As some fires rage, parts of the nation are gripped with witchcraft.
What to do about wildfires?
Skeptics think we should stop firestorms by reducing fuel loads, and clearing firebreaks. Unskeptical scientists on the other hand are talking about going vegan, swapping light globes, installing windmills and photovoltaic panels and of course…. planting more trees. Oh the dilemma? Should we stop fires with firebreaks or wave some solar panels? Yea, verily, let’s control fires on Mt Tamborine by cooling the world? Hail Mary and line up the wind towers to face north at the equinox!
Joelle Gergis has a PhD in climate science, yet even she apparently believes that these fires are caused by coal plants, and could have been prevented if only we installed enough solar panels. It says a lot about what a PhD is worth these days. It also says a lot about the Australian National University, and all of it is sad.
Gergis, in particular, is not the only one, but she is all “moss drenched” hype and marketing, no caveats, no qualifiers, and no error bars.
What will it take for us to wake up to the Science Crisis? Somehow it had never occurred to her that rainforests can burn. What are our universities teaching?
Five kilometers away from the Binna Burra disastrous fires is Numinbah, where there is no trend at all in rainfall
This is the reality of climate change:
…
The only trend that’s meaningful in fires is that 67 years of fire management in the hot, dry state of WA shows the more prescribed area we burn, the less wildfire does.
As the Bushfirefront team says — high fuel loads make unstoppable fires:
Fires on hot windy summer days in long unburnt forests simply cannot be put out by humans, no matter how many, how courageous and how hard they work and how good their technology. Even under relatively mild conditions, the intensity of fires burning in fuels over about 10 tonnes per hectare is simply too great to allow them to be attacked successfully. The 2007 Victorian fires demonstrated that the entire firefighting resources of Australia, plus international assistance from NZ, Canada and the USA, were inadequate.
Let’s see that data again. After terrible fires of 1961, prescribed burns were ramped up dramatically, and wildfires were almost non-existent for the next twenty years in WA.
As prescribed fire reduction declined, Wildfires increased in South West Australia.
In Australia we can either have man made fires or natural catastrophes. Cool burns, or uncontrollable firestorms.
Other fires are burning on the Sunshine Coast and there are no trends in rainfall there either
Rainfall data from Nambour Bowls Club from 1900 – 2015 and then at Palmwoods shows no correlation with the rise of man-made CO2.
Here’s Joelle Gergis at The Guardian joining fantasy clouds of cause and effect in vague prophet-speak:
Although there are natural seasonal fluctuations in the Indian and Southern Ocean that are influencing the dry and windy conditions we are currently experiencing, all of Australia’s weather and climate variability is now occurring in a world that is 1°C warmer than it was since pre-industrial times.
The human fingerprint on Australian temperatures has been clearly detected since 1950. This means that all natural variability is now being modified by human influences on the climate system, leading to changes in observed climate variability and extremes.
Since the 1970s, there has been an increase in extreme fire weather, and a longer fire season, across large parts of the country.
She doesn’t mention the lack of any trends in drought or rainfall.
Gergis is “the modern” fortune teller, but just like fortune tellers have done for eons, she refers to mystical signs and plants suggestions with emotive allegory:
It’s clear to me that the extreme events we are experiencing right now in Australia and all over the world, are a sign of things to come. Events that were considered extreme in today’s climate will become average in the future as records continue to be broken and the “new normal” emerges.
What we expect to see in our future climate is playing out right now, not decades in the future. As we begin to drift away from the safe shores of historical variability, the only certainty is that life in the “new normal” will be outside the range of human experience.
The same questions need to be asked of the ARC (Australian Research Council) — they continue to fund Gergis (and many others who apparently agree with her). Let’s go right up the chain, The Minister of Science needs to explain how taxpayers are benefiting from funding profoundly unscientific work.
It’s time the ABC explained why it does not ask its own science unit to look at the basic important data on climate change, and ask scientists like Gergis, her Director, the university, the ARC and the minister even one hard question.
We don’t need to do a sophisticated analysis here, just the basics, obvious to anyone able to read.
Fires are worsened by drought, temperature, fuel-loads, wind speed, wind direction, lightning and arson. Globally there has been no change in droughts for 60 years, and climate models — can’t predict rainfall or droughts, exaggerated temperature trends, and got wind speeds wrong. Wind speeds have been slowing — which ought to make fires slower too. The only way CO2 emissions make fires worse is through fertilizing extra growth and increasing fuel loads. This is the one factor none of the unskeptical scientists will mention.
Theoretically there is not even a reason CO2 emissions cause droughts. Professor Andy Pitman says that “a priori” CO2 emissions are not linked to droughts. Warmer worlds are also more humid worlds, with slightly higher rainfall (on average).
Rainfall patterns inland on the Gold Coast, in Brisbane and on the sunshine coast show no correlation with CO2 emissions. There is no trend.
Anyone who questions the magic spell is called a “Denier”. Obviously, the scientific case is so pathetically weak it must be guarded by name-calling.
What’s the polar opposite topic to climate change? Probably “cost of living”.
The latest Newspoll shows that the Coalition has far more to gain from addressing cost of living instead of “climate change”. Labor voters are even more focused on cost of living than conservatives — which means there are a lot of Labor voters who can be potentially won over to the conservative side if the Liberal-National government plays the cost of living card against climate change and shows they are the team to get costs lower.
As far as conservative voters go, Climate Change ranked 5th as an issue. For every vote the Libs lose by aggressively tackling this — they stand to win far more. Furthermore, of the one in ten voters who are “conservative” and concerned about climate change, how many will dump the concern if we finally get some real debate in Australia? If one major party starts to talk about how futile and expensive it is to change the global climate these numbers will swing.
