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Time to panic:
Peter Hannam says: “The world’s oceans are heating at the rate of two trillion 100-watt light bulbs burning continuously…”
Maybe not?
Jo says: “… that’s two trillion light bulbs, plus or minus 200 trillion…”
Conclusion: Random noise is coming to get you.
Scientists used to care about measurement error. Not so much any more. The ARGO buoys are marvelous high-tech robots, but each thermometer measures 200,000 cubic kilometers of ocean. The thermometer in a buoy is accurate in a laboratory to 0.005C, but can they really detect global oceanic changes of five thousands of a degree?
Oh yessity say the scientists, because there are 3,000 thermometers. But, no no no thinks Jo. If they were all measuring the same swimming pool, having a lot of them would reduce the error, but each thermometer is measuring a different piece of ocean full of thermal noise. Some will argue that the the exact absolute temperature is not what matters, it’s the changing trend we need to measure. But these thermometers are not staying in one place measuring one tiny slice of the ocean, they roam randomly through water that varies from zero to 30C. Small eddies stir the water, and blobs of warmer and cooler tendrils circulate side by side. I hear there are internal thermal waves of heat sloshing through the ocean too. It’s a mess out there.
Imagine if our surface thermometers were roaming around the countryside. Look out — the Stevenson screens are on the move! How good would you feel about “the hottest” ever record then?
Are the oceans really warming? We’ll know in another 30 years or so.
 ARGO data, updated to Jan 2015 | Graph: David Evans Peter Hannam of the Sydney Morning Herald at least writes up the temperature change in decimals, which the ABC did not. It’s a big step forward in mainstream journalism (how low are our expectations). Perhaps skeptical criticism is getting to him? But he is still a gullible repeater, naively accepting everything he hears — he didn’t ask how big the error bars are, and whether 0.005C is remotely meaningful. Nor did he point out that if the oceans can absorb all that heat energy, and only warm by such an infinitesimally small amount, isn’t that a good thing? You know, perhaps we’ve got quite some time before we have to hit the panic button?
“Southern oceans play major role in absorbing world’s excess heat, study finds“
Oceans store about 93 per cent of the extra heat taken up by Earth. Photo: Max Mason-Hubers
The world’s oceans are heating at the rate of two trillion 100-watt light bulbs burning continuously, providing a clear signal of global warming, according to new study assessing data from a global fleet of drifting floats.
The research, published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Climate Change, used data collected from the array of about 3500 Argo buoys from 2006-13 to show temperatures were warming at about 0.005 degrees a year down to a depth of 500 metres and 0.002 degrees between 500-2000 metres.
Oceans south of the 20-degree latitude accounted for two-thirds to 98 per cent of the heat gain during the period studied, with three giant gyres in the southern Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans largely responsible for drawing down the extra warmth.
“The global ocean heat content right now is the most reliable metric of that radiation imbalance” between the energy received from the sun and what is radiated back to space, said Susan Wijffels, an oceans expert at the CSIRO and one of the report’s authors.
The ABC don’t even mention how small the theoretical temperature change is. It’s another chance to run their favourite headline “2014 hottest on record”. Reporter Bridget Brennan didn’t ask “how much warmer are the oceans”. She didn’t ask what the error margins are either. She mentioned “international data sets” but didn’t ask if the satellites (the two best data sets) agree that 2014 was the hottest ever (they don’t). She didn’t ask about “the Pause”.
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9 out of 10 based on 65 ratings
Should David Rose’s children murder him for the sake of the planet?
Welcome to western civilization’s advanced scientific debate. There there are no shades of gray, we can’t discuss whether climate sensitivity is 1, 2,or 3 degrees, and it’s not even about numbers. It’s about whether you are good or evil.
For a religious believer, the worst thing that could happen is a polite conversation. They know (at least on a subconscious level) that they don’t have the answers, and that if skeptics were heard the voters would flee… the only possible answer is to “win” through bully-boy tactics. Unleash the righteous indignation!
David Rose does Daily Mail articles asking dangerous questions about error bars and wanting to know pedantic, unreasonable things like where the scientific data is. One commenter urged his children to kill him. Rose has been a journalist for 34 years. He has seen nothing like this vitriol. As he writes below, The Guardian and other newspapers support brutal threats in comments but filter out skeptics.
Climate of Hate: His children are urged to kill him, he’s compared to Adolf Hitler and labelled a ‘denier’ – even though he’s Jewish. Disturbing article reveals what happens if you dare to doubt the Green prophets of doom
- Journalist David Rose has been labelled a ‘climate change denier’
- Wrote article about scientists covering up data in ‘climategate’ scandal
- He believes ‘renewable’ sources such as wind and ‘biomass’ are futile
- One online commenter urged Mr Rose’s own children to murder him
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8.9 out of 10 based on 135 ratings
Summer 2015, Margaret River, South West WA.
