#TalkAboutIt: Climate change sceptics versus the scientists (correcting ABC mistakes, strawmen, and misleading lines)

#TalkAboutIt: Climate change sceptics versus the scientists, By Clara Tran and staff

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Busy slaying strawmen instead of real debate?

What a facade. The ABC says its skeptics versus “the scientists” except there are no skeptics present. In typical Newspeak the ABC says “#TalkAboutIt”, but it’s a conversation with themselves. They invent “DorothyDixer” strawman questions for their own team to bravely kill.

If the ABC really wanted their listeners to discuss skeptical views, they would invite skeptics to make them — but interviews are a thing of the past (back in the days when the ABC was an institution of repute). The fake debate is the only kind that professors like Matthew England can win.

This is why the ABC fails so dismally to dint skeptical numbers in Australia. If they want to convince skeptics of their point of view then they have to deal with actual skeptical arguments, but they are too afraid to air them. Consequently they sideline themselves out of the national debate, relegated to the propaganda wars.

Correcting the ABC:

Skeptical Scientists versus The Unskeptical

The ABC offers arguments allegedly made by climate skeptics, all of them minor and of little consequence (short version first, more depth below):

Claim 1: Global warming is not happening because it is cold

Pure hypocrisy. Mirror the message: Global warming is happening because it’s hot. Haven’t we heard that before? The day that Matthew England or the ABC publicly complain about alarmist scientists who attribute single storms, floods, hot days, and reckless fish to carbon dioxide, we’ll start to take him seriously. Leading skeptics do not use this argument, but you won’t find what skeptics do say on their ABC.

Claim 2: Climate has changed throughout the Earth’s history

The banal truth. There is no state of “Climate Sameness”.

Kurt Lambeck bravely decrees that sea levels were the same for 6,000 years despite the evidence. Seas have been falling around Australia for longer, and rising and falling by one metre in the Maldives for example. A thousand tide gauge measurements show sea levels are only rising at about 1mm a year. The raw satellite data agreed, until it was “corrected” and a 3mm  rise was created by adjustments.

Last time Lambeck made this flat-for-6000-year claim it was based on “modeled” estimates of sea levels back to 4000BC. (If we can model those seas so well, why do we bother with measurements and gauges at all?) But Lambeck’s sea level data has error bars ten meters wide. Seriously. (See the graphs).

Claim 3: Human emissions are tiny compared to natural CO2

Again, the banal, undeniable truth — human emissions are 4% of natural ones. Prof England does not even try to suggest that this is incorrect (nor does the ABC mention, shh, the 4% fact). What can they say?

First up, we get served the usual eye-candy-photo, the classic agitprop shot of steam-pretending-to-be-CO2. Look Mum! It’s “pollution”. Second up, check the caption: Photo: The energy sector reportedly makes up about 76 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

In the context of a debate about natural versus man-made emissions, how many ABC readers will come away misinformed? The caption implies human emissions are larger than natural ones. In the context of man-v-nature, why highlight the irrelevant sub-parts of man-made emissions at all? Corrected it would read: “the energy sector makes 76 per cent 3% of the world’s CO2 emissions”. It’s only inflated 2500%.

To raise the inanity score even further, technically, if we are talking about all greenhouse gases (that’s what they said), then water vapor rules — and emissions from the world’s oceans blast those percentage points into decimal oblivion.

Claim 4: Scientists are creating panic in order to get funding

Prof England says it’s absurd, because scientists are angels (or something like that), since they seek the truth, and are only after Nobel Prizes. I’m thinking we don’t need to pay them then, if the money is irrelevant?

But if money did have any influence, billions of dollars have been paid to find and assess a man-made crisis. There is also a 1.5 trillion dollar climate industry dependent on it, but almost no specific funding for skeptical scientists. There is no government funding to audit reports from the foreign committee called the IPCC (and, by strange coincidence, no government funded scientists have done it voluntarily).

As usual, the ABC represents the vested interests, governments and corporations, and works against the volunteers and taxpayers. Why do conservatives put up with it?

England says the person who finds a flaw will get a Nobel. Nice fantasy (should we put it to the test?). Look at Bjorn Lomborg. Forget any prize — in Australia Lomborg can’t even get an office. He believes the IPCC science and comes with $4m in funding, yet can’t work in Australia because university students have been trained to howl in “disgust” and protest until weak Vice Chancellors cave in.

Skeptics don’t get prizes from officialdom. Instead they get exiled, stranded at airports, sacked, harassed from committees, their children’s work may be targeted, they lose their professorships, and even their email accounts. (One time the ABC came to our house to interview us, but they left out the data we presented, and edited in sentences that were never said — and we can prove it, because we filmed it.) If somehow skeptics get any government funding at all, they may be subject to intrusive witchhunts from Congressional Committees, and onerous FOI’s, which universities handle in a biased one-sided manner. England lives in his fantasy land where sensible well trained scientists would work hard to prove the theory wrong then loudly announce their skepticism — but in the real world their only reward is to be called “deniers” and have their careers wrecked.

Claim 5: Antarctic sea ice is growing

Antarctic Sea Ice IS growing. See the Cryosphere satellite data. Doesn’t really fit the narrative, does it? Clara Tran and staff find a few post hoc excuses for the growth in sea ice that went entirely against the models, without admitting the models were utterly wrong (Previdi and Polvani 2014[1]). Some things can never be said.

Dr Jan Lieser from the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre said sea ice growth was a symptom of global warming.

Growing sea-ice wasn’t a “symptom” of global warming until after the sea-ice grew. But that’s always how witch-doctoring works. Whatever happens, it’s now a symptom. Except science is meant to predict things.

Matthew England goes on to imply only a small sector of Antarctic sea ice is expanding, when the record ice growth applies to the ice around a lot of the continent, not just the Ross sea.  Then he drags in the Arctic and Greenland as if they have something to do with Antarctic Sea Ice and finishes up with a mindless tobacco analogy. He sees skeptics as dying smokers, which says a lot about him and his ability to reason.

 

A climate debate on TV,
As appearing on ABC,
Is a biased affair,
With the skeptics not there,
To allow them to disagree.

–Ruairi

———————————————————————————————

How many ways can one article be wrong — there’s more

Serious climate skeptics have better arguments. They say global warming has been happening for the last three centuries, is mostly natural, and point out that the 18 year global pause and the missing hotspot show that the climate models are wrong — and that climate scientists don’t know what drives the climate. Matthew England and the ABC have no good answers to these points, which is why they don’t discuss them.

Claim 1: Global warming is not happening because it is cold

Strawman coming:

“The idea that global warming is over because you encounter a cold day is a very common mistake people make,” said Matthew England, climate scientist from the University of New South Wales and a fellow at the Australian Academy of Science.

Behold the hypocrites. If we mirror the statement we see how mindless it is. Global warming is happening because it’s hot.  Not only do the ABC never protest that, they can wait barely a few paragraphs before using it themselves:

…And this week it announced July was the warmest month since record-keeping began in 1880, with 2015 shaping up to beat last year’s mark.

Does one hot month make a climate trend, or it is just weather? In any case, it’s not even true. Does one ordinary month make a press release? Apparently so. Satellites are more accurate at recording temperatures, and both global datasets show that July 2015 was the hottest July since July 2014. If ABC “reporters” interviewed skeptics they might be able to do more than cut and paste government press releases. Gullibility is so unbecoming in a journalist. They would also find out how these surface records have uncertainties larger than the “records”. ABC viewers/listeners/readers are going to feel a tad cheated as they find out that surface measurements depend on mystery adjustments that are not independently audited and sometimes use thermometers over car parks and near air conditioners. And they will find out.

England makes the claim that The Pause has stopped. He’s made weak post hoc explanations about trade-winds causing the pause, but he can’t predict the trade-winds. He doesn’t have the honesty to admit the skeptics were right, that the models exaggerate and fail to contain important factors. Nor does he admit that if trade winds sometimes cause cooling, the absence of them would sometimes cause warming — did that happen earlier?

Other claims that the pause has stopped depend on assuming that ocean heat is still rising and that we can measure those temperatures to one hundreth of a degree with a single thermometer per 250,000 cubic kilometers of ocean. Still others (Karl et al) claim  we should ignore the best ocean data and correct poor data sets with estimates that have error bars 17 times larger than the estimate. This is more like witch-doctoring than science.

Claim 2: Climate has changed throughout the earth’s history

Essentially the Global Worrier response to this is that past changes were all smaller than now, except for ice ages which are caused by orbital shifts.  For the sake of reminding people what variability looks like, here’s the last 12,000 years in Vostok Antarctica graphed below, no ice age involved. In contrast, the last 30 years of satellite measured temperatures over Antarctica shows a flat nothing, no change, during which time CO2 has risen “dangerously” past a hundred tipping points, and whole campaigns have run solid begging us to worry that Antarctica is melting “like never before”.

For England’s point to be right about calculating “forcings” meaningfully, climate models would need to be accurate enough to predict those moves below. He might protest that climate models don’t need to understand regional changes like this because they are looking at global averages, but the GCMs (big computerized climate models) estimate the regions, then add up the mistakes to get the global average.

Vostok ice cores

Matthew England seems to think the models understand the climate — this sentence is all about modeled forcings:

“If you look at the ‘forcings’ we’re applying today, and the rate of change in the climate system, this change that we’re imposing with greenhouse gases is about a thousand-fold the size of the change we had from these orbital shifts.

But the models can’t predict past climate variations. There are nearly a million years out of the last million where the models couldn’t calculate the global temperature from the orbital “forcings”. The climate models don’t predict the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman warming, or the Minoan, or any of the scores of unnamed blips on the graph. If carbon dioxide levels were so steady until the last century or two, and orbital forcings are so puny, then why did the temperatures vary so much in the preceding few centuries?

They even have a misleading name for the recent temperature changes that their climate models cannot predict: “natural variability”. Climate models fail to predict or explain the current 18-year pause, during which time humans emitted one third of all carbon emissions in the whole of history — “oh the natural variability is temporarily overwhelming the carbon forcing”. Well that’s one way of saying it.

The caption on the photo is entirely fanciful:

Most of the really big shifts might be explained partially with orbital mechanics, but piddling little one degree variations like we’ve had in the last century have been occurring since before there were humans and none of the CO2-driven models can possibly hindcast them (which means explain why each bump occurred).

England seems to think the climate models depend on basic physics, rather than mostly on guesses about how clouds, humidity and ice cover will respond to extra CO2 or extra warming.

Claim 3: Human emissions are tiny compared to natural CO2

Apart from deceptive captions (see above), the only “point” made was that over the USA the EPA estimates that human emissions are 82% of the total emissions. So what? The USA covers only 2% of the surface of the Earth.

The other wasted paragraphs merely say what we all know — CO2 levels are rising. Whether or not humans are entirely responsible for the rise (and it’s debatable), temperatures rose just as fast when CO2 was “ideal” (e.g. 1680 to 1900), and temperatures ought have been rising in the last 18 years according to the CO2 hypothesis but haven’t. We don’t even understand where fossil fuel emissions are going. Forest fires may  produce half as much CO2 as all fossil fuels burned. Every year, natural CO2 variation dwarfs man-made input. Nothing fits.

Claim 4: Scientists are creating panic in order to get funding

Obviously, only government funded scientists can find the Truth, not independent unpaid scientists with no vested interests.

If they [skeptics] could disprove the physics of the greenhouse effect …

Note the distracting strawman… “disprove the physics”. This debate is not about infrared spectroscopy, it’s about modeled feedbacks,  which observations show are not happening. The main skeptics are not arguing about basic physics, they are debating the way it’s applied to the climate system.

Claim 5: Antarctic sea ice is growing

England tosses an irrelevant crumb — a strawman, pretending the skeptics are talking about a small part of Antarctica:

Professor England said it was the Ross Sea sector, a very small region in the Antarctic, where sea ice is expanding.

The cryosphere satellite data shows the sea-ice is at a record for the sea ice around a lot of the continent. It’s not about the “Ross Sea”, it’s about “Antarctica”.

England claims Antarctic ice sheets are shrinking too, but doesn’t give us the full story — that different methods of measuring the Antarctic ice mass disagree about whether it’s shrinking or expanding, and satellite temperatures show it isn’t warming. In short, in Antarctica there is not too much to panic about — the sea ice is at record highs, the temperatures are not warming, the ice sheet is slightly expanding or slightly shrinking (no one is sure), and the only parts that are definitely warming or melting are over volcanoes. The ice sheet is behaving in ways that appear to be just normal Antarctic variability over the last 800 years.

Having failed to come up with a single reasonable argument, England is left with nothing but the sea-ice-is-like-a-cigarette smear, because if you smoke penguins, you’ll get cancer, if you know what I mean. He’s doing word association games and ignoring the evidence:

So all of the world’s cyrosphere is ringing out the alarm bells, the ice is melting rapidly, globally.”

An analogy for this climate scepticism could be “somebody who smokes cigarettes,” Professor England said.

Skeptics points are like the healthy fingernail of a dying smoker, says England. Not hardly, says Jo. The problems with the models are crippling — just don’t mention the 28 million radiosondes, the satellites, Argo buoys, 6000 boreholes, hundreds of paleolithic proxies, and the radar altimetry.

It’s models and witch-doctors versus empirical reality.

Will they fix it? Some people correct their errors and apologize for mistakes

Matthew England has a history of unscientific exaggeration, saying things that are demonstrably false. In 2012, he told Australians on national tv that the 1990 IPCC projections were “very accurate”, but the data from all the recognized global data sets shows the actual temperature rises fell below even the lowest predictions. When I pointed out the error with exact numbers and exact quotes, he replied with weak excuses. I responded with more graphs and exact quotes. Despite that, he still has not apologized to Nick Minchin or Australian taxpayers.  Does accuracy matter?

——————

[1] Previdi, M. and Polvani, L. M. (2014), Climate system response to stratospheric ozone depletion and recovery. Q.J.R. Meteorol. Soc.. doi: 10.1002/qj.233

h/t to David B and Mal R Thanks.

Strawman image adapted from wikimedia — author Chaluco.  Carnival in Lantz.

9.5 out of 10 based on 115 ratings

217 comments to #TalkAboutIt: Climate change sceptics versus the scientists (correcting ABC mistakes, strawmen, and misleading lines)

  • #
    Phil R

    It’s models and witch-doctors versus empirical reality.

    Heh, reminds me of another funny quote:

    Putting ‘climate’ in front of ‘scientist’ has much the same qualifying effect as ‘witch’ in front of ‘doctor’

    John Brignall

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    • #
      OriginalSteve

      I recall hearing a story told by an ex-South African military guy, who’d become a christian missionary. He described how after a calamaity had occurred in the village, the local witch doctor would blame a wealthy villager, who’d then be killed to appease “the spirits” and his property divided up between the chief and the witch doctor. One thing that came out of it was being wealthy was a dangerous situation when a witch doctor was around.

      In some ways the whole CAGW thing is witch-doctor-ish – blame the worng people, strip them of wealth and redistribute it to a few…..hang on…..

      320

    • #
      PeterPetrum

      Oh, that’s one for my astrophysicist Prof daughter. Thank you, thank you!

      61

    • #
      Prof. Em. A.G.W. de Nihilist

      And you should see what they have done to the science climate in our academic institutions. Tornado’s of vitriol and hyporbilic fury, flash mob floods whenever someone with a mainstream opinion dares to express it and catstrophic levels of rising angst should someone of other than rigid, pre approved, doctrinaire reputation be considered to visit let alond take up a position.

      130

  • #
    KinkyKeith

    OK.

    Let’s talk about it.

    The concept of man made global warming is a SHAM that has no other driving force than that of advertising for political gain.

    The sort of unqualified people like Matthew England and the mass of people calling themselves “Climate Scientist ™” do not have the capacity by training during coursework to MODEL anything.

    There are more people on this site with qualifications more relevant to the study and quantification of CO2 and Climate than all the university Climate Departments in Australia.

    Note that there are many others in Australian Universities who are probably qualified but are not part of the Climate Brigade and want to avoid conflict so stay in Engineering and Chemical Engineering.

    The constant bombardment of young minds by the JJJ and ABC type media outlets have won the day and only hard reality like having your electricity bill upped by 18% because of “a few bugs in the CCS Unit” will see any change.

    Large computers are not needed to model the CO2 – Atmosphere interaction and the whole CAGW farce is in fact Scientifically Legless.

    The only problem is: We Are Not Dealing With Science.

    What we have is very deliberate misinformation designed to draw votes which gives access to treasury which means you may never have to work again.

    Crazy!

    KK

    614

  • #
    TdeF

    “water vapor rules — and emissions from the world’s oceans blast those percentage points into decimal oblivion” star comment

    Of course, but the atmosphere is in furious exchange with all the other gases too, controlled by Henry’s Law. Like a fishtank, fish cannot live in anaerobic water. It has to be filled with oxygen. Fish, krill, whales, dolphins breathe in and CO2 out, fart, digest. Storms, wind, wavelets, rain continually drive the rapid exchange of these very soluble gases.

    Why not ask the oxygen comes from if we breathe it and burn it all the time? Why aren’t oxygen reserves vanishing?

    It is estimated that photosynthesis by phytoplankton produces half the world’s replacement oxygen by CO2 capture and conversion, but where do you read about it? CO2 in particular is extremely soluble because it is so polar and compresses very readily, into a liquid at depth. The average concentration of CO2 in the oceans is a huge 5ml/litre, 0.5%. Then consider that the oceans weigh 400x as much as the air and it is no surprise that the world’s major source of CO2 recycling is the ocean itself. All the old CO2 from the 1950s is gone, whatever the origin.

    All this simple observation, known chemistry and physics is hidden by the IPCC, because they want to hide that air goes rapidly in and out of the water. Humans came from the water and brought their salty water with them internally and their O2 into CO2 processing, like every fish. The IPCC are pushing that life on land is all there is to life, temperature, CO2 and climate. No, the great oceans which cover 66% of the planet are by far the dominant earth environment, not the tiny, thin amount of air above it and the few humans. Even the IPCC accept that 98% of all free CO2 is in the ocean but the IPCC argue it is somehow trapped there because deep ocean currents take 1000 years to mix but this is nonsense. CO2 is a gas and does not obey these made up excuses. The half life is 14 years, accurately measured.

    You have to wonder what will happen though in Paris with a Conservative government in control in Australia, Canada, NZ and now the UK. As Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said, “The argument [behind climate change] is absolute crap”. The worry is the influence of Barack Obama who insists our Great Barrier Reef is vanishing, even though UNESCO says that is not true. How it is connected to CO2 is simply not explained, but what would a lawyer know?

    733

    • #
      TdeF

      Sorry, too enthusiastic. Whales and dolphins and manatee/dugongs and seals, otters are mammals who returned to the water from land and have lungs. They surface to breathe. Fish, prawns, krill. That’s enough.

      190

    • #
      Richard

      Great stuff as usual TdeF, and you are right of course. I wrote about Henry’s law here if anyone wishes to check it out: http://chipstero7.blogspot.co.uk/

      202

    • #
      Hugh

      The average concentration of CO2 in the oceans is a huge 5ml/litre, 0.5%.

      I’d rather believe I’m lied to it is 2.5 mmol/kg, which is, AFAICC, 0.03 g/kg = 0.003 weight per cent. This is “huge”, but 100 times less than your number. While I wasn’t able to google average (not mean) seawater inorganic carbon concentration from any highly credible source, I’m rather interested in your source.

      60

      • #
        Hugh

        Well, I’m talking about inorganic carbon, not carbon dioxide, to be precise.

        50

      • #
        • #
          TdeF

          Sorry again, 50ml/litre as on the graph, not 5ml/litre. 0.5%. Note also how much more soluble CO2 is than Oxygen and it is obvious oxygen enters the water very quickly. Ask any fish.

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          • #
            Hugh

            50 ml CO2, measured in one atm as gas. 1 mmol is 22 ml in one atm. Your source is OK, interpretation was not.

            10

            • #
              TdeF

              At the temperature and pressures of the deep ocean, even 10 atmospheres at 100 metres, CO2 is a liquid, even a liquid/sold mix deeper.

              CO2 phase diagram

              At 1 atmosphere per 10 metres, you have 10 atmospheres at only 100 of the 4Km depth, so for most of the ocean, CO2 is a liquid.

              You could measure it in ml/litre of equivalent gas at STP and perhaps that is what is done? I am not clear and had assumed they were measuring ml of CO2 liquid.

              50

              • #
                Hugh

                Sure, CO2 gas can be solidified, but your graph refers to amount of CO2 as gas in NTP. You get it? It does not mean there is 50 ml liquid CO2 / litre seawater at 2,000 metres in ~200 atm. It means there is about 2 mmol of CO2.

