According to a new study released by Nature Climate Change we are, remarkably, at the very peak of conditions for wheat growth worldwide — and it’s all downhill from here. (What are the odds?) The last 15 years, which have been the “hottest on record” and saw massive human CO2 output, were the peak time for wheat. But all that is about to fall off a cliff if we do … more of the same.
To demonstrate that millions will starve: take projections of extremes from broken climate models, and put them in wheat crop models, and then assume we take no adaptive measures for the first time in human history. Ignore that even the IPCC doesn’t think extreme events are necessarily changing: “Climate models are unable to predict extreme events because they lack spatial and temporal resolution. In addition, there is no clear evidence that sustained or worldwide changes in extreme events have occurred in the past few decades. “
There’s been no increase in drought globally in the last 60 years either. Pouring free fertilizer into the sky, along with better agricultural practices, has produced a global boom in crops (See CO2science for scores of studies on biomass gain, and photosynthesis). But from now on it’s doom, gloom and pain — even though in a warmer world the air will be more humid and the temperatures more stable (the extremes of hot and cold happen under clear sky conditions). Nevermind. Give me another grant.
See this graph? It’s all over, the crash is coming, you better believe it. Nature Climate Change says so:
Peter Oborne resigned from the UK Telegraph because it was scandalously holding back negative stories about HSBC, a major advertiser. His plea is an eye opener:
The coverage of HSBC in Britain’s Telegraph is a fraud on its readers. If major newspapers allow corporations to influence their content for fear of losing advertising revenue, democracy itself is in peril.
So much for the illusion of free press.
A friend said this has nothing to do with a science blog. I said, Why not? Science journals are publishing houses too, and worse, their main advertiser is also their biggest subscriber. The journals live where a monopsony meets a monopoly. The largest customer of many science journals are government funded university libraries and academics. The advertisers are often the same organizations. A new Nature journal was even set up this month in partnership with a university. Independence is not just a blurry line out there, it’s deep fog. There is dominant government funding from beginning to end.
The government doesn’t have to heavy hand the journals, as HSBC did. It doesn’t need to be overt at all. In fields like climate research nearly every single employee in the chain of people who send in material, review the material, buy the subscriptions, and pay for advertising are predominantly paid from the public purse. How many of them, do you suppose, would be active critics of big-government and of big-spending policies?
Perhaps the blog model of science publishing is the purest form of publishing — one that only answers to the readers.
Reports are coming in that the BOM and ABC are spinning the Queensland cyclone. This is the thread for those comments. I’ll add more detail as the situation “clears”.
When it comes to our rare high-quality historic records, and the real long term trends of Australian weather, the silence is striking. There are some excellent historical records of long term temperature data from the late 1800s in Australia, which lie underused and largely ignored by the BOM.
For the BOM, history almost appears to start in 1910, yet the modern type of Stevenson screen thermometer was installed across Australia starting as early as 1884 in Adelaide. Most stations in Queensland were converted as long ago as 1889 and in South Australia by 1892. Though states like NSW and Victoria were delayed until 1908.
Here’s a photo of the ones in Brisbane in 1890.
Brisbane was recording temperatures with modern Stevenson screens in 1890, as were some other stations, but the BOM often ignores these long records.
The BOM don’t often mention all their older temperature data. They argue that all the recordings then were not taken with standardized equipment. The BOM prefers to start long term graphs and trends from 1910 (except when they start in 1950 or 1970, or 1993).
The BOM was set up in 1908. Before that there were Stevenson screens going in all over Australia, but somehow these records appear uninteresting to climate researchers. Could it be that the late 1800s would have been more captivating if they were colder? In the late 1800’s there was the widespread heatwave of 1896 killing hundreds of people and recording 50C plus temperatures across the continent as well as the infamous Federation Drought?
Figure that if the BOM were curious about long term natural trends, it would not be impossible for a PhD student to compare the distant past and estimate those long trends. (If two stands of trees in 1200AD are accurate to 0.1C, why not actual, but non-standard thermometers in 1890?)
Not only were some stations using Stevenson screens in Australia, but other types of non-standard but common screens were documented, along with sites, and there were studies of overlapping data. (Though there were also some highly irregular sites that would defy analysis). More to the point, with millions in government grants available for research, the BOM could even recreate some historic sites and do modern side-by-side comparisons. Surely in the space age we can figure out the temperature differences of wooden boxes?
Suppose for a moment that the old records showed cool summers, or demonstrated that Australia had warmed by two degrees instead of one? Wouldn’t there rather be a flood of papers adjusting and homogenising Glaishers and Stevensons, and perhaps even sheds and octagons? Whole new museums could spring forth, recreating sacred meteorology stations from 1862. School children would file by and gasp!
The British CRU (University of East Anglia) reports Australian trends from 1850
Above, the year that Nicholls 1996 describes “most” stations as being shifted to Stevenson screens.
There were a few late exceptions to these dates.
Although there were many sites, especially in NSW and Victoria that didn’t get Stevenson screens until sometime in 1907, vast areas of Australia in WA, Queensland and South Australia have accurate older data. When “hottest” ever records for these states are announced, why are the older high quality measurements almost invisible?
The debt Australia owes to Clement Wragge and Sir Charles Todd
The Stevenson screen was championed by Clement Wragge. He installed the first Stevenson Screen in Australia at Adelaide in 1884 and cheered on others like Charles Todd in 1886. Todd compared the Stevenson screen to other types and concluded in 1898 that the Stevenson was more useful. (Thanks to Lance for that history and trove links!)
