in the Academy of Science publication utilise the weak diagonal to make their point. Many of William Blake’s lithographs for instance gain their visual strength by using the diagonal from the upper left to the lower right, while these coloured sqiggles with numerals along the edges use the exact opposite diagonal. But the most major disappointment is all the pictures are already coloured in. The kiddies will have nothing to do.
20
Gary in Erko,
The kiddies are the ones who did the coloring.
60
Whenever I teach a beginning programming course I always begin by telling my students that inside every computer is a ‘universe’ waiting to be ‘built’ and they are the creator of that universe. Whatever universe they construct is a result of their intellect and programming skills.
I also stressed that they could write programs, elegant or sloppy, that would give results and numbers without generating any apparent errors. And yet those numbers might be complete garbage if they did not understand the basics of the problem they were trying to analyze or solve. It was up to them to insure ‘their universe’ accurately reflected our ‘real universe.’ If there were discrepancies they should go back to their drawing boards. Or in a programmer’s case… keyboards.
In my advanced classes, before I allowed a student to turn in their program and code for grading, I required the student to sit down with me and run their program while I tried to ‘break’ it. It was my own version of the peer review process. And it was rare that I could not get the REV1.0 code to ‘break.’
I wish I could sit down with these ‘scientists’ and their ‘models’ and see how much damage I could do to their egos and code.
If they keep their code and models away from scrutiny how is it that we should have faith in their results? I am reminded of that mission to Mars that failed because one part of the code was using english units and another part of the code was using metric units. No obvious errors were generated when the code was run… the results were used, but the end results was nothing more than a couple of billion dollars was used to aluminum plate a small portion of Mars.
I think maybe there is a positive aspect of this whole AGW-fiasco that has taught me something. Perhaps I should also include in my beginning lecture a statement that their creation is also a reflection Of their own character and moral values.
I don’t trust these people at all. Mostly because I have been inhaling what they call a toxic pollutant for about 60 years and have suffered no ill effects.
210
This is worth repeating, by brilliant physicist, Freeman Dyson.
In the modern world, science and society often interact in a perverse way. We live in a technological society, and technology causes political problems. The politicians and the public expect science to provide answers to the problems. Scientific experts are paid and encouraged to provide answers. The public does not have much use for a scientist who says, “Sorry, but we don’t know.” The public prefers to listen to scientists who give confident answers to questions and make confident predictions of what will happen as a result of human activities. So it happens that the experts who talk publicly about politically contentious questions tend to speak more clearly than they think. They make confident predictions about the future, and end up believing their own predictions. Their predictions become dogmas which they do not question. The public is led to believe that the fashionable scientific dogmas are true, and it may sometimes happen that they are wrong. That is why heretics who question the dogmas are needed.
— Freeman Dyson
90
reasons for temp increase in rural areas.
http://www.wmo.int/pages/themes/climate/statistical_depictions_of_climate.php
“These changes can also occur to weather stations that are still in rural locations and are often harder to detect. For instance, the growth of trees around a farmstead that maintains a weather station alters the local wind flow and temperature patterns, and so reduces extreme wind speeds and the incidence of frosts (where they occur). The trend in the observations reflects the changes in the microclimate of the farmstead while the general climate may not have changed”
they said it- ” may not have changed”
while the general climate may not have changed.
40
what climate change, and reasons for an increase in temp.
http://www.wmo.int/pages/themes/climate/statistical_depictions_of_climate.php
“These changes can also occur to weather stations that are still in rural locations and are often harder to detect. For instance, the growth of trees around a farmstead that maintains a weather station alters the local wind flow and temperature patterns, and so reduces extreme wind speeds and the incidence of frosts (where they occur). The trend in the observations reflects the changes in the microclimate of the farmstead while the general climate may not have changed”
they said it,” may not have changed”
30
Now, now I think the AAAS should be applauded for a stellar piece of work, delivering exactly what was expected of them. I don’t think people recognise the kind of effort that went into this ‘dossier’, it’s not easy to fly in the face of contradictory observations and the scientific method you know. Do you people seriously not understand how their comrades in arms on the AAE last year, led by Chris Turney, were in mortal danger – proving the models correct that Climate ChangeTM may threaten our future!! (of course definitions of ‘our’ exclude the public in practice as they are not on board the gravy train). 😉
111
I am not sure I agree with you that all of the comrades involved in the Turney Travesty were in mortal danger. To be in mortal danger, means you risk being mortified, or otherwise dead. I would be more generous, and inclined to say they were taxidermic, or otherwise stuffed.
30
Seems to be a bit of confusion between AAS (Australian Academy of Science) and AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science). Or maybe not …
10
Warwick Hughes spots a doozy:
The Australian Academy of Science quotes “Unusually Weak Solar Activity” as one reason for the post 2001 temperature slowdown.
Download the 7MB pdf report – page 10 Box 2.2 for the amazing quote saying
[…unusually weak solar activity] is a cooling influence.
That they have the hide to include that in the face of decades of the IPCC refusing to accept the sun was affecting changes in earths temperature.
They also say [None of these influences is likely to continue over the long term.] Talk about messy statements – so solar – aerosols – volcanoes are all short term.
100
17 Feb 2015
The sun has gone quiet again during the weakest solar cycle in more than a century (vencoreweather.com)
The main driver of all weather and climate, the entity which occupies 99.86% of all of the mass in our solar system, the great ball of fire in the sky – has gone quiet again during what is likely to be the weakest sunspot cycle in more than a century.
it is pretty well understood that solar activity has a direct impact on temperatures at very high altitudes in a part of the Earth’s atmosphere called the thermosphere.
