The witchdoctors at work: ABC FourCorners parades four farmers and a fireman who “believe” in climate change

 Four Corners has become TwoCorners — it represents both sides of politics —  Green And Left

Brissenden has done no research, interviewed no critics, and asked no hard questions. When it comes to serving the Australian people, protecting them, and holding our government to account, he’s AWOL — promoting his own pet interests instead, hiding the scandals and critics. What do we pay him for?

The iconic show on the ABC won’t interview skeptics that walked on the moon or won Nobel and NASA prizes, but if a cherry farmer feels the climate is changing, send in the film squad!

After years of telling skeptics that you don’t ask a plumber to do heart surgery, the ABC “Weather Alert! last Monday was 90% plumbers.

The formerly iconic FourCorners “public affairs” show crafted a 43 minute advertisement for the Renewables Industry and Carbon Trading Bankers and the Green Blob. And we taxpayers paid for it all. As usual, most of their facts were correct, but only because they barely had any. The facts apparently are that at least four farmers across Australia have the feeling that their climate has changed and are “doing something”. Yeah. Plus a whole bunch of consultants paid to solve a crisis say there is a crisis to solve.

Map AUstralia - hottest ever temperatures

Witchdoctors from neolithic tribes used similar techniques to the ABC so-called journalists Sarah Ferguson and Michael Brissenden. In the stone-age, a Voodoo Chief would chant a list of recent weather porn (like Al Gore does now), then loosely connect it all with the evil new type of, say, cooking pot, (brought from his competitor). He’d follow it up with some Yes-Men “witnesses” who’d nod solemnly and declare they have seen the weather change since the new pot arrived.  Voila, blame the pot for the storms, “see the light” and give the man some more conch shells.

Witchdoctors, BOM?

Keep your eye on the pea. All the farmers are probably right about recent changes to the weather patterns, but like the cooking pot, there’s no cause and effect link between your air conditioner and earlier grape harvests. How do we know it’s not natural? Answer, broken “climate models”.

http://joannenova.com.au/wp-admin/media-upload.php?post_id=57765&tab=type_urlThe ABC also gave time to APRA and the RBA — both notable climate science authorities (not) — who agreed with the IPCC. They interviewed (or rather, promoted) someone from a left wing think tank,  the Special Counsel for Climate Risk from Minter Ellison, a consultant from “ClimateRisk” and a spokesperson from the industry body for insurance companies. All four of these specialists, predictably,  were happy to help sell the topic that brings them more business. Could we imagine an insurance agent telling us that things are not going to be worse than we expect? Or how about a Special Counsel for Climate Risk that said the risk was inconsequential and her job was irrelevant? It’s a bit rich to call these “interviews” — no hard questions were asked. Much was made of the farmers historic weather books, but Brissenden didn’t ask to see their records from, say, Jan 1896 when a long heatwave killed hundreds across Australia and temperatures hit 50C in four states. He travelled around the country “over four months”, but didn’t find half an hour to phone one skeptical scientist, businessman, or lowly blogger who could have saved him from looking like a gullible patsy.

All the alpha-plumbers, I mean “experts” in something else, were followed by a yes-man who told the audience that the APRA or RBA “don’t make these decisions lightly” as if those organisations had done what even the peer review journals never did — check the actual data, replicate the method, get the same result. Did APRA or the RBA interview any skeptics? Don’t expect the ABC to ask.

We got the reverse osmosis version of the truth…

All up, this was the Agitprop star-list of filtered factoids. We got the reverse osmosis version of the truth — where 80% of the information goes down the drain, and the mineral-free-story gets presented to at least twenty or thirty Australians, or whomever is left that still watches this Pravda type predictable stuff. No wonder few commentators cite TwoCorners anymore. Everyone knows what every show will explain before it goes to air.

But wait, I hear you say, they interviewed a real climate scientist — Karl Braganza, the visionary modeler who can “see a direct link to extreme weather” through his crystal ball, I mean climate model. With his psychic gift he can see the real pattern hidden under error bars two miles wide with a skillless model (see the refs at the end). Sure, let him speak, but a real journalist might be able to find another expert modeler who can point out the dismal failure rate of the IPCC approved models, the inconsistencies and the fact that none of the models include any solar magnetic effect, solar wind, or changes in solar spectra. They might also mention that sun spots actually correlate with our climate — with the raw measurements — and on both the “up” bits and the “down” bits for the last 5,000 years. A real journalist might have asked Braganza how well his models predict all those past turning points?   Australian voters who pay something like $600 a year per household for Renewable Targets might like to know that from the dawn-of-civilization up until 1979 his climate model’s success rate is “zero”.

 

The show opened by blaming the intransigence of the political system, which translated, is the ABC confession that after all these years of propaganda, the voters still picked the wrong people.

Rob Rogers, Deputy Fire NSW Fire service, conveniently said that  modern records are so unprecedented there are “no records” of weather existing on that scale. Which — as we have seen from hundreds of historic weather reports is false — see the drought and death in 1896, and 1878, 1939 the fires of 1851 and the news of “Australia cooling” that came out in the 1950s...

Only a few weeks ago the BOM said the same thing about warming in Sydney and scored a lot of headlines, but had to retract it the same day when they realized it had still been hotter in Richmond in 1939. Not so unprecedented.

Don’t ask about the Australian one-second record scandal:

Jennifer Marohasy points out that Sarah Ferguson and Michael Brissenden are withholding important information. New hot records are set on electronic equipment which can pick up one-second noise, unlike historic records done in old fashioned thermometers:

Braganza [BOM] explained that it is really only since the 1990s that we have started to see the extreme heat. What he didn’t mention is that a totally new method of measurement came into effect on 1 November 1996 – with the transition continuing, so each new year, additional weather stations have their mercury thermometer replaced with an electronic probe taking one-second spot readings.

Brissenden has done no research, interviewed no critics, and asked no hard questions. When it comes to serving the Australian people, protecting them, and holding our government to account, he’s AWOL — promoting his own pet interests instead, hiding the scandals and critics. What do we pay him for?

See the worst place on Earth for global warming — but hide bumper crops, cool summers and good rain

South West WA and Perth was made out to be the global posterchild for climate panic — “the changes here have happened faster and earlier than anywhere else on the planet”. ABC viewers won’t know though that the horrors of climate change mean we’ve had one of the coldest summers in two decades, a record surplus on a bumper grain harvest, and that our dams are fuller than they’ve been for years. These things are just “weather”, but so are most of the heatwaves and the storm surges that the ABC is pretending are prophetic “signs” of our guilt. Why is it OK to mention one kind of weather but hide the other kind?

Warwick Hughes calls this ABC FOUR CORNERS MAYBE WORST SHOW EVER. —

” what a pageant of old wives tales mixed with assorted lies and exaggerations.”

Starting with the “Braidwood drought” was a dud move due to rain and floods a week or so ago in the region – so that should have been cut. Surely the show has staff that are half awake?? I mean Canberra flooded!!

ABC enables virtue signaling “free advertising” for companies that say the right message:

Mark Valencia, sustainable growing blogger at SelfSufficientMe was scathing:

One of the farmer interviewees, the multimillion-dollar corporate winemaking dynasty Brown Brothers, cited climate change as the reason for its decision to buy into Tasmania in order to “climate-proof” their business. …

I guess spending 32 million acquiring vineyards in Tassy had nothing to do with this “poor Aussie battler” expanding their business hey… wink wink. Sorry, but call me cynical if I think their appearance on Four Corners was nothing more than a publicity stunt aimed at toffee nosed left wing wine guzzlers residing in inner-city Melbourne.

Another farmer (I heard speaking on the ABC Radio promo) said climate change has made him “change” his farming method drastically! For example, he now rotates crops and cattle on his property… well, duh… shouldn’t you be doing that anyway? You are a farmer, for goodness sake, crop rotation and moving your cattle to prevent scorched earth makes sense, doesn’t it!?

 UPDATE: Anthony Cox at ClimateSceptics

Four Corners then introduces its resident scientific talking head, Karl Braganza from the BoM. Braganza wastes no time in saying things are going to get worse, temperature, storms, the lot. Braganza is amazing. Here he is back in 2016 claiming storms will decrease, albeit become more powerful in the future. That claim about storms becoming worse, albeit less frequent, is thoroughly rebutted here. In fact, all extreme weather is reducing: droughts, storms, rainfall, as even the IPCC and other prominent alarmists like Professor Muller concede.

 UPDATE #2: Reader Peter P writes that the farmer’s numbers don’t make sense:

MARTIN ROYDS: Yes we have 130 years of rainfall and temperature graphs

Since 1985 to now, the temperatures have been increasing .8 of a degree per decade.

So, in that thirty year period, it’s gone up 2.4 degrees, maximum temperature.  [my bold]

I was interested in this quoted rapid temperature increase, so I checked out the temperature figures for Braidwood on the BOM site.  It appears that you can get an average max temp for the period 1907-1975 from a recording station in one of the main streets of Braidwood – my reading of the data shows the average annual maximum for that period to be 19.0C.   After that period there are the records from an AWS at Braidwood Racecourse for 1985 – 2018.  They show an average annual maximum of 19.2C, barely changed from the earlier period.  And this is (roughly) the 30 year period of rapid temperature increase claimed by Martin Royds in the program. – -Peter

UPDATE #3: The great Ruairi

Many media, duped and misguided,
Have on climate-change, long since decided,
To report with great zeal,
The fake climate spiel,
From the Left and keep it one-sided.