Lance Pidgeon discussed Todd’s extraordinary attention to detail and his work with different screens on this site. Adelaide has one of the longest running temperature records of the Southern Hemisphere. Todd’s meteorological plan started way back in 1856. As Pidgeon quotes, Todd was responsible for setting up the telegraph network in four states, and connected Australia to the world in 1872 through Darwin. He set up meteorology stations along the telegraph lines and collected the data coming in down the lines:
“With the building of the Overland telegraph in 1855, Charles Todd, aged 30, as Superintendent of Telegraphs, established meteorological stations on every route where he constructed telegraph lines in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia’s Northern Territory and Darwin. Todd organised the real time collection of the data by telegraph and began the preparation of synoptic maps. By the 1870s, and throughout the 1880s and 1890s, the meteorological data from the telegraph stations saw an increasing use of synoptic charts of pressure, wind, temperature and rainfall for daily weather forecasting.”
Jennifer Marohasy describes how he drove the installation of these instruments at post offices in South Australia and the Northern Territory.
Australia’s telegraph and meteorological networks owe a huge debt to electrical engineer, meteorologist and astronomer, Charles (later Sir Charles) Todd, who was employed by the South Australian government initially as superintendent of telegraphs, arriving in Adelaide in November 1855. He soon had a telegraphic line operating from Adelaide to Melbourne, and by 1872 he oversaw completion of the overland telegraph line from Adelaide to Darwin connecting Australia to Europe via Indonesia. By 1877 each state had tapped into this network.
In 1870 the post office and telegraph departments were amalgamated and Charles Todd was appointed Postmaster General and Superintendent of Telegraphs. This institution, established in 1870, became a Commonwealth department at federation on 1st January 1901, and was administered from Adelaide until 1975.
For Charles Todd the telegraph and post offices were a means to an end. His first passion was meteorology, and everywhere he established a telegraphic office he established a weather station and trained the staff in the operation of the equipment. The telegraphic officers in South Australia and the Northern Territory were required to report temperatures and rainfall on a daily basis to his observatory in Adelaide.
By 1860, Charles Todd was receiving temperature data from 14 stations in South Australia and the Northern Territory. By 1879, he was publishing weather maps, which resemble current synoptic charts.
In Queensland the state meteorologist Clement Wragge took up the Stevenson screens, very quickly installing them across Queensland during 1889.
In Western Australia people tended to take their cues from Todd in South Australia, using the same octagonal design at Perth Botanical Gardens as was used in Adelaide, and single louvre wall shade screens in most other stations in the colony. William Cooke, the first Government Astronomer of the Colony, replaced most meteorological stations with Stevenson screens “before the end of 1897” (Nicholls, 1996). Lance Pidgeon wrote about the comparisons of the octagon designs and the Stevenson screens, and I’ll do a post soon talking about comparisons of Glaisher and Stevenson screens.
In Victoria and NSW temperatures were recorded in a mix of “sheds” or “stands” that are quite different to the Stevenson screen. But plans for some of these are available, and it would be possible to build and recreate similar structures to compare the different types of screens.
In Tasmania meteorologists used shelters or sheds til 1895, then installed Stevenson screens after that. So screens were installed reasonably early, though Nicholls notes “but they were in disrepair by 1907”.
The striking lack of curiosity
The BOM sweat to issue press releases telling us how serious “climate change” is, and how it will hit Australia harder than the rest of the world. They make sure Australians know all the infinite details of projections from climate models we know are broken. But when it comes to our rare high quality historic records, and the observed long term trends of Australian weather, researchers mostly seem to have something better to do. It’s OK to adjust modern Stevenson screens with stations 300km away to rescue a signal, but the old data is apparently beyond hope. Who wants to add 10 or 20 extra years of data? The interminable tedium of those long term natural trends!
Years of toil and diligent care collect dust in backroom archives. “Nothing to see here”.
Welcome to “science journalism” at The New York Times where climate forces are not so much about sunlight and cloud cover, but about “deniers”, “doubters”, and “disinformers”. While our climate is supposedly the crisis the world must face, the NY Times solution is not to investigate and debate the leading ideas, but to ask what names we toss at Nobel Prize winners who don’t endorse the approved establishment line. Pravda would be proud.
Most surveys and polls show 50% of the population are skeptical. A real newspaper that was leading and shaping the public debate would find the most informed views from both sides and put them forward, shaping and hammering out the public debate. Instead, the NY Times discusses petitions pushing namecalling.
Justin Gillis asks: What to Call a Doubter of Climate Change? What indeed, I wonder? Does any single real person doubt that the climate can change? I have not met such a person (though many believers of the dominant government-endorsed paradigm seem to think the climate was stable and perfect before emissions of man-made CO2). The UN redefined the boringly obvious term “climate change” to be a coded shorthand for “man-made global warming”. Justin Gillis has fallen for that cheap rhetorical trick (as the UN knew many gullible “reporters” would). Who needs a dictionary when you can just blindly repeat agitprop?
If Gillis used accurate English, he might wonder what to call people people who were unconvinced of the hypothesis that humans control the climate. The only term is “skeptical”. Those who support the theory can be called “scientists” if they provide empirical evidence — how about some observations of strong positive water vapor feedback for starters? Alas, there are no “scientists” who can provide this evidence. Even the IPCC admits there is “high confidence” that most models overestimate this largest feedback factor, and explains the gap between observations and predictions as an “elusive” bias.
Until a scientist names observations to back their theory, skeptical scientists remain skeptical, and the scientists with broken models, faith, and hope should be called “unskeptical scientists” (as I’ve been saying for five years). Hey, it’s accurate English, if you care about that sort of thing.
Maybe “opponents of climate science” are those who call people names instead of discussing the evidence? Just a thought.
Gillis ought to learn how to Google
“The scientific dissenters object to that word [denier], claiming it is a deliberate attempt to link them to Holocaust denial. Some academics sharply dispute having any such intention, but others have started using the slightly softer word “denialist” to make the same point without stirring complaints about evoking the Holocaust.”