Queenslanders can tell us what happened. I’d like to ask MV…
8.1 out of 10 based on 49 ratings
There is a large gap between what the certified appointed experts say and what the public thinks on GM, Climate Change, pesticides, ethics, and sigh, on evolution. The researchers were “surprised” that a collective pool of university educated, largely government employed scientists have a different spread of opinions to the population at large. On climate change half of the public are skeptics that man-made effects are dominant. In the AAAS, 87% of scientists think it is. But despite twenty years of propaganda the public are not buying their message.
UPDATE: Given that 48% of Meteorologists are skeptics and survey after survey shows that two-thirds of geoscientists and engineers are skeptics, the 87% figure “across the sciences” seems hard to believe. 3748 members of AAAS took the survey — and as A.Scott points out on WUWT in comments, only 7% of the respondents were from the Earth Sciences, and nearly half were “biomedical”. Link to the survey Questions. See TdeF in comment. H/t to Michael for the tip about Scott.
The answer is not more propaganda, it’s open public debate
To resolve the gap, scientists naturally think the public needs more education. But perhaps it’s the scientists who need to learn to start reasoning and stop namecalling instead — “denier”. The public knows that isn’t science.
We never hear a climate scientist pull up colleagues for using a fallacious form of reasoning. Welcome to modern climate science. Was than an ad hom? Well, I’ll cheer you on.
The answer is not to train more obedient citizens to respect official doctrines, but to air these taboo topics in open debate. If the scientists really are right, and the evidence is overwhelming, the citizens will see their questions answered and move towards the settled science view. If science is a bureaucratized sink-hole of groupthink stuck in a dead end hypothesis, some dead-wood will go, and the gap closes toward the public.
These issues are so polarized there isn’t a forum where the best of both sides hammer it out while the crowd watches — so the gap grows. The public know they are not being told the whole story. The Internet is the closest it gets to real debate, but Unskeptical Scientists are running away.
The brand name “science” is falling
The Star of Science is tarnishing fast. Both scientists and the public are feeling down about it. When asked about U.S. scientific achievements, in 2009 65% thought theirs were the best in the world or at least above average. But now it is down 11 points to 54%. That’s a big fall in a short time. It seems a bit devastating that nearly half of all US citizens apparently don’t think US science is even “above average”. The land that put man on the moon isn’t sure any more if it’s better at science than, say, Venezuela.
Four out of five adults say science has improved their life and healthcare, but only 3 out of five say the same about the environment and food (would you like a cholesterol-free climate?) Diet science is up there with long range rainfall predictions. The good brand-name and goodwill of science is being eroded away.
One third say we don’t need the government for science to advance
One response surprised me — about 40% of people don’t think government investment is essential for science. I had no idea it was so high in the US and one third even say “private investment is enough”. In Australia I don’t know what those numbers would be. The idea is so strange, I’m not sure if anyone has even thought to ask. Some 61% say that government investment is essential for scientific progress, while 34% say that private investment is enough to ensure that scientific progress is made.
There is a lot to discuss with these results…
— Jo
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PEW research Centre
Public and scientists express strikingly different views about science-related issues
Despite similar views about the overall place of science in America, the general public and scientists often see science-related issues through a different lens, according to a new pair of surveys by the Pew Research Center in collaboration with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
The report finds significant differences in views on 13 science-related issues asked about in the surveys. For instance, there is a:
- 51-percentage point gap between scientists and the public about the safety of eating genetically modified foods — 88% of AAAS scientists think eating GM food is safe, while 37% of the public believes that.
- 42-percentage point gap over the issue of using animals in research — 89% of scientists favor it, while 47% of the public backs the idea.
- 40-percentage point gap on the question of whether it is safe to eat foods grown with pesticides — 68% of scientists say that it is, compared with 28% of citizens.
- 37-percentage point gap over whether climate change is mostly caused by human activity — 87% of AAAS scientists say it is, while 50% of the public does.
- 33-percentage point gap on the question about whether humans have evolved over time — 98% of scientists say we have, compared with 65% of the public.
There is no single direction of differences between scientists and the public. By a 20-percentage point margin, citizens are more likely than scientists to favor offshore oil drilling. And by a 12-point margin, the public is more likely to say that astronauts are essential for the future of the U.S. space program.
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9.1 out of 10 based on 51 ratings
People are bored of the sermons, the half-truths, and carefully filtered messages. Who wants to be told what to think?
The ABC lost nearly 4% of its audience last year. Australians are tuning out the $1.1 billion ABC public broadcaster, and it has nothing to do with the small 5% efficiency cuts. The fall in popularity occured before the cuts. The three commercial TV channels in Australia all did much better at maintaining their popularity — despite suffering larger cuts to their budgets.
The ABC share is down to 10.08 per cent of 16 – 54 year olds. Nearly 90% of working age Australians are paying for the ABC but not watching much. The losses in the over-55 age group, traditionally the ABC stronghold, were almost as large as the younger groups.