–Ruairi

This is the ABC speaking to the fence sitting and ignorant, and the 2% of the population who need affirmation that they are smart, caring, and deserve their junkets, jobs or solar subsidized electricity bills.

On skillless models

I’ve said it before

The models not only fail on global decadal scales, but on regional, local, short term[1] [2], polar[3], and upper tropospheric scales[4] [5] too. They fail on humidity[6], rainfall[7]drought [8] and they fail on clouds [9]. The hot spot is missing, the major feedbacks are not amplifying the effect of CO2 as assumed.

If FourCorners wants to represent the four corners, and get some relevancy back, it needs to generate actual controversy by interviewing the best of both sides of this debate.

*Regarding the ABC interviewing those “paid to find a crisis” — the ABC should interview them — along with the skeptics who question them. And may the best argument win.


REFERENCES

[1^] Anagnostopoulos, G. G., D. Koutsoyiannis, A. Christofides, A. Efstratiadis, and N. Mamassis, (2010). A comparison of local and aggregated climate model outputs with observed data’, Hydrological Sciences Journal, 55: 7, 1094 — 1110 [PDF]

[2^] Koutsoyiannis, D., Efstratiadis, A., Mamassis, N. & Christofides, A.(2008) On the credibility of  climate predictions. Hydrol. Sci. J. 53(4), 671–684. changes [PDF]

[3^] 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

[4^] Christy J.R., Herman, B., Pielke, Sr., R, 3, Klotzbach, P., McNide, R.T., Hnilo J.J., Spencer R.W., Chase, T. and Douglass, D: (2010) What Do Observational Datasets Say about Modeled Tropospheric Temperature Trends since 1979? Remote Sensing 2010, 2, 2148-2169; doi:10.3390/rs2092148 [PDF]

[5^] Fu, Q, Manabe, S., and Johanson, C. (2011) On the warming in the tropical upper troposphere: Models vs observations, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 38, L15704, doi:10.1029/2011GL048101, 2011 [PDF] [Discussion]

[6^] Paltridge, G., Arking, A., Pook, M., 2009. Trends in middle- and upper-level tropospheric humidity from NCEP reanalysis data. Theoretical and Applied Climatology, Volume 98, Numbers 3-4, pp. 351-35). [PDF]

[7^] Anagnostopoulos, G. G., D. Koutsoyiannis, A. Christofides, A. Efstratiadis, and N. Mamassis, (2010). A comparison of local and aggregated climate model outputs with observed data’, Hydrological Sciences Journal, 55: 7, 1094 — 1110 [PDF]

[8^] Sheffield, Wood & Roderick (2012) Little change in global drought over the past 60 years, Letter Nature, vol 491, 437

[9^] Miller, M., Ghate, V., Zahn, R., (2012) The Radiation Budget of the West African Sahel 1 and its Controls: A Perspective from 2 Observations and Global Climate Models. in press Journal of Climate [abstract] [PDF]

 

Belated H/t to Robert Rosicka, DonS, MurrayShaw, Tony Thomas, toorightmate, Pat, Dave B, Original Steve, Another Ian,  el gordo, Chris G

 

9.8 out of 10 based on 105 ratings

143 comments to The witchdoctors at work: ABC FourCorners parades four farmers and a fireman who “believe” in climate change

  • #
    Dennis

    This reminded me of the massive beat up broadcast by Four Corners about live cattle export to Indonesia that resulted in the then Labor government banning live cattle export creating chaos for the beef industry here and all businesses and people who participate in it. And caused enormous problems for the indonesian government by stopping live cattle deliveries during Ramadam when people are fasting and feasting when that period ends.

    The beat up we later heard was all about animal activists creating a drama claiming that cattle are treated inhumanely by Indonesians when they are slaughtered. Video was shown of Indonesians “torturing” a beast before killing it. But the men were laughing and so obviously putting on an act. Later it was admitted that the slaughter shed was on a small island where one beast is killed occasionally.

    Live cattle are purchased so that they can be slaughtered in accordance with Halal methods and other reasons and most are slaughtered in large abattoirs and most are owned by the Australian company Elders to Australian Standards. Elders released a letter after the Four Corners programme pointing this out and that their representatives had investigated and discovered that the beast shown on Four Corners was singled out and the workers were paid to act the part.

    ABC should not be allowed to get away with deceptive journalism.

    602

    • #

      The Fourth Estate has become a Fifth Column!

      Fifth column, clandestine group or faction of subversive agents who attempt to undermine a nation’s solidarity by any means at their disposal.

      https://www.britannica.com/topic/fifth-column

      A fifth column is any group of people who undermine a larger group from within, usually in favor of an enemy group or nation. The activities of a fifth column can be overt or clandestine.

      – Wikipedia

      80

      • #
        OriginalSteve

        Note…the following fictional scene is firmy tongue in cheek satire….

        * sound of A*C jungle drums*

        “Bwanna…the natives are restless….”

        “Yes faithful companion…indeed…I spotted the witchdoctors screaming at the sky….it can only mean one thing…”

        ( another explorer chimes in) … “I say, if you see one, a slug of brandy to the first chap who bags one of the blighters with sone science-based ammo, what….be warned though, they bite…”

        ( other explorer ) ” Youre on old bean, a bit of sport, what!”

        10

    • #
      WXcycles

      And if you ask PM Mal Turnbull or anyone on the Lib front bench, they will waffle about how the ABC is a marvelous and crucially important public institution, and a vital part of the public debate in Aust, and a key part in informing it, and documenting it.

      They know that is not the case. We know it is not the case.

      They’re just taking the p*ss out of the general public, and thinking we’ll just let them off the hook, agsin and again.

      They are responsible for there being no lie that ABC will not voice, and promote, no deceitful propaganda the ABC fears to air, for they know Mal and the Libs will always let them, and even defend them, and do nothing at all to finally end this public-money waste and perversion called ABC.

      I am thoroughly tired of Liberal party appologists and PMs propping up ABC’s rank propaganda, and partisan perversion of topics in so-caled ‘public debates’.

      No, Mal, Libs, you are responsible for this, you are the people doing this to Australia, you are the defenders of the status quo at the ABC.

      50

  • #
    Komrade Kuma

    I just loved the crap about Perth’s dams and aquifers under the sand plain being reduced. Well that might have something to do with Pert tripling or quadroupling in size in my lifetime and vast tracts of macburbia methinks. As for the drop in rainfall in the ‘wheat belt, I understand that has more than a little to do with over clearing the land which has also created a salt problem and a lack of windbreak problem through that same area, i.e. local waether/climate and not global.

    Herr Goebbels would have been mightily impressed with this well put together bit of denier baiting.

    382

    • #
      C. Paul Barreira

      Goebbels was the great winner of the twentieth century. His continuing influence astounds. At best his end was miserable. Even so, his and Magda’s murder of their six children is a model for politicians, media and bureaucrats everywhere, not least here in Oz. The ABC’s performance for decades now has followed the same pattern of stealing the future from coming generations whether through tolerating and encouraging immense levels of debt (public and, especially in Oz, private) or the gradual withdrawal of electrical energy, or wrecking morale. This institution is capable only of producing lying propaganda in pursuit of the culture of death. And for the majority of Australians, not least in South Australia, that’s just fine—and the current election does nothing to deny the claims.

      260

  • #
    Lionell Griffith

    The “modern” way of thinking is that if you don’t investigate and don’t find anything, there was nothing there to find. Then if you talk about what you expected to find, it happened as you described. Back in ancient history (ca 1956) that was called “dry labbing” and was very much frowned upon. Especially in lab classes. Alas, it is no longer so.

    Today, you don’t actually need to do the experiment. All you need is a very expensive computer and a complicated undocumented program filled with equations. Then have it print extensive tables and plots which can then be presented as “data”. Select the printout you feel best defends your theory and call it “proof”. Finally, claim that anyone who disagrees with the computer is a denier along with a random list of other attributes you think will induce shame.

    The amazing thing is that people who do such things actually get paid to do it and are treated as if they were actually scientists doing science. Apparently it is a lot safer in spite of being less honest and honorable than robbing banks, strong arming old people, or taking candy from children.

    401

    • #

      I deal with the government earth scientists on regular basis and get constantly astounded how slow, inefficient and poorly productive this bunch is. What I do in a week, they do in 3 years with a team that produces some wonky PhDs that no one reads or wants.
      I would rather be called a plumber that a government scientist any day.
      In fact being a geoscientist in a petroleum industry is like being a plumber anyway, as we try to discover liquid movement in the opposite direction to the classic plumping science.

      132

      • #
        Lionell Griffith

        I found much the same thing when I worked as a software engineer consultant for NASA. As near as I could tell, the prime motivation was to spend a large sums of money to support projects that never end. Actual useful results matching the expenditures were hard to find. I am amazed they got people to the moon and back and only killing the few they did. Must have been a different time and a different people.

        61

        • #
          Ian Hilliar

          Correct. Different people at NASA GISS, with no relation to the old NASA we love and admire.