Thermospheric temperatures increase with altitude due to absorption of highly energetic solar radiation and are highly dependent on solar activity.
if history is a guide, it is safe to say that weak solar activity for a prolonged period of time can have a negative impact on global temperatures in the troposphere which is the bottom-most layer of Earth’s atmosphere – and where we all live.
Both of these historical periods coincided with below-normal global temperatures in an era now referred to by many as the “Little Ice Age”.
In addition, research studies in just the past couple of decades have found a complicated relationship between solar activity, cosmic rays, and clouds on Earth.
50
handjive, take a look at P. Gosselin’s NoTricksZone blog post today.
It makes for some very discomforting reading if one has any understanding of history and the implications of a much cooler or colder global climate.
.
Hopefully not to repeat the CAGW alarmist’s gross alarmism, if the future solar outcomes align themselves with the past historical events in similar solar radiation situations, we are looking at a possibly very serious change to cooler or colder, perhaps much colder global temperatures and all that implies for the absolutely essential global food production and for global energy use.
Fluctuating Atlantic … German Experts Say “Things Could Become Very Bitter For The IPCC Forecast Models”!
50
Lets hope that Mother Nature makes an unambiguous statement via temperatures leading into Paris. Then maybe we can put this insanity into a padded cell.
10
SMH has a link to this AAS paper, titled “Climate Change for Dummies.”
A heading from the subs editor?
You would be ‘dumbed-down’ after reading it.
30
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ötzi
Ice man was under 5,000 years of ice which melted to reveal him, he was covered with 5,000 years of ice and on the surface when he died. The climate cycles and that includes the ice ages.
70
The fraud just keeps getting bigger and bigger, they’re up to ambit claims of 10s of Billions!
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-17/we-just-blasted-1-billion-into-space-was-it-worth-it-
.
… But let’s go with it for a minute. A climate-observing system would cost a lot, maybe $5 billion a year, the researchers wrote last year. A top-of-the-line, sky’s-the-limit climate-observing system might cost even more than that—totaling as much as $200 billion to $250 billion from 2020 to 2050, they wrote …
Lets stay with it
How many kids could have clean water for that (all of them)
How many kids could be immunised against measels for that (all of them)
How many diseases would be history?
How many cyclone shelters could be built in the Philippines for that?
We could have a manned mars series for that money
We could double the number of africans who have electricity for that.
How many poor destitute people could eat this year (all of them)
Yet what do these idiots want to spend on, some grand mission to save the earth from a wholly beneficial trace gas that we actually RELY on to live. I vote we don’t do that, I vote we help people actually living today instead. This article says it all, global warming is all about fleecing the public, it’s all about MONEY. Climate alchemy is all about turning CO2 into gold!
50
Bob Tisdale has a post up on the AAAS propaganda.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/02/16/climate-propaganda-from-the-australian-academy-of-science/
30
A search on their website for funding doesn’t really show a detailed breakdown of their sources.
I couldn’t see the Annual Report location, but it looks like Govt funding is a large part of their funding source – it says under bilateral activities ::” A large part of the Academy’s bilateral activities are funded by the Australian Government.”
With a little additional window dressing, and very stern endorsements etc, i see no reason why JoNova shouldn’t be funded officially.
Also at a more general level why is it that science can become politicised with such little objection by scientists?
Is it chronic underfunding, or that education has since decades put science as handmaiden to political objectives or other?
40
chrism,
The last thing we need is government funding of JoNova.com because . . .
The square brackets and what’s in between them was added by me. Meaning that by providing the funding, even if only partial, the government then becomes a partner in the enterprise. The word ‘free’ in ‘free media’ means free for outside influences.
I for one would not suffer government having a say in what gets printed here.
Abe
30
Was it really the hottest year ever last year? Well not where I live. Nor where I grew up in the country. Nor was it hotter at my aunt’s place 500km away. I don’t need a thermometer or a report from BOM to know and understand this fact. Fewer times in the pool, less use of air conditioner, green tomatoes hanging on bushes, no possums falling out of trees etc. We are being lied to and conned. Speak up now. You will be surprised how many other people will then start to do so too!
40
mem @ # 39
A very interesting supposition is suggested in the WUWT blog post ; Theory on the Pause – climate science has ‘exhausted adjustment rationales’
The author of the post is suggesting that the [ official ??? ] global temperatures have plateaued for the last dozen years because the NCDC./ NOAA / GISS / CRU and etc have quite literally run out of all the different ways in which they can further adjust the historical and current recorded temperatures to suit the global warming catastrophe meme.
40
do i detect a little REPETITION in the following?
17 Feb: Business Green: Will Nichols: Paris climate deal must lay ground for global carbon trading MPs say
Energy & Climate Change Committee says global agreement must allow carbon trading between countries to help meet emissions targets
A global climate deal must allow countries to meet their emission reduction commitments by funding green programmes in other nations, MPs will say today.