Is the ABC biased towards Green politics?
 Christine Milne leader of The Greens, at a rally outside Parliament House. Photo: Daily Telegraph. “Only” 40% of ABC journalists vote Green.
The Australian, last week: Older viewers abandon the ABC
THE ABC was the worst performing television broadcaster last year, losing 3.95 per cent of group audience across all the channels before the government announced budget cuts.
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9.1 out of 10 based on 113 ratings
Those who believe the Glorious Climate Models (GCMs) are in trouble. Many of them have spent their entire careers soaking in dire predictions, but things are falling apart — (or rather, not falling apart) — the models don’t work, the public doesn’t care, the media are not that interested, and skeptics keep winning Bloggies awards. Spare a thought for them. It’s tough out there for unskeptical people. Children still know what snow is.
Things are unravelling in believer-land and there is pain. They are witnessing “the wholesale destruction of the planet”, or perhaps the death of a hypothesis, which is nearly as bad.
 Truthout, where no conspiracy is too grand, and skeptical scientists are bastards The headline reads:
“Mourning Our Planet: Climate Scientists Share Their Grieving Process”
The 3,000 word extravaganza of psychological pain is published by an NGO aptly called Truthout (think, “LightsOut”?)
“Climate science researchers, scientists, journalists and activists have all been struggling with grief around what we are witnessing.”
There’s an angry professor calling other scientists who disagree “greedy, lying bastards” and talking of backing “you plutocrats, denialists, fossil-fuel hacks “ against the wall. Another professor blames ACD for the driving cause of her depression.
ACD, by the way, is Anthropogenic Climate Disruption. Forget Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) — it is quietly gone, buried in the backyard, thanks to the inconvenient Pause and lack of Global Warming*.
They’re trying on a new term — Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD).
Climate Disruption is everywhere, more vague, scary and infinitely applicable for PR and media.
Here’s an angry professor:
“My overwhelming emotion is anger; anger that is fuelled not so much by ignorance, but by greed and profiteering at the expense of future generations“, wrote Professor Corety Bradshaw, the director of ecological modeling at the University of Adelaide.
“I am not referring to some vague, existential bonding to the future human race; rather, I am speaking as a father of a seven year-old girl who loves animals and nature in general. As a biologist, I see irrefutable evidence every day that human-driven climate disruption will turn out to be one of the main drivers of the Anthropocene mass extinction event now well under way.”
My message to Prof Corety is that instead of being an angry scientist he could try being a logical one.
I’d say “Listen to the instruments, rather than the subcommittees. The weatherballoons, satellites, and tide gauges are telling you that climate sensitivity to CO2 is much lower than the experts-in-unverified models are suggesting.”
Though people are stealing his daughters future, and profiteering too. I daresay they are the ones trashing the scientific method and the economy in the hope they can change the weather.
But Prof Bradshaw’s faith is as complete as his humility is completely-absent:
My frustration with these greedy, lying bastards is personal. Human-caused climate disruption is not a belief – it is one of the best-studied phenomena on Earth. Even a half-wit can understand this. [And university professors too, thinks Jo].
We can hardly argue with “science” like that, can we? The Greedy-lying-bastard Index is irrefutable.
He goes on:
As any father would, anyone threatening my family will by (sic) on the receiving end of my ire and vengeance. This anger is the manifestation of my deep love for my daughter, and the sadness I feel in my core about how others are treating her future.
He of course loves his daughter, and skeptics hate theirs dontchaknow?
Science used to be about dispassionate observations. Now, you’re a good scientist if you are more mean and angry than the next guy:
Mark my words, you plutocrats, denialists, fossil-fuel hacks and science charlatans – your time will come when you will be backed against the wall by the full wrath of billions who have suffered from your greed and stupidity, and I’ll be first in line to put you there.
He thinks he’ll be first in line, but there’s at least a hundred haters already lined up ahead of him. And they want skeptical scientists strangled, jailed, beheaded, or on a good day, just treated as traitorous war criminals. Some fantasize about exploding skeptical kids. Get behind Greenpeace I say.
The University of Adelaide must be proud of his vocabulary-of-names. Still, it’s not like we could expect him to understand the risks involved with models. Professor Corety Bradshaw is the director of ecological modeling at the University of Adelaide.
In a post-modern post-science world Touchy-Feely scientists are all the go
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9.5 out of 10 based on 185 ratings
The Prophets of Doom are still at The Guardian (and the CSIRO)
Climate change will hit Australia harder than rest of world, study shows
The first paragraph contains the word “could”. It’s all a guess based on models they already know are broken:
Australia could be on track for a temperature rise of more than 5C by the end of the century, outstripping the rate of warming experienced by the rest of the world, unless drastic action is taken to slash greenhouse gas emissions, according to the most comprehensive analysis ever produced of the country’s future climate.
But wait, will Australia — a rich, low population country with a temperate climate and surrounded by ocean — really be hit harder than the polar regions, the poor, those closest to rising seas and those living in cyclone zones?