          10

  • #
    Ruairi

    Many media, duped and misguided,
    Have on climate-change, long since decided,
    To report with great zeal,
    The fake climate spiel,
    From the Left and keep it one-sided.

    450

    • #

      Several updates to the post, including many hat tips (and probably more to come). Thanks!

      102

    • #

      I had a book of limericks at one time, Ruairi. Of course they were mostly off-colour and some were even humourous, but none were as topical and as clever as yours!

      Keep up the good work. I, for one, appreciate them.

      Cheers

      110

  • #

    I had to replant our Tahitian Lime tree because of climate change, it was bearing any fruit. It could also be due to the fact that it was planted in a poor spot where the soil wasn’t very good from the start and drained much too fast (within a day it started looking better). But I blame climate change.

    260

    • #
      robert rosicka

      And my Mango trees in North east Victoriastan wasn’t fond of the unprecedented frosts and died ,surely victims of climate change ?

      191

      • #
        RickWill

        So sad. But a species of tree in the wrong place.

        I lost a baby magnolia in Melbourne while away for 10 days. Apparently the longest spell of no rain here for a long time.

        80

        • #
          Graeme No.3

          One of my regrets was not saving the Fiji Times headlines over a few days**, starting with NO RAIN FOR 3 DAYS, SUVA FACES DROUGHT. This went on daily until 7 DAYS WITHOUT RAIN, RECORD DROUGHT IN SIGHT. The next day the headline was RAIN.

          ** 1969/70 can’t remember. The “problem” was eventually solved by a pipeline from the Nausori river (more water than the Murray) a whole 15 kilometres away.

          161

  • #

    Erm, it ‘wasn’t’ bearing any fruit.

    70

  • #
    Yonniestone

    As Jo suggests while Brissenden was travelling the country “over four months” he could have dropped by to speak with the lowly blogger in Perth and her husband who by chance worked at the then Australian Greenhouse Office,
    There he contributed to the development of FullCam, a fully integrated carbon accounting model for estimating and predicting all biomass, litter and soil carbon pools in forest and agricultural systems for the Australian government. (FullCam, part of Australia’s National Carbon Accounting System, received a Special Achievement in GIS award at the 2010 ESRI International User Conference).

    Brissenden with film crew in tow could’ve gotten at least an hour of footage of a well presented scientifically factual counter argument to the “climate change consensus” side which would’ve given the publicly paid for 4 corners show journalistic credibility and served the Australian taxpayer according to the The ABC Act 1983.

    Its such a shame this opportunity was missed and why other publicly funded outlets haven’t taken the time…………….oh wait.

    312

    • #
      glen Michel

      Well,he doesn’t look too convincing standing out in a paddock with his Dalgety clobber and his hands on hips. Brissenden for all the touts hasn’t done too many hard yards in my opinion;soft overseas postings and receiving second-hand news doesn’t pass muster.Most folk at the ABC are lost when they get 10ks from Ultimo,so chaps like Brissenden looking like one of those seriously in-depth reporters look rather comical to me.

      151

  • #
    pattoh

    It MUST have been Russian Hackers corrupting the data!

    How long before the solar magnetic field or lack of it will make it any ABC platform? [ let alone the TSI interference pattern from all the other cycles]

    180

  • #
    Ian George

    Things never really change. An article from March, 1846.
    ‘The aborigines say that the climate has undergone this change since white-man came in country. ” Old-hands”
    speak positively of creeks, constantly running streams, in their early days of trial, which have now been dry for several years.’
    See the whole article here at:-

    https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/679787?searchTerm=climate%20change&searchLimits=

    240

    • #

      Arctic expeditions in the mid-1800s ran into Eskimos who described much easier access to their local coves in the time of their grandparents. Interestingly, this would fit with Joseph Bank’s and the Royal Society’s description of a suddenly open Arctic in 1817.

      210

    • #
      beowulf

      That excerpt from Trove refers to the Maitland district on the Hunter River in NSW, one of the most flood-prone localities in the nation. My family farmed in the Hunter since before 1820 when the land was first being settled hereabouts and the family folklore is full of floods and droughts. Of the NSW coastal rivers, the Hunter has the largest catchment, which accounts for its variability in flow rate, and for its massive floods when the entire catchment is involved as it was in the 1955 flood when an immense rain system settled over the entire area covering thousands of km2.

      A lot of the early settlers had an English mind-set where they expected streams to be gentle, constant sources of water as they are in Britain. In Paterson, right on the edge of the riverbank, they built tobacco-drying warehouses and large brick flour mills, obviously in the expectation of using water wheels as motive power. The Paterson River (a major tributary of the Hunter) ranges from a gentle tidal stream to a raging torrent, and most of those early buildings have long since been carried away by the floods for which the river is known. It floods most years. In 1967 after the 65-66 drought broke we had 13 floods in the space of a year. There is nothing constant about Australian streams.

      Another major tributary of the Hunter is the Wollombi Brook which drains the mountainous Wattagan area to the south west of Newcastle, but enters the Hunter much further north towards Singleton. A fluvial geomorphological study of the Brook was undertaken some years back. It revealed a depositional history that scared the pants off the people doing the study. What they found was that in the several hundred years prior to white settlement there were floods on a scale unimagined; floods that would make the 1955 monster seem a trivial event. If something on their scale happened now it would wipe clean the face of the lower Hunter Valley except for the higher points. Cities like Maitland, Singleton and Raymond Terrace would disappear, along with much of Newcastle. There would be nothing left to clean up. Infrastructure would be a shambles for months/years. The hit to the economy would be lethal.

      So much for human-induced climate change and its alleged “unprecedented” effects.

      121

  • #
    Bob Fernley-Jones

    Joanne, You mention that calling drought at Braidwood was a bit dumb. Dumber still is that the BoM has a weather station at Braidwood Racecourse and the claimant profits from making such claims. Here is an extract from my formal complaint to the ABC:

    1.1) From the transcript:

    “MARTIN ROYDS, Jillamatong Beef, Braidwood NSW: The temperatures are more erratic, we seem to get frosts in the middle of summer, we’ve had frosts nearly on Christmas day. We’re getting hot, dry weather in the middle of winter. so the climates got a lot more erratic.”

    A simple Google search for ‘Summer frost NSW Australia’ yielded 428,000 hits, but nothing of relevance was found. A similar search for ‘hot winter day NSW Australia’ yielded only a report of a single warm day of 26 0C in Sydney in July 2017. However, Sydney is climatically incomparable because Braidwood is located at an altitude of about 690m (2,250 feet), east of Canberra.

    So, what does the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) have to say? Quite a lot actually. They opened a weather station at Braidwood Racecourse in 1985, and:

    • There was a solitary rather cold overnight Summer minimum of 2.3 0C on the 17/Feb/2017, but it was consistently colder in the past (figure 1).
    • There was a solitary warm winter day maximum of 20.9 0C on 22/August/2015, but again, it was consistently warmer in the past, with a notable cluster of up to 22.3 0C in 1995 (figure 2).

    1.2) From the Transcript:

    MARTIN ROYDS: Yes we have 130 years of rainfall and temperature graphs. Since 1985 to now, the temperatures have been increasing .8 of a degree per decade. So, in that thirty year period, it’s gone up 2.4 degrees, maximum temperature.

    However, that would be an eight-degree rise per century, or implausibly about eight times greater than the Australian average as stated by the BoM’s Dr Braganza at 5 video-minutes. Also, the BoM data show no discernible warming trend in the summertime maxima at the racecourse (figure 2).

    1.3) From the Transcript (summarising Mr Royds’ views):

    “MICHAEL BRISSENDEN: All around the district the dams have been drying up… Braidwood slipped into drought once again and it’s taking a heavy toll on the local farmers.”

    However, the available BoM rainfall data for the Racecourse reveals negligible rainfall reduction trend since 1985 and nothing unusual in annual variability apart from a drier period in the 1990’s (figure 3).

    1.4) From Mr Royds’ website:
    He runs the Tombarra Centre which provides accommodation for up to 52 people to engage in conferences and workshops etcetera, to “Live, Learn, Relax at Tombarra” focussing on land and environmental matters. The fact that he might gain business benefits from the claims made above should have caught the notice of any nonaligned investigative reporter.

    442

    • #
      ghl

      Hi Bob
      If you paused and looked carefully at his graph of Temp you see a large (multi-year) gap in the middle. I wonder about equipment changes etc.

      50

      • #
        Ian George

        Bob,
        I hope your complaint is dealt with – I sent a complaint but have heard nothing back as yet.
        Basis for mine.
        Braidwood’s annual average max mean from 1907 – 1974 was 19.0C.
        From 1992 – 2017 it was 19.3C. That’s an increase of only 0.3C at best.
        Hottest year was 1919.
        Most of the the data from 1974 – 1992 is missing when the site moved from Wallace Rd to the racecourse.

        Re the drought – Braidwood had above average rainfall from 2010 – 2016 conclusive. Last year it was below average – but not its worst.
        Back above average for Jan and Feb this year.

        BTW, why, with all the hotter temps supposedly upon us, has no temp exceeded 50C which has only been recorded three times – twice in 1960 and once in 1998.

