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A new incendiary blog by Dr. Duane Thresher and Dr. Claudia Kubatzki unleashes on NASA Goddard Institute (one of the two main motherlodes of climate activism), calling for them to be defunded because they are “ignoble”, with “herds of do-gooders”, and “NASA GISS is a monument to bad science that truly should be torn down. Take the money and buy a rocket.”
They are a husband and wife team, both producing peer-reviewed climate papers. He worked at NASA GISS for seven years. Since they came out as skeptics in California, they’ve had to move house. Thanks to Marc Morano for the tip.
His latest post calls on the new NASA head, appointed by Trump, to just turn off the tap, cut the cash: Bridenstine, Climate Scientists Are Not Noble, Stop Paying Them
Everyone assumes climate scientists are noble. Fighting to save the planet. What nonsense. Not even close.
They write about a wave of new money into climate science and the decay of the field:
Enter opportunists, carpetbaggers, the corrupt, the ignoble.
What to do? Stop paying climate scientists. The good ones are so into their science they will work for food, maybe less, […]
How many solar panels does it take to stop floods and droughts in Australia? The science of managing the weather with power stations and other modern superstitions. September 20 @ 6:15 pm – 9:00 pm
The Generous Squire, 397 Murray St, Perth city, Western Australia.
Organized by LibertyWorks: $20 or Free-for-members. Includes a beer or wine. Early bird discount of $15 ends tomorrow at midnight. Food for sale.
How to destroy a perfectly good electricity grid in three easy steps
The World is watching Australia. Despite being handicapped with abundant resources, we’ve turned ourselves into an international spectacle with rampant blackouts, flying squads of diesel generators, and the highest electricity prices in the world.
An achievement like this does not come easily.
The grand experiment unfolds around us, as the nation discovers why “free” energy isn’t free, why storage is deceptively expensive, yet baseload is deceptively cheap.
9.7 out of 10 based on 111 ratings
Cambridge University Press
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology may not be meeting WMO, UK, US standards
Since the Australian BOM allows for one second “records”, it’s not clear it is even meeting guidelines recommended for amateurs.
The key question: How much of the warming trend in Australia is due to the switch in the mid 1990s from older slower thermometers to new electronic zippy ones that could record every waft of hot air? How many records today are just noise?
If the BOM would release its calibration and comparison data instead of deleting it, we might know. Why won’t they?
Here’s an example graph from Maryborough where the daily maximum was 1.5C above every thirty minute reading. Ouch — are we writing outliers and noise into our history books and climate data bases?
Add “sampling method” and averaging to your skeptical vocabulary. There will be a lot more discussion on these.
Maryborough. Graph by Ken Stewart.
Let’s consider some basic standards in the meteorology world
The Weather Observer’s Handbook 2012 tells us the new electronic sensors are more sensitive than the old mercury thermometers. The author, Stephen Burt, explains that the new electronic sensors can be too sensitive, […]
Hurricane Irma is a big bad storm, like other big bad storms. Six awkward facts: It’s only the 7th most intense at landfall in US history. It formed over water that was two degrees cooler than normal, 1893, 1933, 1950, 1995, and 2005 had more Accumulated Cyclone Energy by Sept 10. In 1933 two hurricanes hit the US in just 24 hours In 1893, 1909, 2004 there were three Cat 3+ landfalls in US (blame climate change). NOAA itself says there’s no evidence anyone can detect that greenhouse gas emissions have an effect on hurricanes.
Not to be stopped by a lack of any scientific connection, climate druids are out in force finding fingerprints in every storm. Like all the great witchdoctors of history, Big Storms are a chance to pump fear and sell their services.
Tim Flannery is up with other great scientists like actress Jennifer Lawrence:
Graham Lloyd, The Australian:
Oscar-winning actor Jennifer Lawrence said Harvey and Irma were signs of “Mother Nature’s rage and wrath” at the US for electing Trump to the presidency and not believing in man-made climate change.
