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There are adjustments on top of adjustments. Homogenised records are being used to correct raw records. Some man-made adjustments can infect data for miles around…
Rutherglen is a long running station in central Victoria. There are no documented site moves, but the long raw trend of slow cooling was adjusted up to a warming trend. What was cooling of 0.35C per century became a 1.7C warming trend.
Jennifer Marohasy, and others, have spent months trying to get answers from the BOM explaining why these massive adjustments were made. Excuses flowed. In the latest round, the BOM claim the changes are necessary to make the Rutherglen record match the trends in the neighboring stations. What the BOM doesn’t say is that there was no warming in the neighbours either, not until after they were homogenized. The order in which stations are homogenized matters, which rather says something important about the arbitrary nature of the adjustments. Anomalous trends from far distant and poor locations can spread through waves of homogenization until better, longer stations succumb to political correctness and show the “correct” result. Small choices about which stations to to use first in the process can make a huge difference to the […]
The Australian Abbott government has announced the target of a 26% reduction in emissions of CO2 by 2030. This futile effort to change the weather is all cost and no benefit. It’s 26% reduction in 1.3% (Australia’s share) of 4% (human share) of total CO2 emissions globally. If we succeed there’ll be 0.01% less CO2 in the air (at best).
The only good thing is that the policy supposedly can be achieved without “without any need to purchase emissions reductions from overseas.” That means Australia won’t be feeding the global banker-broker machine and assorted “carbon market” bureaucrats — not until the Labor Party come to government, anyway. This is a big win, helping to slow the cycle of governments feeding vested interests who promote big-government.
For once the Greens had a realistic response, though they probably did not intend it that way:
“The Greens party room also discussed the government’s target. The party’s MPs agreed it was “an all-around science fail” and they “all nodded vigorously”, a senior source said.”
Because “carbon accounting” is a joke, measured in a dozen mindless ways, all sides are spinning this in equal and opposite directions. Black IS white simultaneously, and too […]
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The danger is in the definition
Ken Stewart has been diligent at trying to understand the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) method for finding heatwaves. He’d heard BOM head, Rob Vertessy speak on ABC radio, declaring that heatwaves were the “number one cause of death” from natural disaster in Australia. Ken wrote to Vertessy repeatedly but for some reason, despite the deadly risk to Australians, Vertessy was unable to answer the question of how to define and estimate heatwaves. (Perhaps if the BOM had The Internet, he could have sent Ken Stewart this link, which Stewart has now found himself four months later.)
The Excess Heat Factor: A Metric for Heatwave Intensity and Its Use in Classifying Heatwave Severity, John R. Nairn and Robert J. B. Fawcett (2015) [1]
With these instructions Ken has now replicated the BOM results for the 2014 heatwave in Melbourne. He has also used the same technique on Marble Bar, Western Australia, and Mawson, Antarctica and found that potentially heatwaves are a killer danger to our Antarctic researchers, and if heatwaves kill, they’d be much safer in Marble Bar. For the record, Marble Bar is the place that had 160 days in […]
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7.7 out of 10 based on 35 ratings
Across the West, there is a layer of smart-but-busy intellects who have not been involved in the climate debate. For one reason or another they’ve been too busy setting up IPO’s, doing research projects, or directing companies in perhaps technology, mining or banking, and generally being productive. It is excellent to see some of this caliber adding their brain-power and resources to the public arena. Especially so in Australia, where the debate is almost entirely bare-bones-volunteers versus billion-dollar-institutions, and where the culture of philanthropy is not well developed compared to the US.
This unusual advert was placed in The Australian today. In a normal world, investigative journalists would have already interviewed and discussed views like these, but in the hyperbolic, politicized and religious world of climate-alarm it was simpler for productive people to just get on with it, talk to their peers and make it happen.
Click to enlarge, or read the text below.