Some skeptics do object to the Holocaust allusion (which is exactly how some name-callers use it), but this skeptic just objects to the abuse of English (Defining “denier”. Is it English or Newspeak?). In this science debate, a denier ought to deny something — I’ve been asking for evidence for five years. What observation do “deniers” deny? Be my guest Justin, lay it right out. You can have a guest post on my blog. Please.
Gillis refers to those who ask questions about government publications as “opponents of climate science“, as if climate science itself is defined by government press releases rather than logic and evidence. But the opponents of climate science are those who want to stifle real debate by declaring the debate over before it starts. The only point of promoting the activist’s namecalling petition is to stop debate by denigrating alternate opinions. It’s a cheap smear article designed to let readers know they are not permitted to ask questions, lest they be seen as a brainless crank, right wing ideologue, or reprehensible “denialist” (aka rock-for-brains or a fan of Hitler).
Those without evidence preemptively call themselves the winners, and toss childish names at their opponents. Real science is about observations and logic, not ad hominem attacks. Obviously, if Gillis could find the scientific observations to back up his devotional faith, and win a real debate, he wouldn’t namecall to denigrate opponents.
An enlightened discussion of the petition could discuss the scientific method instead. But Gillis just uses it as a mindless label:
“The petition asking the news media to drop the “climate skeptic” label began with Mark B. Boslough, a physicist in New Mexico who grew increasingly annoyed by the term over several years. The phrase is wrong, he said, because “these people do not embrace the scientific method.”
Since the scientific method works by discussing observations rather than discussing names, it’s Mark Boslough who doesn’t embrace it. It is the exact opposite of the scientific method to accept a hypothesis on the authority of an opinion poll of experts and Bill Nye the Science Guy.
Gillis — bringing you the news ten years after it happened (the “olds”?)
“It is perhaps no surprise that many environmentalists have started to call them deniers.”
Started? Environmentalists have been calling anyone who disagrees with their religion a denier for more than a decade. Perhaps he’s heard of George Monbiot, who was tossing out the term in the media in 2005? Desmog blog started in 2006 and hasn’ t missed a day of denier namecalling since.
Readers, help me, when did the denier term start? Is Gillis ten years late, or twenty?
The Australian Academy of Science (AAAS) updated their “Science of Climate Change” document. It’s more glossy unscientific propaganda.
Garth Paltridge wonders in The Australian if the Academy will come to regret it. As usual, it’s what they don’t say that matters. They don’t mention how badly the current models have failed, and they hide that climate models give contradictory rainfall projections and just cherry pick one that gives the answer they want. They repeat the meaningless argument that their models don’t “work” without CO2. Perhaps they should let the taxpaying voters know that their models don’t “work” with CO2 either? None of the models can explain what caused the Medieval or Roman warming when CO2 was “ideal”. They conceal that the model forecasts rely on assumptions of feedbacks that the empirical evidence shows are wrong.
“Basically the Academy has fallen into the trap of being no more than a conduit for a massive international political campaign ”
The problem is that, after several decades of refining their story, the international gurus of climate change have become very good at having their cake and eating it too. On the one hand they pay enough lip service to the uncertainties of global warming to justify continued funding for their research. On the other, they peddle a belief — this with religious zeal, and with a sort of subconscious blindness to overstatement and the cherry-picking of data — that the science is settled and the world is well on its way to climatic disaster. The Academy document fits neatly into the pattern. It is a sophisticated production that tells only one side of the story.
For instance it does not say, or illustrate with a diagram, that all the mainstream climate models have over-estimated the general upward trend of global temperature for the last 30-or-more years by a factor (on average) of at least two. Nothing is said about the distinct possibility that the models include feedback processes which amplify far too much the effect of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Instead, the document talks about an apparent pause in global warming since 2001. It attributes the pause to some temporary fluctuation in the internal behaviour of the ocean. It does not mention that climate scientists have for many years deliberately played down the contribution of natural oceanic fluctuations to the rise or fall of global temperature. The possibility of naturally induced rises seriously weakens the overall story of human influence.
The pace and volume of the cheerleading is picking up. Over the weekend, the Vatican announced that climate is now a Catholic issue, and they are setting up an enviro “think tank” (what does God think of Climate Change?) The Australian Academy of Science produced its new advertising to feed the cash-cow called climate-grants (details on that later). The zombie issue of imaginary climate refugees resurfaced — 45 Fijian Villages are “projected” to be relocated in the next five to ten years; which bureaucrat says this, and will they apologize and quit 10 years from now if this turns out to be a wild exaggeration like the last claim?
It’s On. In 2015, we are going to be swamped with climate-spin.
The UNFCCC meeting in Paris is a major money and power-grab, and those with snouts in the trough know that their future fat cheques depend on how well they push propanganda, silence critics, and shout down intelligent debate. At one stage they were asking for 1.5% of global GDP (about $2,500 per Western family of four annually).
How much will they take? As much as we let them.
We can protest now, or protest later, but why wait? They will ask for “as much as the voters will bear”. Let’s mark out the pain-threshold right now. The more they get, the more they want. They deserve nothing.
The meeting, COP 21, is Nov 30 – Dec 11. It is a giant junket, a grand theater to generate headlines and reward compliant serfs in the media, in science, and in the NGOs. The real action is on right now, the negotiations are taking place in the months leading up to the meeting. Whether or not it will succeed will likely be decided long before Nov 30. It’s time for us to get serious.