A global carbon market of linked emissions trading scheme’s is “the most cost-effective way possible” to cut CO2 levels, the Energy and Climate Change Committee (ECCC) writes in a new report…
The ECCC say an agreement in Paris should not turn its back on some of the carbon trading principles that under-pinned in the Kyoto Protocol, arguing that any new treaty should “facilitate the future development of carbon pricing policies including emissions trading”. In particular, it said the treaty should allow countries to meet their INDCs by transferring parts of their contributions to other parties and financing emissions reduction activities in other countries…
The EU emissions trading scheme (EU ETS) is the world’s largest and most well established cap and trade system, but a range of disparate regional, national and subnational trading systems have sprung up…
The value of carbon varies widely between geographies as does the type of credits different systems will accept, fuelling risks that they system ***COULD BE*** gamed or may struggle to deliver promised emissions reductions…
***The process is also politically fraught – the EU had planned to link with Australia’s Emissions Trading System, but this was put on hold after the Australian government announced plans in November 2013 to repeal its carbon pricing legislation…
Meanwhile, Davey used a blog post yesterday to call for “robust EU ETS reform” ahead of the UN summit in Paris, which could facilitate market linkages. “Linking trading schemes could help us tackle climate change in a co-ordinated and cost-effective way,” added a Department of Energy and Climate Change spokeswoman…
http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/analysis/2395565/paris-climate-deal-must-lay-ground-for-global-carbon-trading-mps-say
reminder: Newspoll: among Coalition voters, Abbott leads Turnbull 54-40:
yesterday’s MSM lovefest following ABC Q&A’s previous nite’s lovefest:
SMH Andrew P. Street’s View from the Street: Malcolm Turnbull sits for nationally televised job interview – “And while nothing was said that was obviously anti-Abbott, there was an audible “plop!” when he dropped the PM in it regarding the sacking of Philip Ruddock as chief whip”…
all Tweet examples from Rachel are from MSM!!!
SMH Rachel Olding: Malcolm Turnbull turns Q&A into the ‘Malcolm Turnbull Show’
His appearance drew widespread applause from the show’s rabid Twitter following, who didn’t miss his less-than-subtle criticisms of the Prime Minister…
TWEET: Peter Van Onselen (The Australian, Professor at UWA): Great performance by Malcolm Turnbull tonight on #QandA
TWEET: Richard Hinds (Daily Telegraph/Fox Sports. ABC Offsiders panelist): Just tuned in to #qanda. Is Turnbull Prime Minister yet?
TWEET: Latika Bourke (Fairfax): Was there any need for any other panelist tonight? Let’s be honest. #QAndA
TWEET: Matthew Knott (Fairfax): Turnbull providing a perfectly cogent response to the Human Rights Commission report without attacking the commission…
——–
no-one loves Malcolm more than…
Herald Sun Lanai Scarr and Caroline Zielinski Malcolm Turnbull wows public with almost-perfect performance
POOR Tony Abbott. Not even television viewers like him as much as they do Malcolm Turnbull…
PUNTERS are already responding to Malcolm Turnbull’s performance on the ABC’s Q&A program last night, with odds firming for the Communications Minister to become Prime Minister…
But if last night’s public appearance was anything to go by, Malcolm Turnbull has come out positively prime ministerial.
With his signature wit and grin, the Communication Minister’s performance on Q&A had the Twitter world a-twitter with praise…
uh oh, no-one loves Malcolm more than…
SBS Catherine McGrath: Comment: Let’s be honest, Malcolm Turnbull is flirting with us
It is a bit like the teenage romance where the potential beau is just slightly out of reach but looking oh so alluring and he appears to be interested in us, in this case the voters. It’s flattering really. One can’t help but be impressed…
Opinion polls show he is a more popular leader while Tony Abbott’s approval ratings are still sliding…
——–
WHEN DID OUR MSM STOP BEING REPORTERS & BECOME THE STORY THEMSELVES?
40
pat,
I realise this may be a rhetorical question but I think it needs to be answered anyway for the benefit of those to whom it has not sunk in yet.
The MSM became the story when they began to receive their funding from government and/or other politically inclined individuals with a personal agenda. (Does the name Murdoch ring a bell?)
As I mentioned earlier, the word ‘free’ in ‘free press’ means free from outside influences.
Abe
40
BTW THIS IS THE LOADED QUESTION ON Q&A:
ABC Q&A: The Questions
THE END OF ABBOTT PM?
Zack Solomon: Following the recent leadership spill Tony Abbott stated that good government starts today. Despite this we have experienced yet another week of unpopular decisions, captain’s calls and gaffes. Does the panel believe that we are witnessing the end of Tony Abbott’s tenure as leader of the liberal party and Prime Minister, and if so who do you believe would replace him? Does the person happen to be in this room?
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s4173305.htm
apparently, this is Zack and he got to ask a question on Q & A previously, which can be found online:
LinkedIn: Zack Solomon, Student in Law, Politics and Public Policy
Location Sydney Area
Education: Macquarie University Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Majoring in Law, Governance and Public Policy 2015 – 2017
Previous: 2012 – 2013: Questioner on ABC TV Bill Gates Q and A …
United Nations Conference Award ,UN Youth Australia, March 2013
https://au.linkedin.com/pub/zack-solomon/aa/a14/720
2013: Zack on Twitter: Had an amazing time at the UN Youth NSW State Conference!!! Truly inspired by speakers such as @BrttnyTrlfrd and @chrisrvarney
2009: Chris Varney on Twitter: Sign this petition to help save the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference…
2012: ScoopNZ: Brittany Trilford addresses world leaders at Rio+20 opening
During the opening of her three minute address Brittany told leaders, “I stand here with fire in my heart. I’m confused and angry at the state of the world. We are here to solve the problems that we have caused as a collective, to ensure that we have a future.”…
She challenged leaders to strive for solutions that will inspire hope around the world. “I am here to fight for my future. That is why I’m here. I would like to end by asking you to consider why you are here and what you can do here. I would like you to ask yourselves: Are you here to save face? Or are you here to save us?”…
In addition to addressing world leaders, Brittany has already silenced large gatherings of decision makers, including over 300 legislators here in Rio from around the world at the first Global Legislators Forum on June 16 and over 1,000 business leaders at the closing plenary of the Corporate Sustainability Forum on June 17. She will participate in a panel discussion on June 21 at the Global Town Hall and will ring the Peace Bell that same day at the Federation of World Peace and Love with Severn Suzuki, known as “the girl who silenced the world” since addressing leaders in a similar way at the 1992 Earth Summit.