                Next you probably say CO2 snows down at Antarctica.

                12

      • #
        Leo G

        I think you have the speciation of CO2 as a dissolved gas confused with total concentration. The average concentration of total CO2 (ie as dissolved CO2, carbonate and bicarbonate) in seawater is about 0.009% or 2 millimole per kg.

        50

        • #
          Hugh

          Absolutely.

          50ml co2 gas NTP in one litre seawater is not really 0.5 percent. I’m not sure how you could even sensibly calculate co2 content per volume. Per weight it is a very small amount.

          20

      • #
        TdeF

        Hugh, what is inorganic carbon? Solid carbon? Organic chemistry is wholly about carbon. Life on earth is all about carbon. It’s why everything burns. Trees and plants aren’t made from dirt but wholly from CO2 and water.

        2.5mmol/kg? The atomic weight of CO2 is 12+32 = 44, so 2.5mm is *44*10-3gm = 0.110gm. This is 0.1/1000 or 0.01/100 or 0.01%, far too low.

        40

        • #
          RB

          The concentration of CO2 in the oceans is estimated to be 2.3mmol per kg or 0.044g per kilogram. Only 0.5% is in the form of CO2(aq) so that is 0.22mg per kg.

          There is about 50 times the amount of CO2 in the oceans as in the atmosphere but most of it is as bicarbonate. There is about 1/4 of the actual CO2 in the oceans as the atmosphere.

          10

    • #
      jorgekafkazar

      Fish fart? No wonder my uncle never put water in his whisky.

      60

  • #

    The luvvie media can only speak to luvvie media people or the PVS couch potatoes whose eyes, never mind intellect, are still just about able to focus on a television screen. Who they’re trying to persuade of anything is beyond me. If people have any reservations about the propaganda screen, they soon abandon the Goebbels’ outlets and eventually find their way to the skeptic internet.

    “Not only did these strategies fail, they actually helped the skeptic community grow by acting as recruiting sergeants, funnelling and concentrating the scattered opposition around the globe towards the obscure skeptic sites. That trend was aided and abetted by a complete and utter failure to provide a meaty alternative blogosphere in which the science was being honestly discussed, as opposed to acting as an obsequious mouthpiece for science by propagandist press hand-outs. It was all too blatantly fashionable science lite, so they lost the unaligned professional science demographic.”

    https://thepointman.wordpress.com/2013/06/07/how-to-run-a-really-bad-infowar-campaign/

    Pointman

    353

    • #
      ianl8888

      … the unaligned professional science demographic …

      Too tiny (puny) in numbers for the MSM to care about

      40

    • #
      Rick Bradford

      Who they’re trying to persuade of anything is beyond me.

      It’s all for internal consumption. They’re trying to reassure the Faithful and make sure that none of their followers step out of line and start thinking for themselves.

      Cults do this all the time.

      120

  • #
    Roy Hogue

    Shades of skepticalscience. Have they moved in with John Cook?

    Sorry, I don’t really need to ask, I know the answer but I couldn’t resist. They’re all in the same bed all the time. It’s been an incestuous relationship from the start. One feeds off the other and they never get a reality check.

    The climate change monster has a life of its own and grows larger and larger in public and political life, even as it grows more and more ridiculous. And John Q. Public hasn’t the slightest clue about science in general, climate and weather in particular or how to tell when they’re being bamboozled by a huxter or any other skill needed to keep from being led around by a ring through the nose. Even one of my doctors, a very well educated man who should have a firm grip on science, is caught up in it.

    I would laugh if it wasn’t so tragic. Worse, history is full of other examples. So it’s been going on for a long time. But climate change has a central head, the UN, that was absent in other cases, making it worldwide in scope — and ideal to be hijacked for personal gain. And we can’t seem to cut off that head.

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    • #
      Roy Hogue

      Thank god real skeptics are beginning to grow in number.

      220

    • #
      gai

      Yes the ClimAstrologists are all connected and what is more they are organized by Dr. Noel Brown.

      >>>>>>>>>>
      Next time someone pulls out the ‘independent scientists’ card you can pull this information out to counter it. They have been organized by the UN since 1972.
      >>>>>>>>>>

      Noel Brown is the former Director of the United Nations Environment Programme, North American Office. He was an organizer of the Stockholm Conference for the Environment in 1972 where Maurce Stong got the ball rolling. Maurice Strong like Noel Brown is a member of the Club of Rome, Strong is also a Rockefeller Foundation trustee and senior adviser to the World Bank. Both of whom have been involved in CAGW.

      …It is instructive to read Strong’s 1972 Stockholm speech and compare it with the issues of Earth Summit 1992. Strong warned urgently about global warming, the devastation of forests, the loss of biodiversity, polluted oceans, the population time bomb. Then as now, he invited to the conference the brand-new environmental NGOs [non-governmental organizations]: he gave them money to come; they were invited to raise hell at home. After Stockholm, environment issues became part of the administrative framework in Canada, the U.S., Britain, and Europe.
      (wwwDOT)afn.org/~govern/strong.html

      I was doing a bit of research on Judith Curry when I hit a treasure trove of interesting information.

      Judith Curry is president of Climate Forecast Applications Network LLC per her Congressional testimony. Curry’s co-founder is Peter Webster a member of the Aspen Global Change Institute.

      When you pull the Aspen Global Change Institute thread things get really interesting… I felt like I was tracing Machiavelli.

      Climate Communication is a non-profit science and outreach project supported by grants, including from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Climate Communication operates as a project of the Aspen Global Change Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to furthering the scientific understanding of Earth systems and global environmental change…
      http://www.climatecommunication.org/who-we-are/about-us/

      WHAT WE DO

      We publicize and illuminate the latest climate research in plain language, making the science more accessible to the public and policy makers.

      Examples include our primer on climate change and our feature on extreme weather and its connections to climate change. We’ve also released a report on heat waves and climate change.
      ← We Assist Journalists
      We Support Scientists →

      And guess who is on the staff of Climate Communication?
      Peter Gleick
      Katharine Hayhoe
      Michael Mann
      Jeff Masters
      Michael Oppenheimer
      Naomi Oreskes
      Jonathan Overpeck
      Benjamin Santer
      Kevin Trenbreth
      Don Wuebbles

      To name just a few.
      >>>>>>>>>>>

      How did I find this connection? You will die laughing – From Judith Curry’s website.

      >>>>>>>>>>
      And just in case you were wondering what Climate Forecast Applications Network LLC does:

      Number of Employees: 9
      Woman-Owned?: Yes [Judith]
      Award Totals:
      Program/Phase Award Amount ($) # of Awards
      SBIR Phase I…….. $100,000.00………….. 1
      (SBIR = Small Business Innovation Research)
      STTR Phase I…….. $150,000.00…………… 1
      STTR Phase II …… $980,932.00 …………… 1
      ( STTR = Small Business Technology Transfer)
      (wwwDOT)sbir.gov/sbirsearch/detail/13018

      So Judith and Peter have gotten a healthy chunk of change from the US government.

      What has Judith done for that money? The link goes on to detail it.

      2013 / STTR / Phase II
      DOE
      Principal Investigator: Judith Curry, Dr.

      Abstract:
      This proposal addresses the challenge of providing weather and climate information to support the operation, management and planning for wind-energy systems. There is a growing need for extended range forecast information as wind power increases its penetration into the grid. Future scenarios on decadal time scales are needed to support assessment of wind farm siting, long-term purchase agreements and the regulatory environment. To address this challenge, CFAN has developed a hybrid statistical/dynamical forecasting scheme for delivering probabilistic forecasts on time scales from one day to seven months using what is arguably the best forecasting system in the world (European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting, ECMWF). The project also provides a framework to assess future wind power through developing scenarios of inter-annual to decadal climate variability and change. The Phase I project conducted a pilot study for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) region. The project included: assembly and evaluation of relevant data sets; development and evaluation of an ensemble prediction framework for forecasting regional wind power generation and demand on time scales from days to months; development of strategies to assess long term (decadal) changes to the regional wind power environment; and formulation of an online tool that provides decision makers with actionable information related to wind power forecasts and projections. The proposed Phase II project will further develop the capabilities begun during Phase II and extend the project to include the continental U.S. and offshore regions. The objective is to develop a commercially viable capability for the growing array of diversified users in the wind energy forecast market. Commercial Applications and Other Benefits: Customers and end-users of these products include wind farm operators, regional power providers, grid system operators, and energy sales and trading. The other target application is assessment of wind energy project feasibility, to select favorable sites where wind is strongest and year-to-year variability is minimized. Customers for such assessments are project owners, government planners, regulatory agencies, and investors.

      The Aspen Global Change Institute is a United Nation project though they would never say that. It was founded in 1989 just after Hansen and Wirth tricked Congress into believing the climate was getting hotter. The USA then signed (12/06/92) and ratified (21/03/94) the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change at which point hugh amounts of $$$ were directed towards CAGW.

      Dr. Noel Brown is the former Director of the United Nations Environment Programme, North American Office. After receiving a Ph.D from Yale University, he became an organizer of the Stockholm Conference for the Environment in 1972. Dr. Brown is the President of the Friends of the United Nations, a fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, a founding member of the Aspen Global Change Institute and Chairman of the International Institute for Peace through Tourism. He also serves in the Board of Directors of the Climate Institute. Dr. Brown teaches environmental policy at the Elizabeth Mann Borghese Dalhousie Marine Institute in Canada.
      (wwwDOT)usacor.org/biographies/

      >>>>>>>>>>>>>

      People may not understand ‘The Science’ but they do understand being lead around by the nose and they do not like it!

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    Peter Miller

    I presume the ABC is like the BBC, perhaps a little worse, in that it is infested with top heavy, expensive, largely excess to needs, bureaucrats. Mix in a bunch of luvvies and itinerant lefties and you get something which is wasteful beyond belief and peddling the beliefs of the political left, while pretending to be unbiased.

    The BBC used to be sn organisation well liked and respected by the British people, but that was a long time ago – to give you an idea of the problem, the BBC recently paid out redundancies for excess staff of £256 million over a five year period. So, effective management and sound cash control are alien concepts to the BBC.

    As for the BBC’s reporting on ‘climate science’, it is a complete embarrassmen and widely recognised as being a champion of bad science.

    It is not unreasonable to describe the ABC and BBC as Augean Stables, desperately needing the likes of Hercules to clean out the poo which infests them.

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      Peter, the ABC is like a mini-BBC, but without the balance. 😉

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      TdeF

      The ABC has 1,000 public service journalists. Why? The BBC has 5,000. The current review of the BBC will have great impact on its Australian little me. However while the BBC is very publicly aware of its charter, its need and legal obligation for impartiality, under current management, the ABC is seized with Groupthink according to former Chaiman Maurice Newmann, extreme left thinking at that. Apparently some 60% of staff vote Green and their attacks on a conservative government are incessant and extreme. They even set up a (government funded) web site to assist people smugglers with information. The board refuses to discipline anyone and they appoint their friends to review each other. The same with Climate debates. They just sit around agreeing with each other and hating Tony Abbott.

      The solution is simple. As Managing Director Mark Scott said, we are not North Korea. We do not tolerate interference by government in the media but we do not need government media at all. Sell the ABC. Simple. Created in 1923 in the interwar period as a radio system, it has become a media monolith with everything but newspapers and is pushing commercial firms off the internet with free services, funded by $1.3Billion in public money and apparently, no accountability, no charter. Worse, the people who love the ABC refuse to pay for anything via advertising and those who hate it, are forced to pay regardless.

      The same with the BOM. Weather is very profitable news. Data is collected automatically now and we do not need public service utilities doing what other countries do for profit. We certainly do not need public service activists politicising the weather, upgrading storms to Category 5 and fudging numbers to push an anti government or pro IPCC agenda.

      The ABC, BOM, SBS, CSIRO should be sold. If they are worthless, that is what they are worth. If they are worth a fortune, why should we pay? Without an effective charter of absolute independence, we do not need irresponsible state funded media or science. 70 years after WW2, the ABC monolith needs to be demolished. It has lost its purpose.

      As for automatic BBC shows on the ABC, Foxtel has outbid the ABC. Sell the ABC, before it becomes a Sydney only retirement home for overpaid irresponsible journalists, if it is not that already.

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        TdeF

        For a picture of what the ABC used to be

        The last headquarters, almost the last act of the terrible Gillard government (no carbon tax) was to gift a new $100Million headquarters to the ABC. Poor things. 5,000 people now and a law unto themselves, publicly funded but not publicly accountable and able to intimidate governments as a untouchable media giant.

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        Paul

        And the ABC still needs it’s Fat Chequer Unit because it’s thousand journos still don’t know how to collect facts about any story.

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      • #

        No point in trying to sell the ABC. Who in the right mind would buy it?

        It is not “tuned” to operate in a commercial market at all.

        The only option for government is to only fund the ABC to provide the core broadcast services as described back in April.

        ABC funding would only be provided for:

        · 2 TV channels per viewing region
        · 1 regional and one national radio station per “band” in any area
        · an Internet presence limited to that supporting broadcast programmes
        · local content production with export marketing potential with cost recovery

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      gigdiary

      Mix in a bunch of luvvies and itinerant lefties

      At ‘our’ ABC they’re all luvvies and lefties. I reckon they’d even vet the cleaning and maintenance staff for any hint of a conservative political leaning.

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    Ben Palmer

    Thanks for this nice summary of the main talking points and arguments – all debunked.

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      gai

      Just remember this is THEIR list of talking points. The do not DARE go anywhere near our list of talking points.

      My list includes the temperature adjustments:
      Quick Summary Of NCDC Data Tampering Forensics

      CO2 vs Temperature Adjustments — Proof That US Warming Is Mann-Made (Part 2)

      Time Of Observation Bias (TOBS)

      And that is just the start. As another comment I just posted shows, the long term sea level data shows the sea level is dropping as the earth cools from the Holocene Climate Optimum.

      A set of comments I made in the ?George Soros? thread a few days ago shows the CO2 data has been very badly mangled.
      See: (wwwDOT)greenworldtrust.org.uk/Science/Scientific/CO2-ice-HS.htm

      The ‘Catastrophic’ part of CAGW is based on CO2 causing an increase in water vapor tripling the effect of CO2 AND causing a run away positive feed back scenario but water vapor has declined.
      See: (wwwDOT)climate4you.com/ClimateAndClouds.htm

      That is just a couple of examples. Once you look into each piece of the CAGW edifice you find it is sitting on shifting sand.

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        Bulldust

        I had a lovely cruise in 2013. We visited Kusadesi and had to travel inland to Ephesus (Efes) to see the ruins. It used to be a Roman era port – here is the current map with location:

        https://www.google.com/maps/search/37.941111,27.341944/@37.941111,27.341944,15z/data=!4m2!2m1!4b1?hl=en&dg=dbrw&newdg=1

        Sea levels are doing what again?

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          Bulldust

          The Wikipedia entry about Efes Harbour:

          The importance of the city as a commercial centre declined as the harbour was slowly silted up by the river (today, Küçük Menderes) despite repeated dredging during the city’s history.[37] (Today, the harbour is 5 kilometres inland). The loss of its harbour caused Ephesus to lose its access to the Aegean Sea, which was important for trade. People started leaving the lowland of the city for the surrounding hills. The ruins of the temples were used as building blocks for new homes. Marble sculptures were ground to powder to make lime for plaster.

          (Emphassis added).

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          • #
            James Murphy

            Plate tectonics – There are 3-4 plates all pushing each other around in that area, and Turkey happens to be on the Anatolian plate which is moving (being pushed) west/southwest, more or less…as well as up and down.

            Our alarmist friends are too terrified to bother themselves with basic geological principles, like eustacy vs localised, or relative sea level changes. and frequently fail to apply proper definitions when they somehow learn the fancy big words.

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  • #
    Ruairi

    A climate debate on TV,
    As appearing on ABC,
    Is a biased affair,
    With the skeptics not there,
    To allow them to disagree.

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    gai

    “Matthew England seems to think the models understand the climate — this sentence is all about modeled forcings:”

    “If you look at the ‘forcings’ we’re applying today, and the rate of change in the climate system, this change that we’re imposing with greenhouse gases is about a thousand-fold the size of the change we had from these orbital shifts.

    This one really makes me grind my teeth!

    The actual reality:
    GLACIAL INCEPTION
    Can we predict the duration of an interglacial? gives the calculated solar insolation values @ 65N on June 22 for several glacial inceptions:

    Current value – insolation = 479W m−2 (from that paper)

    MIS 7e – insolation = 463 W m−2,
    MIS 11c – insolation = 466 W m−2,
    MIS 13a – insolation = 500 W m−2,
    MIS 15a – insolation = 480 W m−2,
    MIS 17 – insolation = 477 W m−2

    (Changes near the north polar area, about 65 degrees North, are considered important due to the great amount of land. Land masses respond to temperature change more quickly than oceans.)

    So where are we in terms of the Milankovitch cycle and solar insolation?

    NOAA lists the Berger June solar insolation values @ 60N (not 65N)

    Holocene peak insolation: 523 Wm-2
    ……………………………………………..decreased = 47 Wm-2
    to NOW (modern Warm Period) 476 Wm-2
    …………………………………………….. decreased = 12 Wm-2
    above the Depth of the last ice age – around 464 Wm−2

    Look at the amount of solar insolation it took to get out of the Wisconsin Ice Age and do not forget the Younger Dryas Cold Event aka The Big Freeze (ca. 12.9–11.6 ka)
    11,000 years ago…………… 523.16 Wm-2 peak insolation
    Wisconsin Ice age- Holocene transition
    12,000 years ago…………… 522.50 Wm-2

    In other words the earth barely made it out of the Ice Box at peak insolation and the earth has dropped an additional 47 Wm-2 since that peak and is now ONLY 12 Wm-2 above the bottom value for the Wisconsin Ice Age. — And these idiots are afraid of runaway warming???

    It takes about 5 Watts per square metre to raise the worlds temperature from 15°C to 16°C. — (Kelvin Vaughan )
    …..

    So what about this great climate control knob called CO2?

    The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Schimel, 1996] estimated that the change in solar forcing between 1850 (start of the industrial age] and 1990 was only •0.3 W/m 2 at the top of the atmosphere vs. 1.5 W/m 2 for forcing anthropogenic CO2 [cf., Reid, 1997].

    1.5 W/m 2??? that is not even enough to raise the temperature a half degree!

    And that is not even getting into the Dansgaard-Oeschger oscillations, Bond events and Heinrich events that cause global temps to change 16C and 8, 10C in dramatically short times and even NOAA says no one really knows WHY.

    When you can definitively explain the Dansgaard-Oeschger oscillations, Bond events and Heinrich events then get back to me about the CO2 Control Knob.

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    Radical Rodent

    The energy sector reportedly makes up about 76 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

    A classic lie by omission, unless they assume that everyone will insert “human produced” before “greenhouse gas emissions” (which, of course, no-one will), as it is feasible that the energy sector makes up about 76% of human-source “greenhouse gases” (though that very term is contentious enough). However, by not putting that simple phrase in, they are leading their readers to the assumption that this proportion is of all greenhouse gas emissions – in other words, they are eliciting a huge lie!

    JN, having seen your interaction with the delightful Anna, you might as well have been banging your head against a brick wall (the preceding in-car sequence says it all, really). The shutters were up with that girl, and there was nothing that could breach them. Not one iota of fact could have caused that young lady to review her position; her mind was made up, and there was no way it could be changed, even if she had to chisel her way into your house through an engulfing glacier – in her tiny mind, global warming is and it is all the fault of humans, or, perhaps, to suit her comfort-zone thinking, Man.

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    JB

    As a former friend of the ABC I am appalled at the total bias the ABC has on the climate issue and several others. The rabid environmental lobby ought to be proud that they have destroyed the credibility of 3 of the worlds best public broadcasters. As an example, how many BBC documentaries do not contain a reference to global warming / climate change? The BBC has become a joke, an irrelevance thanks to the greens. The ABC is not much better as this article shows.

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    ScotsmaninUtah

    This is a great article 😀

    I liked the piece about Kurt Lambeck .. also his paper on Sea levels and Glacial Rebounding in Britain was interesting but I could not reconcile the position of the British Roman seaforts (1 mile inland and 30 feet higher ) with his timescales especially considering the last Glacier in Britain was around 15,000 years ago.
    But as this article states he was using a computer model.

