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Sabra Lane interviews Bernie Fraser, Chairman of the Climate Change Authority on the ABC 7:30 report. She only had time for a few questions. Shame then, to only ask one’s everyone knows the answer to.
Instead of asking Fraser how many dollars each Australian will have to spend to lower global temperatures by one degree Celsius, Sabra Lane asks him about global psychology instead: “On the Renewable Energy Target, there’s a lot of talk about the Government watering it down or getting rid of it. What impact is that having on Australia’s reputation?
What does she think the head of any “authority” dependent on the fear of a carbon-crisis for its existence was going to say? Not much — Sabra, no one overseas cares a lot about what we do?
9 out of 10 based on 78 ratings […]
Palmer is offering to vote for Tony Abbott’s Direct Action Plan as long as he gets “his” Emissions Trading Scheme as well (the one he didn’t want eight weeks ago, to solve a problem he didn’t believe existed).
None of it makes sense on its face. Clive Palmer, the coal miner and die-hard unbeliever, appears to “want” an ETS, the Climate Change Authority, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and direct action to reduce CO2 as well as the RET. (And some say that Gore lost?)
Is Palmer just playing games with both the Coalition and the media, holding cards for negotiation-sake, and messing with journalist’s heads? It could be. But until we see the fine print on the legislation (and all the other deals), we can assume the loser of the Gore-Palmer paradox was neither Gore nor Palmer, but the Australian taxpayer.
Abbott will find it hard to knock back a deal to bring in “Direct Action”, after having campaigned for so long to get it working. Especially if the ETS is sold as a dead duck at zero dollars and only on the condition that Japan, South Korea, China, Australian and the US all start emissions trading. […]
… 🙂
7.7 out of 10 based on 32 ratings
Funny things happen on the Internet sometimes. Rather spectacular claims were made that 900 days of data “were fabricated”. This claim was described as not just speculation, but “a demonstrable fact”, and worse, the crime was apparently even “admitted to” by the man himself! Except that none of it was real, and three tiny misunderstood dots were not fabricated, not data, and not important. Welcome to a Bermuda-Triangle-moment in blog-land, where facts vanish, ships full of misquotes appear from nowhere, and ghosts-of-malcontent and misunderstanding roam freely. This post here is to slay the last loose ghosts, lest anybody think they might still have life in them, or indeed, think they ever did.
Usually a live debate is a brilliant way for spectators to learn. But in that particular science thread, the main lesson is not science but manners. Common courtesy may seem a quaint anachronism, but without it, logic and reason die on the sword of uninformed passion. A simple polite email and an open mind could have saved the world from a cloud of nonsense.
Thanks to the many valiant souls who fought for common sense.
It’s rare in a complex […]
Ten awards will be given to prominent global warming skeptics at the Ninth International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC-9), taking place in Las Vegas on July 7-9.
It’s great to see people who have put their careers and reputations on the line for scientific progress get the recognition they deserve. Awards are not as exciting as “new science” I know, but they are an important way to say thank you for some exemplary dedication. There are some giants here who I very much admire.
Sherwood B. Idso, Arthur B. Robinson, Roy Spencer, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, S. Fred Singer, Willie Soon, Patrick Moore, Tom Harris, Alan Carlin, E. Calvin Beisner .
There is still time to get tickets to go to the conference. We, unfortunately, can’t be there, but had fabulous, rewarding experiences in the past. It is a great credit to Heartland that they put on better science conferences than The Royal Society. The truth shall not be suppressed (but only because some people put in the effort to get it out there). Don’t discount how useful it is to make the effort to say thank you.
9.1 out of 10 based on 88 […]
Filed under: Light relief (for a moment til we get back to The solar model)
Not only will your air conditioner make little fish more reckless, but other fish might seriously not be able to find their friends for coffee. I did not make up that headline. Your taxes did.