Kelly Rigg, Executive Director of Global Campaign for Climate Action, organizers of the contest says “With youth accounting for 3 billion of the world’s population, it is critical that young people from all walks of life are engaged in influencing global decision-making on sustainability now – they will live with the building blocks or the broken promises, depending on the choices leaders make.”
Transcript of Brittany Trilford’s speech at the opening of the UN Rio+20 Earth Summit
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO1206/S00522/brittany-trilford-addresses-world-leader-at-rio20-opening.htm
THEIR ABC.
20
Buckley writes the piece, but keeps mentioning himself throughout.
14 Feb: Renew Economy: Tim Buckley: UK major parties vow to shut down coal, Australia should follow
The UK’s political leaders have seen the writing on the wall and are moving ahead of the inevitable carbon bubble and stranded asset crunch. This is increasly being accepted by key global financial analysts including Goldman Sachs, Macquarie Group, Deutsche Bank. Bernstein and Citigroup,” said Mr Buckley…
(Tim Buckley is the Director of Energy Finance Studies, Australasia for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. He has 25 years of financial markets experience, including 17 years with Citigroup culminating in his role as Managing Director and Head of Australasian Equity Research.)
http://reneweconomy.com.au/2015/uk-major-parties-vow-shut-coal-australia-follow-80721
COMMENT by Joe: Tim, I’m not sure it’s your remit as you’re not the site editor but I would argue that the headline is deliberately misleading. Unfortunately, as the article makes clear, we aren’t shutting down ‘coal’, merely ‘unabated coal’. I’m sure all involved know the difference here… Interesting also to note that when I searched for this story via google UK to find the info from a UK news outlet there was absolutely nothing apart from this Reuters article.
excerpts from link posted by Joe:
13 Feb: Reuters: Susanna Twidale/Alister Doyle: British leaders pledge climate push, curb on coal plants
No deadline given for phasing out plants.
The leaders of Britain’s three main parties have pledged to end power generation from coal plants that don’t use emissions-capturing technology…
Coal-fired power generators, which emit almost double the amount of carbon dioxide as gas-fired generators, provided a third of Britain’s electricity in the first half of last year…
“This will be of international significance because the UK is now the first major economy to make explicit its commitment to end the use of unabated coal,” said Matthew Spencer, director of think-tank Green Alliance, which brokered the pledge along with environmental groups including Greenpeace and WWF…
Aug 2014: ABC: Corrections & Clarifications: Tim Buckley
AM and News24 : On 29 July, when reporting on the proposed Carmichael coal mine in Queensland, the ABC included comments from Tim Buckley from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. However, the ABC did not provide additional context to show that Mr Buckley is also Managing Director and Portfolio Manager at Arks Investment Management, a clean energy fund. View the report.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-08-22/tim-buckley/5689338
the company is ArkX not ArkS, but accuracy doesn’t matter at the ABC.
pdf: July 2011: ASCALON LAUNCHES ARKX GLOBAL CLEAN ENERGY FUND
Arkx is jointly managed by Mr (Geoff) Evison and Tim Buckley and is part owned by Ascalon, a 100% owned subsidiary of Westpac Banking Corp.
http://www.ascalon.com.au/media/6695/ascalon%20launches%20arkx%20global%20clean%20energy%20fund.pdf
***Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis
is anti-coal and funded by the Rockefeller Family Fund.
Rockefeller Family Fund: Since 2006, RFF has focused its Environment program almost exclusively on climate change…
Among numerous milestones, this work has led to: a ground-breaking report issued by senior U.S. military advisors that climate change is a national security risk…
In addition to engaging national and local anti-coal advocates on the ground, RFF assembled a team of financial experts to analyze –and expose the flaws in–the financing behind the construction of new plants and coal-related activities. This pilot project started at RFF in 2007 and has since become its own non-profit organization, the ***Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. The Institute’s reports, which have prompted federal and state investigations of coal activities, and its training sessions for advocates have added a new dimension to the fight against coal…
http://www.rffund.org/programs/environment
10
pat,
So let’s see if anyone has gotten the picture yet.
Large multnational investors such as The Rockerfeller Family Fund and ArkX invest large amounts of money in green renewable energy companies worldwide.
Those companies receive generous funding of all makes and models from
governmentstaxpayers.The
mediamultinational investors promote those same companies making them attractive to otherinvestorstaxpayers.The value of the stocks in these companies goes up and people start to make money.
But these multinational investors know that renewable energy in not commercially viable in the long run so . . .
When those renewable energy companies approach the point where they can no longer continue to function financially, which many eventually do, . . .
and because these multinational investors know ahead of time when this will occur . . .
they simply sell their stocks, and rake in the profits.
Of course then the other investors, the ones that
thoughtwere convinced by the media, that green renewable energy companies are good investments, lose money.And finally, those non-viable green renewable energy companies file for bankrupcy/restructuring and the
governmentstaxpayers also lose their money.Is that about right?
Abe
50
How’s that for redistribution of wealth?
40
Did I mention that throughout the lifetime of these energy companies, the rates that taxpayers are forced to endure are way higher than if their electricity had been provided by traditional coal, oil, and natural gas?