The Tim Flannery-backed Climate Council declared: “Fingerprints of climate change all […]
…
9.6 out of 10 based on 25 ratings
UPDATE #4: Now Cat 2, crossed the coast, winds 105 mph (165 km/h) and 942 mb. Slowing down, but hurricane force winds are still covering an area 80 miles from the eye. Hurricane Jose is Cat 3, 120 mph, 956 hPa. Moving at 14 mph.
UPDATE #3: Late Sunday night Australia time (Sunday morning US 11AM) Official advisory updates are here. #46 says 130mph, with lowest pressure 933 hPA . Watch news come in on twitter #IRMA. Blackouts across Miami — over 1 million without power. Storm surges. Streets turning into rivers. Waterspouts off the east coast of Florida.
For comparison:
A few hurricanes that have hit Florida Hurricane Year hPa Speed mph Fatalities Labor Day 1935 892 160 160 Camille 1969 900 175 259 Andrew 1992 922 145 65 Katrina 2005 902 175 1,245–1,836
Katrina is listed as 920 and 902 hPa on different wiki pages. (PS: Judging by the map on this post, Camille and Andrew did not hit Florida. Hmm. Wikipedia?)
UPDATE#2: Sunday morning Australia time. Irma now aCat 3, up to a Cat 4 again, savaging Cuba and weakening as it loses moisture being half over land. It is […]
The BOM’s bad luck never seems to end. Of all the 695 stations in Australia, 693 worked perfectly, but Jen Marohasy and Lance Pidgeon happened to live near, or have a personal random connection to the only two stations that didn’t — Thredbo and Goulburn. Apparently these stations had been flawed (not fit for purpose) for 10 years and 14 years, but the BOM world-class experts hadn’t noticed. I expect they were just about to discover the flaws when (how inconsiderately) Lance and Jen announced the errors to the world and the BOM were forced to do this pointless 77 page report to stop people asking questions they couldn’t answer.
The nub of this fracas is that something called an MSI1 hardware card was installed in cold locations even though it would never report a temperature below minus 10.4C. Awkwardly this doesn’t explain why the 10.4C appeared in the live feed, then was automatically changed to -10C in the long term data sets which are used for climate analysis. Does the BOM think the dumb public don’t know the difference between -10 and -10.4? Implicitly — the BOM installed the wrong type of card, and also accidentally had an error […]
Christopher Kremmer, Senior Lecturer in Literary & Narrative Journalism, School of the Arts & Media, UNSW, wants to help you shield yourself from worldviews that you don’t like, so he provides a detailed “how to” list of ways to make sure you filter out, specifically, news.com.
This man lectures in journalism. Instead of teaching journalism students on how to logically outplay and counter arguments and spot the flaws, he’s teaching them to cleanse their feeds lest they be exposed to inconvenient worldviews.
The team that has no evidence and no answers has to find a way to compensate for their intellectual vacuum.
Taking control of who gets to send us news
… before I had even typed in my search terms, it was apparent that my options had been narrowed. The news list that the aggregator threw up was dominated by websites whose idea of what constitutes news is very different to my own.
It takes a lot of effort to build an information silo:
One by one, I began blocking offending mastheads, then refreshing the browser to check the progress of my censorship. It takes a while because news websites use multiple addresses to maximise […]
Who knew it would cost a lot to change the climate?
It’s crisis time in Australia. Electricity bills have doubled, and the fallout is just starting to feed through to consumers. Not only does electricity cost more, but so will nearly everything else. Large businesses, economists, and miners are warning that Australians will be paying so much more it will push our inflation figures up.
Major packaging and brick makers, supermarkets, soft-drink bottlers and poultry producers said yesterday the bill shock would chip away further at profit margins and could push up consumer prices…
Economists, including National Australia Bank chief economist Alan Oster, warned the power bill shock was expected to show up in national inflation figures as early as next month.
He predicted headline inflation would increase 0.6 per cent for the July-to-September quarter, purely from energy price rises.