A new website called ClimateChangePredictions is keeping track of the “hardest hit” predictions and can’t find a consensus on this one:
“Rural Australians will be the hardest hitby climate change according to Professor Steve Vanderheiden from the Charles Sturt University (CSU)”
“Sydney’s urban areas to be hit hardest by global warming” — ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Sytem Science
“Climate change is faster and more severe in the Arctic than in most of the rest of the world”
There seems to be consensus in the developed world that Africa will be the hardest hit or most affected region, due to anthropogenic climate change.
Bangladesh is one of the hardest hit nations by the impacts of climate change.
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9.2 out of 10 based on 121 ratings
 Click to nominate your favourite blogs Bloggies nominations are open but only til Sunday this week. There is still no Science and Technology category, after 2013 when 4 out 5 finalists were skeptics. Protest by nominating science blogs for all the other categories that apply. As I’ve asked before:
Do these dumb awards matter? They bring in new traffic, and help bloggers tick credibility boxes with the media and with donors. So yes. If you bother (I know it’s a chore) it is a way to say thanks and to put your favourite sites further up the rankings lists. Think of it as a way to alert more people to the sites you feel deserve more attention. It’s free advertising for them. You might have a bit more sway if you also tick the box “I’d like to be on the panel of voters who choose the finalists”.
They may have axed the Science and Technology Category because too many skeptics kept winning it, but that only meant skeptical blogs won in other categories. The blogs you visit every day may not be just science blogs, but politics, education, entertainment, and topical blogs. They may also be New, Secret, Humorous, Groups, and they may be well designed, and well written. What I’ve said before still applies:
You might think the blogs in your usual science circle are not Education, Topical, Group, Secret, or Business blogs, but when you look at the past finalists (eg for Education: Science is beauty, or AMS Graduate Student) you will see that science blogs easily fit. In terms of science education, skeptical bloggers are doing more for the history and philosophy of science, the scientific method, statistics, rhetoric, and paleohistory than any national curriculum. Are skeptics blogs well known and promoted by the media, or are they all a best-kept secret? Which skeptic blogs started in 2014 and are new?
Nominations close on Sunday evening. To nominate click here, fill in at least three different URLs. But you can nominate any blog for several categories as long as they suit the category.
8.7 out of 10 based on 40 ratings
It’s not fossil fuels causing global warming, it’s man-made adjustments. Stop the adjustments!
In South America, there are hardly any rural land thermometers. GISS tells us the area is warming (see the map below). Paul Homewood looked at the raw data. There are only three rural stations currently operating in the area, Puerto Casado, Mariscal, and San Juan, and they all show a raw trend that falls. As in so many other situations, after adjustments, all three show a rising trend. The changes are breathtaking. In Mariscal raw temperatures of 25.5C turned out to be “really” 22.5C. (Those 1950 thermometers were hopeless 😉 ). In San Juan Bautista, and Puerto Casasdo the old thermometers get adjusted down by around two degrees. Perhaps there are reasons for the adjustments, but if old thermometers so so bad, and station changes have made such a difference, why does any scientist pretend we can calculate global temperatures accurately?
 The GISS map of South America. Left: The warming. Right: The NOAA map showing “grey” areas with no coverage. See Notalotofpeopleknowthat for source links. Paul Homewood describes what he found when he compared the raw data with the official set: Massive Tampering With Temperatures In South America. This is just one of his three graphs. They are all show similar transformations.
 … Christopher Booker discusses the implications in: Climategate, the sequel: ‘How we are STILL being tricked with flawed data on global warming’.
Although it has been emerging for seven years or more, one of the most extraordinary scandals of our time has never hit the headlines. Yet another little example of it lately caught my eye when, in the wake of those excited claims that 2014 was “the hottest year on record”, I saw the headline on a climate blog: “Massive tampering with temperatures in South America”
After telling us about Homewoods work, Booker describes how dubious so many of the surface temperature sets are:
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9.4 out of 10 based on 145 ratings
 Limestone beach cave, 3hrs north of Perth, WA | Click to enlarge.
9.4 out of 10 based on 32 ratings
Are we all intelligent adults in the room — can we discuss the weather without calling people names?
The state of the national conversation is pathetic.
Matt Ridley, best selling science writer, PhD, elected to the UK Parliament did the unthinkable and switched to become skeptical of carbon crisis a few years ago. This week he wrote about that transformation and the different behaviour of skeptics and those who disagree with them…
UPDATE: Attacking the man takes on an especially blunt meaning today. Bishop Hill reports that in comments Gary Evans, a Guardian author (aka Bluecloud) laid out his best scientific argument. Should that not be [Matt] Ridley’s severed head in the photo? Where else but that paragon of progressive ethics: The Guardian? Such is the intellectual parry of gullible believers: We would actually solve a great deal of the world’s problems by chopping off everyone’s heads. Why are you deniers so touchy? see More Greenpeace Death Threats? Nice of him to prove Ridley’s point.