Note the carefully phrased results:
“Whilst fish kept under normal conditions consistently chose the familiar school, fish reared under high CO2 conditions showed no preference for either the unfamiliar or familiar school.”
If increasing CO2 was a politically-correct achievement, would that same result carry a headline telling us that “Climate Change makes Fish More Confident with Strangers”?
9.3 out of 10 based on 72 ratings […]
Leif Svalgaard claims “TSI has not fallen since 2003”. It’s technically true in a sense, but demonstrably false when discussing 11 year smoothed trends (which is written on the graph he was criticizing). Willis Eschenbach sadly was carried along. This post is in response to an overheated thread at WUWT. Both men owe David Evans an apology.
The fuss is over the big fall in TSI. Leif Svalgaard said it was “almost fraudulent” that we claimed there was a fall in TSI since 2003 since there wasn’t a fall in this dataset. He says: “There is no such drop.” I say, look at the graph below, it’s even in your own data. Svalgaard provided the link to his TSI set, and we’ve included that line in the graph below. It’s the light-purple line. (Has he paid attention for the last ten years?)
In his rush to call it “totally wrong” and to declare “the model is already falsified” he didn’t notice we were talking about a trend in 11 year smoothed TSI, and the fall is evident in whole cycles (but takes some wisdom to find in daily or monthly data). I guess that’s a mistake that could happen to […]
Some people are claiming that the transfer function is meaningless because you could use white noise instead of temperature data and get the same notch. It’s true, you could. But the argument is itself a surprisingly banal fallacy. It looks seductive, but it’s like saying that it is meaningless to add 3 oranges to 3 oranges because you could add 3 oranges to 3 apples and you’d still get six!
It is trivially obvious that the transfer function will find a relationship between entirely unrelated time series, as any mathematical tool will when it’s misapplied. The question that matters — as with any mathematical tool — is has it been misapplied? What matters is whether the base assumption is valid, and whether the results will be a useful answer to the question you’ve asked. If the assumption is that apples and oranges are both pieces of fruit, and the question you ask is “how many pieces of fruit do we have”, then it is useful to add apples and oranges. But if you are trying to compare changes in fruit consumption, adding the two is mindless. So let’s look at the assumptions and the question being asked.
Assumptions first
Two […]
I’m sure some people must be tired of discussing the solar model 😉
7.2 out of 10 based on 21 ratings
Nils‐Axel Mörner has a new paper out (his 589th). For 60 years he has been tracking the coastlines close to him, and carefully isolated the exact part which appears to be the most stable. From that he shows that the real sea-level rise in Northern Europe is less than 1 millimeter a year since 1890. This is less that the 1.6mm trend in 182 NOAA tide gauges, and far below the estimates of the IPCC reports.
There is also no sign of acceleration in sea-levels for the last 50 years. (How much should Europeans spend to stop a 1mm annual rise that was already going in 1890 and has not changed much since then?) If anything, Nils work shows how difficult it is to measure true sea-level rise on land that shifts.
In this graph below, he compares the rise of most tide gauges with the Kattegatt region, and the IPCC results. This is only one result from one place, but it is based on thousands of readings from sites all around Kattegatt. His painstaking attention to extreme detail and empirical data stands in stark contrast to the IPCC where the trend depends heavily on adjustments. (Those adjustments appear to […]
To recap — using an optimal Fourier Transform, David Evans discovered a form of notch filter operating between changes in sunlight and temperatures on Earth. This means there must be a delay — probably around 11 years. This not only fitted with the length of the solar dynamo cycle, but also with previous independent work suggesting a lag of ten years or a correlation with the solar activity of the previous cycle. The synopsis then is that solar irradiance (TSI) is a leading indicator of some other effect coming from the Sun after a delay of 11 years or so.