To beat this wave of government funded fog, you can help support independent science by writing letters, emails and comments and through donations. We get no government grants to show where governments are wrong, and we have some big bills to pay. Dr David Evans has been working full-time using his Fourier work and Stanford level maths to update the notch-delay theory and look at the equations that underlie the models. (If you wonder why we’ve been quiet on it, it’s because he prefers to bury himself in productive solitude and private emails, not hack out issues in the “bloodsport” of mostly pointless ad hom comment wars. He’s been industrious; there is a busy year ahead on the blog.) We have more big news to release on both soon. The notch-delay comes out stronger than before after working through the issues raised last year. This work (and our household) depends on support from independent thinkers like yourself. See the bottom of the post for personal thanks to some direct deposit donors as well. The paypal option is here. US dollars and British pounds are also accepted, and thanks to the falling Australian exchange rate, foreign cash goes an extra long way now. Every contribution helps. Thank you, Jo
We must roast the media for pushing propaganda
The media IS the problem. Letters to editors discussing how their journalists are gullible patsies for not being even a tiny bit skeptical of government propaganda will hurt much more than letters that just dispute science content. Letters about science undermine their confidence as a “scientist”, but letters about their journalistic ability hurt so much more. Journalists kid themselves that they are independent critical thinkers. Wedge them by politely pointing out the questions they didn’t ask.
The “200 countries” headline below is there to pump the illusion of inevitable momentum toward a climate deal. Two hundred countries did what?
Almost 200 countries have agreed a draft document on how to best slow down climate change.
The blueprint is a first step towards negotiations for a deal to be agreed in Paris later this year which would come into effect in 2020.
The United Nations required an official text six months ahead of the French summit. That text was drafted in Geneva.
“The text has grown, so yes that makes June, which is the next time that they will get together, a little bit more difficult, but it does have the huge value that it is recognised as a formal negotiating text and that all parties will be eager to engage with that text,” said Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Real journalists would ask: So what exactly did “two hundred” countries do? Did their parliaments discuss this exact draft? Did a single citizen of each nation sign off on something (and if so, who were they)? Was this agreement anything more substantial than an email to some sub-sub-bureaucrat of the Dept of upper-middle-climate-control? Does “agreement” mean 200 bureaucrats were sent a draft and they didn’t actually say “we want no part of this”?
Euronews, whoever they are, does not bother to try to answer these questions.
How big are those UNFCCC aims?
What’s ultimately up for grabs in Paris is a global bureaucracy that can control carbon emissions (meaning energy) worldwide. It is one of the largest and most ambitious political and scientific ambit claims ever, and it is hidden in plain view (but don’t hold your breathe waiting for the media to point it out).
“This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history”, Ms Figueres stated at a press conference in Brussels.” — Christiana Figueres, the Executive Secretary of UNFCCC 3 Feb, 2015
They are aiming for some sort of UN or global body to be able to override national governments. As the history of federations such as the USA or Australia show, that sort of control will likely evolve to centralize powers even further. This will necessarily entail a class of global bureaucrats, probably not directly accountable, paid what they think they are worth out of tax income, and dispersing funds worldwide according to their agenda.
In the meantime, a bit of redistribution of income is on the agenda: In the draft of UN climate agreement, the developed countries are footing the bill. Vague lip service is paid to “fiscal sovereignty” of developing countries. Developed nations? They belong to the UN.
Option 6: Public sector financing from developed country Parties shall be the primary source of resources, with other sources to be considered supplementary. Different sources to be considered on the basis of clear criteria in order to avoid incidence and ensure fiscal sovereignty of developing countries, and ensure the sustainability, predictability and additionality or resources.]
Here’s the draft. “AD HOC WORKING GROUP ON THE DURBAN PLATFORM FOR ENHANCED ACTION.”
There are 86 pages, please search and add your thoughts on this document below.
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So much for the theory that skeptics are dumb or uninformed. Fox News reports that a new study shows that when people are quizzed about climate science, the skeptics outscored the believers.
Dan Kahan at Yale did the study on 2,000 people, but with only nine questions, so there is limited insight here, but it fits with his previous study which found people who knew more about maths and science were more likely to be skeptical. Readers of skeptical blogs (who chose to respond to surveys and list their qualifications in comments) are likely to have hard science degrees. The world is slowly waking up to the fact that the skeptics are more knowledgeable about science.
In a proper science quiz, the gap would probably be even larger. On two of the nine questions, skeptics got the science right. But believers “outscored” skeptics at repeating the propaganda (which shouldn’t be a question in a survey about scientific knowledge). I’d like to see all nine questions (can anyone find a preprint or the paper?)
Skeptics get science right:
One question, for instance, asked if scientists believe that warming would “increase the risk of skin cancer.” Skeptics were more likely than believers to know that is false.
Skeptics were also more likely to correctly say that if the North Pole icecap melted, global sea levels would not rise. One can test this with a glass of water and an ice cube – the water level will not change after the ice melts. Antarctic ice melting, however, would increase sea levels because much of it rests on land.
Believers (including believers who design surveys) get propaganda right, but science wrong:
Liberals were more likely to correctly answer questions like: “What gas do most scientists believe causes temperatures to rise?” The correct answer is carbon dioxide.
A question of propaganda, not science?
The design of the questions was sloppy and not well informed. Asking “which gas do most scientists believe causes temperatures to rise” is not about science, but about opinions. It’s a social science or cultural question, not a question about our natural world.
There are another two big problems with this question. Kahan assumes most scientists would say “CO2”, but as far as I know the question has never been asked across a representative slice of the disciplines of science (or even among the sub-group “climate scientists”). Since half the meteorologists and two-thirds of geoscientists and engineers are skeptics — it is far from obvious what the scientific world at large would say to this question. Worse, in terms of scientific accuracy, the correct answer really is not CO2, but H2O. Even the IPCC says that “Water vapour is the most important greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.” (IPCC AR4, p 632). Kahan reports the results as if they are about “climate science”, but what he asked instead was a question about PR. Scientifically, he’s wrong, but giving points to believers for making the same mistake as he does.