        92

  • #
    robert rosicka

    Geez remind me not to upset the host ! That has to be the best slap down ever .

    Didn’t Albany have the highest ever recorded temperature or did Bom finally get around to fixing their stuff up ?

    Some of the video they showed was from the Tassie flood which was blamed on cloud seeding .

    To use Braidwood as an example after a flood shows just how deceitful these presstitutes really are , they should have had a disclaimer or mentioned the rain after they filmed .

    282

  • #
    el gordo

    Because of the program’s blatant bias I didn’t watch it, nevertheless on the question of summer snow I believe its a regional cooling signal and may have something to do with the second law of thermodynamics.

    160

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      robert rosicka

      Snow in summer is about as unusual as the ABC doing scare stories on climate change Elgordo .

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      • #
        William

        I remember having the fire going one very cold Christmas day back in the seventies – in Toowoomba, Queensland.

        40

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

    I had been listening to and watching the ABC since the 1960s but stopped about 5 years ago due to their extreme green/left bias. They are a very predictable waste of good Oxygen

    301

  • #
    toorightmate

    I know a bit about crop rotation.
    I was taught about it.
    At school.
    Primary school in fact.
    1935 if I remember correctly.
    So there, I was a very early student of rocket science.

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    • #
      Steve of Cornubia

      There is mention of crop rotation during Roman times and it is almost universally accepted to have been utilsed well before that. This from Wiki:

      “Agriculturalists have long recognized that suitable rotations – such as planting spring crops for livestock in place of grains for human consumption – make it possible to restore or to maintain a productive soil. Middle Eastern farmers practiced crop rotation in 6000 BC….”

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      • #
        Environment Skeptic

        Crop rotation could not be practiced in the 16th century. The word ‘rotation’ suggested ‘orbit’, or that the world was not perfectly flat and the like. Instead they would checkerboard crops. 🙂

        30

        • #
          Annie

          Wot! Like checkerboard heather-moor burning in the Yorkshire Daes?

          40

          • #
            Annie

            Dales. Fumble fingers…

            20

          • #
            Environment Skeptic

            Yes it might well be that the checkerboard pattern had its ancient origins in the agricultural practice of burning alternate paddocks and when viewed from above form a checkerboard pattern with the burnt ones appearing black….I want to take credit for this new theory though…Thanks in advance. 🙂

            20

      • #
        Steve of Cornubia

        If climate change gets any worse, that farmer might have to get REALLY inventive. Perhaps he’ll start watering the crops during dry spells and not harvesting the crops until they’re ready. If he gets really desperate, he might even synchronise his planting with the appropriate seasons. Now how radical would that be?

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        • #
          robert rosicka

          Common practice for farmers was over grazing ,over stocking and burning of stubble before planting the next crop .
          One look at those paddocks proves the point , smart farmers have learned from the past mistakes but when drought hits and it’s not if but when in this country it’s not climate change and probably never has been .
          Just a cycle that no-one seems to understand , how does the saying go ” of droughts and flooding rains” .

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  • #
    manalive

    The ABC ‘cherry-picking’ again, sorry.
    There will be a followup programme on Monday when Flannery will be on Q & A, should be riveting viewing.
    Of course everything will be fine in future climate-wise for Australian farmers as long as we continue to rack up electricity costs to consumers — stop complaining all you deplorables!

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  • #
    TdeF

    Do the farmers believe the “Climate Change” is “Man Made”? Clearly neither they nor the ABC have any idea. Yes, you can change the vegetation and water in an area. You can change the climate locally. We humans have worked hard to do so. We even change the climate in our houses, especially in the tropics. Are Climates changing. Of course. We confess.

    Are we changing the temperature of the planet with CO2. No.

    To answer the question, the ABC and friends refer to ‘scientists’ like Al Gore and Tim Flannery and Al Pachauri and Christiana Figueres, none of whom have any qualifications in science at all. That is except for Tim who did his degree in English and a PhD on ancient kangaroos/wombats which qualified him for a degree in the Science department. He joins a group of people including zoologists, botanists, psychologists who get a science degree, often without any hard sciences at all. This includes mathematics, chemistry, physics and what people would usually associates with science plus engineering and computer science.

    The question is not whether climates, individual climates can change in the short term, the medium term or the long term.

    The only question is whether such change is caused by man made CO2. The first question is whether the steady increase in CO2 is man made. You can measure this with C14. Less than 2% of all CO2 is man released and that vanishes into the oceans, half every 14 years.

    The second and subsequent question is whether rising CO2 is warming the planet. As CO2 is still rising steadily but the temperature has been constant for 20 of the 30 years, this is busted too.

    There is no Man Made Climate Change on a global scale. There is almost no old CO2 in the air. There is no logic. 350,000 windmills for absolutely no effect on CO2, their only goal. What an incredible waste, the greatest in human history.

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    • #
      robert rosicka

      At what point in earths history has the climate ever remained stable ?
      What is the perfect temperature for the earth to be ?
      What is the right amount of Co2 to be in the atmosphere (if any) ?

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    David-of-Cooyal-in-Oz

    Great post Jo,
    I particularly liked your inclusion of temperatures reported by explorers Sturt and Mitchell in the 1800s.
    Cheers,
    Dave B

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    robert rosicka

    More propaganda from their ABC , just heard the report on the floods at Ingham and the reporters say it’s a relief to have some rain after years of drought !

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  • #
    Ken Stewart

    Well said Jo. “Two Corners”- I like it! Can I (and anyone) use it? Or is it copyright? It needs spreading.

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  • #
    Roy Hogue

    Apparently a bowl of cherries has the same predictive power as the BoM.

    I don’t know whether that builds up a bowel of cherries or tears down the BoM. Any guesses? 😉

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  • #

    How many times must it, the obvious, be said?

    Climate is change. Relics of old civilisations in the middle of not-much-at-all show times when conditions were greatly different. Old sea ports, even after a few hundred years, show climate change. The process which filled in Bass Strait just over ten thousand years ago was supposed to stop? Job done? Saying that some farmers now have noticed different conditions in their lifetimes ignores the fact that every generation notices such changes.

    Stable climate is not climate. It may as well be a wigwam for a goose’s bridle. Stable climate cannot be. Change is both cyclical and lineal. Don’t bet on any of it. Don’t buy condos in the Arctic because of a forty year trend. But don’t buy North African farmland in hopes of a Roman Era greening. Don’t buy lumps of Sahara desert in hopes of a return to pre-Egyptian grazing.

    The Big Fib relies on emphasising the very remote past and very recent present. In short, it relies on ignoring history, both human and geological, treating the last century as an old sepia photo left in the bottom of a draw and the previous centuries as mere “anecdote”. Maybe the reason so many smirking amateurs posture as climate authorities is that more informed people would have trouble staying on-script. (David Hogg should get a climate gig next. Right beside Justin Trudeau, who’ll soon be available, with luck.)

    And my thanks to those brave souls who view the ABC so I don’t have to.

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  • #
    el gordo

    ‘Perth and the South West have just experienced two cooler and wetter than average summers, but the general trend has been for hotter and drier conditions, with climate models predicting that will not only continue, but worsen.’

    ABC

    This is blatant propaganda, see how they mix the truth of cooler and wetter summers with predictions of a warmer and drier trend based on faulty models.

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    • #
      Graeme#4

      The BOM have moved the Perth temp measuring site twice, each time to a warmer location. This has resulted in two noticeable step changes when compared to the Perth Airport measuring site. I recall nobody taking the original Kings Park hill site readings seriously because they were much cooler than Perth city.

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  • #
    el gordo

    ‘Scientists may need to create a sixth category for cyclones as climate change creates more extreme weather events, according to New Zealand’s Climate Change Minister.’

    ABC

    The more extreme weather events in midlatitudes is caused by global cooling ….. climate change is no laughing matter.

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    • #
      robert rosicka

      Elgordo if the category refers to the speed of wind maybe there should be another category and personally I like “Ludicrous speed”.

      70

      • #
        RicDre

        Excellent! It describes both the wind speed and the scientists who think we need a sixth category for cyclones.

        40

    • #
      sophocles

      We could introduce Cat 10 where the winds are supersonic. Then we could toss him into them and watch him fly.
      He doesn’t realise that Cat 5 is open ended: “wind speeds of 250kph or more

      Yes, he’s an embarrassment.

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      • #
        el gordo

        Its not the intensity so much as the frequency which is unusual and I’m putting it down to a negative PDO and blocking highs.

        ‘The third cyclone to venture towards New Zealand since February, Tropical Cyclone Hola, is carving out a southward path.

        ‘Niwa meteorologist Seth Carrier said the “increased frequency” of ex-tropical cyclones affecting New Zealand this year was unusual.’

        Stuff

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        • #
          sophocles

          You’re right about the frequency. I’ve been watching the space weather and the sun is bare. A cat 1 TC winds up and suddenly there’s a complex spot with a b-g-d field which flares at just the right position for the TC to wind up a couple more notches. The last Cyclone, Gita, was wound up by just one sunspot. Apart from that, the sun was blank. This time there were a couple of Coronal holes making for some bumpy Solar Wind so thankfully Hola is not so strong.