The discovery of this delay is a major clue about the direction of our future climate. The flickers in sunlight run a whole sunspot cycle ahead of some other force from the sun. Knowing that solar irradiance dropped suddenly from 2003 onwards tells us the rough timing of the fall in temperature that’s coming (just add a solar cycle length). What it doesn’t tell us is the amplitude — the size of the fall. That’s where the model may (or may not) tell us what we want to know. That test is coming, and very soon. This is an unusual […]
The Fairfax press say the improbable Gore-Palmer play was a win for alarmists. The Australian calls it for skeptics and says Gore is a fool. I’m not calling anything until I see the fine print. Palmer says he’s met P.M. Abbott and he was ‘encouraged’ by his climate plan.
The only thing I can say for sure is that the science of CO2 is irrelevant to both Gore and Palmer. Everything else is a paradox. We’re not being told everything.
It seems now that Palmer’s amendments to repealing the carbon tax do not include an Emissions Trading Scheme (even the Fairfax press agrees). That makes it look like a skeptic win, but keeping the $10b Clean Energy Finance Corporation is a win for Gore, and so is keeping the RET (Renewable Energy Target) and the Climate Change Authority — it’s another government funded advertising unit for the carbon scare campaign. The more patrons who are dependent on the carbon-subsidies, the more pro-carbon lobbyists there are. And they lobby like their livelihood depends on it — because they have nothing if the government policies don’t prop up their pretend free market.
Why would Gore have any interest in standing next to […]
This is not what PUP voters thought they were voting for… but the Big-Bankers will be happy.
Really? Clive Palmer holds the balance of p0wer in the new Australian Senate, due to start on July 1. He’s the coal magnate who made it clear he would get rid of the carbon tax. Now he’s palling up with Al Gore, and saying he’ll vote the tax down but only if we add a clause for an emissions trading scheme that is conditional on China, the US, the EU, Japan and Korea joining in too. Is this a meaningless dead-duck promise that is unlikely to happen, or is this the long softening up for the UN convention in Paris next year, when weak schemes (like China’s, where lots of permits are free) are used as leverage to call in the sub-clauses? I don’t think Gore would be flying out here if there was no chance this legislation would matter. At the very least he will use it to lean on other countries, as evidence that “Australia wants in”. At the very least this is about keeping the illusion of momentum going.
What is going on behind the scenes for this extraordinary turn-around? […]
The Solar Series: I Background | II: The notch filter | III: The delay | IV: A new solar force? | V: Modeling the escaping heat. | VI: The solar climate model | VII — Hindcasting (You are here) | VIII — Predictions
All models are wrong, some are useful. That’s how all modelers speak (except perhaps some climate scientists).
The barriers to making a good climate model are many. The data is short, noisy, adjusted, and many factors are simultaneously at work, some not well described yet. Climate modeling is in its infancy, yet billions of dollars rests on the assumption that CO2 will cause catastrophic warming and the evidence that most recent warming was due to CO2 comes entirely out of models. It’s important to focus on the pea:
“No climate model that has used natural forcing only has reproduced the observed global mean warming trend” (IPCC 2007)
It is a crucial plank that modelers say “we can’t explain the current warming without CO2”. Current climate models assume that changes in solar radiation have a small immediate effect and solar magnetic […]
Jennifer Marohasy has been very involved in looking at Australian temperature data this year. She is speaking in Sydney on Wednesday about what she’s found. She’s talking about the new temperature dataset the BOM uses called ACORN, which they built after we asked them for an independent audit of their High Quality set.
Modelling Global Temperatures – What’s Wrong. Bourke & Amberley – as Case Studies
From Jennifer’s site: “The most extreme example that Ken found of data corruption was at Amberley, near Brisbane, Queensland, where a cooling minima trend was effectively reversed, Figure 1.” Jennifer has also raised her concerns (repeatedly) with Minister Greg Hunt.