The cost of living is now the greatest concern for voters, with a majority claiming it should be the federal government’s top priority.
Amid high energy prices and stagnant private sector wage growth, an exclusive Newspoll commissioned by The Australian shows 37 per cent of voters named cost of living as the most important issue, with 19 per cent citing economic management.
We can’t have both a low cost of living and a forced renewables transition. The Coalition could wedge Labor on this if they dared face the name-calling bullies.
The Newspoll is the third to be conducted since the election and surveyed 1661 voters across city and country areas from September 5 to 7.
It involved 956 online surveys and 705 robo interviews with a margin of error plus or minus of 2.4 per cent.
Both parties pander to the namecallers, and debate is practically non-existent in the Australian mainstream media, so this poll is “as good as it gets” for the unskeptical alarmists.
Stockholm School of Economics professor and researcher Magnus Soderlund reportedly said he believes eating human meat, derived from dead bodies, might be able to help save the human race if only a world society were to “awaken the idea.”
Soderlund’s argument for human cannibalism was front and center during a panel talk called “Can you Imagine Eating Human Flesh?” at the Gastro Summit, reports The Epoch Times. “Conservative” taboos against cannibalism, he said, can change over time if peoples simply tried eating human flesh.
Should we eat Great Aunt Polly or what?
Check my numbers — Around the world 55 million people die each year. The human body is 18% carbon, so a 60kg person has 10kg of pure carbon and that will generate 40kg of CO2 in “the end”. Looks like 55 million dead people will emit around 2.2Gt of carbon dioxide, or about 5% of human emissions, and about 0.002% of total natural emissions. Even if we could get over the idea of eating Aunt Polly (which I don’t think we will) aged steak is unlikely to compete well in a market with yearling beef.
It’s all a bit macabre.
He suggested more plausible options such as eating pets and insects.
Not that eating Rover is going to sell well in the West either.
Before human meat becomes the next cuisine trend, however, history shows there are potential health risks to cannibalism.
Indeed. Say hello to Human Spongiform Encephalitis, Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, and Kuru and they’re just the ones we know about and all universally fatal. In twenty years time there’ll be a lot more.
Söderlund used his tv interview on the State Swedish Television channel TV4 to give a powerpoint presentation entitled “Can you Imagine Eating Human Flesh?” It included such topics as “Is Cannibalism the solution to food sustainability in the future?” and “Are we humans too selfish to live sustainably?”
In desperate times, people have fallen back on cannibalism to survive; for instance, there are reports of cannibalism during the North Korean famine in 2013, the siege of Leningrad in the early 1940s, and China’s “Great Leap Forward” in the late 1950s and 1960s.
In most civilizations, cannibalism is the last port of call, used only if the alternative is certain death. But what are the potential health consequences of eating one’s neighbor, if any?
Let’s economically-cannabilise academia instead. We all know there are much better uses for that money.
Time for the cost-benefit question. In a sane world, the business case for carbon mitigation is like a naked singularity. No matter how many times the question is asked, no numerical answer ever emerges.
Yet whole economies are circling around this very question. — Jo
—————————————————————————-
Question 2: How many degrees Celsius of warming will these new requirements abate, and how will this outcome be measured?
The WA population is 2.6 million or about 0.03% of the total population of Earth. Given that the largest economies in the world, such as China, India, Brazil, Japan and Indonesia are not going to achieve significant emissions reductions, the imposition on the people of WA poses a large burden on the industry and economy of the state which may be entirely pointless. Only 16 countries are even aiming to meet their Paris targets.[2]One of those 16 is Indonesia, but only five months ago Indonesia threatened to withdraw from Paris Agreement.[3] The United States of America is one of the few that has reduced CO2 emissions, but not through any schemes or with targets. The reduction is almost entirely due to the growth of the shale gas industry.
If we assume the IPCC is correct and assume Australia could reduce emissions to zero starting today, it would lower the temperature in 2050 by around 0.015 °C.[4] Obviously the total for Western Australia alone, and with only a partial reduction, is an order of magnitude (or two) smaller than this. If the IPCC climate sensitivity is 3 to 10 times smaller, as the empirical observations suggest, the total effect of Western Australian action alone will be smaller still.
The EPA is only required to consider the environmental implications, but even so, if the benefit of carbon abatement by Western Australian projects is surely measured in ten thousandths of a degree, should the EPA be pursing guidelines that have only a symbolic benefit?
Surely there are more important environmental actions the EPA ought be considering?
The EPA needs to define what a “reasonable” measure is.
Furthermore, if the EPA action reduces emissions, in all likelihood those emissions will simply migrate (with the jobs and capital investment) to the countries with lower emission standards. Thus the emissions will just be emitted elsewhere and the EPA regulations will have achieved nothing in terms of overall CO2 emissions.
Worse, most countries have lower pollution standards than Australia does, and so the net effect may be to preserve an immeasurably small part of the WA wilderness, but indirectly create more environmental damage globally.
The EPA document argues that “It is rapidly becoming standard international practice for greenhouse gas emissions to be considered by regulatory agencies”. Many countries are paying lip service to emissions, but actual reductions are rare: see China, Indonesia, India, Africa, Brazil or the USA.
[2^] Nachmany, M. and Mangan, E. (2018) Aligning national and international climate targets, London School of Economics and Political Science. http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/publication/targets/
Heads must roll at JCU for the incompetent mismanagement, and for acting as “science” rulers and trying to suppress a scientific view they personally didn’t like. They’ve already wasted $630,000, and now another $1.2m — all so they could stop Ridd saying there is a replication crisis in science and our institutions can no longer be trusted:
James Cook University has been ordered to pay reef scientist Peter Ridd $1.2 million for unlawfully dismissing him after he publicly criticised the institution’s climate change science.
