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ARC Grants have just been announced for 2013
Let’s look at what won a grant in light of the fact that nearly 80% of all the applications for ARC funding fail. (Indeed Nobel Laureate Brian Schmidt wonders if our best scientists are hobbled by an arduous waste-of-time process where they spend up to 30% – 50% of their working life applying for grants.)
Looking at the current round of successful grants. How do you beat four out of five candidates for funding? Here’s one successful method:
Step One: Use statistically insignificant results obtained by dubious techniques to generate a paper with conclusions that grab headlines.
Step Two: Make sure these “results” support contentious Labor Party policies, and actively promote the spurious conclusions in the media prior to publication.
Step Three (optional): Possibly go on to publish the paper, then again, maybe not.
Step Four: Apply for more money.
Apparently the ALP need to find budget savings from the science program to deliver their promised “surplus”. They are thinking of a grants freeze — which is a good way to create uncertainty and encourage the best researchers to leave the country. Here’s […]
Good news for climate bloggers (why aren’t I “excited”?)
The topic no one was going to mention in the election campaign, just got a mention. And in less than 24 hours, it’s already being revived from oblivion. Banking group HSBC tells us that:
Barack Obama may consider introducing a tax on carbon emissions to help cut the U.S. budget deficit after winning a second term as president, according to HSBC Holdings Plc.
A tax starting at $20 a metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent and rising at about 6 percent a year could raise $154 billion by 2021, Nick Robins, an analyst at the bank in London, said today in an e-mailed research note, citing Congressional Research Service estimates. “Applied to the Congressional Budget Office’s 2012 baseline, this would halve the fiscal deficit by 2022,” Robins said.
There is no guaranteed path of course, the Republicans control the House. But how telling that the Zombie Ghost of Cap N Trade popped up its head so fast once the votes were in.
Climate Depot responds:
‘Congratulations to President Obama. Now that Obama will never have to face voters again, he may attempt to make global warming a key part […]
UPDATE: The US Election is being called for Obama on all major outlets. MarketWatch. Telegraph. Real Clear Politics. Mark Steyn’s thoughts: “Life Free… Or Die”.
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Voting is now underway in all states of the US including Hawaii and Alaska.
Something very strange is going on with money. Normally bets are a decent indicator, but in the US right now as people roll out to vote, polls are largely at 50:50, but betting odds of 2-9.
The bet-takers own website explains that Obama’s odds of victory fell to a low of 2-9, with 75 percent of the action coming in for the incumbent Obama. CSM explains that given the odds, bettors were only taking in 20 cents for every euro wagered, plus the original stake, meaning Paddy Power wasn’t paying out a longshot. On the flip side, unpaid Romney bets held odds of 7-2.
Follow the odds on Predictwise or Oddschecker.
It’s so strange, one betting site in Ireland (Paddy Power) has already paid out $750,000 to Obama bettors. That was Monday.
Putting a fine point on it: Gallup and Rassmussen are saying Romney 49: Obama 48. (For more poll results than you could want see the BBC. They can’t […]
Photo: Jo Nova
Post by: Lance Pidgeon with assistance from Chris Gillham and others.
It is as if history is being erased. For all that we hear about recent record-breaking climate extremes, records that are equally extreme, and sometimes even more so, are ignored.
In January 1896 a savage blast “like a furnace” stretched across Australia from east to west and lasted for weeks. The death toll reached 437 people in the eastern states. Newspaper reports showed that in Bourke the heat approached 120°F (48.9°C) on three days (1)(2)(3). The maximumun at or above 102 degrees F (38.9°C) for 24 days straight.
By Tuesday Jan 14, people were reported falling dead in the streets. Unable to sleep, people in Brewarrina walked the streets at night for hours, the thermometer recording 109F at midnight. Overnight, the temperature did not fall below 103°F. On Jan 18 in Wilcannia, five deaths were recorded in one day, the hospitals were overcrowded and reports said that “more deaths are hourly expected”. By January 24, in Bourke, many businesses had shut down (almost everything bar the hotels). Panic stricken Australians were fleeing to the hills in climate refugee trains. As reported at the […]
Want to discuss elections that are coming?