Paul McArdle from WattClarity makes the point that for most of the last 16 years our electricity prices didn’t even rise with inflation. In this graph, since the start of the NEM (National Electricity Market) in 1998 the spot price of electricity was about $30 per MWh, barring major drought, carbon tax and the […]
It was only June when there were expectations of an El Nino coming. But the sea has cooled rapidly since then — much faster than usual — and now NOAA thinks a La Nina is slightly more likely. If so, global temperatures will decline.
Cold water is upwelling across the Eastern Pacific. Sea Surface Temp Anomaly. | Image Sept 6, 2017
I notice that there is also unusually cold water on the surface of the eastern Indian Ocean near West Australia (see below). One spot is 2.5C cooler than normal. I don’t know the significance…
9.3 out of 10 based on 76 ratings […]
Hoping for the best for everyone affected. Irma is a mega-blender, may set all time record windspeed for Atlantic storm, and on the way to Florida by Sunday. On twitter the hastag: #Irma
Just as man-made climate change usually causes long droughts in hurricanes, this month it causes #&@Hurricanes*$&*! Not just Irma, but Jose as well.
h/t Ben Pile @clim8resistance
Ryan Maue: Hurricane expert, skeptic, estimates Irma is so fast, it ought to be called a Cat #6. “Simple physical arg for Category 6 at 170-knots (Haiyan) is power or destructiveness is v³ in knots = 2-times v³ at 140-knots.”
In an update Maue predicts 190mph: “Based on near perfect environment for #IrmaHurricane to intensify, expecting a peak of 900 mb central pressure & 190 mph in next 24-36 hrs.”
Radar simulation from NOAA’s flagship hurricane model (HWRF) for Category 5 Hurricane #Irma for next 5-days. pic.twitter.com/MUtYybVjHV
— Ryan Maue (@RyanMaue) September 5, 2017
Prepare to be told your car causes Hurricanes. Keep these Climate Depot points handy — Hurricanes: 1) NOAA: ‘It is premature to conclude (AGW has) already had a detectable impact on’ hurricanes & 2) NOAA: U.S. Record 11 Years Without Major (Cat 3+) […]
The Money Question trumps
Three quarters of Australians may believe climate change is real (so the ABC keeps telling us) but only 13% of Australians are willing to pay $1 a day or more to save the world. Anyone can tick the box “Don’t pick on me, I believe in *Climate$%@$#Change*”. But if people believed it was a threat they wouldn’t balk at paying $100 a year, which is what 62% of Australians did in the latest Newspoll.
87% of Australians think a dollar a day is too much. But hey, it’s only the planet at stake.
Most Australians don’t want to pay anything more for renewable power.
The survey is still biased. There was no option to pay “less than zero”. How much are you willing to pay to get rid of renewables?
The sad thing is that most Australian’s don’t realize they’re already paying so much more.
For starters, The Australian calculated that the bill for federal renewable subsidies would be $60 billion by 2030. That’s $2500 per Australian. In a house of four, that’s $10k over 20 years or $200 per year. And that’s only the federal subsidies and schemes, it’s not the state schemes, nor […]
The real story here is that past scares claiming that ocean acidification would create reckless fish were most likely an artefact of an inadequate experiment. There are big swings of CO2 and pH in shallow water environments, and the normal day-night cycle turns out to be good for fish. Putting them in a laboratory tank without these daily changes may create fish that behave badly. So ocean acidification is not only natural, but a good and necessary thing.
New hope for reef fish living in a high CO2 world
Chemical changes in the ocean, as a result of climate change, are leading to a more acidic environment, referred to as ‘ocean acidification’ (OA). In a laboratory setting, these changes have been shown to lead to a range of risky behaviours in the affected fish, with some fish unable to flee from their finned foes effectively.
But, when researchers recalibrated experiments to adjust for natural daily changes in concentrations of dissolved carbon dioxide (CO2), the primary chemical driver of OA, they found that the fish were less affected than previously thought.