          Ah, well. it’s the third one this year. And 2018 is not yet 3 months old. We’ve had bumpy solar wind so it’s not a powerful cyclone but it’s still going to be wet!

          This year has been a very wet so far. My lawns have actually been growing this Feb, so the lawn mower has not been idle. They’re also a lush green. Usually they go brown just before Christmas and stop growing until about halfway through March when it deigns to rain. But not this year.

          The crickets are the biggest and most prolific I’ve seen for a long time. I haven’t heard any cicadas for a week or so. I think they must have drowned.

          Tomorrow we will know exactly where Hola is going to go. The Met Service thinks it’s going to come down the Tas to just west of North Cape. I’d rather it went East as far and fast as it can gallop but the Tas is very warm so that’s most likely it’s track.

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      • #
        el gordo

        The Tasman Sea overheated in December and warm SST presumably lingered, which sort of explains something of the mechanism.

        ‘NIWA meteorologist Ben Noll says the “very impressive marine heatwave” has led to the largest deviation from normal temperatures in the world.

        “The sea surface temperatures in the Australia-New Zealand region are presently the most anomalous on the globe,” he says.

        “Typical La Nina signature but intensity turned up many notches.”

        News Hub

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      • #
        yarpos

        He realises well, thats not the point, he is headline hunting and keeping the masses fearful.

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    • #

      Unless there’s been more fiddling, the elite of recorded cyclones, those below 880 hPa, were Pacific events in the 1950s and 1970s. Simple historical fact.

      But who knows, what with this giant memory hole that’s formed over the planet? These days I can never tell if we Eurasians are at war with Oceania or or with Eastasia. Maybe we’re even in Oceania and at war with…Eurasia? Eastasia?

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  • #
    pat

    big news, if true:

    9 Mar: WUWT: Anthony Watts: OUT: One less climate alarmist
    From Fritz Vahrenholt and Sebastian Lüning at their website Die Kalte Sonne (LINK), comes this bit of good news.
    One of the most irrational warmists in the world, Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber, of the Potsdam PIK is getting forced out by his activism…

    (excerpts) In addition, a mysterious accumulation of Schellnhuber’s publicationsin the journal of the National Academy of Science was noticed. The secret was probably that as a member of the company he was allowed to select his article reviewer…

    Some of the press finally said what many thought. Spiegel to Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber: “One gets the impression that you are now more activist than physicist” . This also fits his role as ghostwriter for the Pope , to whom he apparently put his words almost at will in the mouth. He largely ignored the uncertainties in the climate sciences. His goal: the unconditional destruction of the fossil fuel industry…
    https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/03/09/out-one-less-climate-alarmist/

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  • #
    pat

    9 Mar: NoTricksZone: “Climate-Pope” Schellnhuber Stepping Down …Growing Impression He Had Become “More Activist Than Physicist”
    By P Gosselin
    “We now seriously need a Schellnhuber timeout. […] We do hope the new PIK leadership will correct the extreme direction the institute is currently on and rapidly puts an end to the flow of climate-alarmist press releases.“…

    From Die kalte Sonne here, by Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt
    (Translated by P Gosselin)
    (excerpt) Recently there had been a mysterious spree publications by Schellnhuber appearing in the journal of the National Academy of Science. The suspected secret is that he was allowed to choose his peer reviewers himself as a member of the society…

    FROM COMMENTS:
    AndyG55: I wouldn’t put too much hope in LESS fundamentalist alarmist front from PIK.
    The new guy is Johan Rockström, who, if anything, is even more a radical alarmist nutter than that the previous alarmist nutter. (LINK)

    http://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/research-news/2017-07-02-three-years-to-safeguard-our-climate.html

    AndyG55: And another (LINK)

    https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/09/planet-climate-change-johan-rockstrom/

    A TRUE BELIEVER, and a RADICAL ACTIVISTS.
    Who else would use such idiotic phrases like “a safe operating space for humanity”…
    http://notrickszone.com/2018/03/09/climate-pope-schellnhuber-stepping-down-growing-impression-he-had-become-more-activist-than-physicist/#sthash.u3sPEY2B.dpbs

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    • #
      pat

      AAP report 23 Feb:

      23 Feb: SBS: AAP: Revolution needed in climate change fight
      Radical change in the next 20 years is needed to achieve climate goals agreed to by some 200 nations.
      Both said “revolutions” were needed to tackle climate change, such as capturing greenhouse gas emissions from power plants that burn fossil fuels or by reforming agriculture, where meat production and fertilisers are big sources of greenhouse gases.
      “When Germany is not in a position to phase out coal can we expect that Poland or Indonesia or Vietnam or Turkey … can phase out coal?” Ottmar Edenhofer, new co-director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told Reuters.

      Edenhofer, formerly the institute’s chief economist, and new co-director Johan Rockstrom, a Swedish scientist, said governments were far from achieving the core goal in the 2015 Paris Agreement of limiting a rise in global average temperatures to “well below” two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times.
      “We have just literally 20 years to either succeed or fail” in the goals of getting the planet on a more sustainable path, Rockstrom said in a joint telephone interview.

      The University of Pennsylvania rated the Potsdam Institute as the world’s top environment policy think-tank this month…
      Rockstrom and Edenhofer were named by the institute on Friday to succeed Hans Joachim Schellnhuber in October.
      https://www.sbs.com.au/news/revolution-needed-in-climate-change-fight

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  • #
    sophocles

    “New hot records are set on electronic equipment which can pick up one-second noise, unlike historic records done in old fashioned thermometers”

    Okay, we have modern hysteric records versus old fashioned historic records.

    At least that climate model with Zero success is consistent: no positive success and no negative failure!
    Nor vice versa.

    Ah, modern science … it’s certainly different … 🙂

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    • #
      Kinky Keith

      Tree ring data gives readings that are converted roughly to an equivalent temperature.

      Rough stuff.

      Much of the past 150 years has mercury thermometers measured, at best, hourly and often much less.

      Currently procedure is to measure every second.

      There is no way that the measurements from those past systems can be scientifically compared and each individual data set MUST be kept separate.

      They are NOT measuring the same thing!!

      KK

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  • #
    pat

    on a similar theme, BBC has quickly jumped on the following and no doubt it will be all over theirABC soon:

    A warming planet will devastate fisheries
    Nature.com-8 Mar. 2018
    Fishing fleets will fare worst in the North Atlantic, where catches are expected to drop by nearly 60% by 2300, according to modelling done by Keith Moore and Weiwei Fu of the University of California, Irvine, and their colleagues…

    9 Mar: Reuters: Alister Doyle: Fisheries output to plunge unless global warming reeled in
    Global fisheries output will slump by 20 percent by 2300 and by 60 percent in the worst-hit North Atlantic region if governments fail to slow long-term global warming, a U.S. team of scientists said on Thursday…
    Unchecked long-term warming would thaw sea ice around Antarctica and disrupt ocean currents, winds and the growth of tiny plankton, the report found. Worldwide, ever more nutrients would sink to the ocean depths, away from fish near the surface.
    “Marine ecosystems worldwide will be increasingly starved for nutrients,” lead author J. Keith Moore of the University of California, Irvine, told Reuters of the findings published in the journal Science…
    The shifts would cut the productivity of fisheries in 2300 by an average 20 percent and by 60 percent in the North Atlantic, where a normal upwelling of nutrients from deeper waters would be most reduced, according to computer simulations.

    Exceptions would be the Southern Ocean near Antarctica and in the Arctic Ocean around the North Pole where higher temperatures and shrinking ice, allowing more sunlight to reach the water, would boost the growth of tiny plants…

    Moore said such long-term projections involve many uncertainties but add to existing concerns about more heat waves, downpours and droughts that mainstream scientists link to a build-up of man-made greenhouse gases in the atmosphere…
    “We need to be thinking 1,000 years into the future, not 100 years,” he wrote in an email. “Global warming isn’t a problem our children can solve – it will be too late.”…
    The study assumed greenhouse gases will continue to build up in the atmosphere, boosting average surface temperatures by 9.6 degrees Celsius (17 Fahrenheit) by 2300…

    ***Charlotte Laufkoetter, a scientist at the University of Bern who was not involved in the study, praised the findings as based on the best existing science, despite the difficulty of projecting so far into the future.
    “There are of course several uncertainties – circulation in the Southern Ocean is very difficult to model,” she told Reuters.
    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange-fisheries/fisheries-output-to-plunge-unless-global-warming-reeled-in-idUSKCN1GK2QI

    9 Mar: ScienceMag: Will marine productivity wane?
    by Charlotte Laufkötter & Nicolas Gruber
    http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1103.full

    interview with Charlotte Laufkotter begins at 14mins10secs; ends at 20mins, with acknowledgement this scenario only MIGHT happen:

    12 Mar: BBC Science in Action includes:
    Long-term Impact on Fisheries from Climate Change.
    Changes in the cycling of nutrients in the world’s oceans are already occurring. Global warming is having an impact on the marine food chain already. Nutrients needed to feed phytoplankton, the first organisms in the food chain, are being locked up at depth. This means less food for the larger organisms, including fish. The decline has been predicted to be low and slow for the next 100 years. But new work has pushed the models further into the future and have shown much greater declines in fish stocks around the whole world by 2300.
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csvrh9#play

    20

    • #
      RickWill

      Who funds such useless naval gazing! Could it be the fishing industry setting up a long term plan for compensation???