    Thanks Clara Tran and staff, and to Jo .. 😀

    side note..
    Today I learned that there is such a thing as an “Environmental” psychologist.
    However I do not know what they do 😮

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      Radical Rodent

      ScotsmaninUtah: “Environmental” psychologist? That’s nothing – at Charles Sturt University (no, I have no idea where it is, and, no, I have no wish to find out), there is a “Professor of Public Ethics”. He is probably as engaged with reality as your environmental psychologist (or any psychologist, if you think about it).

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    • #
      gai

      ScotsmaninUtah,
      If you want here are ten papers that prove the sea level has not risen. The sea level was up to 1 to 2 meters higher than today in tectonically stable areas 2000 to 5000 years ago.
      https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2015/03/08/the-cant-find-the-missing-water-and-it-is-a-travesty-that-they-cant/#comment-499786

      I have yet to find one area that the ClimAstrologists have touched where the data has not been ‘adjusted’ until it supports CAGW.

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      • #
        ScotsmaninUtah

        gai
        I disagree with you regarding the sea level not rising, It has been doing so for the last 20,000 years (as we exited the last ice age) , see Professor John christy’s comment on this.
        However, In my post (apologies if I it was not clearly explained ) I was referring to the change in sea level around the British isles since the Roman period. In which “the glacial rebound” has already happened (due to the ice sheets disappearing around 15000 years ago) which is a long time before the Romans started building in Britain . Thus the drop in sea level over the last 2000 years (Roman sea forts are now 1 mile inland) cannot be explained by kurt Lambeck’s paper.
        I hope that kinda explains what I was trying to say..

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      • #
        ScotsmaninUtah

        gai
        thank you for the link to the 10 papers , I will take a look at these it will be interesting to see how they compare with Curry’s paper on estimating absolute sea level for 2nd and 3rd order events. 😀

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    • #
      George McFly......I'm your density

      They counsel trees…

      40

  • #
    diogenese2

    The significant thing about this programme is that the sponsors think it is necessary (quite reasonably).They are admitting that they are losing credibility and have pointed to
    their areas of vulnerability.
    Claim 1; The “hiatus”, hence the “hottest ever” stories whist the people shiver.
    Claim 2; The rapidly emerging paleodata refuting that today is “special”.
    Claim 3; TdeF #3 nails this pretty well although # 3.1 – whales & Dolphins will still not survive an anaerobic ocean, they can breath but there is nothing to eat! Even Wikipaedia on the carbon cycle (possible suffering from Stoat attack) shows the context – human emissions are 2% of the exchange between atmosphere and biosphere/oceans.
    Claim 4; Actually the contributions of Scientists to the current “panic” are small, as is their share of the pot.
    Claim 5; possibly and own goal!

    Jo; #6.1 That is wicked, you should be ashamed – and what are you doing up at 4.33am!

    I get the impression that the usual suspects are beginning, somewhat hysterically, to just go through the motions as they perceive the thrashing they are going to get in Paris.
    Note that India is adamant on their emission increases – also they will want more coal than they can dig so watch out for Soros to come fishing.
    China, ironically, after only 2 decades of frantic growth is running out of workforce and are trying, with scant success, to increase the birthrate. To quote “To have a child in China
    is a test of the family’s economic strength. The policy has been changed but the younger generation in the cities still need to consider their economic situation before having a baby”. (see GWPF website)

    Malthus, eat your pants!

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    • #

      I hope they do get a thrashing in Paris, but I’d bet money that there will be a monster press conference at the end (already scheduled in ) saying how groundbreaking these deals are and how much more needs to be done. No matter what happens, this is coming. They won’t make the same PR mistake again as they did in Copenhagen. They are much better prepared this time with all the promises already locked in publicly months ahead. They may well pull off a hundred billion dollar crime.

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      • #

        …..but I’d bet money that there will be a monster press conference at the end (already scheduled in) saying how groundbreaking these deals are and how much more needs to be done.

        I for one can’t wait for this huge press conference, when the talking head says that as a result of this momentous conference, they categorically demand that all CO2 emitting power plants be turned off immediately, and that no more of them open, anywhere on Planet Earth.

        I’ll be waiting an awful long time to hear that.

        Tony.

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        • #
          AndyG55

          Japan have nine new coal fired power stations planned, that I have heard about.

          There may be more.

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        • #
          TdeF

          No, only in Australia, NZ, Canada, the US, Japan and Western Europe. It is not about the rest of the world.

          The Russians and Chinese and Indians or any Asian country at all are obviously not going to take any notice. The Africans are too poor and the smaller nations at the UN want cash as compensation for being smaller nations. Especially Christina Figueres’ Costa Rica with a GDP per capita of 1/7th of Australia. The whole campaign is to get ‘rich’ countries to pay indulgences directly to the UN. It was never about Global Warming. That is openly admitted, but no one really listens. They gave up on science years ago. Remember the IPCC announced all the Glaciers in India were melting and 400 million would die of thirst by 2035? No evidence at all. These announcements are irrelevant. It is all about money and power, not Science.

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          • #
            TdeF

            In the paper this morning, Russia and the Ukraine have been producing dodgy CO2 certificates for millions in cash. Now who could have expected that?

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            • #
              gai

              GEE so what else is new?

              Undersecretary of the Treasury of the USA, Harry Dexter White, handed over US printing plates for Allied military marks to the Soviets after WWII. Of course he was also a USSR spy.(Code names—JURIST, LAWYER and RICHARD)

              Harry Dexter White along with John Maynard Keynes are best known as the architects of the Bretton Woods system. (IMF and World Bank)

              Isn’t it nice to know the world financial system was set up by a Communist and a Fabian Socialist?

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          • #
            Cookster

            The Chinese and Indians will likely be on the receiving end of any efforts in Paris by the Western climate establishment to reduce our emissions – they are being bribed! The Chinese play lip service to pretend they believe the global warming hype by building a few token wind farms knowing full well the UN and self important fools in Western democracies are willing and able to throw billions at them to clean up their act.

            The Chinese are more concerned with coal particulate pollution than CO2 emissions. This is why they are replacing old coal powered stations with new / cleaner coal powered power stations. The new technology is also more efficient and therefore more cost efficient.

            Russia will never agree to curtail production of fossil fuel reserves that it needs to sell to keep the lights on in Europe. Not much I like about Putin but on this issue he just might be on our side!

            Also Christina Figueres’ Costa Rica is blessed with readily available geothermal energy and plenty of dams for Hydro. Unlike places like Australia where we are stuck with useless wind farms and yet to be seen solar plants.

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        • #

          Surely some of you have wondered why the UN has never come out and called for the closure of CO2 emitting power plants ….. anywhere, especially in the already Developed World.

          That’s where they will be getting their money from, with the imposition of an ETS, the money raised being forwarded to the UN for dispersal in the non Developed Countries.

          Shut down those CO2 emitting plants and there goes the source of their money.

          I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been accused of making that up, but hey, I can only go on what the UNFCCC has said all along, and it’s still at their site. Seven years ago, when I started all this it was right up there as a statement all on its own. Now, with literally thousands of edits since then, it’s hidden in reams and reams of text, you know, hidden in plain sight.

          I wrote about at the time in a Post from 2007, and have written about it often since then.

          Perhaps the best Post is at the following link.

          The UN and Climate Change – Ten Fateful Words dated November 2010, just prior to the Cancun gabfest. (incidentally, some of the links at that Post have since, umm, disappeared, probably because the articles linked to may have been, how shall I put this politely, perhaps inconvenient)

          Close down the power plants and there goes all their money. THAT’S why you’ll never hear the UN calling for closures.

          Tony.

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      • #
        John F. Hultquist

        Keep asking how many degrees lower will this make the temperature in 2100.
        Unfurl a large banner across the street from the meeting during this big press conference.

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  • #
    Manfred

    Well, I’m relieved that thankfully, no one has yet mentioned that well known laxative, ‘anthropocene’.

    He might protest that climate models don’t need to understand regional changes like this because they are looking at global averages, but the GCMs (big computerized climate models) estimate the regions, then add up the mistakes to get the global average.

    aka, The Great [Global Average Temperature] Con. There is no empirical global average temperature without knowing the range (and standard deviation). On its own, it is empirically meaningless. Models jerking themselves around some arbitrary ‘average’ in response to arranged forcings in order to demonstrate anomalies, does not the climate predict. This has been recurrently demonstrated quite satisfactorily.

    Thank you Jo, for this excellent summary. It will be of great value to new visitors here.

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      ‘anthropocene’? Surely you mean the Academicene: a period whose beginning is marked by a thick deposit of thin layered white carbon material in what is known as the “P-C transition”.

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        KinkyKeith

        brilliant but may go over he heads of Klimate Scientists who study no Geology. 🙂

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      • #
        Manfred

        Superb MH!
        Who knows, it may well transpire that we have a real catastrophic species extinguishing event from the sky, one that geologist of the far future do indeed define by the definitive PC layer.

        Anthropocene is a social and scientific ‘red flag’. Confusingly, it could also be considered as a Green Flag.

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    • #
      gai

      The ‘global average temperature’ is a really rotten number to follow in the first place since it does not actually measure the energy in the system. (You need to include the latent heat in atmospheric water among other things.)

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  • #
    Bill Johnston

    Well done Jo.

    Perhaps England could hire an used Russian icebreaker and head down there for Christmas with all his greenie mates. Or even get hold of a bunch of data from the Bureau of bulls*it and analyse it for himself. I wonder who the ABC’ll peddle out next, I wonder even if the likes of England pay the ABC for gas-time. I wonder if there is any global warming.

    We can be sure the campaign will ramp-up over the comming months.

    Cheers,

    Bill

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  • #
    Yonniestone

    The ABC’s “#TalkAboutIt” reads like any other rabid propaganda that I’ve personally encountered in my short time, when people get so absorbed in their cause it affects their lives they get very tiresome to those not seeing the light and judgments leading to divisions placed by both sides will naturally occur.

    Some will say I’m doing exactly that by supporting the skeptical CAGW argument via this website, it would be true for the exception of one vital fact, I don’t 100% believe everything that’s written on these pages and will either research or continue to until I’m satisfied of saying yes, complete unquestioned agreement is a huge destroyer of human creativity that greatly assists the uncreative.

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  • #
    gai

    “If they [skeptics] could disprove the physics of the greenhouse effect…”

    …..

    This is the other statement that is a real winner. (My other comment is still in moderation)

    Dr. Happer has disprove the physics of the greenhouse effect that under lies the climate models. (Paper soon to be published hopefully)

    The take away from his UNC lecture (9/2014) was the CO2 ‘modeling’ is a mish-mash of theoretical equations and experimentally derived data. Where the Climate alarmists missed the boat is in using equations for ‘line broadening’ aka the ‘wings’ where the additional CO2 absorption ( at 400 ppm) is supposedly taking place. These equations produce results that do not match up to the experimental data. The lines are not as broad as theory would have it. This means you take the log curve and squash it even flatter at 400 ppm and above. This means the CO2 sensitivity is much smaller than calculated by the IPCC.

    These absorption wings are not this broad.
    https://geosciencebigpicture.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/co2abs4x.jpg

    Dave Burton was kind enough to record the lecture and he has the slides.

    Here’s Prof. Happer’s lecture:
    http://www.sealevel.info/Happer_UNC_2014-09-08/
    (There’s no video recording, but there’s an audio recording + powerpoint slides, so you can step through the slides as you listen to the lecture.)

    Also, if you click on the link there entitled “Another_question.html” you’ll see an email exchange where Prof. Happer kindly explained this to me in more detail.

    Slides 16, 22, 42, 43 and 44 are the critical slides. Especially Slide 22 titled:
    Lorentzian line shape nor Voigt line shapes are correct in the far wings!

    WUWT has an illustration from the old logarithmic CO2 curve. If it was adjusted for reality, 80% to 90% of the effect of CO2 occurs in the first part of the curve at less than 220 ppm, the minimum amount of CO2 essential for plants and therefore life. (That amount has been ‘adjusted too’)

    https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/clip_image002_thumb3.jpg

    This is the old curve. You can figure CO2 is essentially saturated @ 400 ppm so the line go pretty much flat at that point instead of slowly continuing to climb.
    wattsupwiththat(DOT)files.wordpress.com/2010/03/co2_modtrans_img1.png

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      AndyG55

      “This means you take the log curve and squash it even flatter at 400 ppm and above. ”

      Actually Gai, start flattening it at around 280ppm.

      https://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/agw-an-alternate-look-part-1-details-c.pdf

      Of particular interest is figure 2.

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    • #
      OriginalSteve

      Based on John Christy’s 2012 submission to the US Senate Committee on Public Works, I’d consider that a giant killer. All he did was compare empirical evidence in the form of weatehr balloon and satellite temperature readings and compare them over 20 years agaionst the IPCC models in the AR4 report.

      He found that surface temps based on observations above, increased 0.0-0.2C, where as the IPCC models predicted 0.4-1.2C

      IPCC 0
      John Christy 1

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    • #
      bobl

      Yes, this has been my position for some time, the thickening of the spectral lines depends on the atmospheric density being unbounded, but it’s not. Atmospheric density remains the same because for each CO2 added an O2 is removed. CO2 energy interception does saturate, it cannot remain a log characteristic unless the volume of the atmosphere increases with burning!

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  • #
    el gordo

    “The climate system is changing dramatically compared to past climate changes … ‘

    That is an outright lie.

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    • #
      gai

      Boy is it ever! The earth is in one of the least volatile climates in geologic history. The abrupt climate changes have been very muted during the Holocene and that is what has allowed humans to build civilization.

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  • #
    el gordo

    ‘Antarctic Sea Ice IS growing.’

    It has been growing over the past few years, but now it has returned to average.

    https://sunshinehours.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/antarctic_sea_ice_extent_zoomed_2015_day_235_1981-2010.png

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    gai

    “Matthew England seems to think the models understand the climate — this sentence is all about modeled forcings:”

    “If you look at the ‘forcings’ we’re applying today, and the rate of change in the climate system, this change that we’re imposing with greenhouse gases is about a thousand-fold the size of the change we had from these orbital shifts.

    ………………………

    This one really makes me grind my teeth!

    The actual reality: GLACIAL INCEPTION?
    Can we predict the duration of an interglacial? gives the calculated solar insolation values @ 65N on June 22 for several glacial inceptions:

    Current value – insolation = 479W m−2 (from that paper)

    MIS 7e – insolation = 463 W m−2,
    MIS 11c – insolation = 466 W m−2,
    MIS 13a – insolation = 500 W m−2,
    MIS 15a – insolation = 480 W m−2,
    MIS 17 – insolation = 477 W m−2

    (Changes near the north polar area, about 65 degrees North, are considered important due to the great amount of land. Land masses respond to temperature change more quickly than oceans.)

    So where are we in terms of the Milankovitch cycle and solar insolation?

    NOAA lists the Berger June solar insolation values @ 60N (not 65N)

    Holocene peak insolation: 523 Wm-2
    ……………………………………………..decreased = 47 Wm-2
    to NOW (modern Warm Period) 476 Wm-2
    …………………………………………….. decreased = 12 Wm-2
    above the Depth of the last ice age – around 464 Wm−2

    Look at the amount of solar insolation it took to get out of the Wisconsin Ice Age and do not forget the Younger Dryas Cold Event aka The Big Freeze (ca. 12.9–11.6 ka)
    11,000 years ago…………… 523.16 Wm-2 peak insolation
    Wisconsin Ice age- Holocene transition
    12,000 years ago…………… 522.50 Wm-2

    In other words the earth barely made it out of the Ice Box at peak insolation and the earth has dropped an additional 47 Wm-2 since that peak and is now ONLY 12 Wm-2 above the bottom value for the Wisconsin Ice Age. — And these chicken littles are afraid of runaway warming???

    …..

    So what about this great climate control knob called CO2?

    The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Schimel, 1996] estimated that the change in solar forcing between 1850 (start of the industrial age] and 1990 was only •0.3 W/m 2 at the top of the atmosphere vs. 1.5 W/m 2 for forcing anthropogenic CO2 [cf., Reid, 1997].

    1.5 W/m 2??? that is not even enough to raise the temperature a half degree! (It takes ~5 W/m2)

    And that is not even getting into the Dansgaard-Oeschger oscillations, Bond events and Heinrich events that cause global temps to change 8C, 10C and even 16C in dramatically short times and even NOAA says no one really knows WHY.

    When you can definitively explain the Dansgaard-Oeschger oscillations, Bond events and Heinrich events then get back to me about that CO2 Control Knob.

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    • #
      Richard

      not even enough to raise the temperature a half degree (it takes ~5 W/m2

      Just a quibble, but it would take 2.72 W/sq.m to raise the tempearture 0.5C according to the S-B law assuming the average surface temperature is 288K.

      Anyway, I have always found it odd how the forcing from the Milankovitch cycle could be so weak. The theory promoted by the IPCC and Skeptical Science is that the weak forcing from the Milankovitch cycle starts off the warming and this is then amplified in a positive feedback loop by CO2 and other greenhouse gases that give us interglacials. The globally-averaged forcing from the Milankovitch cycle is often estimated at around 0.8 W/sq.m (2010 Climate and Earth’s Energy Budget) and the globally-averaged temperature-change between glacials and interglacials is estimated to about 5C. Now, a 5C temperature increase from 283K to 288K requires 26 W/sq.m of forcing. So about 25.2 W/sq.m of forcing between glacials and interglacials should be attributed to greenhouse gases with only about 0.8 W/sq.m attributed to the Milankovitch cycle. Question: How do glacials even begin when the forcing from greenhouse gases are ~26 times stronger than the Milankovitch cycle? Wouldn’t the planet just be stuck in an interglacial forever?

      Nothing about the CAGW-theory makes sense.

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      • #
        gai

        Thanks Richard,

        Where the IPCC and Skeptical Science mislead is they are not looking at the 21 June insolation minimum at 65°N.

        It is not the amount of solar insolation but the distribution of the solar insolation that counts.

        This is the exact same type of sleight of hand that Trainbreath pulls with his flat disk always facing a weak sun.

        RACookPE1978 gives a Spreadsheet for solar radiation received on the equinox at each latitude at noon.

        The value of 1150 W/m^2 at the equator at mid day vs TOA for that day receiving 1353 W/m^2 gives a much better idea of how much energy is ‘lost’ before it encounters the oceans at the Equator and is absorbed or reflected. ‘Lost’ is being reflected or being available to interact with the upper atmosphere such as forming ozone. In other words at that latitude at midday the atmosphere is pretty darn transparent especially when you consider the chemical reactions taking place in the atmosphere and the fact that some of the incoming radiation is absorbed and transformed in to ‘heat’ – kinetic energy.

        This energy then penetrates the oceans up to a depth of up to 100 meters where it is absorbed.

        Trenberth’s cartoon doesn’t even get into the chemical reactions taking place in the atmosphere much less the energy stored in the oceans.

        If we compare the numbers in Trenberth’s cartoon to RACook’s numbers, Trainbreath has 23 W/m^2 reflected by the surface and 162 W/m^2 absorbed or putting their flat disk as equivalent to a horizontal surface at midday some where between Lat_W of 70 to 80. I know I am comparing apples to the stuff coming out of the back end of a pig. However even, I as a lay person realizes the energy that hits the surface of the earth is not immediately re-radiated once the sun goes down else we would be heading towards absolute zero every night.

        Also solar radiation entering the oceans is going to have a residence time that is a lot different then that of land. John Kehr shows this in his third graph where the response of the Northern Hemisphere vs the Southern Hemisphere can be seen. (The Southern Hemisphere has a lot more ocean. Earth is closest to the Sun in January, the Southern Hemisphere summer and the southern pole is tilted towards the sun.)

        …the basic generic behavior of the Earth is on an annual basis.This is based on the average from the 1900-1990 data and I have used this extensively as the baseline behavior for the Earth today. Anomaly has no place on this chart because this shows the actual temperature of the Earth and each hemisphere. How the seasons affect the global average is readily apparent. To me it also shows how many factors can influence the global anomaly….
        theinconvenientskeptic(DOT)com/2013/03/misunderstanding-of-the-global-temperature-anomaly/

        A reasonable tutorial on the Milankovitch cycles with good animation.
        (wwwDOT)sciencecourseware.org/eec/GlobalWarming/Tutorials/Milankovitch/

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        • #
          OriginalSteve

          Just a thought – the ammount of heat needed to be pumped ito the air to increase ocean temps by even 0.1C would have to be huge – not being a physicist I could imagine to raise air temp to probably 100s degrees C and the direct themal coupling of air to ocean would be limited, so to increase temps of the ocean would probably mean the atmosphere turing into a thermal plasma?