“Shallow water habitats where reef fish live can experience substantial natural fluctuations […]
For all the other stuff…
9.2 out of 10 based on 33 ratings
Instrument errors, noise, may account for a quarter to one half of our national warming trend in the last century.
When the newspapers run a headline with Sydney hits, say, 44.4 degrees and that number gets engraved in history, who realizes that the extreme heat may have only lasted one second? You might think the maximum temperatures were above 44 for at least ten minutes, but the BOM will write it into the record books even if that heat lasts one second, and if the temperature a minute before was more than a whole degree cooler. We’re writing puffs of jet emissions, car exhaust, or random packets of hot (or cold) air into history books, and comparing these new records with old ones done in slow reacting liquid in glass thermometers. No wonder we are setting records!
In the last twenty years, electronic sensors have replaced most of the old fashioned thermometers. It’s for exactly this reason that we need the side-by-side comparison data that Bill Johnston asked for and which the BOM can’t supply because it is deleting the data – as a matter of routine practice.
Back in 1910, or even 1990, thermometers were not able to […]
Will Corals Survive?, asks a group of international scientists.
Corals first appeared 540 million years ago, but having made it through supervolcanoes, mass extinctions, and an asteroid impact equivalent to 10 billion Hiroshima A-bombs, it’s now likely they will be wiped out because a trace gas has risen from 20% up to 25% of levels common for half of the last 300 million years.
Source: www.geocraft, Scotese and Berner 2001
Having made it through the volatile last 65 million years, and multiple ice ages where the oceans rose and fell by as much as 125m repeatedly, it will be tragic if the current man-made warming phase wipes them out. According to one thousand tide gauges the worlds oceans are relentlessly rising by 1mm every year. While corals coped with the last 125,000mm of sea level rise, it’s not clear they will still be around if it rises another 20mm.
Current climate change marked in
The team of 22 researchers admit “there is still a lot to understand about corals,” and “there are major knowledge gaps”. But despite not knowing much, the experts on marine ecosystems advise that “our only real chance for their survival” is to control the […]
The cost of Going Green, The Australian, Cover, September 1, 2017.
The Australian calculates the total bill will be in the order of $60b for green electricity.
It’s not like we could have done something better with that.
Read it all (if you can), then write to your MP and Senator. Ask why — if they are serious about helping reduce CO2 — we don’t have a USC coal plant like so many other countries, and why we don’t have nuclear power. Then ask why, if they are concerned about the poor, about health, about education, we are wasting $60b dollars to try to change the weather in 2100 that we could be spending on these critical areas right now?
Taxpayers hit with a $60bn power bill
The Australian, Adam Creighton
Taxpayers will have paid more than $60 billion through federal renewable energy subsidies by 2030, about twice what the crumbling car industry received over 15 years and enough to build about 10 large nuclear reactors.
The government’s large and small-scale renewable energy targets, which will compel energy retailers to buy 33 terawatt hours of wind, solar and hydro energy by 2030, will […]
How many people have died prematurely because they swapped their fats for carbohydrates?
More fat meant less death (left). More carbs (right) meant the opposite (at least above 60%). (Click to see the full table of Figure 1 results).
New research published in the Lancet shows that low fat diets could increase your risk of death.
Specifically, those who are in the top fifth of carbohydrate-eaters are also about 28% more likely to die than the fifth eating the lowest amount. This is a correlation (only), but the PURE* study was tracking the thing that matters most — all-cause mortality — and they followed the diets of 135,000 people in 18 countries for 5 – 9 years. Loosely, if people avoided high carbohydrate diets, they were less likely to die.
The graph flattens off below “60% carbs” (that’s a percentage of total calories). However, the mortality numbers keep improving for the highest fat intakes which rather skewers 40 years of headlines. I’m guessing that some people who kept carbs below 60% ate more protein instead, which, judging by the “fat” graph, wasn’t as useful.
The McMaster University team announced this quiet bomb, slightly obscured, in a press release […]
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The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
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