The judge lambasted the university, saying it had “failed to respect (Dr Ridd’s) rights to intellectual freedom”.
JCU has said it will appeal the finding that the dismissal was unlawful and declined to comment further on the judge’s ruling.
In a scathing judgment handed down on Friday, Justice Vasta criticised the university for an “blatantly untrue” and “appalling” public statement it issued after the April ruling.
“Professor Ridd was entitled to say that he had been vindicated by the court.”
This is the most important battle any scientist faces. Without free speech there is no scientific research, only propaganda.
Until JCU pays up and sacks those responsible we must assume all research coming out of this uni is filtered to fit a political agenda. What are JCU researchers not saying because they fear being sacked?
The ABC reminds us of just how dangerous his words were:
Dr Ridd was dismissed by James Cook University (JCU) in 2018 after being issued with a number of warnings for comments he made about a coral researcher and for telling Sky TV that organisations like the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) could “no longer be trusted”.
Court documents at the time said Dr Ridd described his colleague in an email as “not having any clue about the weather”, and that he “will give the normal doom science about the Great Barrier Reef”.
Dr Ridd said in another email that JCU, along with other universities, were “Orwellian in nature”.
No breach of government propaganda will be tolerated.
Gideon Rozner IPA:
It is time for JCU to accept the decision and move on. If not, Education Minister Dan Tehan must intervene and tell JCU to withdraw its appeal because it is an inappropriate expenditure of taxpayer funds and will do irreparable harm to the international reputation of Australia’s higher education sector.
The WA Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) wants every new project to aim for carbon neutrality, costing billions, almost certainly increasing pollution overseas, but hoping to lower temperatures over WA by 2100 AD.
The EPA is a scientific advisory body — the government doesn’t have to follow their advice — but if it does, and the advice was wrong — who is responsible for loss and damages which are foreseeable? The IPCC favoured models do not include solar magnetic, spectral or particle-flow parameters, and repeatedly fail. They are unaudited, unvalidated, and unaccountable. If the sun controls the climate these models will not show that. If the EPA is notdoing due diligence on reports of a foreign committee, which person representing Western Australians is?
— Jo
Submission for the EPA Greenhouse Gas Emissions Assessment Guidance – Consultation
Question 1: Has the EPA done due diligence on the IPCC Climate Report?
The EPA’s core role is to “protect the environment and abate pollution”, Section 15 of the Act (s.15)
Therefore, the EPA would be legally obligated to assess the scientific evidence. The question upon which everything hinges was stated in the Background Paper thus:
“How serious are the projected environmental impacts of further greenhouse gas emissions?
“Taken together, this information is of concern and cannot be dismissed as speculative or incorrect…
The EPA is not quoting evidence or data in the background paper. It is merely repeating committee reports. Given that management of the West Australian environment depends upon these forward projections, and billions of dollars depends upon the EPA guidelines, the onus of due diligence surely rests with the EPA, not with a foreign unaccountable organization such as the IPCC. While the media and activists may claim “thousands of scientists” are involved, in actuality, the number who have checked the key conclusions is small. For example the number of listed reviewers of Chapter Nine of the Fourth IPCC Assessment Report was only 601 , and these scientists only have to have read the draft chapter to be included. They don’t necessarily need to have critically audited it. Thousands of other scientists involved in the IPCC reports are specialists in adaption, mitigation, biology, markets, or some smaller aspect of climate science. They have assumed the assumptions and conclusions of Chapter Nine were correct.
Question 1: Has the EPA assessed or audited the IPCC Climate Report?
Question 1.1a: If so – which observational data sets shows that man-made CO2 causes dangerous warming? Or is the EPA policy dependent entirely on reports based on unverified and unvalidated climate models with a proven record of failure? (see below).
Question 1.1b: If the EPA has not independently assessed the data and evidence, will the EPA take responsibility for any damages that occur to the state (flora, fauna or citizens) if it recommends action based on unverified, unaudited climate models that peer reviewed papers already describe as “skillless”?2
The direct warming effect of doubling CO2 will only lead to 1.2 °C of warming3 according to James Hansen, and the IPCC4 . Skeptics largely accept that, the contentious point is whether that warming is amplified by feedbacks as the IPCC contends5 , or dampened by feedbacks as the empirical evidence from 28 million weather balloons suggests.6 7 8 The CCSP Chapter 5, mentions “fingerprint” or variant of that, not just once, but 74 times. If the models are wrong on this one key feedback we would expect to see evidence from many sources, which we do.
The model predictions fail on almost every level and aspect. They are unable to predict temperatures on global scales, and also on regional, local, short term 9 10 , polar11 , and upper tropospheric scales12 13 too. They fail on humidity14 , rainfall15 , drought 16 and they fail on clouds.17 The common theme is that models don’t handle water well. This is obviously a big problem on a planet covered in water. Water holds 90% of all the energy on the surface,18 and both NASA19 and the IPCC20 admit water is the most important greenhouse gas. Furthermore the predictions of upper tropospheric water vapor, which are the most important feedback in the coupled climate models have been repeatedly and completely incorrect.21 22 This particular aspect of model predictions is known as “the missing hot spot” – the section of the atmosphere above the tropics around 10km altitude. It’s more important than any other single aspect, even than the direct effect of CO2. The amplification is called positive feedback, and this particular feedback from water molecules is one of the biggest single factors in climate models23 . There are claims that it doubles the effect of all other forms of warming24 .