The question of science versus opinions-of-science underscores a major problem with the whole survey design. There is conflict in the reporting: on the one hand, the questions are described as being about where people thought “scientists stand on climate science”, but on the other, the results are expressed as knowledge of climate science itself, not a knowledge of the sociology of scientists opinions. Does Kahan really understand what science is?
The eternal problem of unstated assumptions, confirmation bias and “cause and effect”
Kahan assumes that skeptics are politically motivated, but no studies have looked at the leaders of the skeptics movement, or why people switched sides, nor have studies sorted out cause and effect.
The study’s author, Kahan, also says that the global warming debate has become so politically polarized that people pick their side based on politics rather than what they know about science.
Do skeptics vote right because they “were born” that way, or do they vote right more often because there is no other option? While many studies find right-leaning voters are more likely to be skeptics, those studies are no use for figuring out cause and effect. Many skeptics (like me) were originally quite left-leaning politically. What choice did we have once we realized how futile and unscientific the left leaning policies are? Many left leaning skeptics realized the consensus was wrong and later changed their vote.
“The position someone adopts on [global warming] conveys who she is – whose side she’s on, in a hate-filled, anxiety-stoked competition for status between opposing cultural groups,” Kahan writes in his paper.
Again, this is true of the left, but not what I’ve experienced on the right. Skeptics and believers co-exist on the right — I’ve seen polite discussions and agreements to disagree when I’m at right-leaning events. I’ve yet to come across a left-leaning group that welcomes skeptics. There is political “hate” that runs from either side, but believer versus skeptic hate in my experience is mainly a “left” thing.
One of the other reasons there are more right leaning skeptics is probably that there are open discussion on the right. Right leaning groups are more likely to encourage and respect free speech, as well as being stocked with better informed people (as this study shows). It is a banal truth that conservative believers have a much higher chance of discovering that the science is not settled, because they are more likely to come across well informed and skeptical friends. Conservative media outlets are also more likely to show both sides of the debate. Left leaning ones (Fairfax, the ABC, Guardian etc) almost never expose their readers to the rational side of the skeptic argument. (Go on, list the major skeptics who have been given column space or air time? What’s the ratio? 99:1?)
The political bias of skeptics and believers is mostly a creation of the left. Left leaning believers are far less likely to hear both sides of the debate. They are shielded from it by coercion, namecalling, and aggressive tactics to stop polite discussion. In Democratic and Labor circles, skeptics are exiled, called “deniers”, and treated like dirt equivalent to pedophiles. The right leaning side asks for open debate. The left leaning side does everything it can to avoid debates, and uses smear campaigns and ad hominem arguments to silence public discussion and try to prevent skeptics from even being allowed to speak on radio and TV.
Is the left leaning side driving polarisation? Let’s can quote Dan Kahan. He thinks it is newsworthy to mention that being a patronising namecaller is unlikely to win friends and influence people. He is, of course, talking to left leaning believers when he says this.
Kahan says that if global warming believers really want to convince people, they should stop demonizing and talking down to their opponents, and instead focus on explaining the science.
“It is really pretty intuitive: who wouldn’t be insulted by someone screaming in her face that she and everyone she identifies with ‘rejects science’?”
Skeptics have been saying the same thing for years. It’s just good manners really.
Like so many science papers, the press releases appear to have gone out before the study itself is available. Apparently it was published on Jan 21, but there is no active link through the journal. This is a shame. We can hardly discuss it properly without the paper. It’s another case of “Science-for-PR” rather than science for science’s sake.
Roy Spencer of course, understands what is going on:
“It’s easy to believe in the religion of global warming. It takes critical thinking skills to question it,” Roy Spencer, a climatologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, told FoxNews.com.
Heatwaves are a wonderful headline generator. That’s because the term sounds scary, yet the “wave” itself is undefined. A hundred different types of heatwave are theoretically possible, but they all sound the same in a headline. It means an activist team could pick and choose the particular one that scores a “record”. Heatwaves can be 3, 4, 5, 7 or 10 days. They can be measured by town, city, state or national data and they are can be above 35, 37, 40 degrees or… pick a number. A heatwave can be measured as days above some percentile of average. That means a few warm days in a cold town can be defined as a heatwave.
Geoff Sherrington, drawing no dollars from the taxpayer, takes a simple and obvious approach, and looks at 5 capital cities with the BOM raw and adjusted ACORN data. He considered 4, 5, and 6 day heatwaves to see if there was a trend. With 5 cites, 2 data types, 3 lengths of heatwave, Sherrington created 30 graphs. After testing all those different combinations of heatwaves, there were only three graphs out of 30 that showed an increasing trend. Over half of the heatwave graphs showed no trend, and a third showed a cooling trend. This is not what the press headlines are telling Australia.
But are heatwaves becoming more frequent? Of the five capitals, only Perth shows a higher number of heatwaves in the last 60 years than in the first half of the last century. Adelaide had fewer heatwaves in recent times, and things stayed about the same in the other three capitals.
The hottest heatwaves in Perth were in 1933, 1956 and 1961. The hottest in Adelaide was 2009, then 1939. In Sydney, 1960 was a standout. In Melbourne, 2009, 1959, and 1912. The hottest heatwave years in Hobart were 1994, and 1955. The old raw records give the record to 1897.
If the BOM were scientists would they issue press releases saying that one particular definition of heatwave showed a warming trend without also mentioning that there were 20 other definitions of heatwave that didn’t show it?
If the ABC were journalists they would not parrot the unscientific BOM press releases without asking about the other forms of “heatwave” and the effect of adjustments.
“Does this increase in heatwaves hold for other lengths and cutoffs of the definition of heatwave?
Why don’t the BOM mention those types of heatwave? Don’t people in Adelaide, for example, have a right to know that they had more 4, 5, and 6 day heatwaves early last century?
Why does it take an unpaid volunteer to tell the complete story on heatwaves when the Australian people pay the Bureau $300 million to do that?