And all because of a non-existing problem.
And don’t you want to scream?
Abe
40
‘And don’t you want to scream?’
Occasionally, thanks for asking.
30
“And don’t you want to scream?”
Yes.
00
June 2014: SMH: Swapping picket lines for pinstripes: Meet the new face of anti-coal activism
by Jamie Freed and Nassim Khadem
Tim Buckley, a former head of equity research at Citigroup, once spent his days doing financial modelling for conglomerates like Wesfarmers, which has a coalmining business…
Now he works for the US-based pro-renewable energy group Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. One of his projects is demonstrating why spending $40 billion on coalmines and infrastructure in Queensland’s Galilee Basin doesn’t make financial sense.
***His aim is to convince superannuation funds, lenders and governments that funding infrastructure for the projects would be a bad long-term investment and they should focus on energy sources with more promising futures, such as solar and wind…
Buckley is one of a new breed of climate change activists. Former US Treasury secretary and Goldman Sachs chief executive Hank Paulson, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and the retired founder of Farallon Capital, Tom Steyer, have formed Risky Business, which will this week release a report designed to influence business decisions about the risk of not taking the prospect of unmitigated climate change seriously…
http://www.smh.com.au/business/carbon-economy/swapping-picket-lines-for-pinstripes-meet-the-new-face-of-anticoal-activism-20140624-3aqeu.html
funny Fairfax had the above in June 2014, & ABC was correcting story & referring to Buckley’s Arkx connections in Aug 2014, & IEEFA still has mention of Arkx on their webpage (easily found online by headline search):
Feb 2014: IEEFA welcomes Tim Buckley
The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis welcomes Tim Buckley as the Director of Energy Finance Studies, Australasia…
Buckley is co-founder and managing director of Arkx Investment Management, an investor in leading global-listed clean energy companies. Additionally, Arkx consults in the low carbon finance sector, providing an international perspective into the Australian market…
because Giles was reporting this in 2013! did Arkx continue without Westpack? who knows?
Sept 2013: Renew Economy: Giles Parkinson: Arkx sinks as Australian fund managers snub clean investments
In the last few weeks, Evison and co-founder Tim Buckley have learned the cost of being too far ahead of the times when Westpac’s Ascalon Capital Managers pulled its support for the fund. Its Global Listed Clean Energy Fund is being wound down after 7 years of investing.
Arkx, the first Australian wholesale fund to invest in global clean energy equities, foundered because it was unable to attract enough funds managers to support its product, its founders say.
“Westpac ran out of patience waiting for investors to take action,” Buckley said this week.
***“At the end of the day, we were unable to convince the Australian superannuation industry that there are real opportunities as well as threats arising from the move to a low carbon future, and that the issues of energy security and climate change are real.”
As it is, if the Coalition has its way, and wins the election tomorrow, Australia is probably not going to make a transition to a low carbon future anytime soon…
The fund peaked at $11 million, but funds managers will tell you they need around $50 million just to break even once custodian, administration, information and other expenses are taken into account.
The decision by Ascalon to pull support has a certain irony, because it comes just six months after Westpac made a big deal about its commitment to spend $8 blllion to invest in what the Australian banking giant described as “the most pressing issues in society and the environment today.”…
Buckley is not critical of Westpac, but he is critical of the “herd mentality” of funds managers. “They don’t want to be the first to act. And Australian fossil fuel companies have a very visible lobby saying it is too early and expensive to act, and politicians buy this despite the obvious self-interest…
He says it is heartening to see some super funds are willing to act bravely and “accept their fiduciary duty.” He cites ***Local Government Super for being the leading super investor in Australia in terms of its numerous moves to protect its members from the risks associated with climate change, taking initiatives in their bond, listed equities and property asset allocations…
http://reneweconomy.com.au/2013/arkx-sinks-australian-fund-managers-snub-clean-investments-64247
watch your Super and watch out for continugin attempts to make Turnbull PM.
30
Councils are carrying out their ‘fiduciary duty’ in stopping the climate from changing. Amazing, this is worth following up.
20
Are those the councils who were sucked in by Lehman Bros?
20
Not sure, but here is the problem writ large.
http://www.lgsuper.com.au/documents/media/Media%20release_Money%20Magazine%20award.pdf
00
Yep, same crowd.
http://www.lgsuper.com.au/employer/crmlist.asp
No recourse to law next time they go belly up, which shouldn’t be too far off.
00
ABC-BoM Fails.
27 Nov 2014
BOM predicts long, hot Summer for NSW north east
“But in terms of El Niño like conditions that generally means heatwaves are more likely, and widespread flooding is less likely.”
27 Jan 2015
Flash flooding damages homes on New South Wales mid-north coast
18 Feb, 2015
SES warns NSW North Coast residents to prepare for forecast torrential rain
20
Also, this approaching east coast low should dampen temperatures yet again. Its entirely possible that Australia’s south east may have its coolest summer in quite some time.
40
A recent peer reviewed paper found a considerable amount of aerosols in the atmosphere that were not detectable by satellites. These aerosols are causing the global temperature to be up to 0.12C cooler. http://s11.postimg.org/ce7etg3yb/Aerosols.png (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GL061541/abstract) These Aerosols are from volcanic eruptions which models cant predict.
Also I’m sure you’re all aware there has been a measurable amount of heat from the atmosphere going into the oceans due to increased trade winds. England et al took this heat transfer into consideration regarding models http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/model-trend/england-2014-nature-ocean-winds-figure-5.gif
This transfer of heat causing a lowering of atmospheric temperatures will be short lived due to the ocean controlling overall temperatures http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=66
03
It’s not a “measureable” amount of heat going into the oceans if you have real error bars on each thermometer recording 200,000 km3. Hm?