The CCSP (Climate Change Science Project) published the predictions and observations as graphs in separate parts of its large 2006 report
Many top climate scientists have admitted and discussed the differences between modeled and observed trends on the most influential feedback system in the climate models:
“…‘potentially serious inconsistency’ between modelled and observed trends …discrepancies in the tropics remain to be resolved.” (Karl et al., 2006)
“Surprisingly, direct temperature observations from radiosonde and satellite data have often not shown this expected trend. (Sherwood et al, 2008)
“… the tropical troposphere had actually cooled slightly over the last 20 to 30 years (in sharp contrast to the computer model predictions… (Santer 2008)
… (most) models overestimate the warming trend in the tropical troposphere…The cause of this bias remains elusive. IPCC, 2013 (IPCC) 25
Models systematically overestimate nearly every other aspect
As expected, when the models are wrong on a key factor the predictions are systematically wrong in many outcomes. This includes sea-levels, where 1,000 tide gauges show the rise is only 1mm a year, far less than predicted. 26 27 Seas around Australia were rising just as fast around the time of the Great Depression as they are today.28 The raw satellite data agreed with this29 until it was adjusted in 2003, allegedly to match one subsiding gauge in Hong Kong. Satellites are now tracking every 20m rolling sandspit above the seas — and if seas were rising the beaches would be shrinking. Instead, when 709 islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans are studied, 89% have either stayed the same or got bigger.30 Not one island large enough to have human inhabitants was getting smaller. Sea levels also started rising long before human emissions of CO2 became significant. The IPCC favoured models can not explain why this warming started around 1800AD. 31 32
The models cannot explain the warming during the Medieval Warm Period either. There are claims this was not global, but scores of proxies from all over the world show that it was. 33 34 Furthermore, 6,000 boreholes drilled around the world agree that the warming effect was global. 35 36 37 38
There are many reasons the IPCC work can be dismissed as “speculative”
Argument from Authority or Ad Populum is fallacious reasoning and though skeptics are independent and vastly outnumber convinced scientists, that does not make them right, and does not form any part of the scientific argument put forward here. However, it does show that the EPA has not critically investigated the IPCC conclusions and forward projections. If they had, the EPA would be aware that the IPCC work is very much a speculative extrapolation with unverified, unvalidated modeling.
To that limited end, it’s worth noting that thousands of independent scientists are actively protesting the IPCC assumptions. Survey’s show most engineers and geologists39 , and half of the worlds meteorologists,40 and climate scientists do not agree with the IPCC’s level of certainty.41 Skeptics include Nobel Prize winners of Physics, and Freeman Dyson and 3 of the 4 surviving astronauts who walked on the moon. Unlike the IPCC, their opinions cannot be dismissed as “speculative”. Their claims are modest (that the climate is likely to continue changing at a similar rate to the last century and that IPCC is exaggerating the effect of CO2 by a factor of 2 – 10 fold). On the other hand the IPCC claims involve “unprecedented” changes, and rapid acceleration which is not shown in any dataset, only in model projections.
If the evidence was so overwhelming, and the debate not even worth having, why do the small number of officially recognized climate scientists find it so hard to convince other scientists? The laws of science are the same regardless of the branch of science. Atmospheric physics is still physics.
It is worth noting that the IPCC assessments are dependent on a few scientists who have behaved in profoundly unscientific ways: for example, hiding data, declines, history, adjustments and methods.
The BOM admits that its methods cannot be replicated: If it can’t be replicated, it isn’t science
The Bureau of Meteorology admits its methods cannot be described in full42 . Each station is adjusted by techniques that are not fully published. In their own words their methods of adjusting the data are:
“…a supervised process in which the roles of metadata and other information required some level of expertise and operator intervention.”
…several choices within the adjustment process remain a matter of expert judgment.
Does the EPA endorse scientific work that cannot be replicated and whose methods are not described in full? If the EPA does not carry out due diligence, it is implicitly accepting these profoundly unscientific standards.
Australia has always been a hot land. Our environment is surely adapted to that?
50 degree temperatures occurred right across Australia. Click to enlarge.
Archival history from Australian news reports suggests extreme heatwaves were common in the 1800’s. CO2 was low in the 1800s yet there are scores of references to 125F “in the shade” in our national newspaper archives, which is an astonishing 52°C. This was measured on non-standard equipment, but was sometimes done by expert scientists. Early explorers were trained to measure temperature. Charles Sturt recorded temperatures in the shade of 127F, 129F and even 132F, reporting that the ground was so hot, if matches fell on the sand they would ignite spontaneously.43 44 In 1846, Sir Thomas Mitchell also recorded 129F.45 He was afraid the thermometer would break as it “only reached 132F.” In 1860 John Mcdouall Stuart’s party measured 128F in the shade.46 Heat was so common that miners in 1878 had a policy to “knock off” work if the thermometer hit 112F (44.4°C). No air conditioners then. Despite the spikes of heat in the 1800s, by 1952 Australian scientists were discussing the cause of mysterious long cooling trends across a large part of the continent.47
Conservatively, even if some of these many recorded temperatures are overestimating the heat by 2 or 3 degrees Celsius, these temperatures would still show that Australia has always had extraordinary heatwaves.
There are many examples of Australian thermometers being inadequately sited, mysteriously adjusted, and readjusted. E.g. Streaky Bay, South Australia48 . For other examples see Climate Change: The Facts 2017.49
Parts 2 and 3 coming.