In the climate debate, paying obeisance to climate scaremongering is about as mandatory for a public appointment, or public funding, as being a Protestant was in 18th-century England.
Matt used to believe (like so many of us did):
I was not always a lukewarmer. When I first started writing about the threat of global warming more than 26 years ago, as science editor ofThe Economist, I thought it was a genuinely dangerous threat. Like, for instance, Margaret Thatcher, I accepted the predictions being made at the time that we would see warming of a third or a half a degree (Centigrade) a decade, perhaps more, and that this would have devastating consequences
When he initially switched there was a genuine conversation. People did try to engage him in long exchanges, but he gradually grew more and more skeptical, and the conversation just got more and more silly.
Then a funny thing happened a few years ago. Those who disagreed with me stopped pointing out politely where or why they disagreed and started calling me names. One by one, many of the most prominent people in the climate debate began to throw vitriolic playground abuse at me. I was “paranoid”, “specious”, “risible”, “self-defaming”, “daft”, “lying”, “irrational”, an “idiot”. Their letters to the editor or their blog responses asserted that I was “error-riddled” or had seriously misrepresented something, but then they not only failed to substantiate the charge but often roughly confirmed what I had written.
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9.3 out of 10 based on 150 ratings
UPDATE: 6pm — Despite the hype, the BOM shows no towns making 50C in WA. Marble Bar was the hottest at 49.0C. At least, the BOM, WA Today, The Australian and the ABC have printed the old record correctly as 49.2C.
Will it be a hottest record at one of the hottest towns in the world today? The forecast for Marble Bar, Western Australia, is 49C. The record for Marble Bar stands at 49.2C or 120.5F recorded in 1905 and 1922. I guess if we give up our cars and airconditioners the temperatures in Marble Bar will go back to these ideal conditions?
Thermometer-spotting: the temperature has varied up and down.| The BOM page for Marble Bar: 48.3C at 2.54pm but the highest was 48.9C at 2:46 (8 minutes earlier?). | At 3:30pm the current temp is 48.4C but the highest as listed as 49C at 3:12pm. | Now at 3:50pm the temperature has fallen to 47.9C and it looks like the peak was reached just short of the old record.
Overexcited journalists get 50C into headlines already
 Sat Jan 14, 1905 At least one journalist is so excited he predicted it’s “highly likely” one of the towns in the area will hit the magic 49.5C which can be rounded up to 50C! (Seriously, Anthony Sharwood says that. Marvel at the power of odd versus even numbers and rounding conventions. It is not as though our modern media can report to one decimal place in a headline after all.) And who needs rounding, or even a measurement? That same headline today already assumes the BOM are wrong and it will hit 50C. “It’ll reach 50 degrees in parts of Western Australia today”. Hey, it might turn out to be right.(It didn’t). This article also gets the record maximum wrong saying it was 48.6C in 2008. It’s on the news.com site, but frustratingly it’s not clear which newspapers it was printed in or how many people saw it. Andrew Burrell from The Australian also gets 50C into the headline:“Pilbara miners brace for 50C scorcher “ and “Weather records set to tumble with temperatures in WA tipped to hit 50C “. How many people in Australia will already think 50C happened, even if it doesn’t.
Historic hot days in Marble Bar
Here are historic newspaper stories of the day the 120F records were set:
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8.8 out of 10 based on 68 ratings
We skeptics get excited about unusual things. The Australian published Michael Asten today in the Op-Ed pages, and took the extremely rare step of publishing a scientific graph (!) with a few error bars and everything. Newspapers publish economic graphs all the time, so it’s nice to see the scientific debate getting a bit more sophisticated than just the usual “deniers are evil, government climate scientists speak the word of God” type of stuff. (In the Enlightenment, data was a greater source of authority than any human; how we pine for those days.) The only thing the story should have added was a note that reminds us that the not only was the “hottest” record not beyond the error bars but that it did not occur in satellite measurements. I’m sure a lot of people mistakenly think that NASA might use satellites, but they prefer highly adjusted ground thermometers next to airport tarmac instead.
The headline on that graph could have been “Climate scientists don’t know what caused most of the big moves on this graph”. Some mystery effect caused the warming from 1910-1940. In ClimateScienceTM it is OK to call that “natural variability” and pretend to be 95% sure whatever it was has now stopped.
The Australian
Angry summer alarmists all choked up without reading fine print
Blame me for the red scribble and arrows (which didn’t appear in the paper).
 Red words and arrows added by me. Click to see the original.
Michael Asten juxtaposes a quote or two. The silliness speaks for itself when placed next to this graph:
John Connor, CEO of The Climate Institute, greeted the 2014 result with the comment “This data shows not only a series of alarming years but decades of warming to make an undisputable trend”
What does “indisputable” mean anymore? We’re not allowed to dispute it?