      50

      • #
        sophocles

        What it really means is that the fish move. The fishing boats have to figure out where. The fish don’t really decrease in great numbers. Like penguins, they just just change where they live.

        30

  • #
    liberator

    I thought it was a bumper crop of cherries this year – so does that mean climate change is helping the cherry farmer by giving them a better crop? Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth.

    50

    • #
      Annie

      The earlier ones locally were a bit ordinary but the later ones were superb. We buy the cherries produced by Cathedral Cherries who operate near Alexandra. We can also buy Koala Cherries from Yarck.

      In our own place we have had wonderful crops of nectarines, apples, pears and now figs. Our berries, other than mulberries and blackberries fared badly with frosts knocking them out and later on, humid heat. Of course, we also have our usual fight with sulphur-crested cockatoos and various other parroty-types, except for the Black Cockatoos who seem to confine themselves to the hakea nuts and pine nuts.

      Looking back at some ancient kept emails; I saw one from our daughter from about 10 years ago saying it was a bit hot for March! Stone tbe crows! You mean it’s been a bit hot at this time before?!

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    • #
      Environment Skeptic

      Last year and year before that the honey harvested by a beehive that looks after me was dismal…the coolish summer weather in Victoria Au at the time slowed the production of nectar from flowers and that has an equal effect on how much nectar is turned into honey by hard working Australian bees.

      Convo’s with a commercial bee keeper in my area described similar information.

      This year is going blockbusters this year due to the warmer weather. Honey producers have been complaining all over the world including New Zealand which had one of its worst years ever last year and as for the UK and Ireland ….well they need to just keep feeding their bees sugar, like they do in the USA most of the time…

      “Why I’m Not A Commercial Beekeeper Anymore” – YouTube
      ▶ 5:19
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZYWucqTyWU

      30

  • #
    Phillthegeek

    Lol! was wondering how long it would take for the whinge about that 4C program to come out.

    “we’ve had one of the coldest summers in two decades”

    And i see you have switched to weather rather than climate. 🙂

    Still upholding the rep of a satirical humour website like this is a worthy goal. Keep it up. 🙂

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    • #
      robert rosicka

      Like a true troll you have nothing no argument no counter just hit and run before your mummy finds your trolling the internet ,it’s not our fault you can’t count to ten and your faith has blinded you to the scam that is CAGW .

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  • #
    Phillthegeek

    And really, if you guys are sooooooo upset about what you claim the ABC hasn’t done…..then pitch your own production to them.

    Stop the inflicting of your pointless, endless, whinging about how hardly done by and oppressed people with your perspective are and see how you guys go producing a “balanced” program on climate change and its effects on the ground.

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    • #
      Dennis

      No problem, just send $1.3 billion a year to this website.

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      • #
        Kinky Keith

        🙂

        I think I felt a tremble a while ago.

        Do you think he might have become cranky and stamped his foot?

        Poor bubba, the current education system sure has a lot to answer for.

        KK

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      • #
        Phillthegeek

        Nah…fund it out of all that Cool Futures money rolling in………

        23

      • #

        Don’t need big dollars to ask the farmers around here for their thoughts on climate.

        They offer them for free…and they’re not the same as those of the ABC’s picked team. Our cockies are old enough to remember the somewhat lower rainfalls before the late 1940s, the drenchings of the 50s and 70s with regular summer thunder in the arvos, the Millennium Drought, followed by the return of winter thunder after decades of westerlies dominating the cold months…

        And their parents told them of the WW2 Drought, and their grandparents told them of the Fed drought, the heat of the WW1 years while Europe shivered in mud. You see, around here every month bar one had its highest mean max between 1910 and 1919 (the exception being August, hottest in 1946).

        And who will forget the events in 1963 when we got a third of a year’s good rainfall in a couple of days? Or Australia’s F4-5 tornado which struck south of here on New Year’s Day 1970?

        What would the ABC and climate racketeers do with with a ’63 Macleay flood or the Bulahdelah Tornado if they struck now? Would it be weather or would it be climate? Try to keep a straight face when answering, warmies…Straight face, I said!

        Major reality distortion costs billions while observing reality is cheap. Free, even.

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    • #
      mc

      Stop the inflicting of your pointless, endless, whinging about how hardly done by….

      Who’s whinging? The whole thing is just hilarious; take the play being staged in Sydney for example, Kill Climate Deniers, funnier than a hat full of a-holes, but I’ve seen one that raises the comedy bar even further, it’s called Death Squads in search of Climate Gulibles; an absolute hoot!

      71

      • #
        Phillthegeek

        Who’s whinging?? ABC openly produces a program from the perspective of people dealng with climate change in terms of how they see it as affecting their lives and livelihoods now. That’s what the program was about. Whinging about it not addressing other issues dear to your heart to do with dubious arguments about climate change is childishly silly.

        Still, that sums up a lot about how some of the denizens hear deal with anything that challenges their local groupthink.

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        • #
          robert rosicka

          If your trying to say it was an opinion piece your wasting your breath ,in 1911 a young woman wrote of her experience living on farms in NSW and it covers pretty much what was in the four corners story .
          Now either she was clairvoyant or it was about the land where she grew up , look up the poem called “my country” by Dorothea Mackellar and reacquaint yourself with some oz history .

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          • #
            Phillthegeek

            “If your trying to say it was an opinion piece ”

            Not at all. It was a perfectly valid presentation of the attitudes of people with actual skin n the game. For a silly blogger to the dismiss it as “witchdoctors at work” os ridiculous and really highlights the think skinned hysterical nature of quite a few in the “skeptic” community. Be better laffs if it wasn’t so sad.

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        • #
          Kinky Keith

          Go back to kindy,

          It’s here, not hear.

          At least you seem to have picked up something from the blog HERE.

          You now seem to be aware of the concept of groupthink.

          Well done.

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          • #
            Phillthegeek

            OMG…. I made a typo!!!! Burn me…i’m a witch!!!! 🙂

            “You now seem to be aware of the concept of groupthink.”

            Visit HERE once or twice and its a bit hard not to be KK, its very ion daH face 🙂

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    • #
      Phoenix44

      I really don’t understand your point. Do you?

      41

    • #
      Fred Streeter

      Stop the inflicting of your pointless, endless, whinging

      Has it not occurred to you that your suffering is self-inflicted? And that there is a simple, obvious way to avoid it?

      80

    • #
      AndyG55

      “Stop the inflicting of your pointless, endless, whinging ”

      You the only one I can see with the pointless whinging.

      You could avoid having your brain-hosed anti-CO2 groupthink questioned by just not coming here…

      … but then WHINGE about it when it you do come here.

      You do NOT project the signs of any rational intellect, Phlop.

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      • #
        Phillthegeek

        Ahh…I see the energiser bunny is back! 🙂

        11

        • #
          Kinky Keith

          I think that any competent person might have absorbed the message by now so until you answer my earlier request for justification of the science that enables Man Made Global Warming I’m going to have to ignore you.

          It’s up to you.

          Do you have the goods?

          KK

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          • #
            Phillthegeek

            Nothing the fervently religious bent on climate change here wouldn’t reject outright simply because it challenges the groupenthunk.

            Do you have the goods?

            Have been there before KK, and frankly am not going to waste my time feeding the chooks here. Its simply sets off another round of pointless bullsh#t about how its all conspiracy, gravy train…….blah, blah, rinse repeat.

            Its actually worse than going to a political blog site and watching another round of RGR wars that come up in between discussions of conservative fwark ups. 🙂

            anyway…hows the imminent we will all be rooooooned by global cooling thing coming along then?? 🙂

            14

            • #
              AndyG55

              Poor little phlop, carries on with his headless chook routine…

              EMPTY of any science…..

              … and prancing around giggling to himself while he proves it…

              What a pathetic life he must lead, if his only jollies are from coming here and prancing around like a mindless prat.

              02

            • #
              AndyG55

              ” Its simply sets starts off another round of pointless bullsh#t”

              ALL your comments are pointless bulls**t, phlop.

              EMPTY of any content except your manic self-preening.

              02

  • #
    Bob Fernley-Jones

    Here is part 2 of a formal complaint I’ve sent to the ABC:

    The opening narrative sets-up the programme agenda with several sensational TV news grabs:

    2.1) Sydney newsreader:

    “Tonight fires break out across the state as Sydney sizzles and the mercury soars, with Penrith recording its hottest day ever at 47.3 degrees.

    This claim became rapidly obsolete in the media with widespread correction of a mistaken early tweet from the BoM. Again, your investigative reporter apparently failed to do a quick online search for ‘Penrith 47.3’ or the like. Maurice Newman, a former Chairman of the ABC put it rather succinctly in The Australian:

    “…according to Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, little old Penrith in Sydney, Australia, was the warmest spot on the planet, recording its highest temperature ever, having “broken the all-time maximum temperature record for … the Sydney metropolitan area”. Well, perhaps in all that excitement the bureau can be forgiven for overlooking the fact Penrith Lakes started recording temperatures only in 1995 and for missing a much higher temperature recorded in nearby Richmond in 1939. But they were right. It was hot.”