NOTE: The three images above are discussed in the submission, but not included. Next time…
2 Hans von Storch, Armineh Barkhordarian, Klaus Hasselmann and Eduardo Zorita (2013) Can climate models explain the recent stagnation in global warming? Academia
3 Hansen J., A. Lacis, D. Rind, G. Russell, P. Stone, I. Fung, R. Ruedy and J. Lerner, (1984) Climate sensitivity: Analysis of feedback mechanisms. In Climate Processes and Climate Sensitivity, AGU Geophysical Monograph 29, Maurice Ewing Vol. 5. J.E. Hansen and T. Takahashi, Eds. American Geophysical Union, pp. 130-163 Abstract
4 See also Bony et al 2006, and the IPCC, AR4 Chapter 8, p 631.
It could have been headlined: How to host Climate Tupperware Parties
It’s another ABC coaching session on how to be a useful political activist. Having beaten Fairfax into the dirt, the ABC is gradually becoming Time-magazine-Readers-Digest-and-Womens-Weekly rolled into one, but aimed at teenagers.
Translated: Only the brave are activists. Don’t give in to your fears!
This is a Greenpeace training manual, pretending to be “news” about a tiny survey:
Liz Lyons from Melbourne is one person who definitely didn’t consider herself or her friends, activists.
“I’d never go to rallies or anything like that,” Liz said.
“No disrespect to anyone who did, I just thought that wasn’t me, that’s not something I would be a part of.”
But when the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report sounded a dire warning of what climate change has in store for the near future, Liz said something changed in her.
“It really came home to me last year when the IPCC report came out,” she said.
“Suddenly this future I had planned for myself — you know the house, the dog, retirement hopefully some day, wasn’t a certainty anymore.”
As well as attending climate change protests, Liz hosted a dinner party for her friends, where a speaker came to talk about climate change.
Leading up to that event, Liz said she was still a bit nervous about how some of them might respond.
“I remember saying to friends, ‘don’t worry, it won’t be too full on’,” she said.
People get marketing degrees to write this kind of first person, soft sell, gently gently catchee monkey. They used to work for Avon, or Tupperware, now they work for the ABC.
I don’t doubt that the ABC narrative writers believe in climate change (whatever that is). But underlying this faith is the happy coincidence that every climate activist is another little helper working to get big-spending governments elected. And we all know what kind of government is more likely to increase paychecks at the ABC. I’m not suggesting ABC staffers are sitting around in tea-rooms joining these dots. Far from it. They are telling themselves how brave they are fighting for “science” while they destroy it. And there’s no one left at the ABC to pop their bubble, so it never occurs to them that this is self-serving fake “journalism”.
But shucks, poor Liz tried recruiting some live-sandwich-boards by boring them with a climate lecture for dinner and it didn’t work:
Although her friends’ reaction to the dinner was positive, and they’ve been supportive of her stance on climate change, Liz hasn’t convinced any to come with her to protests.
And she still doesn’t identify with the “activist” label.
The same kind of government that wants to save the planet and change the weather is the kind of government that wants a broadcasting arm under their control, and a nation paying ambitious taxes. Hand meet glove: say “power” and “glory”! Whatever you do, dont say “competition” or “cost benefit”.
Coming up, some namecalling and lies-for-the-cause:
The ABC staff want to convince junior activists that they are not the “fringe”, the “deniers” are — which means inverting reality (and namecalling). So here comes the reframe with cherry picked statistics:
But could we be avoiding acting on environmental issues because we think they’re more fringe than they actually are?
When it comes to climate change at least, a study by the CSIRO that Dr Leviston was part of, found that may be the case.
When a cohort of people were asked whether they thought climate change was happening, between just 6 and 7 per cent said they didn’t think it was, Dr Leviston said.
“What we did after we asked that question, is we asked people, ‘OK, where do you think the Australian public sits? What proportion of the Australian public fits into [the climate-change denial category]?”
“The estimate was that about 25 per cent — about a quarter of the Australian population — denied that climate change existed.”
So Kilvert et al are arguing that the public are tricked into thinking that 25% of the population are “deniers when really only 7% are. But when we look at the study itself, it’s the famous, well done CSIRO one which shows that 54% of Australians skeptics of man-made global warming.
Here’s one of my favourite graphs from the Leviston study results:
….
But Kilvert and al forget to mention that most Australians didn’t agree with the IPCC. Lies by omission (again).
It’s not about helping the planet, Greens are green to enhance themselves:
The UK is home to the longest single running temperature series in the world, and Paul Homewood caught up with the latest data. Two hundred years before the first coal fired power plant opened the summer of 1666 was hotter than the summer of 2019 in the centre of the UK.
Global warming is “still within the noise”. There’s a warming trend there, but this fantastic long dataset rather puts it in perspective. Even though the 1680 – 1700 period is regarded as the depths of the Little Ice Age, even then, there was still the odd hot summer.
Paul Homewood was responding to the headlines of “Hottest late August Bank Holiday Monday on record!” The only thing that’s extreme about this summer in the UK is the climate propaganda.
With 2,000 possible permutations and combinations of records at that inane level, there’s a new record somewhere every day of the year, not to mention that there weren’t too many air conditioners, tarmacs or concrete towers back in 1700 to warm the thermometers then.
Last month was no warmer than 1801, 1842 and 1932.
The summer of 1976 still remains top of the list, but second hottest was way back in 1826.
Indeed there have been warmer summers on 28 occasions prior to 1900. Notably, one such summer was 1666, the 18th warmest. That was, of course, the year of the Great Fire of London, which swept through London between the 2nd and 6th of September.
Almost all human emissions have come out since 1945. Note the catastrophic effect.
Summer Temperatures England, last 400 years. (Click to enlarge)
Could it be that in a cooler, drier climate, we just get more extremes? The average might be cooler, but the maxes might just as hot as they are now.
