This should end all the Pacific Island climate claims right here. A new study of over 700 islands for decades shows that even though seas are rising faster than any time in the last million years, somehow no islands with people on are shrinking. This means there are no climate change refugees from any vanishing island. Plus it’s more proof that highly adjusted satellite data is recording sea levels on some other planet.
Over the past decades, atoll islands exhibited no widespread sign of physical destabilization in the face of sea-level rise. A reanalysis of available data, which cover 30 Pacific and Indian Ocean atolls including 709 islands, reveals that no atoll lost land area and that 88.6% of islands were either stable or increased in area, while only 11.4% contracted.
Look how closely these researchers are tracking the shores. Below on Tuamoto, French Polynesia, scientists can tell you that islets 12 and 14 (see pic) have disappeared since 1962. So we can track roving blobs of sand about 20 to 30 meters across.
….
No habitable island, none, got smaller:
The researchers reckon that 10 hectares is about the smallest island you’d want to plonk a resort on, that’s about that is about ten Rugby fields. Conveniently for us, no island bigger than 10 hectares shrank despite the world adding two thousand coal fired plants and a billion cars.
It is noteworthy that no island larger than 10 ha decreased in size, making this value a relevant threshold to define atoll island areal stability. We therefore propose to use this threshold, first, to define the minimum island size required for human occupancy or exploitation, and second, to assess atoll and atoll countries and territories’ vulnerability to climate change. Using this threshold for future island development (e.g., resort island) would considerably limit the risk for new developments to be negatively affected by island areal and positional instability, on condition of also avoiding any human intervention that may alter island sediment budget (e.g., sediment extraction) and natural dynamics (e.g., obstruction of sediment transport and deposition by constructions)
See the graph. All the larger islands are staying the same size or growing.
Decadal change in island land area for 709 Pacific and Indian Ocean islands. Click to enlarge.
Coming next, panic that rising oceans are shrinking because islands are expanding. And if you can follow that, there is a job waiting for you at the UNEP.
Who are these environmental stars and global suckers?
The 16 countries with targets in national policies and laws that are compatible with their NDCs are:
Algeria, Canada, Costa Rica, Ethiopia,
Guatemala, Indonesia, Japan, FYR Macedonia,
Malaysia, Montenegro, Norway, Papua New Guinea,
Peru, Samoa, Singapore and Tonga.
“We found only six countries that have set economy-wide targets beyond 2030 in their NDCs – Iraq, Cameroon, Brunei, Armenia, Bhutan and Palestine. Only 16 countries plus the EU currently look beyond 2030 in their national laws, policies and directives…”
The committee writing the report seems to have a thing about “economy wide” targets probably because they are the most expensive, profligately wasteful and pointless schemes, like the Australian carbon tax which cost $5310 per ton of carbon reduced. Economy wide schemes punish sectors which are already efficient, don’t cut much carbon, but they do employ many friends of Big Government.
The report was done by ..”the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and the ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy, both at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the World Resources Institute.”
I don’t think they realize how useful this kind of report is for skeptics.
Nachmany, M. and Mangan, E. (2018) Aligning national and international climate targets, London School of Economics and Political Science. http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/publication/targets/
With boring regularity, when voters are asked to rank their choices, “clean” energy is not a top priority. Only 7% of Australians want the government to promote renewables ahead of other major issues. It’s the same old, same old for years, yet the media and both parties are locked in a death spiral trying to turn it into an election issue. Real people put living Standards above Virtue Signalling, says Alan Moran.
Essential Report Oct 2018: Rocketing into top place is the cost of living. Stuck in the dull middle is renewables.
Essential poll 2018. What Australian want the government to address. Click to enlarge.
Split voters into left and right, and remarkably they all want the same things. (So we’re all still human, though it says something about the type of questions asked.)
Conservative / liberal voters want to be able to afford stuff, stay alive, have a home:
Liberal voters put renewables at number 10 out of 13.
Essential poll 2018. What Australian want the government to address. Click to enlarge.
Labor voters want to be able to afford stuff too:
Even Labor voters are only putting renewables at number 6.