Venue: The Gallipoli Club, 12 Loftus Street (between Bridge Street & Alfred Street), Sydney Time: 5.30 for 6pm
Additional Information: **Bookings from 11 June only ** BAR OPENS AT 5 PM – LIGHT REFRESHMENTS
Click here for info on how to book
8.9 out of 10 based on 71 ratings
Sorry…we’ve been busy in the comments
8.5 out of 10 based on 29 ratings
This post bumped to the top so it doesn’t get lost under the newer post: Solar Model Part IV below.
In The Rage of the Climate Central Planners, Jeffrey Tucker describes something we’ve all experienced. That moment where the social atmosphere turns suddenly poisonous. Climate Rage!
Namecalling is a tool to stop debate. It works to keep the wandering minds in the square. But the flipside is that sooner or later the smallest crack, the tiniest doubt, elicts a bizarre over-the-top response and the mismatch reveals the game. How many passionate skeptics are created in the moment a fence-sitter realizes that those who say they love the environment will risk friendships and burn relationships in order NOT to discuss it? For surely there is only one possible interpretation of Climate Rage.
“They really can’t allow a debate, because they will certainly and absolutely and rightly lose.”
“When that is certain, the only way forward is to rage.”
9 out of 10 based on 218 ratings […]
The Solar Series: I Background | II: The notch filter | III: The delay | IV: A new solar force? | V: Modeling the escaping heat. | VI: The solar climate model (You are here) | VII — Hindcasting | VIII — Predictions
Open Science live — The story so far: Dr David Evans is building the O-D notch-delay solar model. It’s a much simpler big-picture approach than Global Climate Coupled Models. They use an ambitious bottom-up system where the models add up every small aspect in every small cell of the Earth’s climate atmosphere and oceans and try to predict everything, but the trap is the errors — small errors in 10,000 calculations add up to big-mush. David’s approach is top-down. He looks at the whole system from the outside, and doesn’t try to understand or predict each individual part. It’s a way of starting at the start — to shed light on the big forces and processes that happen as energy arrives on Earth, gets reflected, or blended, and eventually changes the surface temperature. His model won’t tell us what happens to rainfall in Sudan in 2050, but […]
In typical style skeptics love to criticize, it is our strength. Sadly, diplomacy, manners, courtesy — burned at the door on a moment’s notice. Sigh. After five years in this debate you’d think I’d know not to expect respect or goodwill from every fellow skeptic. Call me naive, I don’t expect them to agree with me, just to be polite. If someone asks you for a review before they publish, would you congratulate them privately, ask questions, ignore the answers, ignore large parts of the paper, then later post those misunderstood points, without so much as a courtesy check first? Yes, I’m baffled too.
Hey Lubos, no hard feelings, but next time let us save you from posting unnecessary innuendo, irrelevant criticisms, and not-so-informed commentary. It only takes an email.
I groan. In a highly gregarious species, where power is clawed through high-order political games, schmoozing and collaboration, some skeptics still wonder why people who are bad with numbers but good with people, control the institutions, the publications and big budgets. The mystery of it all!
Anyhow, because it is out there (or was, I’ve reproduced it here)* and is being discussed, obviously we need to correct the errors. Lubos […]
The Solar Series: I Background | II: The notch filter | III: The delay | IV: A new solar force? | V: Modeling the escaping heat (You are here). | VI: The solar climate model | VII — Hindcasting | VIII — Predictions
David Evans has analyzed the black box system that is effectively “Sunlight In, Temperature Out”, and found a notch, a delay, and a low pass filter. The problem then is to work out their order and to fill in any other bits needed by the model. This post then, doesn’t have big blockbuster moments (sorry), but these points need to be said.
Energy leaves Earth through a range of electromagnetic frequencies, but the bulk of them can be grouped into three main “pipes”. Radiation either comes directly off the land, oceans, ice and what-not on the ground, or it leaves via the atmosphere. Up in the air, carbon dioxide and water molecules do most of the work sending emissions of infra red to outer space. In the atmosphere, the radiating “surface” is a virtual concept and is effectively at different heights for different greenhouse gases. This is all non-controversial […]
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