Well spotted by Homewood. Did anyone at Hadley or the BBC make this point? All they had to do was grab that data and graph it….
Meanwhile the UK is spending billions to avoid hot summers?
Attenborough turned a natural phenomenon into an advert for the Climate-scare industry. As Benny Pieser at GWPF points out Falling Walruses were turned into the new posterboy of climate change, “It would be a sad legacy if he did not set the record straight.””
Here’s the brief synopsis in case you don’t feel like watching walrus horror flicks.
Though this old video that Polar Bear Expert Susan Crockford found is kinda novel — you can see scientists test theories and then throw them out.
Biologists in 1994 noticed walruses falling down a steep incline. They tried to figure it out. They scratch their heads. Admit they don’t know. They saw it happen three years in a row, and as many as 120 walruses met a flattening end.
The first theory was the animals were trying to escape severe storms, but the next year the weather was perfect. Walruses rolled and crashed again. So did that theory.
The second theory, was that perhaps the sights and sounds of humans were putting them out… but no — discussions with locals suggested not.
The third theory was that they were suicidal. But Dr Seagers, quaintly, doesn’t think we should put human thoughts into a walrus. We have no information, he says with disarming honesty. The lack of any data wouldn’t stop modern climate scientists of course. They could always do a Monte-Carlo on 3,000 model runs of simulated walrus brains.
In the end Dr Seager thinks it’s probably just that the mass walrus gathering has become too crowded. He says they spread out and change the terrain making new paths, and they simply have access to higher ground to fall off from now (or something like that).
I’m glad I’m not a walrus, though some gullible Greens must be feeling like one.
EPA post delayed while I solve a html glitch with references…
In March I was invited to present the FESAus Christmas function in December this year. They’re the Formation Evaluation Society of Australia, a non-for-profit volunteer organisation for Petrophysicists and Well Log Analysts. A niche technical club of experts. It was unpaid, but I was happy to help make it a fun and push some buttons. “Hot” graphs, cartoons and all.
But in June, suddenly it became controversial to make jokes about climate change. Committee members started resigning, and dummy-spit declarations were made that “a discussion about climate was stupid”. People were shaken. The chips were on the table, the members said “yes” but the committee was split. When decision time came, the key committee meeting was hijacked by an outsider from Woodside who turned up by surprise and darkly threatened that all funding or support for the professional organisation and all future speakers from Woodside would be withdrawn if that climate denier, Jo Nova, was allowed to speak.
It was Woodside or me…
So my presentation was cancelled, and by Woodside no less. What’s astonishing is the effort someone inside this 4 billion dollar revenue giant went to — to stop an unpaid blogger from speaking to a low profile, small technical organisation, with little, as in, almost zero, media influence. Seriously? As if a group of experienced geos were at risk of being badly influenced by yours truly — there are people who analyze seismic logs and signatures of key stratigraphic surfaces for fun. Does Woodside think they need “protection”? Or is Woodside just running chicken itself? Scared of the Western Australian EPA, which is currently calling for submissions, and promising draconian guidelines that threaten to kill off the industry? Woodside need the EPA to approve all their new projects. Petrophysicists might be almost all skeptical, but some either work for Woodside or hope too. Woodside are the largest operator of oil and gas production in Australia.
When asked to put their objections in writing the Woodside representative refused. When put the test, they weakly said they objected to all climate change discussions. But of course, there were, and are, other discussions mentioning climate on the agenda and they’re not being threatened.
And the fallout hasn’t finished yet — more resignations may take place if threats from Woodside prevent an esteemed member of FesAus from speaking in my place and about climate change. I hear he is skeptical too. That decision is due soon.
Soft power character assassination
Good enough for Munich, Oslo, London, New York, Sydney and Washington. Not so much, Perth.
Via emails, which I’ve seen, I was referred to as a climate denier, just a blogger, and whose husband was a holocaust denier. It was the full character assassination. We’ve heard it all before. Here’s our reply to one hapless media outlet that posted the anti-semitic allegations about Dr David Evans and then issued a complete apology. I still remember being impressed that the original article was deleted within the hour, late on a Friday night, and our explanation posted immediately. Despite that action, the baseless slurs persist. And what’s my husband got to do with me giving a presentation anyhow? (Where is a feminist when you need one?)
Evans, by the way is PhD, M.S. (E.E.), M.S. (Stats) [Stanford Uni] and a few more degrees, a medal, OK, I’m just showing off. But it doesn’t matter how many prizes you’ve won if the rumor mill circulates lies and innuendo and no one stands against it. Which is why I’m so glad that several people are pushing back. It takes courage when industry heavyweights turn up… especially when jobs are at risk.
One big unspoken implication is that if Woodside won’t let a skeptic speak at an outside event, why would they hire one? Many younger geologists and engineers — who are largely skeptics — are becoming afraid to speak up…
(Lordy B! Pray for Woodside if it hires believer-engineers.)
For what it’s worth, as things got hot I decided to turn up to a FesAus technical meeting myself and listen to a presentation. I handed out Skeptics Handbooks all round. As expected, almost all of the members are friendly and already skeptical (see Lefsrud et al). Geologists and Engineers are the most high-grade skeptics around. They know too much about the history of Earth, and the fickleness of models.
Why this heat? Perhaps there is a religious zealot in middle management at Woodside, it’s hard to believe anyone in upper management would have made such a cackhanded PR move and over-reached this badly.
Otherwise this is the dark hand of soft power — the Administration State has a billion reasons to silence independent thought. When the government gets too big there doesn’t need to be an edict to quash dissent. People silence themselves.