For anyone who is interested, I’ve already answered all of these points Michael raises on an older thread. There is a basic point of logic that no matter how I explain it, it remains invisible to him.
From the end of that long conversation where I showed aerosols were probably higher in the 1980s, but the world still warmed even more than in the 2000s:
But there is much more detail and references on the older closed thread.
It would however be a more honest conversation with him if he could admit that, ask questions, and link back to past discussions rather than just repeat points as if our long conversation had never happened. It would also be more honest of him to not just link to diagrams I provided of Matthew Englands graph but also post the links to the article where I discussed the graph.
But then, I guess he’s not here to learn about the climate then?
50
Joanne Nova,
Completely O/T.
The large open quotes that used to appear in our comments when using the b-quote HTML command have suddenly disappeared. Is this just me or is it on your end?
Just curious. ( I liked the open quotes )
Abe
00
No, science is not saying Aerosols explain the pause, that would make no sense since there has been no pause, just a transfer of heat from the atmosphere to the ocean due to the IPO http://skepticalscience.com//pics/EnglandFig1.png (http://www.skepticalscience.com/surface-winds-push-global-warming-into-oceans-england-2014.html)
The Aerosols I referenced just explain that temperatures should be up to 0.12C higher which pushes the global average temperature in to the higher range of the climate models http://s23.postimg.org/muesnocy3/models.png
00
We go round in circles.
“The pause” refers to surface temperatures, and even the IPCC accepts that. Ask Rajendra.
We dont know if the pause extends to the oceans, the data is too sparse. The rise is too small (below the error margins).
If aerosols cooled us in the 2000s (maybe they did) then they probably cooled us more in the 1980s (bigger volcanoes). But temps rose in the 1980s more and CO2 levels were lower. Your theory is dead.
As I keep explaining, there is no internal consistency in your explanations. If I take your idea on aerosols from the 2000s and use it on the 1980s — it doesn’t hold. We emitted more CO2 in the 2000s.
Likewise, if the oceans took out more heat in the 2000s, to be consistent, they probably added more heat in the 1980s (symmetry, balance, etc etc).
You want to pretend that aerosols and the ocean can explain why the models crashed and burned in the 2000s, but it conflicts with what happened in the 80s.
Your ideas are a patchwork of excuses for recent model failures that don’t explain other time periods, ie, inconsistent.
Your use of “science is saying” is self-satire. Who appointed you lord of science?
00
I will have to concur that there is a surface temperature pause and yes the models did not predict the increased trade winds transferring so much heat into the ocean due to the IPO http://skepticalscience.com//pics/EnglandFig1.png(http://www.skepticalscience.com/surface-winds-push-global-warming-into-oceans-england-2014.html).
Of cause I’m not going to agree with your opinion about ARGO measurements. They float around the oceans so multiple floats are taking samples of the same areas as can be seen in this short video showing the ARGO movements https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GJS4AKsuRw and they work amazingly well http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/GLBhycom1-12/navo/globalsst_nowcast_anim30d.gif The simple fact is the error bars are 0.005C not in your opinion of 0.02C.
The aerosols during the 1980-90s from large volcanic eruptions caused a massive cooling, not a pause, but over time satellite measurements found no more aerosols and climate models ran with Zero aerosols. This recent paper shows that in the lower atmosphere there is a large amount of aerosols causing a global cooling. This has nothing to do with the pause, it just explains that temperatures should be up to 0.12C higher which pushes the global average temperature in to the higher range of the climate models http://s23.postimg.org/muesnocy3/models.png
00
Great. Thank you. I’m glad we can agree on one point.
As for the ocean: “The simple fact is the error bars are 0.005C not in your opinion of 0.02C. ”
It’s not just my opinion the error bars are larger, but I’m about to do a post on that this week, with references. We’ll have that debate then. It’s mere common sense, but I have data as well.
You say: “….large volcanic eruptions caused a massive cooling, not a pause,”. Yes. Exactly my point. The models have no idea why it warmed in the 1980s despite the volcanoes cooling things. They thought it was caused mostly by CO2, then “the pause” showed that they don’t understand the cause. After 2000 the volcanoes were smaller, and the CO2 was bigger, and yet the warming paused. You make the excuse the heat went into the ocean. Maybe it did (maybe it didnt’). But obviously the ocean with El Ninos in the 1980s contributed more warming than the models allow. I want them to fix the models, which means turning the CO2 influence down way lower to something realistic, and figuring out the real force of the natural drivers of the climate.
00
Aerosols are measured by satellites as shown here https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/calipso-jpvernier.jpg and they are short lived so after some years the world will continue to warm from Anthropogenic CO2.
This aerosol cooling is determined http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=45 and incorporated into models http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/images/climate_model_ensembles.gif.
So science completely understands volcanic aerosol forcing. I’m just making the point that more aerosols have been found and that these aerosols are causing the global temperature to be up to 0.12C cooler. http://s11.postimg.org/ce7etg3yb/Aerosols.png (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GL061541/abstract)
Models can’t predict ELSO, TSI, Aerosols or IPO so they adjust the models later http://skepticalscience.com//pics/Schmidt2014.gif these adjustments don’t take into consideration the recently found aerosols I mentioned above.
Another way of looking at how much warming is caused by CO2 is to adjust surface temperatures so only CO2 warming is left http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=52 this study also did not take into consideration the recent aerosols found which I mention above.