Asten reminds us that back in 2007 when Bob Carter mentioned the earliest warnings that the warming trends were not matching the predictions, he was scolded:
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9 out of 10 based on 109 ratings
How much does the BOM care about misleading Australians? Not much apparently, unless they are caught doing it. Everyone makes mistakes, but what matters is what they do to correct it.
The BOM claimed (and the ABC broadcast) that this Queensland drought is the worst in 80 years, but Ken Stewart showed with their own graphs that it was only the worst for 9 years. Stewart politely informed both groups two weeks ago. The ABC excused themselves immediately because they always believe the BOM no matter what it says and never ask any hard questions (it’s not like they are paid to make sure Australians get the right information is it? what do you expect for $1bn?). The BOM took five days to fob the error off even though the “mistake” was obvious against the BOM’s own graphs.
But yesterday Maurice Newman mentioned the mythical 80 year drought in The Australian, lo, suddenly the BOM feel the urge to send another email to Ken and the ABC.
Dear Ken,
Further to our correspondence we can confirm that media statements made to the ABC by a Bureau employee on 6 January 2014 did not accurately reflect the relative severity of the current Queensland rainfall deficiencies. Unfortunately the Bureau spokesperson misinterpreted some of the information. We have advised the ABC of the inaccuracy and asked them for an opportunity to update the story, if possible.
Regards,
Climate Analysis Section
Ken Stewart spent today doing their job and contacting other media outlets that the BOM should have.
The message ladies and gentlemen is that we ought send as many letters as we can bear to editors and journalists of all the major daily newspapers and commercial radio stations pointing out BOM mistakes. CC your letters to the BOM.
The next question then is whether the ABC takes the quietest road possible or issues a new story of equal prominence — in ABC Radio Country Hour, ABC TV 7.00 p.m. News, and the Queensland Country Life — pointing out the BOM spokesman gave the wrong message, that droughts have been worse in the past, and despite helpful people pointing this out to the BOM, they still took an extraordinary two weeks to correct it.
We await reports from Queensland.
If we surveyed the punters in two weeks time, how many ABC viewers would say “the hottest year” and “the worst drought”?
9.3 out of 10 based on 115 ratings
This is the tiniest of most preliminary studies on the health effects of wind turbines, but it made it to the front page of a major newspaper. It is really just laying the groundwork for setting up a proper study. But at the end of 2012, according to the Global Wind Energy Council, there were 225,000 wind turbines operating around the world. So the real question is why has it taken so long to do an eight week study on six people in three houses looking at the effects of very low frequency ultrasound?
The Greens and Labor Party are supposed to be concerned about the effect of industry on people and cuddly animals, so where was their angst? If wind turbines ran on uranium, or the turbines were erected in inner-city areas, would the Greens have been so quiet?
Pacific Hydro deserves credit for funding and cooperating with the study which took place at Cape Bridgewater in Victoria.
Turbines may well blow ill wind
Graham Lloyd, The Australian
PEOPLE living near wind farms face a greater risk of suffering health complaints caused by the low-frequency noise generated by turbines, a groundbreaking study has found.
The study by acoustics expert Steven Cooper is the first in the world in which a wind turbine operator had fully co-operated and turned wind turbines off completely during the testing.
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9.4 out of 10 based on 111 ratings
A wake up call from Maurice Newman. The gravy train of bigger and bigger government is grinding to its inevitable halt, and Greece is the destination the Western Express is headed for. Those who promised that big-government could solve everything have bought votes, while using schools and universities to train a generation to hate free market competition. Young people were raised to blame the system and demand the handout, rather than take responsibility. The soft-west has gone too far left. The weak right has rolled over and tries to be a mini-left, settling for being the team B of “progressivism”. Newman’s best line is that the conservatives apologize where they should demand apologies. So true.
To illustrate dismal standards in science and the media, Newman cites joannenova.com.au (thanks Maurice), and thousands more Australians find out a small part of the scandalous failure of academia (specifically, Lewandowsky at UWA) and the ABC. The stories he refers too are: “Lewandowsky peer reviewed study includes someone 32,757 years old” and the “ABC got it wrong, BOM not concerned with Australian public being misinformed“. Ken Stewart at Kenskingdom deserves credit for catching out the ABC and BOM. Readers, when you want to throw your shoe at the ABC (or BBC or CBC), find the quote, and send it in (likewise for Fairfax and CNN etc). It is worth writing to these organizations and journalists, if only to expose how pathetic their answers are. Have confidence, we are getting to them. They still believe they are pro-science and real journalists. It pains them every time we expose their anti-science philosophy and catch them pandering to false-god “experts”.
Would-be journalists don’t want to wear the Useful Idiot badge — a real journalist would hate to think they were mere puppets of corrupt officialdom and crony capitalism. It hurts for them to hear the truth. We need to focus not on the answers they get in interviews, but more so — the questions they didn’t ask. And we need to remind them — at every step — that the opposite of skeptical is gullible.