Essential poll 2018. What Australian want the government to address. Click to enlarge.
The polarising media makes out we are all so different, but it’s remarkable how closely the answers matched. Nearly the same order, nearly the same percentage. Conservatives spread their answers more (are less homogeneous). They care more about state debt and terrorism, but whatever.
The message to Conservatives for the 58th time is that they can drop the whole Paris thing, the media will go crazy, but the public won’t. Obviously it’s no accident that Abbott, Trump and Dean all won. As for the 17% of conservatives who want renewables, that’ll vanish the moment our nation starts a discussion about how expensive they are, and how pointless. Over to you Scott….
He’s in Perth Tuesday night. I’ve seen him speak before and he was excellent. I’ll be there. Tickets to Perth here.
“British Conservative Member of the European Parliament Dan Hannan explains why London will soon be closer to Perth than Brussels, and outlines historic opportunities ahead for West Australian entrepreneurs.” With introduction by Andrew Hastie MP.
Dan Hannan In Australia: Melbourneon Wednesday 31 October in conversation with John Roskam and Nick Cater.
David Evans speaks to Emmett at Resolving Reality radio on why he shifted to being a skeptic (4:15 mins), and on the current state of the climate debate and where climate modelers get their “implacable confidence” from (5:20). David discusses the impasse — the standoff. It’s possible that climate modelers can have the physics right but the model paths wrong.
Quite a bit of the interview is aimed at people new to this debate. Regular readers might enjoy more on the Sun’s role (22 minutes). And some of the history, like the rich pickings of working for the Gravy Train (32:15 minutes).
At 33:00 David discusses the audacious threat to national sovereignty and the near miss of 2009. Useful history to remind us of what is at stake. David goes on to discuss the systematic demonization of non-PC views — he argues that climate change was the test case for the newer more aggressive model of stamping out discussion in so many areas.
David’s research work continues, he prefers to keep a low profile and stay out of the “blood sport” online. I’m not going to put a date on it, original discovery doesn’t work to a timetable, but there is a big book coming, and since the last report of David’s work here, he has added several layers and spent time making sure he understands exactly how the establishment model works. (I say model, singular, because there is only one big overarching theory that bounds the GCM models.) His point about the impasse between skeptics and believers is new, as ultimately is his focus on unravelling the core reasons for the implacable faith that the modelers have in the GCMs which keep failing. We will be revisiting this, opening a new front in the climate debate when we are ready.
A 28 year old guy in British Columbia thought it had some message about climate change if he sealed himself in a primitive biodome with 200 plants. But the sun didn’t shine, the plants didn’t photosynthesize enough, and he “felt sluggish”. CO2 levels were a bit high so he had to abandon the experiment just 15 hours later — calling it “a huge success”. As you would, if you had no connection to actual hardship, or actual success.
The BBC thought this badly planned, unscientific stunt failure was newsworthy and lauded him his 15 seconds of fame and advertising for the cause. Proving that any kind of measurable achievement is irrelevant. If it promotes the religion, anything will do.
I challenge anyone to find a lamer stunt in the history of climate panic
A self-styled “whimsical scientist” who locked himself in an airtight dome with 200 plants to raise awareness of climate change has ended his experiment.
He thanked fans and described the experience as a “huge success”.
While still inside the dome, he explained his mission in a Twitter thread, writing: “#ClimateChange is real, we’re causing it, and it’s a real big deal.
Hmm. He doesn’t say what his “abort” value was in ppm.
“The messed up thing about my experiment is that some of my abort values (eg If CO2 is too high I escape) are just everyday experiences for many people on this planet. Everyone deserves clean air, but not everyone has it.”
So he pushed his body to withstand levels of CO2 that other people experience every day. Indeed “many” people. Give the man a medal.
It is hard to find a bar set lower than that. It might mean more if he had half a lung, or was really an axolotl.
Fake News Lesson: How to turn the views of a minority into National Headlines
Yesterday’s ABC headline tells the world that Australian company directors have started to “care” about climate change. What the ABC don’t mention is that only 17% of them actually ticked the box saying they think the Government should make “climate change” the top long term priority. While more directors were concerned about climate change than any other single issue, most directors thought other things were more important.