Psychology and The New Climate Alarm
Lowell Ponte’s 1975 book warns:
“Global cooling presents humankind with the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for 110,000 years. Your stake in the decisions we make concerning it is […]
Potato Beetle
Researchers predicted a particular beetle would not be able to get into the cold areas of Kazakhstan and western China. But the sneaky beetles learnt to cope with the cold by burying themselves in the ground. The modelers failed completely to predict the spread. Imagine the ecological modelers who are not only using inadequate biological models, but guesstimating the future temperature with climate models that don’t work either.
In the last 500 million years as life on Earth evolved the temperature has swung up and down through a range of about 15C. We are currently in the cooler half of that temperature range, in a mini-warm-moment surrounded by ice ages. Despite this, the climate-industry is panicking that a half a degree of extra warmth this century will wipe out species that survived the last ten million years.
The potato beetle laughs at them.
Crop pests outwit climate change predictions en route to new destinations Scientists highlight the dangers of relying on climate-based projections of crop pest distribution
9.3 out of 10 based on 70 ratings […]
The Institute of Mechanical Engineers in the UK (IMechEng) has a new “climate” survey out. It’s good fodder for headlines about fear and worry. But after priming the audience with a litany of climate disasters and asking them if they are worried about “cyclones”, “droughts” and “the future of the human race”, the awful truth is that half of the Brits don’t want to pay anything to stop it.
It’s another motherhood-two-cent-survey, meaning it asks motherhood type questions and gets everyone’s “2 cents” on an issue (and it’s worth both cents). We get insights like finding that 64% think global warming is “already a problem”, but it can’t be that big a deal because 52% of people don’t think they personally should pay more in tax in an effort to do something about it.
No hard questions are asked, no one is forced to rank the worries of life, only the worries of the climate industry. Evidently the surveyors don’t really want to know if people think “climate change” is man-made. Nor do they want to know how much people want to spend attempting to change the weather. Money is only a Yes No type question.
As usual, there are […]
Welcome to the fairy-land world where we try to control the weather with our electrical generation sources.
Obama’s new plan to stop storms and hold back the tide could make the US poorer by as much as $2.5 trillion dollars, but will not make any difference to the global climate even if it is carried out (somehow) and even if the highly immature, overly politicized science is “right” (despite the evidence). The plan is for the U.S. to cut overall electrical power plant emissions by 32 percent by 2030, compared to 2005 levels.
This “ambitious” goal is purely symbolic. Here’s why. Electrical power plants make 37% of US emissions, which are about one-fifth of global human emissions, which are 4% of total CO2 emissions globally. So a 32% cut in US electrical emissions will result in a 0.1% cut in total global CO2 emissions (at best)*. If the Obama/EPA plan is “successful” and if the IPCC are right, Paul Knappenberger and Pat Michaels estimate that Obama’s new plan will cool the world by an unmeasurable 0.02°C by 2100.
The theoretical, best case (fantasy) cost
“The Obama administration said it would cost $8.4 billion annually by 2030, but argued […]
Twelve thousand years of human history show that more energy leads to more people. There is also positive feedback, where more people means more energy too. Growth rates rose faster and earlier in England and Wales than Sweden (see Fig 3), where coal use became dominant about a hundred years later.
Given a constant resource supply to a population, the per capita availability of resources declines as the population grows. As resources become scarce, individuals consume less, driving down birth rates and/or raising death rates.
Although many resources may influence birth and death rates (e.g., water), energy is a uniquely universal currency because all forms of work require energy expenditure. This applies to the metabolic rates of individuals in wild populations [18] as well as to the industrial energy use of modern human populations, as energy is used to harvest food, deliver water, and provide health care [19–22].
Fig 1. Relationship between energy use (W) and population size for the world, the United States, Sweden, and England and Wales through time. The relationships are highly variable, but overall, the slopes are greater than one (that is, the exponent in the power-law function relating energy use […]
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8.1 out of 10 based on 33 ratings
Climate Change Business Journal estimates the Climate Change Industry is a $1.5 Trillion dollar escapade, which means four billion dollars a day is spent on our quest to change the climate. That includes everything from carbon markets to carbon consulting, carbon sequestration, renewables, biofuels, green buildings and insipid cars. For comparison global retail sales online are worth around $1.5 trillion. So all the money wasted on the climate is equivalent to all the goods bought online.