The Australian “The Left’s gravy train derailing “
Maurice Newman
IN the battle for ideas it is now clear the Left controls the commanding heights. In everything from the economy to sport, the prevailing direction is left. After decades of stereotyping, indoctrination and the clever use of language, Western voters have been conditioned to accept the beneficence of the state.
Politically this has set the stage for governments to see “market failure” in everything. It has become an excuse for an avalanche of regulations and regulators and allowed leftist intellectuals to incessantly bash the very essence of “capitalism”.
They have successfully implanted the notion that free market capitalism is synonymous with profiteering, greed, unequal wealth distribution and, the entrenchment of privilege which must be restrained.
Yet there is no competition commissioner to control the predatory actions of the state, or regulator to rein in reckless central bankers.
Voter acquiescence has been bought by both sides of politics, but conservatives everywhere have been politically outsmarted. They are apologetic when they should demand apologies.
Rather than be true to their values, they have too easily rolled over and allowed the Left to set the agenda on economics and social issues, incapable of arguing an internally consistent position. Quite often conservative policies are indistinguishable from their progressive counterparts.
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9.1 out of 10 based on 125 ratings
Either Will Steffen thinks humans didn’t exist five thousand years ago, or he hasn’t heard of the Holocene. The Herald Sun tells us the extraordinary news that:
“Humans are living in the hottest temperatures they have ever lived and I can guarantee this will only get worse.”
Will Steffen also says the climate is “complex”, and “impossible to entirely predict”. I guess that means his guarantee that it will get worse comes direct from God, since it’s not possible through science. I don’t know why Matthew Dunn, technology editor of the Herald Sun, didn’t ask more about that — obviously that would be big news.
Otherwise, nearly every proxy that’s ever been proxied suggests there were a lot of warmer times in the period 5,000 – 8,000 years ago. Ice cores say it was hotter in Greenland, barnacles, corals, sea worms, and “swash” tell us sea levels were something like 2 meters higher in stable West Australia* and nearly 1m higher in Hawaii and Polynesia, oceans were 2 degrees warmer around in Indonesia, and 6,000 boreholes sunk in the oceans all over the world show it was a global deal. Australian Aboriginals apparently struggled through a 1,500 year mega drought about 6,000 year ago (see McGowan). CO2 Science lists references from South-East Asia to the Sahara, from Antarctica to America. I am barely skimming the surface.
It was even warmer 120,000 years ago when Antarctica was over 2 degrees hotter, and seas were 3 -5 m higher and even more in some places. I’m pretty sure that homo sapiens was around then, and somehow they survived the heat without electricity, cars, hospitals or four-bedroom houses.
Here’s a few graphs of the scores I could use. Greenland has been warmer many times over the last 10,000 years*. The Roman warming of the European region was also fairly significant. Those Romans didn’t get by with togas for nothing.
 … In Western Australia — one of the oldest, most stable pieces of land in the world — sea levels have been falling for 7,000 years.
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9.1 out of 10 based on 105 ratings
I said the vaguest scientists in the world lie by omission, and it’s what they don’t say that gives them away. The “hottest ever” press release didn’t tell us how much hotter the hottest year supposedly was, nor how big the error bars were. David Rose of the Daily Mail pinned down Gavin Schmidt of NASA GISS to ask a few questions that bloggers and voters want answered but almost no other journalist seems to want to ask.
Finally…
Nasa climate scientists: We said 2014 was the warmest year on record… but we’re only 38% sure we were right
Nasa admits this means it is far from certain that 2014 set a record at all
Does that mean 97% of climate experts are 62% sure they are wrong?*
The thing with half-truths is that they generate a glorious fog, but it has no substance. Ask the spin-cloud of a couple of sensible questions and the narrative collapses. This is the kind of analysis that would have stopped the rot 25 years ago if most news outlets had investigative reporters instead of science communicators trained to “raise awareness”. (The media IS the problem). If there was a David-Rose-type in most major dailies, man-made global warming would never have got off the ground.
The claim made headlines around the world, but yesterday it emerged that GISS’s analysis – based on readings from more than 3,000 measuring stations worldwide – is subject to a margin of error. Nasa admits this means it is far from certain that 2014 set a record at all.
Yet the Nasa press release failed to mention this, as well as the fact that the alleged ‘record’ amounted to an increase over 2010, the previous ‘warmest year’, of just two-hundredths of a degree – or 0.02C.
The margin of error is about a tenth of a degree, so those error bars are 500% larger than the amount pushed in headlines all over the world. Gavin Schmidt of course, is horrified that millions of people may have been mislead:
GISS’s director Gavin Schmidt has now admitted Nasa thinks the likelihood that 2014 was the warmest year since 1880 is just 38 per cent. However, when asked by this newspaper whether he regretted that the news release did not mention this, he did not respond.