    2.2) Brisbane newsreader:

    “Queenslanders have suffered through temperatures at least 10 degrees above average as the heatwave sets in for the weekend.

    The claim of “at least 10 degrees above average” is again severally misleading including that sparsely populated areas in the hot centre have a long history of very high fluctuations in temperature that were more severe than those of late. Your programme failed to reveal the proper perspective of various less alarming reports such as in the Brisbane Times on 15/Feb/2018 (even though it too is partly exaggerative or mistaken when compared with the relevant BoM databases):

    “[BoM] forecaster Sean Fitzgerald said much of Queensland recorded temperatures above 35 degrees during the week.
    In particular, out west is where it is very very hot – temperatures out there are at or exceeding 40 in some places, so quite a bit above average,” Mr Fitzgerald said.
    “Lots of places are five degrees above average and some places are even 10 degrees above average, so plenty of warm temperatures about the state.
    “You’re talking about places like Charleville, Longreach, Roma even Toowoomba.”
    Records were also broken in Winton in central-west Queensland which recorded 46.5 degrees on Wednesday, breaking a February 28, 2016, record of 45.5* degrees, while a couple of hundred kilometres south, in Richmond, a 1983 record of 44 degrees was broken when the town hit 44.5 degrees.”

    However, when the BoM databases are examined, all six stations cited were relatively cool in recent times. (e.g. figures 4, 5, 6) Mistakenly, the forecaster’s statement about Richmond is strongly contradicted in figure 3, and, although the stated 45.5 in 2018 is apparently OK, one of the corrective BoM tweets on the saga in 2.1 above admitted that it was 2.3 degrees hotter in 1939. Also, the Winton, Roma and Toowoomba examples only have short records that are incapable of providing long-term trend determinations. Moreover, Winton’s 45.5 in 2018 did not break the record high of 46.9 on 1/Dec/2006 anyway!

    2.3) Melbourne newsreader:

    “The state’s public transport system and power supply have come under pressure as Melbourne baked through its hottest day in two years.”

    There were 193 days hotter than 40 degrees recorded at the Melbourne Regional Office before its closure in 2015. At Olympic Park, the replacing station, it spiked at 41.7 0C on 6/Jan/2018 atop a modest month average of only 27.2 0C. Some more notable past highs were; 2009* = 46.4, 1939* = 45.6, 1908 = 44.2, 2003 = 44.1, 1862 = 44.0. So, a single 41.7 0C day in Melbourne is hardly a big deal but it is dressed-up to be a sign of pending doom. * Catastrophic bushfires driven by extreme winds from the hot interior.

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      robert rosicka

      And yes Victoriastan had power supply issues because of the heat but closing Hazelwood and putting up windmills was to blame for the state just not having the capacity needed .

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    john karajas

    Four Corners have been pouring out their propaganda for decades. I particularly recall an interview that they did with a CRA (forerunner to today’s Rio Tinto) executive showing only his face between the base of his nose and the top of his forehead. Made him look very sinister! Totally uncalled for! The program was about their extensive holdings of coal mines in the Bowen Basin, Queensland, if I recall and Four Corners’ aim was to portray this as being very, very sinister. Just for once I would like to see a Four Corners type approach on the a$@*holes that make Four Corners programs.

    Jo, the work done by you and David is truly important in preserving the sanity of many Australians. Thank you!

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    John Watt

    A while ago Miranda Devine wrote a positive piece in the Western Australian about David Evans’ work. I have suggested to Skynews “Outsiders” (Rowan Dean and Ross Cameron) that they get on board. Surely some serious media coverage is needed to stop Oz’s slide into energy and industrial oblivion.

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      Environment Skeptic

      Perhaps if “Australia” forgets energy, manufacturing, etc, and industrial oblivion…it could make a fresh start and get into banking. 🙂

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      Phillthegeek

      “Miranda Devine wrote a positive piece in the Western Australian about David Evans’ work”

      Wow, that would not have done his reputation much good. 🙁

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        Kinky Keith

        Good one bubba.

        Now why don’t you show us how smart you really are by explaining fully and clearly how man made CO2 leads to global warming.

        You obviously know all about it.

        You can do it! Go.

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          Phillthegeek

          Why bother?? Been done too many times here already and its just not possible to shake the deep seated religious zeal with which the denizens here hold their beliefs.

          Its all a Deep Date conspiracy and Fake News anyway KK. 🙂

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            AndyG55

            There is not one piece of empirical evidence that enhanced atmospheric CO2 causes warming of anything.

            It is a model based ASS-umption for the scientifically gullible.

            And you, certainly, have never produced anything.

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              Phillthegeek

              Seriously Angry, you aren”t that damn Britisher Malcolm Roberts in drag are you??

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                AndyG55

                Poor little-mind zero-science phlop.

                Making faces at himself in the mirror, pretending he is so clever.

                By hurt by his own EMPTYMESS.

                You do see that you responded with NOTHING, as always…. don’t you.

                Poor little ZERO-SCIENCE phlop. !!

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            AndyG55

            “Why bother?? “

            The standard evasionary tactic of the incapable. !

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              glen Michel

              “why bother”. A common statement from a failed millenial from a failed education system

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            • #
              glen Michel

              “why bother”. A common statement from a failed millenial from a failed education system.

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                Kinky Keith

                Glen,
                The education system hasn’t failed in it’s mission.

                Those educated ones are now voting exactly as programmed and elect people who want to live the good life and chain the educated to life of servitude to pay off the resulting government debt.

                Tragedy going unrecognised by the key “educated” players.

                KK

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            Phillthegeek

            Come on people, help me out here. Only a couple more and i can sign off on my current BS bingo card!!

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    TdeF

    Just loving all the rain in Queensland, a declared drought zone. Of course this is going to be framed by the ABC as ‘climate change’ but it was ‘climate change’ which brought the long drought. In the strange logic of climate change, droughts and floods are both evidence of climate change.

    The puzzle is that while the argument is that CO2 is warming the planet unnaturally, I have no explanation for events also being ‘climate change’ Droughts are climate change, as are floods, cyclones, earthquakes, bushfires.

    Man Made Climate Change, the gift which keeps on giving for extreme left politicians. Plus Malcolm Turnbull, the most socialist left politician in Australian history and one who stole his job from the elected PM. Malcolm’s greatest achievement to date is the right for men to marry men and women to marry women. Wow! What a guy. Now his technology minister Matt Canavan is telling us carbon capture really works. Now that’s going to cost us.

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      robert rosicka

      Just re reading a famous bit of what Australia used to be like way back before 1911 when it was first printed , back then it was weather and expected totally normal .

      https://www.dorotheamackellar.com.au/archive/mycountry.htm

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      Kinky Keith

      TdeF,

      You seem to be missing the point there.

      CCS systems don’t really do anything. Everybody knows that.

      All that’s important is that somebody “connected” can make a motza out of the contract.

      All the new CCS plants can be stored next to the Desalination plants.

      p.s. Maybe the CCS process could sell the CO2 to Coca-Cola and Tooheys?

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    Brian Hatch

    Wallace St in Braidwood is several kilometres from the racecourse which is on the river flat and quite exposed. The temps from the two are unlikely to be that similar. There are very few temp records in the Monaro region, but mostly they show minimal change over the last 100 years. Cooma records show a slight drop in temperature since 1858. Oh, dear!

    The main reason grapes are picked earlier is that the varieties grown have changed over the last 30 years, and taste has changed from the robust heavy alcohol wines that required a longer growing season to maximise sugar and therefore alcohol.

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    pat

    BBC World Service this evening was spinning Emanuel Macron’s visit to India as being about “climate change”. nothing documented by them so far, but…

    10 Mar: NDTV: France Wanted India To Announce Talks For 36 More Rafale Fighters
    Sources in the Defence Ministry told NDTV there is no immediate decision likely till the first tranche of Rafales start arriving in 2019.
    by Vishnu Som
    This was, however, not announced in the joint statement made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the visiting French President Emmanuel Macron in New Delhi today and it’s unclear at what stage the talks presently lie…
    Senior sources in the Ministry of Defence Ministry whom NDTV spoke to in the days prior to the visit of the French President have said that while New Delhi has not ruled out a further acquisition of Rafale fighters, there is no immediate decision likely till the first tranche of Rafales, which are already on order, start arriving in 2019. These jets were ordered in 2016 in a controversial Rs. 58,000-crore government-to-government deal between India and France…

    India and France have also been trying to close out a deal to co-develop and refine India’s indigenous jet fighter engine, the Kaveri, a project where the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) has been unable to meet project objectives…

    The acquisition of Rafale fighter jets for the Indian Air Force has been one of the most controversial defence deals every signed by India. In a statement yesterday, the Congress party claimed that the Rafale tender had resulted in ”a staggering loss of Rs. 12,632 crore” since ”India is clearly paying an extra price of Rs. 350.90 crore per aircraft” compared to what Qatar and Egypt are paying for jets they have ordered from Dassault, the manufacturer of the Rafale. These claims have been vociferously countered in the past with Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman recently telling reporters, “Don’t compare it (the Rafale deal) with Bofors. There is no scam here.”…
    https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/france-wanted-india-to-announce-talks-for-another-36-rafale-fighters-1822171