Here’s the questions this blogger wants the ABC to answer:
The ABC budget is $1.1b. Why does it take an unpaid volunteer to ask the questions the Australian public want to know?
What is the ABC doing to make sure corruption, falling standards and confirmation bias are not destroying our most valued public institutions, for example, the BOM?
(The claim was made in a Climate Council report of Jan 2014. From other publications, it seems to be perceived wisdom among authorities from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO, who help to guide national policy.)
Here, we examine the daily maximum temperatures of 5 State capitals, Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Hobart. These were chosen because many people live close to these weather stations and because their observations cover many decades. Brisbane has too much missing temperature data and Darwin is already hot.
We use simple algebra and 5 sites only because of limited resources. However, more complicated analysis must still explain the findings of simple tests.
Here, for ease of calculation, a heatwave is simply defined as a string of consecutive days whose average of the maximum temperatures is anomalously high. We look at past heatwaves of 4, 5, 6 and 10 consecutive days. We select the Top 20 hottest heatwave years and then rank them in various ways.
There are two relevant data sets, both from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) whose compilation of the historical record is acknowledged. The first set is the longer one, called CDO for Climate Data Online. This is essentially raw data as recorded. The second set is the BOM ACORN-SAT, or Acorn for short, which is an adjusted, homogenised set that usually commences in 1910. As time goes by, more announcements are made in Acorn terms, when sometimes it is more appropriate to use raw data, so we test both.
Thus, we present a bundle of graphs, being 5 cities x 2 data sets X 3 heatwave day lengths for a total of 30 graphs. Averaged maximum daily temperatures in degrees C always form the Y axis, years always form the X axis.
The primary finding:
The hypothesis is falsified for the cities tested.
That is, it is wrong to claim that in these important cities at least, there has been such a change of the characteristics of heatwaves as defined.
Findings in more detail
Here is one example of the 30 graphs used in the first stage of the analysis. The temperature data are from the BOM CDO for the Sydney Observatory station 66062.
Renewables, are not just inefficient, unnecessary, and deadly to wildlife, but they were also a disaster of planning and management. The list of dollars and euros destroyed in the Glorious Renewables Quest has gone “nuclear”. The World Economic Forum estimates $100 billion Euro has been wasted, but its even worse than it looks. I had to read their opening sentence twice. I thought it read “European countries could have saved approximately $100 billion if each country had invested in the most efficient energy source.” I was thinking they could have saved that sort of money by using coal instead of windmills… but no, those huge savings would be over and above those ones. The WEF is talking about money saved if “badly managed renewables, had been “well managed ones”.
The inefficiency here is the scale only big-government could achieve.
Europe Loses Billions in Badly Sited Renewable Power Plants
European countries could have saved approximately $100 billion if each country had invested in the most efficient capacity given their renewable energy resources, that is, by installing wind turbines in windier countries and solar power plants in sunnier places.
But why would we be surprised?
The people who pushed renewables onto Europe were never doing it for pragmatic or practical reasons. The numbers never made sense on any level — not for electricity-made, not for global “cooling”, nor species saved, nor jobs created. The numbers didn’t work for “energy independence” and they certainly didn’t add up to a profit.
Since the point wasn’t about electricity, or the environment, it didn’t really matter if the solar panels were not in sunny spots, and the wind towers were not in windy places. If those things mattered, the Greens would have been apoplectic at this waste. How many children could have got access to clean water instead? All of them. WHO estimates the cost of clean water globally at $30b.
Bravo, I thought. ABC covers a good-weather story… but no, lo, for the climate oracles tell us this is ominous and bigger nastier storms are coming. Be afraid!
This weather is weird?
There have only been four occasions since the mid-1960s when cyclones haven’t crossed the mainland before February.
Only four. Golly! This year is almost as “bad”as the worst of the prehistoric era, i.e. ’68, ’80, ’88).
It’s not like the good ol’ days — when people used to get decent cyclones all the time:
Back in 1870, when Cairns started life as a gold port, four to five severe cyclones would hit the Queensland east coast every decade. By 2010, that average was down to less than two.
Lucky them.
To see the effect of man-made global warming, look hard at this graph below. Spot the… trend.
A high bar means a long slow quiet start to the cyclone season.
At the start in 1964 CO2 was a wonderful 320ppm. Now it is at 400ppm and obviously (when seen through a computer model) high CO2 levels affect cyclones.
The $1.1 billion ABC were not able to add in the CO2 emissions line, which is central to the predictions in this story. So I helped them. I can’t think why they didn’t…
Obviously, with a correlation that “good”, every story on late cyclone seasons needs to explain how climate change is involved. So ABC journalist, Jack Kerr finds a professor who can tell us how this is ominous. (The tea-leaves are terrible).
Bernie Lewin and the GWPF have launched an excellent historical paper” “Hubert Lamb And The Transformation Of Climate Science. For those who don’t know Hubert Lamb was the founding Director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (the infamous CRU of ClimateGate). He was also a skeptic.When he died the then director called him “the greatest climatologist of his time”.
He spent most of his career convincing the world that Earths climate was constantly changing. The irony then, was that the UN then redefined “climate change” to mean man-made climate change, and honored him with a building stocked with researchers who spent a lot of the time playing down all that natural variation. He earned the good will and reputation, and the UN spent it.
Lewin captures the repeating patterns of history. For decades Lamb fought the dogma that claimed the Earths climate was unchanging. He succeeded and was rewarded, but then the dogma was reborn in another guise:
.,.