For every director who said the government should put climate change at number one, there were more than three who didn’t want that.
The Australian Institute of Directors surveys its 43,000 members every six months on lots of questions. In this round 1,252 members took part and answered something like 40 questions. Only 39% put “climate change” in the top five “long term” issues. So 61% of respondents didn’t think climate change even ranked in the top five issues facing the nation in the long run. Are they all skeptics?
The ABC also forgot to mention that in the short term, company directors wanted the government to fix Energy Policy.
Step 2: Frame this as a mass movement. Mention big numbers.
For the first time Australian company directors have nominated climate change as the number one issue they want the federal government to address in the long term, according to a survey of more than 1,200 company directors.
Step 3: Mention big numbers again. Then say the survey demonstrates something that was not even asked.
The Australian Institute of Company Directors’ (AICD) biannual Director Sentiment Index — based on a survey of 1,252 publicand private company directors undertaken between September 13 and 27 — shows directors are heeding warnings from regulators about the risks of climate change and the fact that they may, in future, be held liable for failing to act.
It’s handy if you can spook other company directors into the impression that lots of other directors are afraid of being sued.
Step 4: Interview someone who has a conflict of interest and don’t mention the conflict.
Regulators including the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) and the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) are among those that have spoken out about the threats of climate change and the risks to companies.
Dr Katherine Woodthorpe, chairman of start-up Fishburners and who until recently was a non-executive director on the board at Sirtex Medical, said company directors were not just being influenced by regulator warnings, but also a push from investors to act.
Imagine the outrage if Sky News interviewed the Chair of a coal plant and told you their former employment, but not their current one?
Given the amount of money poured into unreliable energy in this country it would be amazing if there weren’t 200 renewables directors or friends among the 43,000 members. Of those who answered questions — 3% work in the energy sector, 8% for a public sector/government body, and 34% for a non-profit entity.
Only 17% of directors said Climate was a top issue (for someone else to solve)
Directors could pick five issues, but 60% didn’t even put a number on “climate change”.
Click to enlarge. (People could rate 5 things, so the percentages add up to a lot more than 100%)
The top short term issue needing care is Energy Policy
If it served the ABC’s purpose, they could have headlined the story “Company Directors think Government top issue is Energy Policy”.
Then they could have interviewed directors who were moving their plants to get away from nightmare electricity prices. The whole story would have had an opposite meaning. Such is the power of The Editor. Why do we give this power to unaccountable non-independent bureaucrats?
Click to enlarge.
Australians are paying for Labor-Green advertising disguised as “independent” journalism.
Tired of the self-serving Fake News? If you can help support me, together we can push back. (Paypal, or direct).
The guest opens with near apocalyptic predictions:
JOSEPH STIGLITZ: If more and more of Australia are not liveable because of climate change, you’re not going to be better off.
You know, the future of the world, let alone the future of Australia really is at stake when we are talking about climate change.
These days, wild claims are just introductory wallpaper. Meh.
Who knew, the key scientific evidence was reviewed by economists.
The evidence is overwhelming and I was on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that reviewed the evidence back 1995, …
Which tells you everything you need to know about how rigorous the IPCC science reviews are.
But it would be OK if only he knew something about climate science, the IPCC or its predictions:
…and I’ve kept looking at the evidence and you know, the one mistake we made in 1995 was that we didn’t anticipate how fast things were going to change.
Indeed, things changed so fast the IPCC has spent the last twenty years downgrading its estimates of climate sensitivity and future warming:
Climate sensitivity keeps falling, Scaffetta 2017. Thanks to NoTricksZone.
This is not what “faster than expected” looks like
Excuses, Excuses — tomorrow will be sunny with weather variability?
Stiglitz: We didn’t fully anticipate some of the effects like the increase in weather variability, the hurricanes, the cyclones and it is I think, fundamentally short-sighted not, not to be thinking about this but over the long term, the real wealth of a country is based on the skills, the abilities, the innovation of the citizens and that is going to depend on the investments that you put in your people — not on coal, not on iron ore.