00
I see you are still the self anointed Spokesman of “the Science”. Congrats.
Your “science” is a pretty weak tool. Only a little while back you admitted we don’t have the same type of aerosol data in the 1980s that we have in the 2000s. Now “science completely understands” aerosols? Yes, but in a way only an omniscient deity would.
Your last paragraph is “argument from ignorance”. But I’m sure I’ve said that before. You don’t understand logical fallacies, no matter how many times I explain them, so there is not much point is there?
As far the second last para: No models can’t predict TSI, but if they understood solar dynamics they might. Everything else you say they can’t predict is something we’ve already discussed. Do you post those inane claims repeated because you have nothing else to say, or do you hope people might mistakenly think I claimed models could predict those things? The strawman fallacy?
As usual, you ignore my main point about the unverified models being post hoc adjusted with cherry picked factors. Any model can hindcast the past with enough factors to play with. It proves nothing. Only models that understand the climate can predict in advance. They all fail.
I’ve also explained why everything else you said in my previous comments only shows how ignorant we are of the main climate drivers.
00
Michael Whittmore,
For thirty years the preachers of the CAGW meme have been telling us that CO2, carbon dioxide, controls the overall temperatures. Now you’re telling us it’s the oceans?
Give it up. Please.
Abe
00
It is no wonder that too many Australian voters are easily manipulated, the Courier Mail Queensland has reported that most Queensland voters did not want a Labor state government at this time, post election surveys indicate that voters who did not vote for the LNP wanted to send the LNP a message that their budget measures were too hard. None had the faintest idea that the LNP could lose office. This reminds me about the hostile Senate in Canberra, the federal government has a clear and substantial mandate for changes in the Lower House but voters did not consider giving the government a supportive Senate and now Labor is capitalising on their Senate power (with support from Others) and is standing in the way of government legislation. Worst example is $30 billion of budget savings held up, 20% of 2014/15 Budget still in negotiation. Meanwhile financial storm clouds are gathering on the horizon overseas.
50
reality check:
17 Feb: Reuters: Valerie Volcovici: U.S. EPA chief hints at softening carbon rule interim timeline
The Environmental Protection Agency said on Tuesday that it may ease an interim deadline for states to meet tougher carbon emission standards after regulators and electric utilities complained a lack of time may destabilize electricity supplies.
EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy told an audience of state utility regulators meeting in Washington that she was giving them a “big hint” the agency may loosen the interim targets set in its proposed rule for existing power plants, under which each state would need to show an assigned average emission reduction between 2020 and 2029…
Janet McCabe, assistant administrator for air and radiation at the EPA, confirmed later in the day that the EPA may revisit the timeline, noting a change in the interim target “was very much on the table.”…
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/18/us-usa-carbon-epa-idUSKBN0LM01020150218
18 Feb: Bloomberg: Mark Drajem: EPA Considers Delaying Carbon Deadline After Utilities Object
McCarthy said the EPA is unwilling to eliminate interim benchmarks altogether because the agency wants to ensure states are on a “glide path” to hit the 2030 target. The final rule will be released after the middle of this year, she said…
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-17/epa-considers-revised-timing-for-complying-with-power-plant-rule
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***reality, with a STING IN THE TAIL:
18 Feb: Guardian: Larry Elliott: BP: huge rise in energy demand at odds with climate change fight
Annual outlook forecasts unsustainable rise in carbon emissions, fuelled by 40% rise in energy demand that it says can only be met by fossil fuels
Rising global demand for energy over the next two decades is at odds with the fight against climate change, the head of BP said on Tuesday, as he outlined the oil giant’s forecasts showing unsustainable increases in carbon emissions.
BP’s annual energy outlook predicted that the world economy would double in size in the next 20 years, resulting in demand for energy rising by almost 40%. The company said two-thirds of this demand would be met from fossil fuels – oil, gas and coal – and that this would lead to a 25% increase in carbon emissions…
Dudl added that the environmental risks put pressure on politicians to come up with a deal at this year’s climate conference in Paris. “The projections highlight the scale of the challenge facing policy makers at this year’s UN-led discussions in Paris. No single change or policy is likely to be sufficient on its own.
“And identifying in advance which changes are likely to be most effective is fraught with difficulty.
***This underpins the importance of policymakers taking steps that lead to a global price for carbon, which provides the right incentives for everyone to play their part.”
Even with the expected rapid growth in the use of renewable forms of energy over the next two decades, they will still only account for 8% of energy demand by 2035, BP said. Fossil fuels will account for 81% of energy, down from 86% at present…
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/feb/17/bp-says-huge-rise-in-energy-demand-at-odds-with-climate-change-fight
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***new CAGW meme. we must listen to Big Oil…and invest more in renewables:
18 Feb: UK Indepedent: James Moore: Deflation? Let’s worry about our carbon footprint instead
As we ought to know by now, there is a drawback to using oil to fuel anything. In the case of cars, it comes in the form of pollution and carbon emissions…
BP warns of this in its Energy Outlook 2035. The report highlights that much of the production boom that has helped to send prices into a tailspin has been driven by North America’s enthusiasm for fracking, a process that is facilitating the energy independence that US security hawks have long craved. But fracking’s growth is slowing…
The renewables sector is also becoming increasingly important and economically attractive. Despite critics complaining about the subsidies handed to it (while turning a blind eye to subsidies given to fossil fuel producers), renewables are getting cheaper and the process is accelerating. As operators learn by doing, costs are coming down…
***These are welcome developments, but more investment is required.
When oil producers start twitching about the impact on the environment of their energy projections, if they come to pass, we really ought to hear what they are saying…
There are signs that other sectors are similarly concerned: the insurance industry, in particular. But even so, we are still planning to pump a staggering amount of carbon into the atmosphere over the next 20 years. The impact of that may be far more economically malign than a bit of inflation. Or a bit of deflation.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/james-moore-deflation-lets-worry-about-our-carbon-footprint-instead-10052677.html#
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pat,
From the linked article:
James Moore’s article begins by feeding the reader a guilt trip by focusing on their use of cars causing air pollution. As we are all aware, there are other sectors in our society/economy that produce higher levels of pollution when calculated as an overall percentage:
1. Commercial and industrial electrical consumption.
2. Transportation. Goods and mass transit.
The price of these components of the economy would immediately go up affecting all segments of society including and most importantly the poor, who don’t even own cars.