“..Right through to the end of the 20th century the claim was that both models and data were showing the enhanced greenhouse effect emerging out of the background ‘noise’ of natural variations. Thus the popular idea that global warming is now emerging from a background of climate stability cannot be blamed on simplifications introduced (mischievously or otherwise) by translation into a popular account. Rather, this idea is in perfect fidelity with the new science, where the old meteorologist’s dogma of natural climate stability has been reintroduced as the baseline assumption, despite all the new evidence to the contrary. In this way, the new orthodoxy of anthropogenic climate change is only the undefeated old orthodoxy re-appearing, but cloaked anew.
Another way to view this is that, indeed, Lamb did help establish the idea of a changing climate. But this quickly became the ground upon which the anthropogenic scare was built. Once built, the foundations were artfully concealed by the new definition of ‘climate change’ as all man made. Lamb’s fame was then appropriated to support this new view. This enhanced his reputation, while at the same time traducing it.
In 2006 Lamb appeared in a listing of the ‘top 100 world-changing discoveries, innovations and research projects to come out of the UK universities’ for the innovation of establishing ‘climate change as a serious research subject’. 129,130
Thus, and in the same year that the CRU building was renamed in his honour, Lamb came to be honoured for an innovation that he had aspersed from the beginning right until the end of his life.
He worried about the distortions in science, and talked, not just of power plays and money, but fashions in thinking that came and went. In the 1930s the idea that the solar cycle affected the climate became so unpopular he said that to speak of the possibility, was “to brand oneself as a crank”. The theory of CO2 driven warming was also popular mid-century (when it was warm) but waned in the 1960s as things cooled… p31
9 Witness to a science transforming
After six years as director of CRU, Lamb’s idyll of ‘calm academic research’ had finally slipped away. In retirement he began to wonder aloud about what had caused the science to go astray. One factor was the distorting influence of public controversy:
Contact lists for our politicians were posted here early Sunday. The Daily Telegraph reports that MPs got close to 300 emails per electorate on the weekend, 20 – 1 in favor of Abbott. My message Friday and the message of emailers was that a shift to Turnbull would split the party. Passion against Turnbull runs deep.
Multiple Liberal MPs received close to 300 emails, per electorate, from the party faithful at the weekend with support for Prime Minister Tony Abbott running at “20-1”.
It can also be revealed in February 2009 when Mr Turnbull was Opposition Leader he trailed Labor 58 per cent to 42 per cent on the Newspoll two party preferred vote.
The Liberal Party’s primary vote was just 32 per cent.
Backbench MPs across Australia contacted by The Daily Telegraph last night confirmed constituents had launched an uprising against the change.
The Climate Council calculate the “odds” that one warm year could be as hot as it was. But those “odds” depend on a logical fallacy, major, inexplicable adjustments and models we know are broken. There are invisible assumptions underlying that claim which are documentably untrue. The “odds” might as well be lotto results.
The fallacy is argument from ignorance, a failure of logic and reasoning like saying “X is true, because we can’t think of anything else“.
To estimate meaningful odds, scientists would have to understand the major driving factors of our climate, well enough to be able to assign probabilities to outcomes. But their models are hopelessly broken, they can’t predict a decadal average on a global or continental scale. They can’t hindcast the past “bumps” without using major adjustments to make the raw observations fit the models. They don’t know why the medieval warm period was warm, they don’t know why the Little Ice Age was cool. They don’t know why the world startedwarming200 years before we poured out industrial levels of CO2. They don’t know if the mystery factors driving our climate for the last 4.5 billion years are still operating. If we can’t predict the past climate without CO2, we can’t tell whether CO2 is controlling our current climate or something else is.
We know the models are missing at least one, and probably many, factors. The only odds we know for sure is that Climate Council Pronouncements are 100% likely to promote alarm.
The ABC, not having much idea what the scientific method is, dutifully parrots it all. (What are the odds of that? “100%”.)
Questions a real science journalist could ask the Climate Council:
Your figures rely on having successful climate models, and Hans Von Storch showed 18 months ago that 98% of models are wrong (and it would be higher now). Doesn’t this mean you can’t possibly calculate meaningful odds? (How can models that miss factors predict “odds” that depend on those factors?)
The models are obviously missing at least one major climate driver since they have overestimated the warming of the last 15 years, even though CO2 emissions have been rising faster than expected. They can’t hindcast any of the turning points of the holocene era. How do you know that (or those) mystery factors are not driving the current warming?
This press release rests on the logical fallacy of “argument from ignorance”. Shouldn’t a scientific council use impeccable logic? What is science without it?
Shouldn’t a scientific group use empirical data rather than simulations, which are not “evidence” in the scientific sense? Evidence used to mean “what I recorded with this instrument”, not “what I saw on my computer screen”.
“A new report by the Climate Council of Australia says it would have been “virtually impossible” for 2013 to be the hottest year in the country’s record without man-made emissions in the atmosphere.
UPDATE: Spill vote is now Monday, not Tuesday. Turnbull has not resigned, but announced he will challenge if the spill vote passes, and is mocking Abbott. — Bolt Polls show Turnbull would deliver only a 6% bounce in the honeymoon. Not even enough to win a snap election.
UPDATE#2: The spill vote defeated 61:39. Abbott stays on as PM, but will have to do something differently, or he has only bought time until the next one.
Firey emails are crossing my desk today of people vowing to quit the Liberal party.
Malcolm Turnbull lost his leadership in 2009 because he wanted an emissions trading scheme. But that extraordinary wave may get reversed. Australia may still end up with an emissions trading scheme which will send billions in brokers fees to bankers, won’t change the climate, and will be almost impossible to unwind. It’s not about free markets, it’s about fake ones. What’s worse than a carbon tax? A carbon market.
In 2009, a week after ClimateGate, and two weeks before Copenhagen, the furious outcry from Coalition party supporters and skeptics turned the Liberal party upside down. The skeptic message has spread since then. In 2014, even CSIRO surveys show that 50% of the population are skeptics.
If you worry about the endless, inevitable rush to bigger government, more freeloaders and less individual freedom, do something — express yourself.