I’m sure he’s too busy contacting newspapers and MSNBC to make sure stories from NASA GISS are accurate and scientifically correct.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk
In the mood for sport? Turn the torch back on the journalists who were too gullible to ask a sensible question. Let’s start asking the ABC and BBC journalists why they didn’t ask “how much hotter was it” and “how big are those error bars”.
H/t to Colin, Gardy.
*And since we’re asking — what’s with the 38% — what are the error bars on that? 😉
9 out of 10 based on 137 ratings
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More beach holidays. Apologies to Northern Hemisphere readers. We’ve had three beach holidays in two weeks with various friends and relatives. January in Australia is tough. 😉
I love the colors of the Western Australian coast. The sky really is that intense blue, and the water is that clear. We fed stingrays at Hamelin Bay at sunset too. This is a seven year old boy hand-feeding a tame eagle ray which must have weighed twice as much as him. That one had no tail, but others did. Remarkable. Click to enlarge shots.
8.9 out of 10 based on 37 ratings
Guest post by Eric Worrall
How can we predict the climate, when we can’t even predict financial markets?
 US Subprime House Price Crash Financial markets are a high stakes battle between teams of skilled traders, armed with powerful computers. [In a perfect market] The factors that affect market prices are well known, and for mathematicians, surprisingly simple to describe. Yet with all this underlying simplicity, traders don’t attempt to predict the future, because they know from bitter experience that predicting the future is futile. Instead, they use their models to gain a deeper understanding of the present.
Say you are trading financial options. Options are a right to buy or sell an underlying commodity (gold, shares in a company, tons of beef, whatever) at a future point in time, for an agreed price. The exact rules vary in different places, but essentially – your option gives you the right to buy an ounce of gold in one month, say, for $1000.
If so, and the price of gold is $1,200 per ounce, then your option is worth $200, right?
Wrong. In one month, the price of gold might be $800, in which case your option is worthless – there is no point using the option to buy gold at $1,000, when you could simply buy it on the spot market for $800. Or in one month, the price of gold might be $1,400, in which case your option will be worth $400, double the $200 it would be worth if you exercised the option (activated the trade) at the current price of $1,200.
How do you price something based on a future price which you can’t foresee?
The answer is you try to estimate the likelihood of the price shifting significantly from its current value. You add an estimate of gold price volatility to your calculation, based on the current range of prices, how much the price of gold is jumping around in a day’s trade, versus the length of time left on the option (1 month).
Of course, there’s more to it that that. Instead of buying and holding the option, you could have put the money into a high interest bank account. So the interest you could have earned if you put the money into a savings account is part of the cost of owning the option – that has to be factored into the value of the option. And if you want to be really precise, you have to consider counterparty risk (the risk that the issuer of the option will go bust, and won’t honor the deal), market liquidity(whether there are enough buyers and sellers to ensure a “real” market, or whether the scarcity of market participants will allow big players to fix prices to maximise their profits at the expense of other participants), sovereign risk (the risk the government will step in and ruin your trade with hostile new laws), and the cost of making a trade (tax, market fees, your time, etc).
But I just said traders don’t use their models to predict the future, and isn’t what I described sounding an awful lot like predicting the future?
The point is, the model can’t tell you what the price of gold will be – it can only tell you what the price of gold might be, to give a range of outcomes with their probabilities as you see it.
So traders use their models to explore possibilities. To protect themselves from the $800 risk, they cover themselves by buying a complementary option – for example, they might buy the right to sell a large quantity of silver at $20 / ounce – the opposite kind of option to their right to buy gold option. The price of silver more or less tracks the price of gold, so buying a right to sell silver means that if the price of gold drops, rendering their gold option worthless, the price of silver will also most likely drop. If the trader gets the right deal when buying the silver option, the trader can still make a profit if the gold price (and the silver price) falls, by buying silver at a low price, and selling it at the locked in silver option price of $20. If the trader has done their job, in the event of a price drop, they will make enough profit from their silver trade to more than offset their loss on the now worthless gold option.
The skill of the trader is exploring the landscape of possibilities, to use the models to help discover paired complementary deals which can lock in a guaranteed profit, regardless of what happens to market prices.
Of course, real trading strategies are generally a lot more complicated than this simplistic example. With all the competing teams of highly skilled traders crawling over the possibility landscape all hours of the day or night, the opportunity for a profit from a deal that simple should disappear before it properly had a chance to manifest.
My point is, the models are not used to predict the future, they are used to explore the landscape of future possibilities, to discover ways to lock in guaranteed profits, and to provide alerts if the portfolio of options and other instruments has an unexpected weakness – to identify scenarios in which traders’ portfolios become exposed to a serious risk of loss, so they can patch the holes in their positions before they become a problem.
Nobody is daft enough in the financial world to believe they can predict the future. The models are only used to answer “what if” questions, to help close loopholes in their complex web of trades which might lead to dangerous losses.
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9.2 out of 10 based on 51 ratings
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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