Then, by lumping together air pollution with carbon emission in the same breath, he perpetuates the lie that CO2, carbon dioxide, is a pollutant. It’s clearly not.
He goes on to tell us that the benefits to the economy of using oil to fuel anything are only transient.
HUH!?
The benefits to the economy will continue until the oil runs out. Current estimates are around the 100 year mark! So, yes the benefits will be transient, aproximately 100 years transient.
Life is also transient, but we don’t measure it’s value by it’s transience.
Abe
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the BP story will end up in all MSM…but thought this headline was “two” cute…
17 Feb: Christian Science Monitor: BP’s ***two-word fix for global climate change
By David J. Unger
It (the BP Report) concludes that no one approach will be enough to meet emissions reductions goals, but offers a simple idea that would help guide efforts: ***carbon pricing…
following is also in The Australian, with the big claim that the Qld electorate “rejected anti-environmentalism”:
16 Feb: Courier Mail: ***Scott Losee: Opinion: Queensland needs effective climate change action following LNP reign
(Scott Losee is aclimate change consultant and former member of Brisbane’s Climate Change and Energy Taskforce)
Annastacia Palaszczuk has led the ALP back to power after the electorate ***rejected anti-environmentalism*** and the rubberstamping of large developments, and has demanded that everything reasonable be done to protect the Great Barrier Reef.
The new Government cannot afford to start by restructuring and re-employing public servants en masse. Nonetheless, it can declare climate change to be non-heretical and ground policy in science and economics, rather than prejudice and pet projects.
While Queensland cannot stop climate change, it can plan for and invest in adaptation…
If managed well, retaining energy assets provides opportunities to embrace innovations such as smart grids, which promise affordable, low-impact, long-term energy, rather than engineered low prices in the short term.
The more deeply rooted question lies with the conflict between Queensland’s economic reliance on coal production and the growing desire of global markets and foreign governments to find less-polluting forms of energy.
The time may not have arrived for wholesale economic restructuring to overcome this conflict, but it will and we need a government that understands these issues.
http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland-state-election-2015/opinion-queensland-needs-effective-climate-change-action-following-lnp-reign/story-fnrab879-1227220487842
***Scott Losee Consulting
http://loseeconsulting.com.au/sample-page/
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I was tied up yesterday and couldn’t read this thread until this morning. In the meantime there have been so many comments that I can agree with that I’m going to simply say amen to them and let it go except for my reply to Mark D.
Lying by omission is the word for it. The oath taken by a witness in court says,
That “whole truth” counts.
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Yes Ruari (from Limerick?) writes some wonderful stuff which I could not emulate.
PeterPeterum above suggests that Joanne should have a separate section for Scatological Science (aka Climate Science)
In my humble way, I have written quite a few doggerel verses extracting the urine out of the ‘greatest scientific scam’ in history. The following are a couple of examples.
Global Warming
You fancy a skite on a Friday night
In June when the bees should be swarming,
You cant stand straight let alone gyrate
Don’t you love global warming.
So what’s the score Mr Albert Gore
Can we have our stolen summer back,
Is your global plan a taxing scam
From a scientific quack.
This is flaming June in a monsoon
Amidst a deep-freezing Nor ‘east wind,
Yet all the doomsters say every day
‘Believe’ – yer oot o yer mind!
Please have no fear for by June next year
They’ll invent another fairy tale,
Control our life-cause us strife with a
Cataclysmic Holy Grail.
You stand on the tee and cannot see
The par three flag with the Haar looming,
Do not fear for it’s summer here
Or am I just assuming?
I kid you not but Scotland has got
A new minister for climate change,
Sun’s not shone since the Nationalists won
Is that not almighty strange?
Pat Healy
The Pleading Rose
I am a vivid flowering rose
Delighting eye and balm to nose,
I thrive on heat of morning dew
But most of all on Co2;
So please don’t limit it the nigh
Or else I will just wilt and die,
I grow in rain and sun from skies
And gas to photosynthesize.
I’m not a scientist like you
With mega grants and peer review,
Please explain to a plant like me
The workings of I Pee See See;
Can it be wise to stop the clock
Then turn it back to an epoch,
When I was cold and half this size
True scientists helped me hybridize.
All those air-miles and pulp from trees
To promulgate your treatise,
Designed to spread alarm and fear
Of a trace-gas which I hold dear;
Your past deliberations show
If you were honest – you don’t know,
What future temperatures will be
I hope its warmer – just for me!
Pat Healy
Sorry Joanne if I bore you, but I think satire is the ultimate laxative for science constipation.
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Surely someone from The Australian Academy of Science (AAAS) will be prosecuted for this? They are using public money to pervert the information we are all entitled to and unless this is stamped upon, hard and soon, it will never stop
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