You know, I spent a lot of time in China. They are beginning to wake up to the dangers of coal. Air is not breathable, that’s the most concrete immediate effect but they too understand the dangers of climate change.
The Chinese do understand the dangers of climate change. They know it’s a scam.
So, I think there will be a global consensus on eliminating coal and that means it is all the more imperative for Australia to get off coal.
Emma Alberici skips the chance to discuss science or economics and asks him a softball psych question instead:
EMMA ALBERICI: I want to know how you explain the politicisation of climate change as an issue, given so many well regarded economists like yourself indeed — the Nobel Prize in economics has gone to William Norhaus this month, who has pioneered a framework for understanding how the economy and climate interact — and yet on the other side we have this politicisation of the issue such that if you want to reduce carbon emissions, certainly in this country, you’re a green leftie. And if you agree that it is all a bit of alarmist nonsense, then you’re really a true conservative.
She works for a tax-payer funded institute which ignores half the country and calls them names, but this ABC senior star can’t figure out why things are “politicized.”
The Nobel prize-winner doesn’t know either, but speculates anyway:
JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Yeah, I really, it is a little bit of a puzzle. You know, there are special interests who make a lot of money out of fossil fuel — coal, oil companies — and they have an economic interest to try to persuade people that its hokum, that it is a liberal conspiracy.
Scafetta et al., 2017“Since 2000 there has been a systematic tendency to find lower climate sensitivity values. The most recent studies suggest a transient climate response (TCR) of about 1.0 °C, an ECS less than 2.0 °C and an effective climate sensitivity (EfCS) in the neighborhood of 1.0 °C.”
A study on Swiss Glaciers shows that the fastest melting was in the 1860s and 1870s, long before the first coal fired power. (See that steep decline from 1850-70 in Part a in the graph below.) In Part b see the glaciers have been going back and forward in cycles that somehow have no correlation with human emissions.
Climate models can’t predict any of these turning points, don’t understand any of these cycles, but “doom is coming”.
Figure 8. (a) Cumulative glacier length changes for the four glaciers Bossons, Mer de Glace, Oberer (O-) Grindelwald and Unterer (U-) Grindelwald …); (b) glacier length change rate …(c )glacier length changes compared to surface air temperature anomalies for the summer … Panel (d) air temps and stratospheric aerosol optical depth (SAOD) (Click to enlarge and read the proper full caption).
In Part c (above) — glacier lengths correlate with temperatures. In part d the brown spikes are the Stratospheric Aerosol Optical Depth [SAOD] — meaning volcanic dust, black carbon, soot. These were bad years to head to the beach.
In terms of speed, note the lack of any spooky “unprecedented” retreat. The glaciers are shorter now, but the rate they are shortening is slower than in 1870.
Unlike CO2, volcanoes and solar activity do correlate with glacier length
See this longer graph — the red line estimate of summer temperature bottoms twice in 1600 and 1810 which also coincides with volcanic activity and solar minima.
It could get pretty expensive to control glacier length since we have to reduce the suns activity and probably set off some nukes in lieu of a handy volcano.
Click to enlarge. Figure 9. (a) black dots are glacier measurements. Grey columns are times of high volcanic aerosols. The red line is an estimate of European summer temperatures from tree rings. [BB means Biomass Burning if you click and read the proper caption.]
Long glaciers coincide with the solar minima and with volcanic forcing:
The flipping of Wentworth just marks a the morphing of the two major parties which started long ago.
The Labor Party now represents the rich and the welfare dependent. The Liberals represent the Deplorable worker and what’s left of the Middle Class and there aren’t many of those in the seat of Wentworth. Turnbull was the perfect fit for the seat as it transited from being a safe Conservative Seat to a safe Collectivist-Virtue-Signalling Seat. He was the Labor-guy badged as a Liberal. Kerryn Phelps is the “ideal” replacement — the Labor-Green candidate badged as an Independent. This made it easier for doctors-wives, lawyers and journalists to vote for an option which was essentially Labor-Green, but had the appearance of being “smarter” and above all the riff raff.