    10 Mar: Reuters: France signs deals worth $16 billion in India; to deepen defense, security ties
    by Michel Rose and Zeba Siddiqui
    A so-called “Industrial Way Forward Agreement” was signed between French utility EDF (EDF.PA) and India’s NPCIL for the construction of six nuclear reactors at Jaitapur.
    Negotiations over the construction of next-generation nuclear reactors in India have been dragging on for years.
    It was not immediately clear whether these were firm contracts or letters of intent.
    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-france-contracts/france-signs-deals-worth-16-billion-in-india-to-deepen-defense-security-ties-idUSKBN1GM088

    BBC did briefly mention the fighter jets and six nuclear reactors, but not as part of their fighting “climate change” spiel. launching the “Solar Alliance” was the full extent of their CAGW spiel:

    10 Mar: NDTV: Emmanuel Macron India Visit LIVE Updates: French President Interacts With Delhi Students
    French President Emmanuel Macron and PM Modi have begun India-France bilateral talks. Focus will be on defence, space and civil nuclear cooperation.
    by Abhishek Chakraborty
    Modi: Tomorrow President Macron will be co-chaired at the International Solar Alliance. President Macron and I plan to work together to battle climate change for the sake of planet Earth’s future. We are committed to the success of the International Solar Alliance…

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    pat

    ***extending cap and trade unlikely, even in Dem-controlled California legislature:

    9 Mar: WaPo: California bullet train costs soar to $77B; opening delayed
    By Kathleen Ronayne and Jonathan J. Cooper, Associated Press 
    The projected cost of California’s bullet train between San Francisco and Los Angeles has jumped to $77 billion and the completion date has been pushed back four years to 2033, according to a business plan released Friday…

    While $77 billion is the baseline cost estimate, the plan estimates total costs could be as low as $63.2 billion or as high as $98.1 billion.
    ***The last plan, presented in 2016, estimated the project would cost $64 billion and be open by 2029….

    The plan relies in part on fresh investment from the increasingly skeptical Legislature…
    A major source of rail funding is the cap-and-trade program, under which the state auctions permits to release greenhouse gases. Rail planners are currently using the money as it comes in but say they’d need the ability to take on debt that would be paid off with future cap-and-trade dollars.

    ***That would require the Legislature to extend the program until 2050. That’s a difficult task for a Legislature that struggled just last year to muster the two-thirds votes needed to extend the program from 2020 to 2030.

    The state has spent $2.5 billion in federal stimulus money and has an additional $930 million in federal money on the table. That’s on top of a $10 billion bond from voters…
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/california-bullet-train-costs-soar-to-77b-opening-delayed/2018/03/09/9bb7baf6-23cf-11e8-946c-9420060cb7bd_story.html?utm_term=.673b39f06d49

    ***cap and trade in California didn’t begin until 2012. interestingly, the bullet train was estimated to cost even more than the latest figures years ago, but MSM’s latest coverage quotes 2016 estimates and ignores the following:

    2011: PaloAltoWeekly: Price tag swells for California high-speed rail project
    New $98.5 billion cost projection adds fuel to criticisms of controversial project
    by Gennady Sheyner
    The cost of California’s proposed high-speed-rail system, originally pegged at about $36 billion, has nearly tripled since the project was presented to voters in 2008, according to a business plan (LINK) that the agency charged with building the new system released Tuesday.
    The estimated price tag for the rail line, which would stretch from San Francisco to Los Angeles, now stands at $98.5 billion and could end up as high as $118 billion under the most expensive scenario, the California High Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) has concluded in a highly anticipated report…

    he detailed 230-page document supplants the rail authority’s 2009 business plan, which was panned by state legislators and nonpartisan analysts as incomplete and optimistic…
    The rail authority argues that the significant cost jump was caused by major changes in California’s landscape since officials first began the project more than a decade ago. The state added almost 5 million people between 2000 and 2010, the plan states, and large expanses of previously vacant land have become “bustling communities, suburbs and roadways.” …

    In addition, the timeline for completion of the project was extended by 13 years – to 2033 – which added $27.5 billion in inflation costs and $16 billion in contingencies, the report states…

    The new plan does little, however, to resolve the lingering uncertainties over how to pay for the new rail line — a colossal project for which state voters approved a $9.95 billion bond in 2008 but which has attracted skepticism and heated opposition in the three years since Proposition 1A passed. In Palo Alto, the City Council has taken an official stance of “no confidence” in the project after initially endorsing the 2008 bond measure…

    At Tuesday’s briefing on the business plan, state Assemblywoman Diane Harkey, a leading critic of the project, said the state is already “drowning in debt” and predicted that the system would require government subsidies.
    “I think there’s going to be a sticker shock for the people of California,” Harkey, R-Dana Point, said. “The more they know, the less they’ll like it. It shouldn’t be that way with something this important.”…
    https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2011/11/01/price-tag-swells-for-high-speed-rail

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      RicDre

      Hmm, the Los Angeles to San Francisco Bullet train construction began in 2015, covers 384 miles and is expected to be completed in 18 years for a cost of 98.5 billion dollars. The US Transcontinental railroad was started in 1863, covered 1,776 miles, took 6 years to build and cost about 2.5 billion in inflation adjusted dollars.

      Where’s Dagny Taggart when you need her? If she is still hiding in the Colorado Rockies, could somebody please try to locate her? California needs her desperately!

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    Richard Ilfeld

    Countries with dominant state run media — perhaps more important state financed media — can presume pro-government pro-elite groupthink broadcasts will be the norm. Yet, in the US, where our “public” media are nothing more than an unwatched poverty program for the well-to-do, the same biases prevail on the commercial side. The folks who run them, and populate the highest levels are generally today from the same tribe as the government elites. They weren’t necessarily this way upon inception, but a few generations of living, working, and intermarrying, going to the same schools and working in the same few blocks of the same cities have done the job. Whether its the awful horror of convincing a population that “the other” is a class of subhumans that needs to die, or the seemingly salvationary need to convince the world that we must all be saved from climate disaster, once this group gets bound to a central idea, there seems not to be internal escape.
    The strange thing is that the unifying concept morphs to fit circumstances; from an inceptual “earth day” focussed on a coming ice age to ACGW, to “CLIMATE CHANGE!” OMG! with an overlay of resource exhaustion we are now nearly a half century into our leadership being more and more obsessed with this border science mythology.

    There may be some who can still be reached by reason, but for most cult deprogramming is called for.
    We must be honest with ourselves. Given power, these folks will happily destroy our daily lives in order to “save the planet”.

    I’m struggling with the resistance my political beliefs provide to do unto them the way I perceive them doing unto me. In the states, there is hope that the worst offenders will self exile to the west coast, while our federal system still provides a way to put a non-believer into the presidency. In a more unitary system like Australia?????

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      robert rosicka

      So very well put Richard !

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      Kinky Keith

      Richard,

      After reading the first few paragraphs it became obvious.

      All operations for the ABC should be moved and relocated.

      All positions to be declared vacant, a restructure carried out with a focus on doing away with kiddy stuff like Trupple J and fake news.

      Broken Hill, once an industrial centre of the nation needs the boost and would be ideal.

      The new motto escapes me at the moment but maybe:

      The Truth Will Set Us Free.

      KK

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    DonS

    Hi Jo

    Thanks for putting yourself through that 4 corners thing. Continuation of civilisation does require personal sacrifice from time to time. Unfortunately I don’t think my tenuous grip on sanity would have been able to cope with another round of finger waging group think presented as serious reporting (part payed for by me) so I gave it a miss.

    In order to argue against the things the CO2 induced global warming cheer squad believe we need to subject ourselves to their points of view before we can knock them over with the scientific method and logical thinking.

    Thanks for doing it for me this time.

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    Ted O’Brien.

    You mentioned earlier grape harvests. Indeed a useful measure, but, earlier than what?

    Locally it has been noticeable for the last three or four years that the spring wattles have been displaying about the beginning of August, just like in the old days sixty or seventy years ago.. “Wattle Day” used to be the first of August, but was moved to the first of September because the wattles started blooming much later. Now we are back where we started.

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    2dogs

    What is the mechanism by which the weather is to become more extreme due to global warming?

    Conceptually, one would have thought that polar amplification would make it less extreme.

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    Allen Ford

    It is not too difficult to figure out why we are in this mess. I would venture to say that it is because the upper levels of management, all over the place, are occupied by pea brains, with no qualifications to make the claims they do, whether about the climate or any other field involving science or engineering knowledge.

    On a completely different matter, why else would the NSW government suddenly discover that a new fleet of trains, costing $2+ billion, that they have signed a contract for, are too wide to negotiate the 10 tunnels on the Blue Mountains railway line where said trains are supposed to operate, so they are caught between fudging the numbers in the safety standards to pretend to have solved the problem, or closing the very busy line for an extended period to widen the tunnels?

    It takes a very perverse level of incompetence to make such monumental blunders.

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    Jennifer Marohasy

    Jo,

    Great blog post!

    As usual so well written, so insightful, and also so on-topic.

    You are brilliant.

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    […] NOVA began a recent blog post” After years of telling skeptics that you don’t ask a plumber to do heart surgery, the […]

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