          Thoughts welcome…

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          • #
            KinkyKeith

            Without any search or real thought on the matter my instinct says that ocean energy is mainly supplied to the molten hot core and little else.

            One day when the core is at boiling point of water the oceans will probably be iced over.

            Experiment: I imagine placing my hand on the Earth at noon in the middle of summer.

            It would feel warm.

            At night it will feel cool where I live.

            No net energy gain.

            Whether water is a better energy absorber than trees or soil probably wont matter much; the oceans will probably not hold much of the Sun’s incident energy.

            ??

            KK

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            • #
              KinkyKeith

              sorry:

              mainly supplied BY

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            • #
              gai

              “… the oceans will probably not hold much of the Sun’s incident energy.”

              KK, I think Dr Nir Shaviv would disagree with you.

              First this graph:
              http://www.klimaatfraude.info/images/sverdrup.gif

              The Oceans as a Calorimeter

              ….So, what do the oceans tell us?

              Over the 11 or so year solar cycle, solar irradiance changes by typically 0.1%. i.e., about 1 W/m2 relative to the solar constant of 1360 W/m2. Once one averages for the whole surface of earth (i.e., divide by 4) and takes away the reflected component (i.e., times 1 minus the albedo), it comes out to be about 0.17 W/m2 variations relative to the 240 W/m2. Thus, if only solar irradiance variations are present, Earth’s sensitivity has to be pretty high to explain the solar-climate correlations (see the collapsed box below).

              However, if solar activity is amplified by some mechanism (such as hypersensitivity to UV, or indirectly through sensitivity to cosmic ray flux variations), then in principle, a lower climate sensitivity can explain the solar-climate links, but it would mean that a much larger heat flux is entering and leaving the system every solar cycle.

              The IPCC’s small solar forcing and the emperor’s new clothes.
              Now, is there a direct record which measures the heat flux going into the climate system? The answer is that over the 11-year solar cycle, a large fraction of the flux entering the climate system goes into the oceans. However, because of the high heat capacity of the oceans, this heat content doesn’t change the ocean temperature by much. And as a consequence, the oceans can be used as a “calorimeter” to measure the solar radiative forcing. Of course, the full calculation has to include the “calorimetric efficiency” and the fact that the oceans do change their temperature a little (such that some of the heat is radiated away, thereby reducing the calorimetric efficiency).

              It turns out that there are three different types of data sets from which the ocean heat content can derived….

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              • #
                KinkyKeith

                Thanks Gai

                Was just talking off the top of my head without any detailed assessment.

                Four decades ago I would have been able to work on it but I have found that the Anthropogenic Global Warming Myth fails on many points at far less sophisticated levels than most people dream of.

                One example is the hyperbolic effect wrt adding more CO2 to the atmosphere.

                There is only one limited quantity of Solar energy ( ground origin IR band as per GH effect) which can be soaked up by CO2 and once that is 100% covered there is no point adding more CO2. Nothing happens.

                Well in fact things do happen, like convection and water vapour but why mess up a good fairytale.

                KK

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          • #
            toorightmate

            You would certainly require many, many Bunsen burners.

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  • #
    el gordo

    ‘And this week it announced July was the warmest month since record-keeping began in 1880, with 2015 shaping up to beat last year’s mark.’

    Simply amazing, a month, have they no shame. In fact 1877-78 were hotter, but that’s another story.

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    AndyG55

    Slightly OT… but it seems that the Joint Initiative led to increased CO2 emissions. 🙂

    “About three quarters of the certificates led to even higher emissions.” […] Through the JI mechanism, global greenhouse gas emissions may have risen an estimated 600 million tonnes.”

    http://notrickszone.com/2015/08/25/the-emissions-certificates-grand-scam-spiegel-the-money-making-machine-three-quarters-led-to-higher-emissions/#sthash.bUMB7ZI3.dpbs

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  • #
    PeterS

    Scientists are creating panic in order to get funding

    It will be interesting to see what happens when (not if) we have our next global financial crisis (which may be right now as we speak or some time later). The money will dry up and the so called climate scientists will have to find some other scam to fund their corrupted research.

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    • #
      Bulldust

      I am surprised the following wasn’t included:

      “On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both. (Quoted in Discover, pp. 45–48, October 1989. For the original, together with Schneider’s commentary on its misrepresentation, see also American Physical Society, APS News August/September 1996.[11])”

      (Emphasis added).

      Stephen Schneider knew of these issues. In my book, and I would hope that of any rational human, the person who goes into teh latter camp, of offering “scary scenarios” is no longer behaving as a scientist. A concerned person perhaps, but unless the scary scenarios are backed by facts, they are simply the imagination running wild. Good for fiction writers, the worst thing you can do if you want to be taken seriously as a scientist.

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    David-of-Cooyal in Oz

    Well done Jo. And many thanks. I could not have created that response, especially in such a short time frame.
    Cheers,
    Dave B

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    Neville

    There is nothing unprecedented or unusual about the climate over the last 165 years.
    The Vance study, the Calvo study, the Lloyd study and the Pages 2k study all show this to be true.
    Whether we choose to talk about SLR, polar bears, extreme events, bush fires, rainfall, floods etc.
    And the RS and NAS report written by 7 IPCC authors( 5 lead authors) tells us there is zero we do to mitigate their CAGW for thousands of years.
    Their arguments are pure fiction and delusional nonsense from start to finish.

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  • #
    Rick Will

    A headline you will not see in popular press:
    “Greenland Accumulates a Massive 200 Gigatonne of Snow and Ice in 2015”

    http://www.dmi.dk/en/groenland/maalinger/greenland-ice-sheet-surface-mass-budget/

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  • #
    handjive

    Gather ’round. I sees what ails ya’ll!

    “What you need isthe Machine To Predict the Future.

    “It can suggest which land will remain arable and which parts will dry out, which cities will be flooded by sea-level rise and which will run out of water because glaciers disappear.

    It can tell you which resorts will prosper and which will fail, where to buy real estate, where to invest in farmland, and which foodstuffs will be in short supply.

    The Machine?

    The IPCC has published five assessment reports, the first in 1990 and the fifth in 2014, so roughly one every five years.
    These reports, compiled from the findings of thousands of scientists worldwide, constitute one of the most fine-grained and comprehensive scientific models ever devised to predict the likely future of life on earth, our oceans and rivers, forests, farms and fisheries.

    These models exist as computer simulations, which can be tested, running them back in time to replicate with scary accuracy the climate events that have occurred over the past century.

    They can be run forward in time to indicate for us what the climate will do in the future, given the slow but steady rise in the planet’s surface temperature.

    Bigger than the Large Hadron Collider, able to see further than the Hubble space telescope, more expensive than the space programme … running only on the lubrication from carbon(sic) taxes …

    The UN Machine To Predict the Future

    PS: Send more money, or the climate gets it!

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    • #
      handjive

      Testing the Machine to Predict the Future:

      The IPCC has published five assessment reports, the first in 1990 and the fifth in 2014, so roughly one every five years.

      How did that 1990 IPCC report go?

      San Jose Mercury News (CA) – June 30, 1989

      GRIM FORECAST
      A senior environmental official at the United Nations, Noel Brown, says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.

      Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of “eco-refugees,” threatening political chaos, said Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program.

      He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human…
      . . .
      A grim Forecast it was, but only for the UN-IPCC’s 97% consensus carbon(sic) induced forecasting ability.

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      • #
        PeterK

        Handjive: Running my “Time Machine” to “Predict The Future” I have found out that I have with luck 20 to 25 years left on this world of ours.

        If the current economic system does not crash, my “Time Machine” says that my kids will inherit all that I possess (which isn’t a hell of a lot).

        My “Time Machine” says that there will be some new discoveries and solutions to some of our illnesses and that over time certain cures will be found and or minimized for some of our current maladies.

        My “Time Machine” says that there will be wars here and there and unless the whole world goes nuts, no world war is predicted to occur.

        My “Time Machine” says that when I die, the weather may be cooler or it may be warmer and that all in all, the weather will probably remain the same in 2035 as it is currently in 2015.

        My “Time Machine” also says that popcorn shares will quadruple in price in the next 9 months.

        If my “Time Machine” is wrong on any of these items listed, please get back to me in 2050 and we can discuss my “Time Machines” errors in “Predicting The Future.”

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    David Maddison

    Interestingly, as the ABC ramps up its Orwellian CAGW propaganda, it is attacking George Orwell.

    http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/theminefield/george-orwell/6708170

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    pat

    when it comes to pushing CAGW, ABC is much worse than BBC. ABC manages to insert their CAGW narrative into almost all programs across all platforms 24/7. talk about overkill.

    25 Aug: Financial Post Canada: Julian Morris: Obama’s Clean Power Plan projections fly in the face of real-world results
    Every regulation promulgated by the White House under the presumption that the social cost of carbon is greater than zero must be re-evaluated…
    (Julian Morris is vice president of research at Reason Foundation and author of the recent study, “Assessing the Social Costs and Benefits of Regulating Carbon Emissions.”)
    http://business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/obamas-clean-power-plan-projections-fly-in-the-face-of-real-world-results

    14 Aug: Reason Foundation: Julian Morris: The Social Cost of Carbon Underestimates Human Ingenuity, Overestimates Climate Sensitivity
    The Clean Power Plan and climate change models assume the climate is more sensitive to increases in carbon dioxide than is actually the case
    A likely explanation for the failure of the climate models is that they assume the climate is more sensitive to increases in carbon dioxide than is actually the case. This is supported by several recent studies, which suggest that climate sensitivity is lower than even the lowest estimate assumed by the Intergovernmental Working Group. The IPCC implicitly acknowledged this in its 2013 update, which reduced the bottom of its range of estimates of future warming, but the Interagency Working Group ignored it in its own updates.
    A further significant problem with the Interagency Working Group assessment of the social cost of carbon is that it is based on highly pessimistic assumptions concerning the ability of humanity to adapt to climate change…
    http://reason.org/news/show/climate-change-overestimates-sensit

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    David Maddison

    It is obvious that CAGW is not happening. Why can’t the “scientists” promoting warming be asked to provide evidence for their claims? This whole CAGW thing is now unstoppable and has a life of its own, independent of the lack of evidence and it is contributing to the decline and destruction of Western Civilisation along with a certain other political ideology known for a vast majority of wars, conflicts and terrorist acts around the world but which I don’t think I would be allowed to mention by name on this blog.

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    • #
      OriginalSteve

      CAGW is a middle class mind-mess. Its a classic case of a little bit of education being dangerous…..

      Ask any blue collar bloke, and I’m very sure most of them will tell you its a pile of horse hooey.

      Ask any wealthy elitist, and they will be too busy peretuating teh myth to make money off the monkey-see-monkey-do middle class.

      FWIW, I’d consider myself middle class and have a B. Eng, I can also see objectively how deeply the middle class has been done over.

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  • #
    pat

    Clara Tran who is credited with the ABC article posted by Jo, describes herself on Twitter: “ABC Journalist/Producer. Avid reader, daydreamer & armchair music lover”, so she is well-suited to writing a CAGW sceptics vs “scientists” piece!

    on Lateline, Alberici, who has no “climate” qualifications, ignores Doherty’s admission that he is not a “climate scientist” as together they push the CAGW line for for than 11 MINUTES! as usual, anything goes provided it fits the CAGW narrative:

    AUDIO: 25 Aug: ABC Lateline: Interview: Peter Doherty, Nobel Prize Winner for Medicine in 1996
    PETER DOHERTY, AUTHOR, ‘THE KNOWLEDGE WARS’ (archive): But I do try to talk out on important issues that I think a scientific voice is useful. And I also try to defend some people in science. I mean, climate scientists, for example, have come under the most extraordinary attack because what they’re saying is very threatening to various vested interests. So I try to speak up for them…
    PETER DOHERTY: I think we’re going to see new technologies that help us to deal with it better.
    ***But it’s kind of an incremental area of science to me – and I may be wrong because I’m not a climate scientist…
    EMMA ALBERICI: Now, you write that so much has been said and written by politicians and others, trying to discredit the findings of the climate science community. Who do you think is winning the knowledge wars at the moment? Is it those who are trying to discredit the climate scientists or the climate scientists themselves?
    PETER DOHERTY: I suspect with the broader Australian community, people are taking notice and I think that climate scientists are getting a good hearing. I think, on the other hand, that because of our heavy dependence on fossil fuel exports and fossil fuel use we have had a rather stronger voice here than many other countries have experienced.
    I think a little bit of that is eroding, though – though we still hear from the Prime Minister, for example, that he thinks that our future rests with export of coal. Nobody expects coal to go away overnight but backing coal as our long-term future doesn’t seem to me to be a very good idea – especially after the discussions I’ve had on this in China.
    EMMA ALBERICI: What in particular has formed that view after discussions you’ve had in China?
    PETER DOHERTY: Well, I was in Hong Kong at a meeting on sustainable cities. And we had a lot of people from mainland China, as well as people from Hong Kong.
    ???And they’re all saying that they’re aiming to get off coal much more quickly than they’ve been saying in the past.
    ???They want to get away from fossil fuels and, of course, they’re putting enormous investment into solar. They’re also developing a lot of nuclear plants. And so I think we’re going to see things happen more quickly than we expect.
    And as was mentioned before, we’re also going to see a lot more developments in storage through battery technology. Of course, we can already store solar or wind if we’ve got the facility; for instance, by pumping water back up into dams to run hydropower. So storage, I think, is going to become a really big thing.
    And we’re going to see transforming technologies too, but I don’t think that’s going to essentially solve the problem without us having some behavioural change…
    EMMA ALBERICI:…You write in the book about everything that’s currently available to us that we sort of take for granted, that it has its roots in science: the internet, electricity, the jumbo jets, statins, vaccines, automobiles, washing machines, even popcorn and Coca Cola. They couldn’t have been imagined, as you write, back in the 16th century.
    But the difference between those discoveries and climate science is that the ones I’ve mentioned make life better, where global warming seems obviously a threat to us. Against that reality we need really good science communicators to make people understand how and why lives will need to change. Do you think they exist at the moment?
    PETER DOHERTY: Well, a lot of people have been trying: people like Tim Flannery on the local scene. We see a lot of reporting in this type of area. But I don’t think it’s cutting through to the extent that it absolutely has to, because we tend to minimise.
    You know, the primary characteristic of human beings that differentiates us from all other species is the fact that we are aware of the reality of our own deaths. And as a result of that, I think the primary defining characteristic of human beings is actually denial…
    EMMA ALBERICI: Indeed. And in fact you talk about, we talk about the need to communicate this properly because it is so complex an area of science and talks about things hundreds of thousands of years ago and hundreds of years into the future – which, you know, makes most people’s kind of brains explode.
    And you mentioned Tim Flannery as someone who has been using the media wisely and getting a message across. But he, for example, in 2008 predicted that potentially by 2013 there would be no more arctic icecaps. And, in fact, just recently NASA has come out and said that the icecaps are pretty much where they were in the 70s?
    PETER DOHERTY: It’s really complex and… I mean, glaciers are retreating. But it’s really complex science. And it’s undoubtedly the case that early on in climate science – and I’ve heard this from active climate science – that the levels of certainty were often greatly overstated and that was a mistake. And I think that’s what got the backs up of a lot of older scientists who sort of came out against climate science and said we don’t really need to worry about it.
    ***But I think the process itself seems to me as an outsider – and I’m an outsider of climate science. It’s not my science; I’m a biochemical scientist – it seems to me that the process has a kind of inexorable quality to it. And it may be that a lot of what we’re seeing – though people are very reluctant to over-commit themselves – a lot of what we’re seeing in severe bushfires, droughts and so forth, extreme flooding, is having a component of climate science effect in that already.
    But what we’re talking about, of course, is a long-term issue and long-term issues are pretty difficult. And also, as “Yogi” Berra says: prediction is difficult, especially if it’s about the future.
    But I think what we can predict: that is if we continue to trap heat in our biosphere, we’re going to have untoward effects as time goes by and things are going to change in ways that are not necessarily great.
    EMMA ALBERICI: So you write that science in the public space needs much more help from professional storytellers. Did you have anyone in particular in mind when you wrote that?
    PETER DOHERTY: Well, there are people who do novelise and write novels about science. I’d like to see a lot more fiction about science – not necessarily science fiction, which has always been a great genre, but it postulates all sorts of things that are not really that likely to happen. But to see science much more embedded in the kind of discourse that we see in fiction would be good….
    EMMA ALBERICI: Now, you bemoan what you refer to as “some false conservative-right-versus-liberal-left divide” when it comes to the need to limit greenhouse gas emissions. And you say you’re not in disagreement with at least some prominent figures on the conservative side of that equation. Tell us what you meant by that?
    PETER DOHERTY: Well, there are some conservatives who say we have to act on climate change and we’ll see some of those emerging in the United States of late, though they’re pretty much shouted down in, say, the Republican Party. But it’s not really a right-issue. I mean, it’s an issue in the sciences.
    I mean, traditionally conservatives have often been environmentalists. The first national parks in the United States were set up by Theodore Roosevelt, who was a Republican president. It’s not necessarily a characteristic of conservatives that they’re anti-environment. That doesn’t make sense and I think it’s a wrong positioning of the right in politics.
    http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2015/s4300063.htm

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    pat

    26 Aug: Guardian: Paul Farrell: Australia must face up to cost of carbon reductions – European climate expert
    Former European commissioner Connie Hedegaard agrees with Tony Abbott that wind turbines are not ‘beautiful’, but calls power plants ‘visually awful’
    Speaking at the City of Sydney’s CityTalks 2015 on Tuesday, Hedegaard urged action to reduce emissions in the lead-up to the Paris climate conference in December.
    “It’s extremely important to acknowledge it’s not for free to make this sort of change. But neither is continuing business as usual,” she said.
    “Either we pay as consumers or we pay as taxpayers. How we split the burden, that’s of course a very different political discussion. We must tell people it is going to cost.”…
    Speaking at the same event, Greens deputy coleader Larissa Waters said Australia should be seeking to reduce emissions by 60% to 80% by 2030 and criticised the Coalition’s attitudes towards climate change.
    “The prime minister’s science denialism just pervades across all of the talking points,” she said. “One marvels at the abject rejection of science that seems to be emanating from the government, which I believe is totally out of step with the community sentiment.”…
    City of Sydney mayor Clover Moore also urged the federal government to take more substantial action…
    MC Adam Spencer said a number of government members had declined invitations to attend the panel…
    The former Liberal leader John Hewson said he was disappointed they did not attend, and said the target set by the government was “about half” what it should be…
    Labor’s environment spokesman, Mark Bulter, said the government’s emission target was “the minimum possible, with lots of fudging, and a hell of a lot of internal inconsistencies”.
    But he refused to outline Labor’s commitment to emissions reductions, or whether the party will provide their policy before the Paris summit.
    (Guardian Australia is a sponsor of the CityTalks 2015 series)
    http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/aug/26/australia-must-face-up-to-cost-of-carbon-reductions-european-climate-expert

    AUDIO: 6mins29secs: 26 Aug: ABC Pacific Beat: Liam Fox: Former EU Climate Commissioner says COP21 is the best chance at a binding deal in a long time
    Connie Hedegaard was Europe’s first ever Climate Commissioner and she hosted those talks in the Danish capital.
    Now she chairs the KR Foundation, which is described as a climate-focused funding platform, and she’s in Australia for a series of speaking engagements.
    Pacific Affairs reporter, Liam Fox, asked Ms Hedegaard if she thought the Paris talks can succeed where Copenhagen failed.
    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-26/former-eu-climate-commissioner-says-cop21-is-the/6725360
    Connie: there are two strong developments since Copenhagen. we’re seeing more & more climate change going on in the real world & US/China engaging.
    Connie: KR Foundation is supporting international climate activities, people who come up with sort of real ideas as to how to transform our economies; for the first 12 months, we have put divestment out of fossil fuels as one of our key themes. price of carbon, technology development is very important. ethics – how to change behaviour – very important.
    Fox: Coal divestment.
    Connie: i’m not going to interfere with Australia’s decisions, but everyone can see that in a world that has to address CC & has to go low-carbon in the near future, we spend worldwide $5 in subsidising coal. that needs to change.