UPDATE: I’m reminded of this Sydney Morning Herald article two weeks ago. “Seven words you didn’t know were racist”. (Kaffir Lime. Peanut Gallery. Barbarian. Paddy Wagon. Gyp. Bugger and Sold down the River.) We can always rely on the SMH.
Some skeptical MPs and commentators have been aggressively and publicly attacking Australian PM Tony Abbott, yet he’s has been one of the most skeptical PMs in the Western World. The climate debate is heating up again with Paris on this year. Seriously — is any alternative better?
Potential candidates include Julie Bishop, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison. According to Dennis Shanahan both Turnbull and Morrison have said they will not challenge. The WA MP rebels (both skeptics) are apparently angling for Julie Bishop, a fellow West Australian.
Malcolm Turnbull is Australia’s version of David Cameron. Will Turnbull, ex Goldman Sachs, former opposition leader who died on the sword of an emissions trading scheme, be our PM next week? If Turnbull did run and win, the only bright point is it will be the best thing for those hoping to set up the equivalent of the UKIP in Australia. It could be the trigger for the conservatives to split from the Labor-lite Liberals. The passion against Turnbull runs deep.
The Nationals have vowed that Turnbull would have to give a written guarantee that he will not pursue a trading scheme, change asylum seeker polices or back gay marriage.
Abbott’s biggest mistake was to feed his opponents and starve his friends
Just this week the government gave $25m to a pointless “carbon capture and storage” project, ensuring yet another group with a vested interest and a PR department to saturate the media with climate fear. They feed the crocodile. They could have given just $10m to set up a new Centre of Natural Climate Research — a group to study the natural forces which drive our climate and which could have provided a small counterweight to the billion dollar industry with an interest in blaming CO2 for everything. They could have provided a mere $1m to a group to replicate the Bureau of Meteorology’s datasets and provide an independent commentary on the scientific value of the biased, major adjustments that the BOM deems necessary.
If the Greens don’t welcome extra funding to understand the climate, what does that say about them? If they worry about climate change, the Australian weather records are too important not to check.
The UK Met Office went to some effort to graph the last 160 years, from hottest calendar year to coldest.
Name the scientific reason:
1. Because the order of the calendar years is important.
The graph reveals mysterious patterns — Years ending in 3, 4, or 5 are more likely to be hotter. Years containing a six are statistically more likely to be green.
OR
2. Because climate models show a linear rise in temperatures, and no “pause”, and this graph does too. Glance at it sideways and be afraid!
The Met Office used to say one year doesn’t mean anything, only long term trends matter.
Now they graph the noise.
…
Thanks to Barry Woods for pointing me at this, and carefully putting the years back in their chronological order in the graph below.
Creative genius in science is about the people who break the rules and see a pattern that the consensus thinks is wrong or refuses to discuss. But capture creative genius in a bureaucratic clamp, smother it with political correctness, and watch the flower die. That’s what The Conversation is for.
Say Hello to a parody of “creative science” in “Living data: how art helps us all understand climate change”. It’s not about scientists who challenge a paradigm, creative science is about cartoons and dances. It’s about glowing plastic sculptures.
A methodology that uses drawing and dance as tools of enquiry is a radical idea for those accustomed to the conventions of the scientific method. But when choreographic analysis is embedded within scientific research, pattern recognition can contribute to some startling discoveries.
Big-government bought science with monopolistic funding over the last 70 years, and it’s bought science-commentary too (e.g. academia, CSIRO, the ABC, The Conversation). We can’t have people highlighting the suffocating effect of bureaucracy, of grant applications, and deadlines! Nor would Big-Government-Science ever seek out, support, and laud scientific work that showed that big-government science (which favours Big-Government policies) is wrong. Where’s the incentive?
The author of The Conversation article not only writes on a government-funded site to promote government science, but gets government grants to do overseas trips and “animations” for climate science. Nice job if you can get it. Where’s the accountability? Dare I say, government funding kills art like it kills real science. (Let’s not forget that an arts grant helped the climate conversation evolve by funding a play called Kill The Deniers.) Thanks to government funds, we’ve devolved from the Masters to an airborne whale with massive mammaries.
Lisa Roberts has received funding from the Australia Council for the Arts to develop animations and interactive works arising from her experience as an Australian Antarctic Arts Fellow working in Antarctica. She is affiliated with the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) as a Visiting Fellow in the Facutly (sic) of Science and is a Visiting Scientist at the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD).
“Feelings of connection” is a PR term, not a part of the scientific method.
The need to understand climate change is urgent. For some people, the facts about climate change don’t matter – so we need experiences that stir strong feelings of connection. Artists are leading the way to reconnect methods of analysis and expression in this way.
Artists may be leading the way (in science communication) — but true artists seek to understand both sides of the issue and bravely speak the unspeakable. People like John Spooner, Steve Hunter, Josh, and Larry Pickering.
Parroting the dominant paradigm is not art, it’s just mastery of a trade skill
The Living Data program that I lead is one of several initiatives to bring together scientists and artists.
“Living data”? Now there’s a problem. The data is alive, but it shouldn’t be. Science is about observations (data) that is supposed to stay the same, and be replicated, not “dance”. Inexplicable and biased adjustments give zombie life to phantomshiftingcopies of the raw data. The 1970s have been warming for thirty years. That may be “art”, but it isn’t science.
Creativity is at the heart of art and science and passion drives both as ways of satisfying curiosity and expressing new findings.
Curiosity used to mean seeking out answers. Not preaching from the pulpit of consensus.
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The Climate Council calculate the “odds” that one warm year could be as hot as it was. But those “odds” depend on a logical fallacy, major, inexplicable adjustments and models we know are broken. There are invisible assumptions underlying that claim which are documentably untrue. The “odds” might as well be lotto results.
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