5.9 out of 10 based on 21 ratings
If Alan Jones needs to get “educated” because he got the level of CO2 wrong once, the Climate Commission surely needs to go back to do high school maths, because anyone who has done junior high can see that the running average in the graph below is an impossibility. The latest Climate Commission report: “The Critical Decade: Queensland climate impact and opportunities” starts with blatantly incorrect figure. Since when do “averages” run outside the extreme highs and lows? Thanks to reader Ian E.
Eyeballing this graph suggests Queensland’s average temperature has risen by 2.7 C since the 1950’s.
The text on the same page says: “The average temperature for Queensland has risen by about 1°C since early last century”. So at least the writing matches the official (if exaggerated) records.
Who proof-read this document?
Three professors (Will Steffen, Lesley Hughes, Veena Sahajwalla) and Mr Gerry Hueston, all Climate Commissioners, signed off on it.
The correct graph should look more like this.
(Graphed by Ian E)
Even the 1 degree trend in this graph above is likely to be exaggerated 8.9 out of 10 based on 100 ratings […]
Stephan Lewandowsky is back, reminding us why argument-by-distant-unrelated-topic is a quick way to get confused.
Should we spend money trying to change the weather? Spin the wheel: Did smoking cause cancer? “Yes!” Was that money well spent? “Yes!” Is climate sensitivity 3.3C! “Yes” . The heck, it must be, because some different scientists were right about a different topic, in a different subject, in a another era. Look at how similar the problems are? No one was sure if any particular lung cancer was due to smoking, just “like” no one will ever know if Sandy was caused by your SUV. Climate starts with “C” and so does Cancer. Spooky eh?
The answer to planetary dynamics comes from tactical analysis of PR strategies by people who oppose The Consensus. Why do we even bother with satellite measurements, cloud microphysics or ARGO buoys?
No atmospheric evidence will convince Lewandowsky, he’s looking for code words in the commentariat.
The tobacco industry claims that smoking does not cause cancer, preferring instead to think of medical science as an “oligopolistic cartel” that “manufactures alleged evidence” linking smoking to cancer.
Climate deniers likewise accuse climate science of being “riddled with corruption” and of manipulating or […]
UPDATE: This Friday Funny-type-curiosity turns out to be a 2007 story a reader emailed, and neither he nor I realized the story itself had been “bobbing around the internet” for the last five years. I wonder how many ducks are still out there? Thanks to MikeUK for pointing that out. – Jo
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Thousands of rubber ducks have been touring the worlds oceans for 15 20 years, and they are about to bob (probably already bobbed) up in England. They fell off a boat in the Pacific Ocean in January 1992, and while most washed up in the South Pacific, some lucky ducks got in the Subpolar Gyre (near Alaska) then frozen in Arctic ice. The pack-ice ducks moved at a mile a day and found their own North West Passage across to the Atlantic. By 2001 were doing tours over the Titanic, washing up between Maine and Massachusetts. Now their chief fan, Curtis Ebbesmeyer predicts they’ll head for the UK.
Mr Ebbesmeyer saw immediately how valuable the little toys would be to scientific research of the great ocean currents, the engine of the planet’s entire climate.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) worked out that the ducks travel […]
For all the data we can scrape out of rocks, shells and cylinders of ice, what we really need to know, in detail on a planetary scale, is how much energy comes in and how much goes out. That can only be measured (even roughly) with satellites.
This paper rattles the whole table of key numbers, with empirical results. It puts core numbers into a new perspective, numbers like the 3.7Watts per square meter that a doubling of CO2 is supposed to add to the surface budget.
The models are hunting for imbalances and build-ups in planetary energy. But according to the observations, the longwave (infra-red) energy coming onto the earth’s surface, the infamous back radiation, is 10 – 17 W/m2 higher than in the famous Trenberth diagram from 1997. So the models are trying to explain tiny residual imbalances, but the uncertainties and unknowns are larger than the target. The argument that “only the forcing from CO2 can fill the gap in the models” is not just argument from ignorance rhetorically, but factually too.