Kerryn Phelps essentially stands for a Get UP approved Labor Green Christmas Wish List: More renewable parasites, death to coal, pandering to collectivist UN committees, a ban on fossil fuel donations (but no ban for government cronies who take big-government funds and donate it to big-government parties.). She wants to restore funding to The ABC because $3m a day is not enough. Heck, they lost 5% a while back.
The vote in the wealthiest electorate in Australia is still underway, but whatever happens, it tells us nothing much about most other electorates. Should the national policy on energy change because of 1,500 voters in the wealthiest seat?
Labor calls for National Energy policy to be set by 1,500 voters in richest seat in Australia
Thus proving that the NEG was really a Labor Policy all along.
Polls show climate and energy policy was a key factor in voters turning their backs on the government in the blue-ribbon Sydney seat on Saturday and electing independent Kerryn Phelps.
The largest poll ever done in Australia was the 2013 election where the only party ever to run in Australia on a blood oath of “no carbon tax” won 90 seats and blitzed the opposition. What’s changed since then? Electricity prices have hit bleeding point, we have more unreliable energy than ever, and watching Australian black-outs has become an international sport.
Liberals could still win the next Federal Election but almost certainly won’t
The hottest two topics in the electorate are electricity prices and immigration. If the ScoMo team grew a spine they could simply copy the Abbott tested formula. It’d be even more popular now than it was then — see Brexit, Trump and Dean.
The Jellyfish-Liberals are trying to satisfy the centre of the climate debate but polls show there is no “centre” anymore. This is the graveyard where losing teams hunt for votes. The centre used to be the place where most people were, but in the artificially polarized climate debate it’s a vacant lot now. The undecideds split long ago into the skeptic camp or the gullible feedlot.
As long as Liberals pretend wind and solar are useful, they can’t defeat the fake claims that wind and solar are cheap. So they get consigned to be the crew that “cause” expensive electricity with policy uncertainty and because they don’t support more renewables. Jellyfish Liberals are called almost the same names they would be called if they were out-and-out “deniers” of the climate religion. Pandering to the namecallers is a losing game.
A by-election in Sydney’s eastern suburbs is no place to test the national temperature, any more than dipping your toe into a glass of chardonnay at the Bondi Trattoria can tell you if it’s warm enough for a swim.
Wentworth is a land removed from the daily struggles faced by other Australians, a place where rising electricity prices barely touch the hip-pocket nerve, where God’s own airconditioner blows gently off summer waters, and “action” on climate change, by which they mean “subsidies”, boosts the share portfolio.
Few Wentworth residents could tell you the price of petrol, just as few know the full horror of the word “commute”…
It is home to 210 surgeons but not a single animal slaughterer. If you live in Wentworth, your meat is boned elsewhere.
Wentworth is home to 731 of them [journalists], the third highest concentration in the country, beaten only by the neighbouring seats of Sydney (962) and Grayndler (837).
The Wentworth result shows people are sick of both big parties. But it tells us nothing about solving the energy crisis or changing the climate.
*Headline changed. It was “Labor calls for National Energy policy to be set by 1,500 voters in richest seat in Australia” but after watching the ABC repeat how “polls show” voters care about climate change, the more important message was the line about the 2013 election.
Australia has had the hottest temperatures for a thousand years (according to some). We’ve “shattered records” yet even so, at the peak of this hot era — six times as many Australians were felled by cold weather. Lord help us when the next ice-age comes.
A study on Australian deaths from 2000-2009 found that heat, cold, and temperature variability killed 42,000 people which was about 6% of all deaths. Of those temperature related deaths 60% were due to the cold. 28% were due to sudden changes in temperature. A mere 10% were due to heat.
Greenhouse gases should help prevent 90% of those deaths (they reduce temperature variability too). Looks like we need to burn more coal. For the sake of the vulnerable and needy.
When are our government and our government broadcaster going to start dealing with real problems, not fake ones?
Attributable fraction of deaths: Heat, cold and temperature variability together resulted in 42,414 deaths during the study period, accounting for about 6.0% of all deaths. Most of attributable deaths were due to cold (61.4%), and noticeably, contribution from temperature variability (28.0%) was greater than that from heat (10.6%).