Not us.
Alarmists get into a sweat,
Overcome with fear, fright and fret,
That a climate-change joke,
Might dissension provoke,
Which they see as a terrible threat.
After the dramatic loss in Tasmania at the May election the local state Labor party has realized they went too far Green left. They are scrambling to distance themselves from the Greens — saying that working with the Greens was a mistake. They are even talking about working people again as if they matter. It is a 180 shift from trying to win votes from the Greens by adopting their policies to openly isolating the Greens and pointing out their flaws.
Far from trying to fight “a climate election” they are even trying to fight on economic issues — ground that usually suits the Liberal (conservative) party. The problem for the Tasmanian branch is that they said something like this in 2010, then reneged when push came to shove and did a deal. Unless they get serious about pointing out why Greens policies are so toxic, the voters won’t believe them. The added advantage of scrutinizing the Greens (finally) would be that the Labor party might win votes from both the left and the right.
Rebecca White is the leader of the Labor Opposition in Tasmania.
Ms White will rise to her feet on Sunday to spruik Labor’s commitment to the working class, and to raise concerns about a “jobs emergency” in Tasmania.
She will use her speech to distance Labor from the Tasmanian Greens.
After working with the Greens earlier this year to pass transgender reforms through state parliament, Labor now seems intent on avoiding the appearance of being too cosy with the minor party.
Ms White’s speech will criticise the Greens’ positions on energy policy, tourism, and planning.
“As bad as the Liberal Government is on jobs — the Greens are just as bad,” Ms White’s speech reads.
“I am tired of the Greens standing in the way of Tasmanian jobs.
“They leave people behind. Working people. Our people.
In 2007 Ken Rudd ran his campaign on a promise of being great economic managers. The Australian Labor party won and did what they usually do –they blew away the surplus, raked up debt, built $800,000 tin-sheds for schools that needed libraries, and created a bubble in pink batts. It’s very risky for any Labor Party to run a campaign on “the economy” — but finally they appear to realize the empty shell of the climate election — where everyone says “they believe” and “they care” but no one wants to pay, and every other issue rates higher. The votes just aren’t there.
The party appears to have decided the key to future electoral success lies in convincing voters it would be a stronger economic manager than the Liberals, both at a state level and federally.
“The Morrison Government is in denial about the economy. A soft economy has been their blind spot, and it’s becoming their weak spot.”
White admitted past alliances with the Greens, most recently from 2010-14, had been a mistake. She painted Labor’s former power-sharing partners as arrogant, anti-everything, job-destroying naysayers.
Her quest to distance herself from the tree-huggers went as far as endorsing roo shooting as a pastime.
Her problem is that Tasmanians have heard this song before. Former premier David Bartlett promised never to do a “deal with the (Greens) devil” in 2010, shortly before doing exactly that to cling to power. Many still recall the similar Faustian pact between Julia Gillard and Bob Brown in the same year.
In preferences, Scott Morrison put Labor ahead of One Nation. What are the odds the Labor party would put the Liberals ahead of the Greens? Close to nothing.
Huge sums would have to be transferred from richer to poorer countries and regions to allow them to take the strain. Even then unemployment and mass migration across now open frontiers would follow. And a full-fledged Single currency would allow no escape hatch.
The political consequences can already be glimpsed: the growth of extremist parties, battening on fears about mass immigration and unemployment, offering a real — if thoroughly unwelcome — alternative to the Euro-centrist political establishment.
Given the timeframe, this is a draft post — just to flag this and start a discussion. Suggestions welcome. More coming Monday.
In March the WA EPA astonished the state by suddenly declaring that all new projects would need to “demonstrate how they would offset all emissions from their developments.” After an outcry these were withdrawn, but the EPA still wants them and are calling for submissions.
The requirements were so drastic they would affect the whole country just because of the size and the revenue lost from the WA projects. Not to mention that if the WA EPA gets away with this scientifically empty power grab, other EPA’s will follow…
The new regulations will affect planned projects such as Woodside Petroleum’s $US11 billion ($15.6bn) Scarborough gas project and its $US20.5bn Browse development, as well as existing projects such as the $US34bn Wheatstone LNG plant and the $US54bn Gorgon LNG plant. — Paul Garvey, The Australian.
The EPA is made up of five members appointed by the minister. It’s a QANGO, paid by the government, dependent on the government, but supposedly independent of it. It makes recommendations regarding the approval of new projects in the state but the government can choose to do something different. The problem is though, that companies need to jump through the hoops (which costs money and time), and it’s harder for a government to say “Yes” if the EPA says “No”. Plus it’s another PR win for the religion of climate change. More paid press releases.
How do we predict or assess the “environmental benefits”: The EPA are only supposed to be considering the environment, not the economy, and they’re only supposed to be considering Western Australia, not the world. It seems to me that the hardest point for them to justify is how cutting emissions in a state of 2.6 million people or 0.3% of the worlds population will have any measurable outcome on the West Australian environment.
Their entire assessment of “likely harm”comes from generic quotes and Argument from Authority from the CSIRO, BOM and the unaudited foreign committee. Who is responsible for checking these?
The EPA needs to define what a “reasonable” measure is. If the rest of the world is doing almost nothing, is it reasonable for West Australian companies to pay exorbitant fees to allay emissions which will drive them out of business? And emissions that will just be emitted elsewhere and which will have no measurable effect to the fourth decimal place on the temperature of WA?
The EPA document is poorly researched — it argues that “It is rapidly becoming standard international practice for greenhouse gas emissions to be considered by regulatory agencies”. Obviously the EPA is unaware that of what is happening in Russia, China, Indonesia, India, Africa, Brazil or the USA. Do they realize Donald Trump won?