Another major implications is that water is churning up and falling out of the sky faster than the experts thought. The Earth’s evaporative cooler is […]
There’s a mindset, a world view here that’s profoundly unreal, anti-science, and of course, fully funded by the Taxpayer from start to end (how could it be any other way?).
From the researcher who holds childish assumptions and misunderstands his own results, to the site that posts it all as if it were “higher thought”, to the trained communicator of science who then parrots the mistakes and insults half the population at the same time. Cheers! Private money couldn’t fund a satire like “The Conversation”. (Well, it could if it were funny.)
The Conversation recall was funded with $6 million.
Stephan continues his war on science
Lewandowsky’s bread and butter stuff is breaking the central tenet of science — namely, that evidence is more important than opinions. His mission (though I don’t think he’s aware of it) appears to be to return us to pre-Enlightenment days when Bishops controlled the public conversation. In this post-post-modern era, some things are so post they’re posterior — some parts of science are returning to unscience. This “science” is not about your data or reasoning, and not about your results — it’s about your ability to get a grant, a title, a university badge. […]
The Clean Energy Council is an industry group promoting renewables. Not surprisingly it defines “success” as being the amount of money it has diverted from other causes into the coffers of its members. Good for them. They are free to lobby. But the RET or “renewable energy target” was set up by the government. They dictated rules to generate a false market in a product that few sane investors would invest in (remember how the same government keeps talking about how we need a “free market”?).
You and I might define success in terms of more peaceful, healthier and longer lives. Or lives where we get to spend more time with our kids and less time in a rat race. Ultimately, this is $18 billion in investments that could have been used to build houses, hospitals, medical research centres and schools. A visionary government could have made it easier for markets in Australia to develop safer, more effective vaccines, or better and earlier cancer detection, or crops with better yields, and higher essential vitamins and minerals. Total NHMRC (National Health and Medical Research Funding in Australia) is in the order of $800 million per year. $18 billion could have doubled […]
Because there is always something else that needs saying….
6.3 out of 10 based on 25 ratings
Gillard knew eight months before the last election that the public did not want an emissions trading scheme (ETS):
(Former Labor MP and ABC presenter) Maxine McKew writes that Ms Gillard met Mr Rudd at Kirribilli House in early January 2010.
“Gillard had a blunt message for her Prime Minister,” she writes. “She told Rudd that under no circumstances would she support the case for an election based on the need for action on climate change.
She didn’t want to offer an ETS, and later declared in the campaign “there will be no Carbon Tax”, but after the election she gave us both. Her poor supporters have been left to weasel and whine post hoc that the public voted for carbon action in 2007. Apologists dissembled on whether the carbon tax is a “tax” or a “fixed priced scheme for an ETS” pretending that a lie was not a lie, that Gillard was doing what the people wanted and not breaking her word. It all comes to nothing.
Gillard cares for working families by giving them what they asked not to get and deceiving them about what a vote for Gillard means. This is “moving forward” right? Forward to where […]
The Australian weather bureau has never seen anything quite like it. The El Nino that was predicted for this summer down-under seems to be gone suddenly.
“Forecasters surprised by El Nino turnaround” [ABC]
The chief climate forecaster says it is the biggest turnaround in weather patterns since records began.
For climate forecasters, this summer was shaping up as deja vu, with the Bureau of Meteorology predicting another El Nino – until Wednesday, that is.
The bureau’s manager of climate prediction services, Dr Andrew Watkins, has changed the forecast.
“Come September, all of a sudden, the temperature started to cool down, the trade winds started to become a little bit enhanced, and the cloud patterns and other indicators like that headed away from El Nino,” he said.
