The Bunyip decided to take a closer look at the rap singing Climate Scientists (in that profane Hungry Beast rap video) and gives us an idea of what kind of rigorous science they pursue.
He’s noticed, for example, that one of the rap-singer-scientists claims a 97.7% (!) certainty that the Murray has not had a worse drought than the most recent one in the last 1500 years.
Snippets below from Insane Clown Posse — Part II
All thanks for the eye-opener go to Melbourne University’s Ailie Gallant (below)…
It is not Allie’s efforts to attract attention (which can also help with the funding), but her co-authored paper on water flows in the Murray Darling Basin which has brought so much re-assurance. In particular, it is the remarkably specific conclusion that there is precisely, and she is very exact about this, a 2.3% likelihood tht any of the many droughts over the past 1500 years were worse than the one just ended – the same dry spell during which the she began smokin’ dos’ stats in her climate crib.
And her methods? Well, let’s just say that the Professor is — yo, lab bitches — down with them.
And this certainty is built upon an analysis of results from Bali, Fiji, Tonga and Tasmania: results from everywhere it seems, except from the Murray itself.
The Original Custodians were not big on meteorological records, so that was a problem for Allie right there. She might have gone off to Barmah (a lovely spot) and cored a few red gums or somesuch, measured their transected rings and deduced when it had been hot and dry or cool and wet. That was not her preferred method, however. Rather, nice and comfy at a Parkville work station, she consulted those who went before, mining their studies of celery top pines in Tasmania, teak in Indonesia, some tall timber in Western Australia, Tongan corals, kauri in New Zealand and other interesting bits of Bali, Fiji and the Great Barrier Reef. The closest survey site was a good 900 kilometres from the Murray, the furthest a 10-hour flight, even for Tim Flannery.
Data sources so far removed from the river she intended to study might have suggested an insurmountable obstacle to those who know not the miracles of modern modelling. By reviewing numbers here, sifting charts there and rejecting discordant figures in accordance with recognised climatological norms and norming, Ailie was able to feed what was left into a computerized vitamizer and – golly gosh, guess what? – demonstrate with charts and graphs that the recent drought really was the worst in centuries, just as the Phage, ABC, Guardian, World Wildlife Fund had been saying all along!
Indeed, by Ailie’s reckoning, it was even worse, which must have convulsed the WWF’s fund-raisers with shivers of delight: the drought was not the nastiest in 100 years or even 1,000 years – it was a full 1500 years since Australia had seen the arid like. Just to put things in perspective, that is not too long after the Romans pulled out of Britain. Amazing, ain’t it, what climate science can learn about a river in southern Australia from a bit of Bali coral someone else has studied? And don’t getting suspicious, thinking nobody could be that precise on the basis of such much-handled data.The science is settled, Ailie assures us, and to a 97.7% certainty, no less!
See also his earlier post Insane Clown Posse on a cherubic faced not-quite-yet-PhD scientist and one Dr Jason Evans “FCS”:
Her UNSW colleague, Dr Jason Evans (left), added even more intellectual heft to the choir, as he has published many, many papers and prognostications about what the weather might do next. He is also the performer ABC viewers will remember as getting in the camera’s face at the 1:53 mark of the two-minute video. That is the instant when he announces with aggressive tunelessness that he is no mere a climate scientist, not him! No, he is “a fucking climate scientist.” There may be one thing, however, Jason Evans PhD (with a self-conferred FCS) regrets publishing, and that would be his prediction in late 2009 of the Saharan future facing the Murray-Darling basin.
”Certainly the southern part of the Murray-Darling Basin, which includes the Lachlan, [is] looking at hotter and drier projections in the future,” a senior research fellow at the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of NSW, Dr Jason Evans, said.
Pity about all that rain we’ve been having.
The diligent Bunyip has noticed one of the performers had 2 seconds of fame in the Climategate emails as well. It’s good to have another blogger out there cross checking the PR output of our taxpayer funded advisers and researchers.