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    pat

    Flannery discredited? never…

    AUDIO: 26 Aug: ABC Breakfast: Tim Flannery’s Atmosphere of Hope: Searching for Solutions to the Climate Crisis
    It’s been ten years since the release of internationally acclaimed scientist Tim Flannery’s landmark book on climate change, The Weather Makers.
    Although the politics around the issue still isn’t settled, the science largely is, with thousands of scientific reports and assessments over the past decade adding to our understanding of how the climate reacts to carbon pollution.
    Ahead of the Paris international summit in December—which will once again aim to reach a global consensus on how deep to cut carbon emissions after 2020—Tim Flannery has released another book…
    (LINKS to textpublishing website re Launch today)
    http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/tim-flannerys-atmosphere-of-hope-searching/6725422

    Launch of Atmosphere of Hope, by Tim Flannery
    When: Wednesday, 26th August 2015 7:00pm
    Where: Basement Theatre B117 Melbourne School of Design, Masson Rd, Building 133, University of Melbourne VIC
    From atmospheric carbon capture through extensive seaweed farming, CO2 snow production in Antarctica and the manufacture of carbon-rich biochar to reflecting the sun’s rays by releasing sulphur into the atmosphere and painting landscapes and cities white, Flannery outlines an array of innovative technologies that give cause for hope…

    26 Aug: AAP: Seaweed could help in climate fight
    Seaweed, special rocks and turning carbon pollution into fibres for manufacturing could help the world combat climate change.
    Climate Council co-founder Tim Flannery says there’s potential in coming decades to draw up to four billion tonnes of carbon out of the atmosphere with new technologies that are at immature stages now.
    Professor Flannery pointed to reports scientists had worked out how to make carbon fibres from Co2 in the atmosphere at a tenth of the cost of conventional production methods…
    “It’s one technology that’s going to help,” he told ABC Radio on Wednesday…
    Prof Flannery referred to a study that estimated if seaweed was raised over nine per cent of the ocean’s surface it would draw down the equivalent of all emissions…
    https://au.news.yahoo.com/a/29351308/seaweed-could-help-in-climate-fight/

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    • #
      David Maddison

      They keep telling us “the science is settled” but where can I find a scientifically rigorous report on this?

      60

      • #
        handjive

        Theoretical and Applied Climatology
        August 2015,
        Open Access
        Date: 20 Aug 2015
        Learning from mistakes in climate research
        Rasmus E. Benestad, Dana Nuccitelli, Stephan Lewandowsky, Katharine Hayhoe, Hans Olav Hygen, Rob van Dorland, John Cook

        “We also argue that science is never settled and that both mainstream and contrarian papers must be subject to sustained scrutiny.”
        . . .
        It’s science Jim, but not as we know it.

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        • #
          Andrew McRae

          It’s taken them a long time to state about science what Bob Carter was telling them 6 years ago.

          At this rate they might admit there was a pause by the time the world has been cooling for a decade.

          10

  • #
    pat

    25 Aug: Daily Telegraph: Former Australian Prime Minister to host CNN global affairs program Amanpour
    by Ian Horswill and AAP
    Mr Rudd, now 57, is one of five special guests to each host an episode of CNN’s international global affairs program Amanpour while its chief correspondent Christine Amanpour is on leave…
    (Rudd) can be seen hosting Amanpour on CNN in Australia on Saturday where he looks ahead to Cop 21 Climate Change Conference and talks to UN envoy Christina Figures…
    http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/entertainment/television/former-australian-prime-minister-to-host-cnn-global-affairs-program-amanpour/story-fni0cc2c-1227498339517

    25 Aug: ABC: Kate Higgins: NSW weather: Severe east coast low hitting late in season, meteorologist says
    Weatherzone meteorologist Rob Sharpe said the east coast low battering the south coast had developed within a low pressure trough yesterday, but that the severe events typically occurred earlier in the year…
    Ms Pepler, a PhD student at the University of New South Wales’ Climate Change Research Centre: Ms Pepler said that while there was no obvious pattern to predict how many east coast lows would affect the state each year, research suggested their numbers may decrease in the future.
    She said storms were a big area of interest for scientists examining links between weather patterns and climate change.
    “The most consistent result we’re seeing is, if anything, a decrease of these winter east coast lows in the future,” she said.
    “That doesn’t mean there will be a decrease in the most intense events.
    “But it does look like they might become less frequent.
    “That could be a concern for water supply, it could be very important for filling up our dam levels.”…
    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-25/severe-east-coast-low-hits-late-in-season/6722892

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  • #
    David Maddison

    “That could be a concern for water supply, it could be very important for filling up our dam levels.”…

    Oh, great! Let’s build some more wind-powered desal plants!

    41

  • #
    pat

    more CAGW fodder for ABC’s “Big Ideas”, partly funded by the ***European Union!

    ANU Events: 2015 Schuman Lecture. The European Union’s climate and energy policy, a driver for growth and innovation.
    Presented by ANU College of Arts & Social Sciences
    (Wednesday, 26 August 2015 from 5:30 PM to 7:30 PM)
    Why does the European Union continue to set ambitious climate targets, go further in pricing CO2 emissions and strengthening low-carbon regulation and standards, notwithstanding its economic crisis?
    How is this being perceived by citizens, cities and businesses? …
    Connie Hedegaard is the Chair of the Board of the KR Foundation, based in Copenhagen…
    The 2015 Schuman Lecture is part of the ANU Centre for European Studies’ three year partnership with ***ABC Radio National. Big Ideas from Europe focusses on the major social, cultural, scientific and political issues from contemporary Europe. The series features panel discussions, interviews and public lectures by eminent scholars and public figures.
    ***It is broadcast on Radio National and also available as a podcast, with additional reading material available on the Big Ideas website.
    The ANUCES is an initiative involving five ANU Colleges (Arts and Social Sciences,Law, Business and Economics, Asia and the Pacific and Medicine, Biology and Environment) co-funded by the ANU and the ***European Union.
    http://www.anu.edu.au/events/2015-schuman-lecture-the-european-union%E2%80%99s-climate-and-energy-policy-a-driver-for-growth-and

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    • #
      gai

      “The European Union’s climate and energy policy, a driver for growth economic depression and innovation bankruptcy.”

      There, now that statement is factual.

      90

  • #
    handjive

    The two most honest statements from 97% “settled” climate science so far, re: El Niño 2015/2016

    SMH, March 6, 2015:
    El Nino declared as climate scientists watch on with ‘amazement

    1. “(S)aid Cai Wenju, a principal CSIRO research scientist who has published widely on the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) climate pattern, “We only understand what we have seen.”

    NOAA. Monday, August 24, 2015
    One forecaster’s view on extreme El Niño in the eastern Pacific

    This is a guest post by Ken Takahashi, who is a research scientist at the Instituto Geofísico del Perú (IGP) and currently leads the national scientific committee ENFEN, which issues the official El Niño forecasts in Peru. This post does not necessarily reflect the views of IGP, ENFEN or NOAA.
    . . .
    You can read why Ken Takahashi’s “view” does not necessarily reflect conform with the views of IGP, ENFEN or NOAA.

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  • #
    BilB

    Good Grief, Jo, now you have resorted to making things up to maintain the impression of authenticity.

    !. Global temperatures are rising, atmospheric energy is increasing, the tropical band is expanding, both poles are losing mass, glaciers everywhere are disappearing rapidly. Your contrarian netball act (standing three feet away and waving your hands furiously to distract from what is really going on) is becoming shabby.

    2. Yes climates change naturally, but never in the history of the earth at the rate that it is changing now due to CO2 accelerated emissions. It is about rate of change and the biosphere’s ability to adapt. The biosphere is not coping at all well.

    3. Atmospheric CO2 has been relatively stable below 280 ppm for millennia, it is in the past 150 years that it has risen above the stability level to 400 ppm despite the steady loss of plants and animals. The statement really is that the CO2 increase is 110% due to human activity.

    4.There are scientists in hundreds of fields of research all of whom receive funding in various forms, climate science is just one of the many fields and that includes a tiny handful of “skeptical” scientists who contrary to your claim do in fact get funded.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming#/media/File:Climate_science_opinion2.png

    Getting published is another matter. Papers which require a different set of laws of physics are still open for publication, but in the fiction stacks.

    5. Antarctic sea ice is just one factor of warming. Just as glaciers initially grow in length, flow faster, then recede in length dramatically as they lose mass, so also does the Antarctic. It does this in contrast to the Arctic as the Antarctic is largely a land mass under mountains of snow and surrounded by a broad expanse of sea. The Arctic is floating on water and surrounded by a vast expanse of land. Of course they perform differently, while all the time losing ice mass to warm currents and warming air currents.

    6. Carbon Capture and Storage and “clean coal” were inventions and playthings of the coal industry and were doomed to failure from the start, and for many reasons.

    The exaggerated and desperate arguments being used here serve only to make skeptics look foolish while progressing them further along the CSD path.

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    • #

      1. You still don’t understand cause and effect. Try it sometime.
      2. I’m sure you were checking the satellites/thermometers/weatherballoons circa stone henge. Right. Do send us those files.
      You confuse smoothing due to low resolution data with high res modern data and deny past variations which swamp modern ones. Show me ONE proxy that continues to modern times and shows a wild rise without the help of thermometers near airports. Go on…
      3. Yup. Atmospheric CO2 is at record levels and modern warming is no faster than warming in 1870, except when it’s slower. AKA The Pause. Let’s talk about how CO2 appears to have almost no effect?
      4. ARgument from authority. You follow a herd. we think for ourselves.”Good luck.”
      5. It doesn’t matter what happens does it? It’s always a symptom. Yes sure, more ice means the ocean warmed, the land warmed, the models were right even when they said sea ice would shrink and thermometers show the ice mass hasn’t warmed either. Throw away your chemistry books. Deny the data.
      6. Hardly, the costs of “clean coal” were always going to doom it. Only an enemy of coal would pump that idea. Coal should have paid skeptics to explain that. Silly them.

      7. So skeptics look foolish according to “BilB”. Well I’ll be…

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    • #

      BilB says this:

      6. Carbon Capture and Storage and “clean coal” were inventions and playthings of the coal industry and were doomed to failure from the start, and for many reasons.

      Note that when it is now proved conclusively that it was never going to work, then all of a sudden it’s an invention of the coal industry.

      Obviously, you have never even checked this out have you.

      There is absolutely no way known on this Planet that an Industry would so comprehensively cut its own throat by, umm, inventing this absolute madness. It increases their costs at construction by 40 to 50%, cuts their actual electricity generation by 40%+, (in other words, decreases their ability to recoup that cost over the electricity generated during the life of the plant) and on top of that, it decreases the life of the plant by 20 years, further decreasing their ability to recoup the costs.

      Amazing isn’t it, that now it’s proven an absolute failure, you now claim it was invented by that industry.

      For so many years, your side looked at it as the only way that coal fired power could proceed.

      Heavens above BilB, your side even factored it into all their costings for LCOE for so many years, and still do it, as a means to artificially inflate the cost of coal fired power.

      You BilB, are an absolute (self snip)

      At least we are now totally sure of one thing. You’ve read what I wrote about it, and are now certain it can’t work at all. All these years you and your side implicitly believed in it, and now you’re moving away from it like rats from a sinking ship.

      All that’s left for to is to blame shift, you fool!

      Tony.

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    • #
      AndyG55

      “The exaggerated and desperate arguments being used here”

      The only “exaggerated and desperate arguments being used here” are from YOU !!

      You know that a cooling period is coming, as do most of the “climate scientists™”…

      …that is why the absolute desperation coming up to the Paris jaunt.

      This is their last chance to push through their farcical, fabricated, global totalitarian agenda.

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    • #
      Popeye26

      bilbi

      Just show everyone here how smart you are and show us ONE (JUST ONE) model that got the current pause correct!

      We’ll be here, patiently waiting but I’m thinking you won’t be back to answer it for us.

      Science CANNOT be ignored – it will out in the end and people like you will be shown to be fools!!

      Cheers,

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      • #
        AndyG55

        “and people like you will be shown to be fools”

        That happened with his first post on JoNova…

        … and nothing since has falsified it.

        100

        • #
          Mike

          Gday AndyG55. A diversionary comment…

          Once upon a time a few years ago, before trillions of dollars a year was spent on ‘talking about the weather’, it was a polite conversation. In actual fact, you could talk about the weather and be certain it would be a ‘safe’.

          Talking about the weather is hard wired into the human organism in some way and affects all ages, even the prematurely born.

          By far the biggest regret i have about the subject of talking about the weather and the funding it (Global warming conversation funding) receives is that it has driven traditional environmentalism into a black pit.

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          • #
            AndyG55

            Imagine how much better off the world would be if the billions and billions wasted on the climate change clap-trap had been spent on REAL problems.

            Like battling REAL pollution..

            Like helping developing countries lift themselves out of poverty…

            Its so sad to see what has happened instead. 🙁

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    • #
      Richard

      Sorry to butt in, but I can’t resist.

      2. Yes climates change naturally, but never in the history of the earth at the rate that it is changing now due to CO2 accelerated emissions. It is about rate of change and the biosphere’s ability to adapt. The biosphere is not coping at all well.

      Now you should explain why (according to Phil Jones) the global temperature increased at exactly the same rate between 1860 and the 1880’s as it did between the 1910’s and 1940 and 1975 to 2009? Human CO2 emissions were negligible pre-1940 (especially between 1860 and the 1880’s) and yet the rate of warming has not accelerated as our emissions have increased. Instead the rate of warming has stayed well-within long-term natural variation. There is no anthropogenic signature in the global surface temperature record. These are the trends according to Phil Jones: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8511670.stm

      The biosphere is not coping at all well.

      On the contrary, we should expect more CO2 to enhance the net-productivity of the biosphere by providing vital nutrition to green plants and microorganisms. The Earth has been coping with vast quantities of CO2 for billions of years already and is well-adapted to it. It has built the entire planetary biosphere out of it. See this paper: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50563/abstract

      Quote from paper: “Satellite observations reveal a greening of the globe over recent decades. The role in this greening of the “CO2 fertilization” effect—the enhancement of photosynthesis due to rising CO2 levels—is yet to be established. The direct CO2 effect on vegetation should be most clearly expressed in warm, arid environments where water is the dominant limit to vegetation growth. Using gas exchange theory, we predict that the 14% increase in atmospheric CO2 (1982–2010) led to a 5 to 10% increase in green foliage cover in warm, arid environments”. Gosh, how will the biosphere ever cope?

      3. Atmospheric CO2 has been relatively stable below 280 ppm for millennia, it is in the past 150 years that it has risen above the stability level to 400 ppm despite the steady loss of plants and animals. The statement really is that the CO2 increase is 110% due to human activity.

      The idea CO2 was stable at 280ppmv for millennia is suggested only by the ice-core data which may not be representative of past CO2 levels. Stomata data shows CO2 as high as 459ppmv and chemical measurements (see Georg-Beck) show CO2 as high as 440ppmv. The ice-core may underestimate past CO2 levels due to various fractionation processes such as gravitational compression which forces CO2 out of the ice and up to the surface over time. So, CO2 rising to unprecedented levels is not a known fact. It is at best an uncertain conjecture that one may, or may not think is justified depending on one’s chosen criteria of credibility.

      Global temperatures are rising, atmospheric energy is increasing

      According to the NASA website: “Global temperature measurements of the Earth’s lower atmosphere obtained from satellites reveal no definitive warming trend over the past two decades. The slight trend that is in the data actually appears to be downward. The largest fluctuations in the satellite temperature data are not from any man-made activity, but from natural phenomena such as large volcanic eruptions from Mt. Pinatubo, and from El Niño. So the programs which model global warming in a computer say the temperature of the Earth’s lower atmosphere should be going up markedly, but actual measurements of the temperature of the lower atmosphere reveal no such pronounced activity”. http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/1997/essd06oct97_1/

      glaciers everywhere are disappearing rapidly

      CAGW-alarmists have been saying this for decades, and yet they’re still here.

      The exaggerated and desperate arguments being used here.

      I’m sorry, but the only desperate arguments here are yours BilB. Those that you have presented here so far have all been re-presented repetitiously by other posters before you and refuted ad nauseam.

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    • #
      Andrew McRae

      It is with some dismay that I must acknowledge the Inconvenient Truth that BilB has exposed with her comment. The truth about the climate debate that is inconvenient to climate skeptics is… that we just had to scroll down to comment 38 before seeing any replies from any warmists! They’re slacking off!
      What happened to the good old days of the “Climate Science Rapid Response Team”?
      What happened to the good old days of jousting with BlackAdderThe4th, Rob Painting, WheresWallace, Adam Smith, and “Michael the Realist”? Now we’re simply sent a mangy marsupial. The general standard of warmists have been dropping in the last 18 months. I don’t suppose that’s because the smartest ones switched sides? At least we’ve still got Harry Twinotter and MattB to keep things interesting.

      Still I have to thank you, BilB, for helping us exercise our talking points. There’s certainly no new thinking needed to respond to your comment as you have provided no new evidence. Same old, same old. Correlation is causation, argument from ignorance, argument from popularity.

      Relative incremental difference is not the problem. Any harm from warming can only occur from high absolute temperature. So climate models have to replicate natural variability at the multidecadal scale to be considered accurate harbingers of doom, yet the AR3 models didn’t work, the AR4 models were way too low, and by AR5 the AR4 models were so far off the IPCC felt they had to hide the discrepancy. The climate modellers will never succeed until the solar magnetic dynamo is understood and the cosmic rays and solar wind are incorporated into the models, but they currently show no sign of learning the lessons Shaviv, Svensmark, and Kirkby have taught them in the published literature.

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      • #
        BilB

        Andrew McRae,

        Good point, where have all the realists gone. The fact is that the discussion amoungst Jonovians has become so ludicrous in the face of empirical world that it is not worth engaging in. Finally, climate action is crawling into life and in a productive way. Solar energy systems are everywhere, now, and we are moving into the stage of making them work efficiently and provide benefits to match the theory.

        That is very much my focus now. I am bleeding energy to the grid and it is costing me real money. Access to Powerwall energy storage is perhaps several years off so I am focusing on storing energy thermally. I’ve replaced every bulb in my house with LED light bulbs from Harvey Norman Lighting and now if every light in the house is on I use less than 200 watts, energy which even a small battery can cope with supplying. The task of getting appliances to operate with a delayed or externally triggered start is now an immediate need.

        In other words we are in a consolidation phase. There is no need to be political as we have a total nut job for a prime minister, consequently we are in a holding pattern there waiting for him to drop politically dead. There is no need to re-debate endlessly the reality of Global Warming as it has become blatantly evident in the environment and most governments have accepted their responsibility to take strong climate change action. This is the time for getting on with the task of evaluating the machinery of renewables and fine tuning it to be ready for volume deployment, as we wait for other key elements such as PHEV’s to become widely available.

        So there is a lot to do. Will CSD’s react by confabulating amounst themselves and flicking sour grape pips at passers by, or will they engage with the new reality, and get on with building a better world?


        And tossing petty insults, abusing English (CSD) and gross generalisations helps the “ludicrous” conversation improve, how? You feed your blind prejudices. “congrats” – Jo

        05

        • #

          This BSB BilB says the following:

          I am bleeding energy to the grid and it is costing me real money. Access to Powerwall energy storage is perhaps several years off so I am focusing on storing energy thermally.

          Oh, come on, tell the truth BilB. You’re not bleeding energy to the grid at all. What you are returning to the grid, is so pitifully small as to not even register. I’ll bet you’re claiming the FIT though, which is what I’m paying you, along with every other consumer.

          And hey, even I’m literate enough to find numerous outlets which can already supply you with a battery backup for 24/7 power from your toy on the roof, and actually, a couple of them even have quotes to do it correctly, rather than most of them which will just fleece you of your money for the absolute minimum requirement, which won’t do the job correctly at all. And hey, even that Powerwall toy is just that, as well as an incorrect solution for what is actually required to do the job of correctly providing power for your home.

          Until people like you actually understand that the ‘energy’ you consume in your home is barely a tenth of the total energy you have access to every day of your life.

          Let’s hope you’re not being a hypocrite by owning an ICE car. Let’s then hope you don’t actually drive it on any roads, day or night. Let’s hope you never need access to a hospital. Let’s hope you never need to take public transport to get around, day or night. Let’s hope you don’t have a mobile phone, or even a landline. Let’s hope you never go shopping for anything. Let’s hope you never do grocery shopping at Coles or Woolies or one of the Independents. Let’s hope you have a rain water tank for all your water supplies. Let’s hope you’re not connected to a sewerage system. Let’s hope you don’t have a job to go to. Let’s hope you home school all your children and don’t send them to a school. Let’s hope you consume no power at all between 5PM and 8AM, and please don’t try and tell us your toy on the roof generates all your power needs, because the excess you feed back to the grid you have sold. It’s not yours any more. Let’s hope you’re not claiming the full FIT and then buying back what you need after hours at a third of the cost of the FIT, or 15 times what it actually costs to generate. Let’s hope you never submit comments to any website where they are being shown 24/7/365.