Dr Watkins says they are not sure why there has been a cooling down. “It actually is quite a unique situation if we end up not going into an El Nino event,” he said. “It’ll sort of be the biggest turnaround that we’ve actually seen in our records going back to about 1950, so quite unprecedented.” [full story ABC]
Good news (possibly) […]
Trawling through our National Archives, Lance Pidgeon has found stories of how a heatwave in 1932 was so extreme that it caused mass bird deaths across outback Australia. The PDF is posted on Warwick Hughes blog. As Lance says, imagine the headlines if that had happened 80 years later. Presumably some would blame coal, airconditioners, and SUV’s for “killing billions of birds”. These old newspaper records also raise questions about our national temperature databases. Things appeared to be hotter then, than history now records them? I’ve only had time for a quick look and a cut and paste.
Great numbers were killed alone by the fortnightly train to Alice Springs. These fell exhausted on the railway line. A large number flew into the fans in the carriages and perished. Thousands fell exhausted in water pools and were drowned. A letter from Minnie Downs told of the death of thousands of birds on one day. The temperature that day was 125 degrees in the shade— and there was no shade. One woman at Tarcoola filled a 40-gallon drum, with shell parrots in one afternoon. Trees actually snapped under the strain of flight after flight of birds which swarmed […]
To handle the sheer number of comments this generates.
0 out of 10 based on 0 rating
“Skeptics” are described as if they are one small block of fringe extremists, but not only is half the population skeptical in some sense, in this debate I am not on either extreme, but a centrist, smack in the middle. On the one hand, alarmists are convinced the climate is headed for a catastrophe, and on the other some people are convinced there is no greenhouse effect at all. Wes Allen, sits in the middle with me, and he’s been engaged in an intense debate with people on both ends of the spectrum. After a scorching critique of Tim Flannery’s work, he has swung his attention the other way. Here is his synopsis of the Slayers book, for discussion, and I’m sure it will generate a long passionate defence and debate, just as previous posts on this topic have. (eg: Why greenhouse gas warming doesn’t break the second law of thermodynamics and So what is the Second Darn Law?). I know the Slayers are keen to discuss their ideas. I’m hopeful people can remain polite, as that’s where progress may be made… many thanks to Wes here who has done a diligent write up, and has […]
For all those thoughts that don’t belong…
7.6 out of 10 based on 29 ratings
In May it was all over the newspapers, in June it was shown to be badly flawed. By October, it quietly gets withdrawn. The apology and press release are coming soon…right?
Thanks to help from the Australian Research Council it only took 300,000 dollars and three years to produce a paper that lasted all of three weeks. But it scored the scary headlines! It was “confirmation”, it was “unprecedented warming”, and it was a scientific certainty that was based on “27 natural climate records” and “over the last 1000 years”. What could possibly go wrong? They had 2 whole proxies that went right back a thousand years, and they’d used computers (!) to rehash the data 3000 ways! Frankly, I’m surprised it lasted three weeks. Let’s remember that if one single journalist had simply asked “how much colder was it in 1200AD?” Gergis, Karoly and the rest would have had to say “0.09 of a degree”. No one asked. But Gergis et al, had a proxy in Tasmania, and another in New Zealand, and they were “confident” they could calculate the whole grand continental collective temperature to nine one hundredths of a degree? Seriously.
As Mike E then pointed out […]
Prof Stephan Lewandowsky had to make an ethics committee application in order to survey anti-skeptics to “find out” whether skeptics are conspiracy mad nutters (as you would). Simon Turnill launched an FOI to ask for information and has received some information. Turnill wondered why the application seemed so unrelated to the survey. I pointed out that I’d seen a different Lewandowsky paper that fitted the description in the application. Simon hunted and found Popular Consensus: Climate Change Set to Continue (where Lewandowsky shows people in the Hay St. Mall, in Perth, some “stock market” graphs and asks them to extrapolate the trend).
Lewandowsky appears to have obtained an ethics approval for this bland paper, and then put in a last minute request for a “slight modification” which was for an entirely different survey for a different purpose and an unrelated paper, and which, as it happens, uses an internet survey rather than a face to face one. But apart from that… it was nearly the same.
Worse, Turnill found that by the time Lewandowsky was finalizing the ethics application in August 2010, he’d already done that bland survey fully 7 months before, and the paper was almost finished. The […]
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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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