The special thing about this industry is that it wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for an assumption about relative humidity that is probably wrong. As such, it’s the only major industry in the world dependent on consumer and voter ignorance. This is not just another vested interest in a political debate; it’s vested-on-steroids, a mere opinion poll away from extinction. You can almost hear the captains of climate industry bellowing: “Keep ’em ignorant and believing, or the money goes away!”.
To state the obvious:
Policy, or the anticipation of new policy, has been one of the biggest drivers of the industry, the report shows.
Most industries this size exist because they produce something the market wants. They worry that competitors might […]
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I used to think there was a consensus among government-funded certified climate scientists, but a better study by Verheggen Strengers, Verheegen, and Vringer shows even that is not true.[1] The “97% consensus” is now 43%.
Finally there is a decent survey on the topic, and it shows that less than half of what we would call “climate scientists” who research the topic and for the most part, publish in the peer reviewed literature, would agree with the IPCC’s main conclusions. Only 43% of climate scientists agree with the IPCC “95%” certainty.
More than 1800 international scientists studying various aspects of climate change (including climate physics, climate impacts, and mitigation) responded to the questionnaire. Some 6550 people were invited to participate in this survey, which took place in March and April 2012. Respondents were picked because they had authored articles with the key words ‘global warming’ and/or ‘global climate change’, covering the 1991–2011 period, via the Web of Science, or were included the climate scientist database assembled by Jim Prall, or just by a survey of peer reviewed climate science articles. Prall’s database includes some 200 names that have criticized mainstream science and about half had only published in […]
How easily it could collapse. What more proof do we need that the climate-crisis facade is maintained by hiding the counter arguments. Evidently the worst possible thing is for the public to be exposed to little pieces of paper with a message that runs against the creed.
The South Australian (SA) government is very very afraid, issuing statements yesterday, designed to intimidate Flinders University into rejecting the Lomborg Consensus Centre. They know that they can’t defend their “wind power” and “climate” policies, and the public will be up in arms when they realize how much money has been burned. (In 2012 Hamish Cumming estimated South Australian windfarms have saved 4% of their rated capacity in fossil fuels at a cost of $1,484 per ton.)
But it’s not about the environment or the economy, it’s about prestige, popularity and status.
If the SA government fails to stop the Lomborg Centre at Flinders University, they know they will be called nasty names by their peers. They admit as much in their bizarre statements, which effectively use political pressure against a university to keep it free of “political pressure”, and admits researchers can be bought to support an agenda. Flinders Uni will look […]
It’s a tax that’s “not a tax” and a “free market” that isn’t free.
Joy. An emission trading scheme (ETS) is on the agenda again in Australia. Here’s why the first priority is to clean up a crooked conversation. If we can just talk straight, the stupid will sort itself out.
The national debate is a straight faced parody — it could be a script from “Yes Minister”, except no one would believe it. Bill Shorten argues that the Labor Party can control the world’s weather with something that exactly fits the definition of a tax, yet he calls it a “free market” because apparently he has no idea what a free market really is. (What union rep would?) It’s like our opposition leader is a wannabe entrepreneur building a Kmart that controls the clouds. Look out Batman, Billman is coming. When is a forced market a free market? When you want to be PM.
The vandals are at the gates of both English and economics, and we can’t even have a straight conversation. The Labor Party is in flat out denial of dictionary definitions — is that because they can’t read dictionaries, or because they don’t want an honest […]
Did you know CCS (carbon capture and storage) requires an industrial plant almost as large as the coal fired power station it is supposed to clean up? Or that it uses fully 40% of the energy of the entire output of the same station? It turns out to be such an onerous, costly pursuit it could only have been dreamed up by an enemy of coal.