          You people are the basest of hypocrites. You think that your toy on the roof is an actual answer. There are 1.5 Million of them, The total Nameplate is 3,300MW. The power they actually generate is the equivalent Nameplate of 420MW. The amount fed back to the grid is the equivalent of around 80MW, when it’s all reduced to a daily average on a year round basis.

          You BSB’s have absolutely no idea whatsoever, and what’s worse, you don’t even care.

          I really hope I never have to respond to you again, but you’ll only read this, and just like the goldfish, it’ll be gone in an instant.

          Your total ‘energy’ consumption is more than just a few light bulbs in your home.

          Tony.

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        • #

          Oh, and BilB,

          I forgot to thank you here.

          Thanks for referring to us as CSD’s. That is a rare honour indeed, to be equated with perhaps one of the single most efficient devices ever invented, the Constant Speed Drive.

          It’s basically just a glorified gearbox, only vastly more complex. They are mainly used on aircraft, coupled to the alternator, and driven by the aircraft’s engine via a shaft. For any input, no matter what the engine revolutions, the constant output driving force is always the same, hence the attached alternator can produce its absolute constant total power at the absolute exact frequency.

          They are also used on some (wind tower) applications in the nacelle, the equipment between the driving fan on the front and the actual generator, so that no matter how slow or fast the fan may be going, the generator is driven at its full operational design for full power at the correct frequency.

          Explaining it as a mere gearbox is like comparing a pedal car to a Rolls Royce.

          So, BilB, referring to all of us here as exceptionally efficient at what we do is indeed a rare admission from you, so thanks.

          Tony.

          PostScript – I guess we won’t see him using that term again, eh!

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          AndyG55

          “and get on with building a better world”

          We want a better world.. so the unreliable, irregular expensive farce that are wind and solar, should get out the way. All they do is displace industries and cause energy poverty in those who can least afford it.

          A better world needs MORE atmospheric CO2, not less.

          More food, more fertile biosphere..

          And if by some unproven hypothetical chance, it also helps us stay out of the next mini ice age… more the better.

          Why are irksome cretins like you, so against this.?

          41

    • #
      Mark Hladik

      Bilb writes:

      “2. Climates (sic) change naturally but never in the history of the [E]arth at the rate that it is changing now due to CO2 accelerated emissions.” [I’m not really sure what ‘accelerated‘ emissions are — — are there some superconducting supercolliders for super-CO2 molecules, the IPCC has been hiding from us?] “It is about the rate of change and the biosphere’s ability to adapt. The biosphere is not coping at all well.”

      Hmmm. Interesting assertion, that the ‘rate of change’ [assuming the meaning is “rate of change of temperature” as referenced to the aforementioned ‘climates‘] has never been seen before in the ” … history of the earth (sic) … “. Of course, BilB has never studied the ” … history of the earth (sic) … “, otherwise s/he would knot that it has been determined that the transitions from glacial-to-interglacial, and interglacial-to-glacial, have taken place in a matter of decades. The best estimates (before Vostok, EPICA, and GISP II) were three-to five-Celsius degrees in about three or four decades. With some refinements, the ice core records are trending towards less than three decades, and the temperature change recorded therein is trending towards five-to-six Celsius degrees over that same time frame.

      So, you assert that a temperature change of about one Celsius degree since the Industrial Revolution, is MORE THAN a change of about, say, four Celsius degrees, in as many decades?

      Do you live in Colorado? I’d say cut back on that stuff you’re smoking. Try some actual science, and run a cross-correlation between Veizer’s paleotemperature record, and Berner & Kothavala’s GEOCARB III (both available at a website called [www] (dot) [globalwarmingart] (dot) [com]. While you’re running the X-corr, go ahead and explain to me the Cryogenian Period (Middle NeoProterozoic Era, just before the Ediacaran Period), when atmospheric CO2 concentration was measured in percents, not ppm (see GTS 2004, Gradstein, Ogg, and Smith, and GTS 2012, Gradstein, Ogg, and Ogg).

      We’ve crossed into the asymptote of CO2’s alleged ‘warming effect’. Somewhere around 300 ppm or so, the increase in the effect becomes effectively immeasurable. Within the precision of our measurement systems, and the climate system natural variability, you cannot see the CO2 effect.

      You say, ‘the biosphere is not coping well’. By what measure? Would you state for us here, that Chixulub caused the biosphere to cope well? Was Araganty/Wilkesland an unmitigated boon to the biosphere? Whatever humans might be doing to the biosphere, it is about the scale of a pinprick compared to what Nature itself has done to the biosphere.

      So, BilB, I issue my X-corr challenge for the 39th time, this time to you. Of the thirty-nine challenges issued, none have dared to report their results.

      Of course, we know why. So let’s see you grow a pair, and step up to the challenge. Let’s see you actually look at some of the ” … history of the [E]arth … “, and not just the last two centuries. I know it is hard to believe, but Earth has withstood some fairly significant events, and golly gee, life just keeps on adapting, and humming, and movin’ on.

      Best regards to all,

      Mark H.

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        gai

        Mark Hladik says: “…With some refinements, the ice core records are trending towards less than three decades, and the temperature change recorded therein is trending towards five-to-six Celsius degrees over that same time frame…”

        Actually it is more like one year for the transition from the Wisconsin Ice Age to the Holocene!

        The temperature changes were from 8C to 16C in dramatically short time for Dansgaard-Oeschger oscillations during the Wisconsin Ice Age. That is why this gnashing of teeth over a change of 0.6C (± 0.2°C)** during the 20th Century is so hilarious. (**from GreenFacts)

        The Initial Discovery of Abrupt Climate Change

        “They knew they had the critical layer of ice in their snow cave [where the ice cores were first processed-wm]. Wanda Kapsner, a Penn State graduate student, had been taking thin sections about every 20 meters along the lengths of core laid out in the cave. She told Alley, ‘This section is in Holocene ice and the next section 20 meters down is in Ice Age ice, and so between these two is where you’re going to find it.'”…

        “‘You did not need to be a trained ice core observer to see this,’ recalled Alley. ‘Ken Taylor is sitting there with the ECM and he’s running along and his green line is going wee, wee, wee, wee – Boing! Weep! Woop! And then it stays down.’ Dust in the windy ice age atmosphere lowered the acidity of the core to a completely new state. ‘We’re just standing there and he just draws a picture of it,”‘Alley said.”

        “Spontaneous celebration was followed by a sudden and unexpected quiet. ‘I think we cheered,’ recalled Alley, ‘and then we were all a little sobered. Because it was just so spectacular. It was what we’d been looking for, and there it was, and then we’re sitting there. Holy crap.'”….

        “In the GISP2 science trench, the tray holding the section of core rolled down the assembly line and then it was Alley’s turn at the ice. “It slides across in front of me and I’m trying to identify years: ‘That’s a year, that’s a year and that’s a year, and – woops, that one’s only half as thick.’ And it’s sitting there just looking at you. And there’s a huge change in the appearance of the ice, it goes from being clear to being not clear, having a lot of dust.”

        “Paper after paper began to roll off the scientific presses from 1992 on, and just like the unfolding recognition of plate tectonics which preceded it by a few decades, it was literally riveting for all of us geologists fascinated by the Quaternary. So we get our first trap-speed: climate can switch abruptly from its cold to its warm state in just one year. Our first peg on the lower-end of natural noise.” — William McClenney,Geologist, On “Trap-Speed”, ACC and the SNR

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        • #
          Mark Hladik

          Hi gai,

          No argument; I would tend to err on the side of caution. I do not dis-believe the ‘one-year climate change’, I am cautious about accepting it without being able to examine the evidence in excruciating detail. This idea may, or may not, hold up. The evidence for the decadal climate change/climate shift has been vetted, and found not wanting. If the evidence holds up for the transition taking place within a time frame of just a year (or two), then so be it.

          The key point I was trying to make with BilB is that a natural transition, several Celsius degrees, in a short-time frame, is far greater than one Celsius degree in some 150 – 200 years (which is about all the time the CAGW-believers ever look at, for reasons which escape me). Do keep in mind that you and I are playing on the same team.

          Thanks, and be well,

          Mark H.

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          • #
            gai

            No problem, Mark,

            I just find Dr Alley’s one year switch a complete jaw dropper. Especially since Richard B. Alley was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, chaired the National Research Council on Abrupt Climate Change for well over a decade and in 1999 was invited to testify about climate change by Vice President Al Gore. In 2002, the NAS (Alley chair) published a book “Abrupt Climate Change:
            Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises ( 2002 )

            In other words Alley is ‘playing for the other side’ and the ‘other side’ is very well aware of just how quick and dramatic the climate switches can be.

            . From the opening paragraph in the executive summary:

            “Recent scientific evidence shows that major and widespread climate changes have occurred with startling speed. For example, roughly half the north Atlantic warming since the last ice age was achieved in only a decade, and it was accompanied by significant climatic changes across most of the globe. Similar events, including local warmings as large as 16°C, occurred repeatedly during the slide into and climb out of the last ice age.”

            The one year switch was the switch from an ice age climate to an interglacial climate (far less snow and dust) and not necessarily the actual temperature rise that Alley says took a decade.

            (Back to the other link)

            The ice that had formed from falling snow during the transition from the last of the cold, dry, windy ice ages to the first of the warm, wet calms of the modern 10,000-year-long Holocene climate is 1,678 meters, just over a mile, down the GISP2 core. Rendered in ice, what exactly would it look like, this boundary of epochs? The young American scientists had read the literature from Chet Langway, Willi Dansgaard, Hans Oeschger, Wally Broecker, and others, and they had heard from the Europeans, who were about a year ahead of them in drilling at Summit. Yet still they were not entirely prepared for what they saw that day in the ice, for the suddenness of it.”

            What an amazing discovery! A one year transition between the climate of an ice age and the climate of an interglacial.

            It completely blows my mind each time I read it.

            There is also this comment by Dr Robert Brown (Duke Univ physicist)

            We are in an ice age, where the Earth spends 80 to 90% of its geological time in the grip of vast ice sheets that cover the polar latitudes well down into what is currently the temperate zone. We are at the (probable) end of the Holocene, the interglacial in which humans emerged all the way from tribal hunter-gatherers to modern civilization. The Earth’s climate is manifestly, empirically bistable, with a warm phase and cold phase, and the cold phase is both more likely and more stable. As a physicist who has extensively studied bistable open systems, this empirical result clearly visible in the data has profound implications. The fact that the LIA was the coldest point in the entire Holocene (which has been systematically cooling from the Holocene Optimum on) is also worrisome. Decades are irrelevant on the scale of these changes. Centuries are barely relevant. We are nowhere near the warmest, but the coldest century in the last 10,000 years ended a mere 300 years ago, and corresponded almost perfectly with the Maunder minimum in solar activity.

            There is absolutely no evidence in this historical record of a third stable warm phase….
            http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/22/a-response-to-dr-paul-bains-use-of-denier-in-scientific-literature/

            In other comments Dr Brown mentions ‘strange attractors’ as part of a chaotic (climate) system.

            If I had to try to muse on the probable nature/structure of the poincare cycles that describe the climate, it would be something like two major attractors but with NUMEROUS lesser attractors in the neighborhoods of the major attractors and with slow processes — e.g. Milankovitch — driving the actual motion and stability of the attractors themselves. As the interglacial draws to a close, the warm phase simply becomes less and less stable. Depending on pure chaotic chance, motion around the attractor will eventually carry the system into a state where transition to the cold phase attractor becomes likely — just enough positive feedback from e.g. glaciation albedo that glaciation becomes favored. Again depending on pure chaotic chance, the transition can be anything from very rapid and sudden to slow and with many bobbles.

            Empirically, the bobbles are a lot more likely in cold phase, though. The warm to cold transition is more usually quite rapid in geological time….
            wattsupwiththat(dot)com/2013/08/27/the-200-months-of-the-pause/#comment-1401486

            And that is what we see, D-O and Bond events as ‘bobbles’ The Bond events being muted D-O events since the earth is already in a warm phase

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    • #
      Bill

      The sad little troll is baaaaack.

      11

    • #
      gai

      Bilb writes:

      Good Grief, Jo, now you have resorted to making things up to maintain the impression of authenticity.

      ROTFLMAO!!!
      Typical frothing at the mouth Warmist projection of their behavior onto the Realists.

      Bilb, I do not take Jo’s word for it I read the papers and do my own research. I could spend the rest of the day and take each phrase and refute it with a lengthy analysis, but I am not going to waste my time. Instead I will post just a few papers that show you are full of emotions and not reason.

      Temperature increasing? – NO!
      I just posted links to Stevengoddard that show the highjinks used to change a cooling US temperature record to a warming temperature record.

      And it is not just in the USA that the actual temperatures are cooling.
      “Cooling…German Springs Arriving 20 Days Later Than 28 Years Ago!”
      http://notrickszone.com/2015/05/31/cooling-german-springs-arriving-20-days-later-than-25-years-ago/
      Darn good read for those interested in such matters. And another example of official government dis-information.

      Here is a paper that shows the change to modern temperatures was abrupt and happened over 150 years ago. LINK

      ABSTRACT
      An ice core removed from the Upper Fremont Glacier… provides evidence for abrupt climate change during the mid-1800s….

      At a depth of 152 m the refined age-depth profile shows good agreement (1736±10 A.D.) with the 14C age date (1729±95 A.D.). The δ18O profile of the Upper Fremont Glacier (UFG) ice core indicates a change in climate known as the Little Ice Age (LIA)….

      At this depth, the age-depth profile predicts an age of 1845 A.D. Results indicate the termination of the LIA was abrupt with a major climatic shift to warmer temperatures around 1845 A.D. and continuing to present day.

      Glaciers are not melting they are re-establishing:
      Norway is experiencing greatest glacial activity in the past 1,000 year.The authors state that most glaciers likely didn’t exist 6,000 years ago, but the highest period of glacial growth has been in the past 600 years. Remember ice age ice sheets were not over the entire earth. Scandinavia, Scotland were glaciated while Siberia was not. It was polar desert as was Alaska.

      The paper: A new approach for reconstructing glacier variability based on lake sediments recording input from more than one glacier

      As far as the Arctic is concerned glaciers are increasing and the Arctic is cooling off.

      Temperature and precipitation history of the Arctic

      Solar energy reached a summer maximum (9% higher than at present) ~11 ka ago and has been decreasing since then, primarily in response to the precession of the equinoxes. The extra energy elevated early Holocene summer temperatures throughout the Arctic 1-3°C above 20th century averages, enough to completely melt many small glaciers throughout the Arctic, although the Greenland Ice Sheet was only slightly smaller than at present.
      climate(DOT)envsci.rutgers.edu/robock/MillerArctic.pdf

      A second paper:

      Holocene temperature history at the western Greenland Ice Sheet margin reconstructed from lake sediments – Axford et al. (2012)

      “….As summer insolation declined through the late Holocene, summer temperatures cooled and the local ice sheet margin expanded. Gradual, insolation-driven millennial-scale temperature trends in the study area were punctuated by several abrupt climate changes, including a major transient event recorded in all five lakes between 4.3 and 3.2 ka, which overlaps in timing with abrupt climate changes previously documented around the North

      A third paper:

      New insights on Arctic Quaternary climate variability from palaeo-records and numerical modelling

      …Arctic palaeo-records and natural variability, including spatial and temporal variability of the Greenland Ice Sheet, Arctic Ocean sediment stratigraphy, past ice shelves and marginal marine ice sheets, and the Cenozoic history of Arctic Ocean sea ice in general and Holocene oscillations in sea ice concentrations in particular. The combined sea ice data suggest that the seasonal Arctic sea ice cover was strongly reduced during most of the early Holocene and there appear to have been periods of ice free summers in the central Arctic Ocean.
      (wwwDOT)sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379110003185

      A fourth paper:

      Ice free Arctic Ocean, an Early Holocene analogue

      Extensive systems of wave generated beach ridges along the North Greenland coasts show that these areas once saw seasonally open water. In addition to beach ridges, large amounts of striated boulders in and on the marine sediments from the same period also indicate that the ocean was open enough for ice bergs to drift along the shore and drop their loads. Presently the North Greenland coastline is permanently beleaguered by pack ice, and ice bergs are very rare and locked up in the sea ice….
      …..We therefore conclude that for a period in the Early Holocene, probably for a millenium or more, the Arctic Ocean was free of sea ice at least for shorter periods in the summer……
      adsabs(DOT)harvard.edu/abs/2007AGUFMPP11A0203F

      Sea level also shows glaciers are re-establishing as the Holocene winds down towards full glaciation.

      Mid to late Holocene sea-level reconstruction of Southeast Vietnam using beachrock and beach-ridge deposits

      ….backshore deposits along the tectonically stable south-eastern Vietnamese coast document Holocene sea level changes…..reconstructed for the last 8000 years….The rates of sea-level rise decreased sharply after the rapid early Holocene rise and stabilized at a rate of 4.5 mm/year between 8.0 and 6.9 ka. Southeast Vietnam beachrocks reveal that the mid-Holocene sea-level highstand slightly above + 1.4 m was reached between 6.7 and 5.0 ka, with a peak value close to + 1.5 m around 6.0 ka….

      Translation the sea level was up to 1.5 meters higher than today in a tectonically stable area ~5000 years ago to 2000 years ago.

      A second paper:
      Sea-level highstand recorded in Holocene shoreline deposits on Oahu, Hawaii

      Unconsolidated carbonate sands and cobbles on Kapapa Island, windward Oahu, are 1.4-2.8 (+ or – 0.25) m above present mean sea level (msl)…we interpret the deposit to be a fossil beach or shoreline representing a highstand of relative sea level during middle to late Holocene time. Calibrated radiocarbon dates of coral and mollusc samples, and a consideration of the effect of wave energy setup, indicate that paleo-msl was at least 1.6 (+ or – 0.45) m above present msl prior to 3889-3665 cal. yr B.P, possibly as early as 5532-5294 cal. yr B.P., and lasted until at least 2239-1940 cal. yr B.P
      jsedres(DOT)geoscienceworld.org/content/66/3/632.abstract

      This study shows a sea level highstand ~1.6 meter above the present level from ~5500 years ago to 2000 years ago.

      A third paper:
      Late Quaternary highstand deposits of the southern Arabian Gulf: a record of sea-level and climate change

      Abstract
      …..It has therefore been necessary to infer the ages of these sediments by a comparison of their stratigraphy and elevation with deposits known from other parts of the world. We regard this approach as valid because the southern Gulf coastline lacks evidence for significant widespread neotectonic uplift,…….
      …..Widespread evidence exists for a Holocene sea level higher than at present in the southern Arabian Gulf, indicating that it peaked at 1–2 m above present level, c. 5.5 ka bp…….
      sp(DOT)lyellcollection.org/content/195/1/371.refs

      This study shows a sea level highstand ~1 to 2 meters above the present level about ~5500 years ago.

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      • #
        BilB

        You are desperately cherry picking, Gai.

        Germany? here in Australia plants are blooming and leaves sprouting. I’ve been back in shorts for several weeks,…and it is still winter. Parts of the northern continents are affected by the continued collapse of the Arctic Polar vortex which has acted to contain the cold polar air for thousands of years. There will be some glaciers that build mass for a short time, but the global trend is massive decline in concert with rising global temperature. Not that that is what you want to believe.

        The problem for CSD’s is that they are forced to read from an ever declining “club” of sources which are all cross referencing each others writings. And the problem with that is that the “papers” from which these sources are all based come predominately from the same hand full of compromised “scientists”. When the papers that these people put out are examined you get this kind of result

        http://www.skepticalscience.com/heres-what-happens-try-to-replicate-contrarian-papers.html

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        • #
          AndyG55

          Bilge, lying again.. even BOM say so…

          Victoria ” Maximum temperatures were below average across the State. Minimum temperatures meanwhile were generally below average throughout Victoria with warmer-than-average areas southwest of Melbourne and in the east. ”

          NSW “New South Wales in July 2015: Coolest July since 1997”

          SA “Statewide temperatures were cooler than average as a whole, with cooler than normal days and nights particularly in central and eastern parts”

          Canberra in July 2015: Coolest July days since 2007

          Cool weather was again dominant in Tasmania during July

          “Overall, mean maximum temperatures were cooler than average across southern and far southwestern Queensland. There were some very cool days during the month, with some locations recording their lowest daily maximum temperature on record on the 17th.”

          Only places even close to average were WA and northern Qld..

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        • #
          AndyG55

          And as long as you get your information from SkS, you will continue to remain woefully ignorant.