On that basis the EPA are calling for submissions and promising to publish them and their responses. (That way they can say they consulted, even if they ignore everything that’s too hard). Nonetheless, it’s still worth putting in a submission Monday. Which I will. This post is here to remind others that’s it due, ask for suggestions, and offer to help.
Right now a very rare southern SSW (Sudden Stratospheric Warming) is taking place, possibly peaking today or this weekend over Antarctica. In the Northern Hemisphere SSW’s happen more often and in the month afterwards, wild polar blasts like the “Beast from the East” can peel off. So somewhere way up at 10hPa or 30 – 50 km, there is an area that’s warmed from -60C to close to zero. The warming up high throws a spanner in the normal jet streams and weeks later, down at the surface, blobs of cold air from the poles may end up wandering far from “home”.
We (as in Africa, Australia, Argentina, or New Zealand) may get bumper snow and severe frosts, or we may not. Some researchers are getting excited and are using the word “historic”.
…
These are rare over the Southern Hemisphere — due to Antarctica being shaped like a circular cheesecake right over the pole and surrounded by water. The geography is cleaner and simpler than at the north pole, and that generates a strong circumpolar jetstream. The strong pattern normally stops these sudden warmings up high which occur with wandering jetstreams.
In the Southern Hemisphere there have only been two officially recorded SSW’s in the last 50 years, one in 2002 and a more minor one in 2010. Though I’d venture to guess that we haven’t got much data on temperatures 30km above Antarctica in 1922 (or whenever). In the northern Hemisphere, some are already discussing the odds of another one for this winter,#PolarVortex.
“… this plot gives a sense of how large planetary-scale atmospheric wave propagation is in the mid-stratosphere (in the SH, the biggest values are more negative). These waves can break (think waves breaking on a beach) and rapidly slow the normal circulation there.”
While those with crystal balls and CMIP5 models may blame any freak weather on CO2, none of the models can predict this. Indeed, the modelers are still trying to define SSW’s Is it a wind reversal, or a temperature gradient change? (Junsu Kim 2017). The best meteorologists can only predict a Sudden Stratospheric Warming a whole week in advance.
Time to arm up on ways to explain to the superstitious that any cold snaps that may come are not another spooky sign of A CO2 Effect.
The unstoppable Tony Thomas has collected the tears of climate scientists the world over as they wallow in their self-inflicted heartache. For anyone who hasn’t come face to face with the raw emotional PR power of a crying scientist, check out Quadrant.
In particular, this new study:
The $2.5 million dollar study of The Emotional Labor of Climate Scientists
.. let’s get back to the psyches of Australia’s top warming spruikers. Geographers Professor Lesley Head (Melbourne University) and Dr Theresa Harada (Wollongong University) have published a breakthrough paper in the peer reviewed journal Emotion Space and Society. It’s called “Keeping the heart a long way from the brain: The emotional labour of climate scientists”.[4] This includes insights about climate-panic people’s “emotional labour” from “feminist perspectives” in which the scientists combat “a strong climate denialist influence”. The authors, straight-faced, found that our climate scientists use emotional denial to suppress the consequences of climate change. Guilt-free, they can then continue “extensive use of long-distance airplane trips throughout a scientific career”.
The authors accept, no questions asked, that 33-50 per cent of the world’s petroleum and over 80 per cent of coal should be left in the ground. Even so, they fret we’re set for maybe 6 degC warming and transformation of society. From this bland starting point, they sample four female and nine male Australian climate scientists — half of a group of 26 rated “the nation’s leaders in this field”. Tragically, the names of this band of bedwetters are withheld. The 13 interviews are wrapped with references to nearly 70 prior academic papers.
The study took at least three years. The scientists were surveyed from mid-2014 . The paper was submitted in May 2015 and re-submitted after revisions in July 2017. It was funded from part of an ARC research grant of $2,467,256 [you read that right: nearly $2.5m] for “cultural dimensions of environmental sustainability and human-environment interactions, including climate change.”
The interviewees’ particular terror was the “strong climate denialist movement [that] was a source of pressure and a cause of anxiety”. Into the bargain the denialist discourses were “seen to undermine the legitimacy of science authority”. The authors seem unaware that Australia’s leading “denialist” is Joanne Nova, one-time professional science educator and now a housewife in outer suburban Perth with a global reputation. Her only resource is her intellect and her only income is from her blog’s tip jar. No $2.5m taxpayer grants for Joanne…
As Thomas says — “note the elistism”. I would add — “note the narcissism”. Could Dr Ailie Gallant be the only homo sapiens that cares?
# Dr Ailie Gallant, Monash: “I often feel like shouting… but would that really help? I feel like they don’t listen anyway. After all, we’ve been shouting for years. How can anyone not feel an overwhelming sense of care and responsibility when those so dear to us are so desperately ill? Perhaps I’m the odd one out, the anomaly of the human race. The one who cares enough, who has the compassion, to want to help make her better. Time is ticking, and we need to act now.”
Or could it be she cares so little about the rest of her species she can’t be bothered even listening to them? And she has so little interest in saving the world she won’t even seek to find out why skeptics are skeptical?
Tony Thomas’s new book, The West: An insider’s tale – A romping reporter in Perth’s innocent ’60s is available from Boffins Books, Perth, the Royal WA Historical Society (Nedlands) and on-line here
The unstoppable Tony Thomas has collected the tears of climate scientists the world over as they wallow in their self-inflicted heartache. For anyone who hasn’t come face to face with the raw emotional PR power of a crying scientist, check out Quadrant.
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