The central problem is that under conditions we humans like to be in, the CO2 molecule emphatically wants to be a huge voluminous gas. To make it more compact and storable back in the small hole it came from, we either have to change it chemically, or forcibly stuff it in under some combination of extreme pressure or extreme cold. And there aren’t many cold sealed rock vaults in Earth’s thin crust, which rests on a 1000 degree C ball of magma. Any form of chemical, temperature or pressure change uses monster amounts of energy, and there is just no getting around it without fiddling with laws of chemistry. The whole idea of CCS is so insanely unfeasible that in order to stuff a beneficial fertilizer underground it […]
There is only one good reason to buy The Age: cartoonist John Spooner
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For foreign readers, there are two big headlines in Australia this week that Spooner is teasing us with.
One is about Shorten’s fantasy that Australia can go 50% renewable by 2030. This is an “aspirational ambition”, which, according to opposition leader Shorten, doesn’t need any kind of feasibility or budgeting before being announced as a policy. He plans to wave his magic wand and make aspirations happen, regardless of stuff like “money”, “Watts” and thousands of dead bats.
9 out of 10 based on 83 ratings
Big Oil knows no bounds. Not only can it derail governments, and thwart the UN, World Bank, and IMF but now it may be sending out climate death squads to assassinate Arctic Ice Experts. These expert hit squads apparently push people down stairs, run them off the road, and strike them down with lightning. Lightning! (That is one mother of aTesla Coil.) James Bond could learn something. Q, where are you?
Prof Wadhams at Cambridge has been the go-to man for Arctic scare stories across the UK (h/t Delingpole). In 2012, Wadhams predicted Arctic Sea Ice was set to collapse in just four years. Last year, after years of a relentlessly surviving Arctic, even some alarmists threw Wadham under the bus, (so to speak) as being too “extremist”. But now he’s topped that.
You see, in January 2013 there were four leading Arctic experts in the UK, now there is one, and he is very very worried.
No, seriously, you can’t make this up. Let’s try to imagine how much more profitable Big Oil would be if every single Arctic climate expert in the World was dead. (Count the zeros…)
The utter futility of it all escapes Wadhams. After a […]
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7.6 out of 10 based on 11 ratings
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What’s scarier than an Endless Global Drought? The fear that the public might… hear from a skeptic. Skeptical arguments are so dangerous that even the whiff of one will kill a $4million dollar project stone dead at conception. Be Gone Freak! Guess who has no answer to the questions skeptics ask? How they do advertise the dire state of their intellectual ammo? You might think I’m exaggerating. Bjorn Lomborg believes the IPCC science 100%, and uses the “denier” term to distance himself from the scientific skeptics. It’s like cloaking himself in garlic, except it doesn’t work — true believers still hate him and seek to shut him down. Lomborg wants to stop fossil fuel subsidies, the arch-enemy in the believers world, and that’s not enough. Furthermore he wasn’t going to work at the Australian Consensus Centre and it wasn’t going to discuss the climate, but two steps of purification is not enough. Lomborg commits the unforgivable sin of wanting to spend enviro-gravy in ways that actually help the poor and protect the environment. He wants measurements and accountability. And that makes him “repulsive” — just ask the students of Flinders University. The modern University needs no logical reason, […]
Pope Francis put out his pro-climate encyclical eight weeks ago, getting mass media attention, but the latest Gallop poll shows the people were not so enthused:
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Pope Francis’ favorability rating in the U.S. has returned to where it was when he was elected pope. It is now at 59%, down from 76% in early 2014. The pontiff’s rating is similar to the 58% he received from Americans in April 2013, soon after he was elected pope.
Is this about “climate change” — the encyclical has 245 paragraphs, 16 mentions of “climate”, 7 mentions of “carbon”, and more than 100 mentions of the “environment”. Moreso it reported around the globe as a “coup” on the climate issue by groups who normally think the Pope is wrong, silly and anachronistic. Furthermore, the biggest change has come among Catholics, Protestants, and especially conservatives. But he’s less popular among liberals too.
The drop in the pope’s favorable rating is driven by a decline among Catholics and political conservatives, two groups that have been ardent supporters of the modern papacy. Seventy-one percent of Catholics say they have a favorable image of Francis, down from 89% last year.
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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