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      • #
        BilB

        What sort of a game are you playing at, Gai? of the references that you make most are paywalled and not available for correlation, or of the ones that are accessible my search engine does not find the quotes you claim come from the documents. And the documents do not by any means hold up you argument. “Phony” comes to mind, but there are other terms.

        16

        • #
          Mark Hladik

          BilB:

          It’s been about 24 hours since I issued #38.7 (above), and I see you have responded to several posts, mine excepted. Unlike other links, what I asked you to look at is NOT paywalled, or hard to find, or difficult to analyze.

          Correlation is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for causality. One must first establish a correlation, after which a causal relationship can be sought. If there is no correlation, then there exists no causality.

          I’m taking your lack of response as the 39th refusal to run the cross-correlation between paleotemperature and carbon dioxide.

          A very good day to you,

          Mark H.

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          • #
            BilB

            I looked at your “slam dunk challenge” Mark H, but it is ridiculous. You’re fipflopping through geological time reading things then declaring them to be absolute facts 700 million years ago. The scientific opinion is very divided on the whether there was a snowball earth in that period. The land masses were in an entirely different place, there were many other factors and chemistries at work, even the atmosphere was very different and a higher pressure.

            The rate of change factor is relevant to life that requires thousands of years to adapt, now becoming extinct because the vegetation and environment that they have adapted to will die off with global warming. There are millions of species in that category. It is arrogant in the extreme to ignore the plight of so much life simply so that one group of people think they deserve “Liberty”, and the “right” to have guns and to shoot rapidly disappearing other mammal species just because people did that several hundred years ago when the human population was a tenth what it is now.

            Wake up to your self fella.

            16

            • #
              Mark Hladik

              BilB:

              The non-sequitur in the second half of your second paragraph constitutes a red herring. There is a brief response to it below.

              Otherwise: “… but it is ridiculous. You’re fipflopping (sic) through geological time reading things then declaring them to be absolute facts 700 million years ago. The scientific opinion is [very divided on the whether there was a snowball earth (sic)] (sic) in that period (sic).”

              No, that would be the IUGS, which is the international body responsible for compiling and organizing the naming of the Geological Time subdivisions. During my undergraduate tenure, there was no “Cryogenian”, or “Ediacaran”, so these are new concepts which have been brought in since the time I completed my degree. If you dispute that the geological sciences are incapable of estimating what conditions on Earth were like during the NeoProterozoic, then I would expect you to have the same disdain for Mann’s tree-ring based ‘hockey stick’ temperature graph (oh, wait — — you think that Mann used actual “science” for the hockey stick, and geologists just make is up as they go along! OK! I can totally see that! Thank you for the enlightenment!!!).

              My undergrad classes referred to a PreCambrian cold period, with the caveat that it appeared to be localized, and probably much like today’s climates. It is in the intervening time that the evidence has accumulated, not just for the Rodinian event, but also for a global ice-house condition. It appears that only the equatorial zone escaped frigid conditions.

              If you can supply a reference for, “… The scientific position … “, being, ” … very divided on … “, the question of the Cryogenian, I’d be happy to examine it.

              I think the consensus on the issue of a ‘snowball’ event is about 97%, give or take … … … … …

              Then you state, “The land masses were in an entirely different place, there were many other factors and chemistries at work, even the atmosphere was very different and a (sic) higher pressure.”

              Thank you for admitting that the “effects” of carbon dioxide are overwhelmed by natural factors! We agree! An atmospheric trace gas cannot control, or change, the temperature of Earth’s atmosphere. There are so many other natural factors in play that a single variable, such as CO2, is not capable of causing changes. If there’s one thing the ice cores have shown conclusively, it is that temperature drives CO2 concentration, not the other way around.

              The fact remains that the ‘ different atmosphere ‘ to which you refer contained CO2 in concentrations of percents, not parts per million like today. As far as the “effect” of the location of the continents, do recall that there was another glacial event at the Ordovician/Silurian transition, and the continents were in very different locations, compared to today, and compared to Rodinia. Oh, and by the way, the atmospheric CO2 concentration during that Early Paleozoic glacial event (Berner & Kothavala, the most-cited reference on the subject) was in the 3000 – 4000 ppm range, about ten times what it is today, yet somehow, the Earth managed to get itself into a very cold time … … …

              I do spend so many sleepless nights wondering how that happened, since CO2 is such an all-powerful ‘greenhouse’ gas … … … … …

              Maybe if you send me a whole bunch of grant money, I could research the subject further, and tie it into ‘global warming’ … … …

              Then you state: “The rate of change factor is relevant to life that requires thousands of years to adapt, … “. I agree! Life requires many generations to adapt to change. That has never, as far as I know, been in dispute. The disagreement is how fast the environment has changed. You are referencing a change, over the past two centuries (give or take) of about one Celsius degree, and calling it (in various ways) ‘catastrophic’. I point out that in Nature itself, greater change(s) has(have) occurred, having nothing to do with humans, and somehow life managed to not only adapt, but survive, thrive, and continue adapting. “gai’s” contention notwithstanding, a change between glacial/interglacial environments, several Celsius degrees in a time frame of decades (or less), is far greater than a single degree in a couple of centuries. Or do you disagree with that statement?

              Change is the norm, BilB! Try to get a clue here! I state again, since you must have missed it, that what ever human-kind might be doing to the environment, it is virtually undetectable against what Nature is capable of doing, and, in fact, has actually done, to the environment. If you dispute that, then you are the one who needs to get up to speed on Earth History. Your perspective is on the order of a human lifetime; our perspective is the whole of the geological environment, which is in constant flux, constant change, constant adaptation. And, whether you like it or not, extinction is the rule, not the exception, in Life History. Some 98% of all species which have ever existed are extinct, and yes, sometimes one species has been the direct cause of the extinction of another [ref: cladistics, which I am not a fan of, but it has some uses]. Nature itself chooses who lives, and who dies out.

              I fail to see any statement from you that Chixulub was a ‘benefit’ to the environment. Was it? Well, we could state that, yes, it eliminated those pesky T-rex’s and the like, and made a niche for the eventuation of larger mammals (including the bi-pedal kind). At the time, though, I do not think that anyone who witnessed Chixulub thought that this was a “good thing”.

              You have now directly refused to establish a correlation between CO2 and temperature. I state again, correlation is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition, for causality. As soon as you cannot establish a correlation, then there is no causation. The simple fact is that there is no correlation between CO2 and temperature (other than, as above, temperature drives CO2 concentration, not the other way around), therefore whatever is happening to the environment is well within the limits of natural variation, and not caused by humans.

              If you do not produce a correlation coefficient, then consider the discussion ended. Put up, or shut up. Prove a correlation, or admit that there is none.

              I don’t know who said it, but it is apropos here:

              “Some drink from the Well of Knowledge; others just gargle.”

              Regards,

              Mark H.

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        • #
          gai

          Sorry you are so computer challenged BilB.

          Or is it that you just like to throw mud on stuff you don’t like?

          My cut and pastes are exactly that. I never learned to type and I am arthritic so I am not about to go typing up fairy tales. I leave that to the warmist Dis-info agents.

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          • #
            BilB

            Gai, I tried to verify your arguments but it was clearly all a fabrication, when not a single “quote” checked out. Arthritic?? you are managing a lot of typing for a one finger performer. I don’t now even believe that of you.

            16

        • #
          Just-A-Guy

          BilB,

          There are only four links in that comment by gai.

          The first one to no tricks zone referring to late summers works just fine.

          The second one labeled LINK, is to an abstract which I now quote in full:

          From the Abstract on Wiley:

          The potential to use ice cores from alpine glaciers in the midlatitudes to reconstruct paleoclimatic records has not been widely recognized. Although excellent paleoclimatic records exist for the polar regions, paleoclimatic ice core records are not common from midlatitude locations. An ice core removed from the Upper Fremont Glacier in Wyoming provides evidence for abrupt climate change during the mid-1800s. Volcanic events (Krakatau and Tambora) identified from electrical conductivity measurements (ECM) and isotopic and chemical data from the Upper Fremont Glacier were reexamined to confirm and refine previous chronological estimates of the ice core. At a depth of 152 m the refined age-depth profile shows good agreement (1736±10 A.D.) with the 14C age date (1729±95 A.D.). The δ18O profile of the Upper Fremont Glacier (UFG) ice core indicates a change in climate known as the Little Ice Age (LIA). However, the sampling interval for δ18O is sufficiently large (20 cm) such that it is difficult to pinpoint the LIA termination on the basis of δ18O data alone. Other research has shown that changes in the δ18O variance are generally coincident with changes in ECM variance. The ECM data set contains over 125,000 data points at a resolution of 1 data point per millimeter of ice core. A 999-point running average of the ECM data set and results from ƒ tests indicates that the variance of the ECM data decreases significantly at about 108 m. At this depth, the age-depth profile predicts an age of 1845 A.D. Results indicate the termination of the LIA was abrupt with a major climatic shift to warmer temperatures around 1845 A.D. and continuing to present day. Prediction limits (error bars) calculated for the profile ages are ±10 years (90% confidence level). Thus a conservative estimate for the time taken to complete the LIA climatic shift to present-day climate is about 10 years, suggesting the LIA termination in alpine regions of central North America may have occurred on a relatively short (decadal) timescale.

          I’ve also taken the liberty of adding bold italics to the text of the abstract to emphasize the quotes in gai’s comment. You claimed that ‘your search engine’ couldn’t find the relevant quotes to ‘the ones that are accessible’. 😮

          Here before you is the full abstract, from a working link, with all of gai’s quotes clearly visible! 😮
          So did you just lie about not finding the quotes or lie about searching for them? 😮

          The last two linked articles are paywalled but . . .
          gai’s quotes are from the abstracts! 😮
          And those quotes are clearly there! 😮

          WTF!!! 😮 !!! 😮 !!! 😮 !!! 😮 !!! 😮

          Abe

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  • #
    pat

    how’s that global warming going?

    25 Aug: Weather Channel: Another Cool Blast Spreads South and East; Record Lows Set
    Fresh on the heels of a blast of unseasonably chilly summer weather last week, yet another shot of cool air has spread across parts of the central and eastern United States. Several record lows have already been set, and even parts of the South are seeing relief from the summertime humidity…
    The cool air first spread throughout the Plains and Midwest on Sunday, dropping high temperatures 10 to 20 degrees below average from the Texas Panhandle and central Oklahoma to the Dakotas and Minnesota.
    On Sunday morning, Casper, Wyoming, recorded its coldest August temperature on record with a low of 29 degrees…
    Rapid City tied its coldest record low for August on Sunday morning and set a new daily record when the temperature dropped to 38 degrees.
    Daily record lows for Aug. 23, 2015, were also set in the following locations on Sunday morning:….READ ALL
    http://www.weather.com/forecast/regional/news/record-cold-plains-denver-snow-rockies-august

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  • #
    pat

    have done a thorough search and can find NOTHING WHATSOEVER on ABC (or Fairfax for that matter) re the following which MSM worldwide has been covering for more than a week!!! doesn’t fit the Obama climate saviour narrative:

    25 Aug: The Hill: Devin Henry: White House defends Arctic drilling plan
    White House officials are defending the Obama administration’s decision to approve oil and natural gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean…
    He (Brian Deese, Obama’s senior climate adviser) also defended oil drilling in general, saying that expanded American oil and gas production is a necessary part of the “transition” from fossil fuels to renewable energy…
    http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/251813-white-house-defends-arctic-drilling-plan

    19 Aug: UK Independent: Green fury after Shell is given go-ahead for Arctic drilling
    by David Usborne/Tom Bawden
    The decision by the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) to allow the multinational to drill off the Alaskan coast prompted environmentalists to accuse President Barack Obama of “double-speak” over his calls to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy sources…
    And just before leaving for his summer break in Martha’s Vineyard, Mr Obama announced he would be visiting Alaska for the first time as President at the end of this month to highlight the perils of climate change in the Arctic…
    The conflicting messages of Mr Obama going to see “melting glaciers” in the Arctic, while at the same time unleashing Shell in the Beaufort Sea, were underscored by May Boeve, executive director of the climate-activist group 350.org. “If this White House is serious about its legacy on climate action, it’s time to stop the doublespeak and finally begin aligning the action with the rhetoric,” she said.
    In Britain, the Green Party energy spokesman, Andrew Cooper, also lamented the decision. “…
    “It is especially disheartening to see this project given the go-ahead so soon after President Obama appeared to be making positive steps towards tackling climate change.”…
    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/green-fury-after-shell-is-given–goahead-for-arctic-drilling-10461535.html

    the only Arctic pieces showing up on ABC’s website for the past fortnight!

    25/08/2015 ABC PM – Russia found to have broken the law in detention of Greenpeace Arctic Sunrise ship

    20/8/2015 ABC Thermal satellite image of the world’s arctic surface temperature
    Temperatures have increased over the Arctic due to dramatic recent decline in sea ice cover..

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    PeterS

    Look on the bright side. If Donald Trump becomes President it should ll change since he believes global warming is a total and very expensive hoax. Of course they will have other issues to deal with him 🙂

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    • #
      gai

      I am actually thinking of volunteering to help with Trump’s campaign if for no other reason than he is giving the MSM and Republican party conniption fits.

      I mean really, a choice between the Twig – brother of the guy who gave us the Patriot Act, Grope n’ Fly and the Bank Bailouts; and Hillary, wife of the guy who gave US jobs, technology and economy to China not to mention orchestrating the housing market collapse? —YUCK!

      I rather vote for daffy duck.

      30

  • #
    pat

    also NOT REPORTED by ABC/Fairfax which churn out CAGW nonsense almost hourly…but NEVER when it doesn’t suit their agenda & especially NEVER when it might inform the public what a scam it is:

    BBC: Carbon credits undercut climate change actions says report
    A UN-backed carbon offsetting scheme enriched Russian and Ukrainian companies but made climate change worse, according to a damning new analysis. In the first study to look in depth at the “joint implementation” mechanism, the Stockholm Environment …

    Guardian: Kyoto protocol’s carbon credit scheme ‘increased emissions by 600m tonnes’

    Politico: Bogus carbon offsets increased emissions

    The Times: Credit scheme backfired, hiking greenhouse gases, study finds

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  • #
    pat

    best laugh today. just searched “carbon fraud” ANY TIME on abc.net.au website and got the following:

    SHOWING RESULTS FOR “carbon fraud”
    Did you mean: “carboniferous”?

    1 search result:

    Personal carbon trading to fight obesity – Health Report – ABC Radio National
    7 Aug 2007

    enough said.

    —-
    Oooh. Nice find. – Jo

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    nc

    Everywhere ABC and BBC is mentioned, insert Canada’s CBC.

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  • #
    pat

    my alarm bells are ringing!

    25 Aug: RTCC: Megan Darby: Financial gatekeepers are blocking green investment – study
    Pension funds and investment consultants are passive on climate risk and locked into short-termism, say researchers
    Investment consultants are holding back finance into low carbon sectors by failing to consider the long term, according to a study from Oxford University…
    Ben Caldecott, director of the university’s stranded assets programme: “Even when longer-term perspectives are clearly superior, they may be compelled to press for alternatives that perform ‘better’ in the short-term.
    ***Pension funds should alter mandates to avoid this.”…
    For their part, Caldecott said pension funds were confused about whether their fiduciary duty allowed them to act on climate change.
    It does, he argued, but “investment consultants are not pressing as proactively as they should be, which might be seriously harmful.”
    In the past, fiduciary duty has been narrowly interpreted to mean funds should focus solely on financial returns for their pension holders, to the exclusion of sustainability considerations.
    On the contrary, UN climate chief Christiana Figueres has argued, it is a breach of duty for investors not to green their portfolios…
    http://www.rtcc.org/2015/08/25/financial-gatekeepers-are-blocking-green-investment-study/

    SIXTY-TWO PAGES!!! ***Connie Hedegaard’s KR Foundation’s grant acknowledged:

    pdf: 62 pages: Aug 2015: Oxford Uni: Investment consultants and green investment: Risking stranded advice?
    Working Paper
    The Programme is currently supported by grants from: Craigmore Sustainables, European Climate Foundation, Foreign & Commonwealth Office, Generation Foundation, Growald Family Fund, HSBC Holdings plc, KR Foundation, Lloyd’s of London, Tellus Mater Foundation, The Luc Hoffmann Institute, The Rothschild Foundation, The Woodchester Trust, and WWF-UK. Past grant-makers include: Ashden Trust, Aviva Investors, and Bunge Ltd. Our research partners include: Standard & Poor’s, Carbon Disclosure Project, TruCost, Ceres, Carbon Tracker Initiative, Asset Owners Disclosure Project, 2° Investing Initiative, Global Footprint Network, RISKERGY, and Corporate Knights.
    About the Authors
    Ben Caldecott is the Founder and Director of the Stranded Assets Programme. He is concurrently an Adviser to The Prince of Wales’ International Sustainability Unit and an Academic Visitor at the Bank of England.
    Dane Rook is a Research Fellow at Stanford University. Until June 2015 he was a post-doctoral Research Associate at the Stranded Assets Programme
    Acknowledgements
    This research project would not have been possible without grants from the Growald Family Fund, the ***KR Foundation (Chair, Connie Hedegaard), and the Tellus Mater Foundation.
    We would also like to thank the following organisations for providing in-kind support to the project: The Prince’s Accounting for Sustainability Project (A4S), Institutional Investor Group on Climate Change (IIGCC), Investor Group on Climate Change (IGCC), Investor Network on Climate Risk (INCR), Ceres, and ShareAction.
    http://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/research-programmes/stranded-assets/Investment%20Consultants%20and%20Green%20Investment.pdf

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    • #
      ianl8888

      … it is a breach of duty for investors not to green their portfolios …

      How long before legislation somewhere is introduced to force this ?

      Even superannuation savings (except for SMSF) are now grabbed at. Most people from, say, their mid-50’s, would not regard their super accounts as “for the longer term” anymore, but these thieves now want funds accumulated over a lifetime of struggle to be fodder for “sustainability”

      [Declaration: I now have no superannuation interests, so my comment is pure of motive]

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      • #

        Superannuation investment in a renewables portfolio.

        So, if the best of them has a lifespan of barely 25 years, then a young person just starting out in the workforce, will have his superannuation contributions paying for an investment in renewables twice for the same thing during his life of contributions. His or her original investment would have been expired after 25 years, and then expired again for the replacement plant.

        I’ll bet that someone somewhere will be making money out of that super investment, but I doubt it will be the contributor.

        Tony.

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      • #
        gai

        In the USA it gets even better.

        The idea has been floated to confiscate IRA retirement saving accounts and replace them with Annuities. After you die any money left would become the government and not your heirs. In 2010 Timothy Geithner’s Treasury Department floated the idea by issuing a notice of a public comment period on a plan for “the conversion of 401(k) savings and Individual Retirement Accounts into annuities or other steady payment streams.”

        Before that In 2008, Rep. George Miller (D-CA) and Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) held a hearing to promote a plan to eliminate all tax incentives for 401k plans, and force workers to set aside 5 percent of their wages in a government administered account that could only be invested in government securities (aka: government debt).

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  • #
    John Watt

    Re the Antarctic sea ice issue:
    A few years ago we visited a New Zealand Antarctic centre which among other things presented the evidence that the ice was increasing.
    Shortly after that TIME magazine claimed that polar ice in general was decreasing due to AGW. When advised of the New Zealand evidence TIME published a retraction (unfortunately not to the original readership audience that was presented with the ice decrease claim).
    If only a compelling, common-sense argument demonstrating CO2’s lack of impact on climate change was available we might be able to get mainstream media to start retracting the messages that are driving disruption of our energy supply industry.

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    • #
      el gordo

      ‘If only a compelling, common-sense argument demonstrating CO2′s lack of impact on climate change was available…’

      The plateau in temperatures for 18 years proves beyond reasonable doubt that CO2 doesn’t cause warming, but the MSM refuse to discuss this reality.

      Because of the widespread propaganda, through the media and education system, we are in need of a catalyst to bring down this deceitful AGW facade.

      A blizzard in Paris in November should get everyone laughing and talking, but I’m not sure the brainwashed masses understand the meaning of irony.

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      • #
        Andrew McRae

        Today I am trying to be polite.

        The plateau in temperatures for 18 years proves beyond reasonable doubt that CO2 doesn’t cause warming

        That’s a non sequitur. The climate is affected by multiple factors, not just CO2, and not all other factors were held constant. The more factors that cause climate change, the more parameters across which the error of climate models must be distributed when predicted warming doesn’t occur.

        It is possible to create a simple model of climate in which the radiative forcing of CO2 is exactly what the IPCC says it is, but the vast majority (over 80%) of 20th century warming is due to natural factors. It just requires assuming that climate sensitivity is less than the IPCC says, that the AMO is a strictly internal periodic oscillation, and that the Svensmark effect can change cloud cover by three percent. In such a model the Pause is successfully predicted. That is also consistent with CO2 warming the climate – just in a fairly weak way.

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      • #
        gai

        I am ardently hoping for a return to glaciation.

        I do not think anything else will wake the brain dead sheeple up. If it doesn’t wake people up, it should at least give another boost to human intelligence. But only if we survive as a species until the next interglacial.

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    • #
      el gordo

      John Watt the comment by Andrew: ‘The climate is affected by multiple factors, not just CO2…’ marks him out as a lukewarmer.

      There are a lot of them about.

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  • #
    prison

    I’d just like to make a comment on Claim #3..

    The clear reason why nobody objects to the claim that manmade contribution is only 4% of the the natural Co2 is that this is completely correct. So why is mans contribution even an issue? Surely this small percentage should convince many that our role is a minor one?

    Well here is the missing part of the jigsaw for some of you: the Co2 resulting from the environment naturally is almost in complete balance with the earths capacity to soak and manage this amount of Co2. The atmosphere has stabilised this way over millions of years and the earth has settled on a temperature range which is as result of this balance.

    So, when mankind adds another 4% there are implications and the natural system is unable to process it. The results and implications are within a range, but it is generally accepted that the Co2 is stored in the oceans and that currently they are reaching saturation points evident from the acidification of the oceans and many other changes taking place.

    That’s why those who accept climate science would not dispute that point. It is fascinating that so many people are onboard with disputing the scientific consensus….

    [Science is not done by consensus. CO2 levels have been both lower and higher in the past than they are now. Life on earth simply went on.] AZ

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    • #
      AndyG55

      “natural system is unable to process it”

      This is absolute balderdash.

      The biosphere is very able to process much higher levels of CO2, in fact has expanded some 10-15% (I forget the exact last number) since we humans have raised the atmospheric CO2 level above plant life’s basic subsistence level.

      PLANT LOVE CO2, and they respond by feeding the world’s increasing population.

      And the ocean acidification NONSENSE again.. seriously???

      Go to junior high at some stage in your life, and learn some basic chemistry !!!!!

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    • #
      AndyG55

      “It is fascinating that so many people are onboard ”

      What is really fascinating is that there are so many people who are ignorant enough to actually not see how monumentally flawed the whole AGW farce is.

      And you seem to be one of them. !!

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    • #
      gai

      prison says “…when mankind adds another 4% there are implications and the natural system is unable to process it.”

      Your claim is base on two incorrect assumptions.

      First Assumption: The earth was not in plant starvation mode and plants will not use as much CO2 as they can grab.

      The fact that the earth has ‘Greened’ according to satellite data quickly kills that assumption. You can go to the bottom of this page and look under Greening of the Earth for a lot of data on that subject @
      (wwwDOT)co2science.org/subject/g/subject_g.php

      Here are other papers refuting that Assumption:
      Carbon dioxide starvation, the development of C4 ecosystems, and mammalian evolution

      Carbon starvation in glacial trees recovered from the La Brea tar pits, southern California
      biblioteca(DOT)universia.net/ficha.do?id=912067

      Plants use all of the CO2 around their leaves within a few minutes leaving the air around them CO2 deficient, so air circulation is important. As CO2 is a critical component of growth, plants in environments with inadequate CO2 levels of below 200 ppm will generally cease to grow or produce… (wwwDOT)thehydroponicsshop.com.au/article_info.php?articles_id=27

      C3 plants might not die at 200 ppm but they are not going to grow and produce seed.

      This, an open air experiment, is even more interesting since the draw down stops at ~310 ppm.
      Carbon dioxide measurements above a wheat crop. Observations of vertical gradients and concentrations

      The CO2 concentration at 2 m above the crop was found to be fairly constant during the daylight hours on single days or from day-to-day throughout the growing season ranging from about 310 to 320 p.p.m. Nocturnal values were more variable and were between 10 and 200 p.p.m. higher than the daytime values.
      (wwwDOT)sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0002157173900034

      Tomato Plant Culture: In the Field, Greenhouse, and Home Garden, Second Edition

      Plant photosynthetic activity can reduce the Co2 within the plant canopy to between 200 and 250 ppm… I observed a 50 ppm drop in within a tomato plant canopy just a few minutes after direct sunlight at dawn entered a green house (Harper et al 1979) … photosynthesis can be halted when CO2 concentration aproaches 200 ppm… (Morgan 2003)

      …Slack (1986) states that ‘low atmospheric CO2 content in many greenhouses is indeed a major contributor to lower than expected yields, and the enriching with co2 to bring levels back to at least ambient will have a major effect on plant yields.”…

      ……..Relative Fruit Yields (5)
      CO2 Conc… 4 weeks…. 20 weeks
      Ambient…….100……….100
      600 ppm…….179……….129
      1,000 ppm ….235……….137
      1,400 ppm ….254……….139

      Second False Assumption: The residence time of CO2 in the atmospher is long. Data from above ground nuclear testing shows that assumption is false.

      In a paper recently published in the international peer-reviewed journal Energy & Fuels, Dr. Robert H. Essenhigh (2009), Professor of Energy Conversion at The Ohio State University, addresses the residence time (RT) of anthropogenic CO2 in the air. He finds that the RT for bulk atmospheric CO2, the molecule 12CO2, is ~5 years, in good agreement with other cited sources (Segalstad, 1998), while the RT for the trace molecule 14CO2 is ~16 years. Both of these residence times are much shorter than what is claimed by the IPCC….
      (wwwDOT)co2science.org/articles/V12/N31/EDIT.php

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  • #
    prison

    I’ve got a comment on claim #5. My disclaimer is that I’m partially informed by an episode of Vice from this season where they went down to the Antarctic to talk to people who had been operating in an area on the west as well as to get on a NASA plane which is used to measure ice shelf thickness.

    They have two means of measurement, on is the old method of sonar and a newer method using lasers which is proving to be more accurate. The NASA scientists have been doing flyovers for many years now to track the thickness of the ice which is showing an alarming reduction in thickness.

    Where one of these bases are located, you can see the water level eating into the ice below due to rising temperatures and the locals are saying that a few years ago, you couldn’t even sail near this area. The scientists themselves are saying even more alarming things and predicting that if these glaciers continue to melt and the accelerating rate that they have seen and that globally, sea levels could rise by 3-4m.

    There was a rise in the area of Sea Ice in the region which has been claimed from heartland announcements to debunk the scientific measurements from NASA. The truth seems to be that while the Glaciers which can be 1-2Km thick melt from warming waters underneath that the change in water composition is leading to an increase in sea ice which is only around 1m thick. Basically what is being reduced is NOT visible, but the increasing sea ice obviously IS visible…

    The last leg of this episode of Vice went to low lieing countries around the equator where the people are currently losing land and their means of survival because of rising sea levels. They showed areas where the sea has reclaimed land where people were living only a few years ago. These are all factual first hand accounts from the people who live there…no wonder their governments are critical of Australia’s recent stance on AGW and apparent inaction to deal with the issue.

    I hope that information gives you all some alternative sources of information to investigate and hopefully it isn’t simply discredited as being wrong by using the usual references originating from heartland and similar groups.

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    • #
      AndyG55

      Gees, they turned up the hose to maximum when they brain-washed you, didn’t they.

      Left nothing behind, not one skerrick of grey matter remaining. !!

      A climate change zombie.

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    • #
      Bill

      finger problem on thumbs, should be a big fat red thumbs down NOT up.

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  • #
    Brett

    An Interview on ABC radio today, some of it here

    “Also the way that we can see and predict severe weather is improving rapidly as well. That’s down to modelling, to science and to observations, the three things working together.”

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  • #
    David Maddison

    Climate change IS serious. Warming would have been easy to deal with BUT how are we going to deal with cooling, especially since by the time cooling becomes significant the warmists would have got rid of all the reliable and cheap power generation (fossil and nuclear).

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  • #
    RoyFOMR

    STOP PRESS!!!

    Global Climate to be tried for ‘Crimes against Science’ at Paris conference.

    In a shock announcement today, UN climate chief Christiana Figueres told journalists that after continual pressure from the Union of Concerned Scientists, environmental bodies, esteemed academics from a wide range of disciplines and learned societies that Global Climate will face charges in Paris that it has wilfully ignored advice, time and time again, about its behaviour not conforming to the settled science of Climate Modelling.

    She stated. “After continual pressure from the Union of Concerned Scientists, environmental bodies, esteemed academics from a wide range of disciplines and learned societies that Global Climate will face charges in Paris that it has wilfully ignored advice, time and time again, about its behaviour not conforming to the settled science of Climate Modelling”

    “We’ve finally lost patience with the stubborn intransigence of Nature in refusing to do what we said it should be doing. Heaven knows, we’ve tried everything. Repeated adjustments to temperature records, creative mathematics, novel scientific tricks and numerous threats of legal action. Our patience has finally snapped”

    She refused to confirm or deny that God will be subpoenaed (under oath) to appear.

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    David Maddison

    I have a question. Is there any genuinely economically viable use for variable and unreliable sources of power such as solar and wind at any price point (let’s call it “dirty power”)? E.g. much is being made of organic solar cells that could be cheaply printed hundreds of square meters at a time. If the price (including land, grid connection and other infrastructure) was cheap enough, would they be of genuine use for something / anything?

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    • #
      bobl

      Yes, it is useful in some contexts. For example remote area communications, small craft, isolated off grid homes usually with a backup genset. It’s also useful for watches, calculators and other pico generation uses, bore pumps and so on. Oh and it’s a pretty good power source for a one watt raspberry pi.

      It is only useful where its stupendously low energy density isn’t an obstacle.

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      • #
        David Maddison

        bobl, thanks for that. They are all legitimate uses. Perhaps I should have qualified my question to mean large scale uses which is what I was thinking of.

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  • #
    Another Ian

    Jo

    Looks like some more mistakes in this paddock

    “Enron Environmentalism: The Carbon Credits Scam Pumps Millions of Tonnes More Greenhouse Gases Into The Atmosphere”

    More at

    http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/08/26/enron-environmentalism-the-carbon-credits-scam-pumps-millions-of-tonnes-more-greenhouse-gases-into-the-atmosphere/

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    • #
      Oksanna

      Love how ‘Dels’ calls it a “green circle jerk”, and asks “This stuff that these greenies have been smoking sounds totally amazing. How do we go about getting some?”.

      Also the history of offsets scams dating back to Enron’s Sulphur Dioxide cap-and-trading, and their support for Climate lobbying and propaganda was interesting, too. Thanks for the link. Always great to read Delingpole.

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  • #
    David Maddison

    SUGGESTED TERMINOLOGY: As per my post above, what do you think of the idea of referring to unreliable and expensive solar and wind as “dirty power” to distinguish it from clean, stable, reliable and economical fossil and nuclear?

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    • #
      David Maddison

      And the only by-products of significance of fossil power are life giving CO2, flyash (from coal) that is used in making concrete and sometimes warm water discharged into lakes or other bodies of water which the marine life loves (life LOVES heat). It’s win-win for everyone.

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  • #

    The fact that warmists collectively decided to change their religion’s name from ‘global warming’ to ‘climate change’ says it all doesn’t it?
    When they are faced with cooling these people are so inwardly subjective in their thinking that they couldn’t see when they did this that this attempt to be prudent would make them appear rather desperate.

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  • #
    Oksanna

    They wiped off their soy-latte milk lip
    and considered the loyal readership
    The ebbing support
    of the warmista sort
    The tiring of the climate guilt trip

    The luvvie journos were apoplectic
    We’ve got to shut down that skeptic
    I know, said one wit
    A strawman to king-hit
    A sure-fire winning dialectic

    Now, a strawman is great to attack
    As the bugger doesn’t talk back.
    Give him a stupid position
    Then commence the excision
    Voila! skeptic in verbal gunny sack

    But the winning plan has backfired
    The fake debate deemed uninspired
    The discerning public
    see straight through the weak trick
    And a real debate is desired.

    (Of course, I acknowledge the true Master who already posted above).

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  • #
    David Maddison

    ATTENTION RED THUMB TROLL: When are you going to make an intelligible comment in support of your warming hypothesis or make legitimate criticisms of comments posted here? That’s how science works you know. It’s not about religious or political beliefs like you anti-science warmists think.

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  • #
    CalUKGR

    Jo, you’re never better than when you’re on the rebuttal, and this piece is a fine example. Fantastic. No wonder the networks are so terrified of ever airing a genuine climate skeptic! The entire house of cards would come tumbling down, down, down…

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    • #
      gai

      Yes, they do not dare interview a well read skeptic. Even the lay audience here and at other realist sites could give the ClimAstrologists a run for their money.

      60

  • #
    gai

    “you can see the water level eating into the ice below due to rising temperatures and the locals are saying that a few years ago, you couldn’t even sail near this area. The scientists themselves are saying even more alarming things and predicting that if these glaciers continue to melt and the accelerating rate that they have seen and that globally, sea levels could rise by 3-4m.”

    First see my comment on GLACIAL INCEPTION above. Another comment on re-establishment of glaciers in Norway and the Arctic as well as a 1.5 to 2 meter fall in sea level is in moderation (too many links.) So glaciers are not going to melt long term.

    Is there melting in the Antarctic? Yes in certain locations but it has been track down and established it is from volcanoes and geothermal.

    Researchers Find Major West Antarctic Glacier Melting from Geothermal Sources

    … being melted from below by geothermal heat, researchers at the Institute for Geophysics at The University of Texas at Austin (UTIG) report in the current edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

    The findings significantly change the understanding of conditions beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet where accurate information has previously been unobtainable…

    They found these sources are distributed over a wider area and are much hotter than previously assumed.

    The geothermal heat contributed significantly to melting of the underside of the glacier, and it might be a key factor in allowing the ice sheet to slide, affecting the ice sheet’s stability….

    Giant Underwater Volcanoes Discovered

    In the first ever-survey of its kind, a chain of massive volcanoes that rise up to 1.86 miles were discovered lurking beneath Antarctic waters near the South Sandwich Islands in the remote Atlantic Ocean… The expedition’s shipboard sonar scans reveal twelve new undersea volcanoes, some rising nearly two miles from the seafloor. Several of them have clearly been active in recent times…..
    http://news.discovery.com/earth/weather-extreme-events/volcanoes-sandwich-islands-110713.htm

    Antarctica Active Volcano found beneath the ice

    A paper published two years ago finds Antarctica has been gaining surface ice and snow accumulation over the past 150+ years, and finds acceleration in some areas. “…a clear increase in accumulation of more than 10% has occurred in high Surface Mass Balance coastal regions and over the highest part of the East Antarctic ice divide since the 1960s….” The entire Antarctic continent has been gaining surface ice mass over the past 150 years and Antarctic surface ice mass is presently growing by 2100 gigatons per year.

    A synthesis of the Antarctic surface mass balance during the last 800 yr Frezzotti, M., Scarchilli, C., Becagli, S., Proposito, M., and Urbini S. (2013)

    Abstract
    …Our SMB reconstructions indicate that the SMB changes over most of Antarctica are statistically negligible and that the current SMB is not exceptionally high compared to the last 800 yr. High-accumulation periods have occurred in the past, specifically during the 1370s and 1610s. However, a clear increase in accumulation of more than 10% has occurred in high SMB coastal regions and over the highest part of the East Antarctic ice divide since the 1960s. To explain the differences in behaviour between the coastal/ice divide sites and the rest of Antarctica, we suggest that a higher frequency of blocking anticyclones increases the precipitation at coastal sites, leading to the advection of moist air in the highest areas, whereas blowing snow and/or erosion have significant negative impacts on the SMB at windy sites. Eight hundred years of stacked records of the SMB mimic the total solar irradiance during the 13th and 18th centuries. The link between those two variables is probably indirect and linked to a teleconnection in atmospheric circulation that forces complex feedback between the tropical Pacific and Antarctica via the generation and propagation of a large-scale atmospheric wave train.

    (wwwDOT)the-cryosphere.net/7/303/2013/tc-7-303-2013.html

    Final Paper (PDF) (wwwDOT)the-cryosphere.net/7/303/2013/tc-7-303-2013.pdf

    Another paper says the same thing.

    Zwally, H. Jay; Li, Jun; Robbins, John; Saba, Jack L.; Yi, Donghui; Brenner, Anita; Bromwich, David (2012) Mass Gains of the Antarctic Ice Sheet Exceed Losses
    PDF File hdl(DOT)handle.net/2060/20120013495

    Abstract:

    During 2003 to 2008, the mass gain of the Antarctic ice sheet from snow accumulation exceeded the mass loss from ice discharge by 49 Gt/yr (2.5% of input), as derived from ICESat laser measurements of elevation change. The net gain (86 Gt/yr) over the West Antarctic (WA) and East Antarctic ice sheets (WA and EA) is essentially unchanged from revised results for 1992 to 2001 from ERS radar altimetry.

    Imbalances in individual drainage systems (DS) are large (-68% to +103% of input), as are temporal changes (-39% to +44%). The recent 90 Gt/yr loss from three DS (Pine Island, Thwaites-Smith, and Marie-Bryd Coast) of WA exceeds the earlier 61 Gt/yr loss, consistent with reports of accelerating ice flow and dynamic thinning. Similarly, the recent 24 Gt/yr loss from three DS in the Antarctic Peninsula (AP) is consistent with glacier accelerations following breakup of the Larsen B and other ice shelves. In contrast, net increases in the five other DS of WA and AP and three of the 16 DS in East Antarctica (EA) exceed the increased losses….

    Robot Sub Finds Surprisingly Thick Antarctic Sea Ice

    Not only is the amount of sea ice increasing each year, but an underwater robot now shows the ice is also much thicker than was previously thought, a new study reports.

    The discovery adds to the ongoing mystery of Antarctica’s expanding sea ice. According to climate models, the region’s sea ice should be shrinking each year because of global warming. Instead, satellite observations show the ice is expanding, and the continent’s sea ice has set new records for the past three winters….
    The findings were published today (Nov. 24, 2014) in the journal Nature Geoscience.
    (wwwDOT)livescience.com/48880-antarctica-sea-ice-thickness-mapped.html

    What does the expanding ice mean?

    Growing Antarctic Ice Sheets May Have Sparked Ice Age

    …In the new study, the researchers found evidence that Earth’s polar ice sheets began growing between 3.1 million and 2.7 million years ago. However, this time frame means that the glacier growth preceded the growth of major glaciers across North America — the earliest compelling evidence suggests Northern glaciers began growing about 2.7 million years ago.

    This finding suggests that most of the earlier ice growth occurred in the Antarctic.…

    The researchers suggested that the growth of the Antarctic ice sheet altered ocean currents worldwide. More Antarctic sea ice would have meant there was less warm, salty water from the North Atlantic that rose upwards and mixed withthe surface waters surrounding Antarctica. Instead, this conveyer belt of heat would have redirected into the deep waters of the Pacific Ocean, and these changes in heat flow might have been substantial enough to initiate glacier formation in the Northern Hemisphere….
    (wwwDOT)livescience.com/49001-antarctic-ice-sparked-pliocene-ice-age.html

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    • #
      el gordo

      ‘The researchers suggested that the growth of the Antarctic ice sheet altered ocean currents worldwide.’

      I’ll have a closer look at that, because the closure of the Central American Seaway may have contributed.

      http://cdn.phys.org/newman/gfx/news/hires/2015/2-smithsonians.jpg

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      • #
        gai

        I thought it was the closing of the Isthmus of Panama (that you show) and the opening of Drake Passage between the tip of South America and Antarctica that cause the earth to descend into glaciation as the ocean circulations completely changed.

        Sort of makes you wonder what will happen if the Antarctic sea ice grows enought to disrupt the Wind Drift current through Drake Passage and send more cold water up the side of South America.

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      el gordo

      ‘The findings do not necessarily exclude other explanations for the Late Pliocene cooling, Woodard noted. However, the fairly rapid change in temperature and circulation that the researchers suggested does imply that a slow process, such as the closure of the Panamanian Seaway, “could have played only an indirect role in the climatic cooling about 2.73 million years ago,” Woodard said.’

      ——-

      Okay, I’ll pay that.

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    […] Not forgetting those Labor/Green media operatives: #TalkAboutIt: Climate change sceptics versus the scientists (correcting ABC mistakes, strawmen, and … […]

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    Ken Stewart

    Jo, these arguments are straight from the Denialism 101 course that I did- almost word for word. Good old ABC.

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