Don’t assume we just got lucky. According to an ABC heatwave panic story, deaths from heatwaves during this 2000-2009 decade were among the worst.
…
The ABC warns us repeatedly of the dangers of a few hot days
Heatwaves are Australia’s deadliest natural hazard, but a recent survey has found that many vulnerable people do not have plans to cope with extreme heat.
The Met Office, Hadley Centre response to #DataGate implied they do quality control and that leaves the impression that they might filter out the frozen tropical islands and other freak data:
We perform automated quality checks on the ocean data and monthly updates to the land data are subjected to a computer assisted manual quality control process.
I asked John to expand on what Hadley means. He replies that the quality control they do is very minimal, obviously inadequate, and these errors definitely survive the process and get into the HadCRUT4 dataset. Bear in mind a lot of the problems begin with the national meteorological services which supply the shoddy data, but then Hadley seems pretty happy to accept these mistakes. (Hey, it’s not like Life on Earth depends on us understanding our climate. :- ) )
As far as long term trends go, the site-move-adjustments are the real problem and create an artificial warming trend. On the other hand, the frozen tropical islands tells us how competent the “Experts” really are (not a lot) and how much they care about understanding what our climate really was (not at all). That said, we don’t know what effect the freak outliers have on the big trends, but then, neither do the experts.
Below, John drills into those details which show just how pathetically neglected the dataset is. For data-heads — the freak outliers affect the standard deviation and calculation of the normal range. This is a pretty technical issue here “for the record” and to advance the discussion of what Hadley neglected data means. For what it’s worth, McLean can manually copy the process that is documented as the right way to create the HadCRUT4 set, and he can produce the same figures they get. That suggests he knows what he’s doing. — Jo
__________________________________________
Leaving outliers in the key years means that Hadley won’t filter out real outliers in other years.
There are only 12 men who have walked on the moon, and only 4 are still living. Selected from the best of the best at the time, with impeccable reputations, why would any of them speak out and risk being called names like deniers of “basic physics”. Yet three of the four have: Harrison Schmitt, Charles Duke, Buzz Aldrin. (Plus others like Australian born Phil Chapman (support crew, Apollo 14) and Walter Cunningham (Apollo 7).
Maybe because they hate watching as the good name of NASA gets subverted into a pagan weather changing cult?
And because these are guys comfortable with risk.
The NASA space program was once one of mankind’s greatest scientific and engineering achievements. In 2012 49 former NASA staff including astronauts, directors of shuttle programs, flight operations, and spacecraft maintenance, wrote to NASA warning that GISS (Goddard Institute for Space Studies) was risking NASA’s reputation by making unproven remarks and ignoring empirical evidence.
Harrison has been a vocal skeptic now for at least nine years. So far the ABC has not asked him why, or anything at all on the topic. But then, he’s only a PhD in Geology, what would he know? If he had a degree in international relations and journalism, or law, he could tell us what the climate is going to do all the time.
Schmitt, Duke, Chapman, Cunningham and Aldrin are only a phone call away from our national broadcaster and the ABC gets $3m a day to cover the bill. How many years will it take for them to get curious enough to ask “why”?
If they were climate believers, how many times would we have heard about it?
The New York Times’ Nicholas St. Fleur addressed the elephant in the room with an assist from science writer Betsy Mason. Here’s how the exchange went:
St. Fleur: “In 2009, we wrote a story called ‘Vocal Minority Insists It Was All Smoke and Mirrors,’ where we quoted you, Dr. Schmitt. The story was basically about people who think the moon landing was faked, and here’s someone who’s actually been there and walked on the moon. You were saying that ‘if people decide they’re going to deny the facts of history and the facts of science and technology, there’s not much you can do with them. … For most of them, I just feel sorry that we failed in their education.’
“I’m wondering if you see any irony in your remarks there and your views on climate change, as one of the leading climate change deniers, when there was a huge report that just came out last week [talking about] the risk and what is going to happen … as soon as 2040. I’d love to know if you see any irony in your views on people who denied man walking on the moon vs. your views on climate change.”
Schmitt: “I see no irony at all. I’m a geologist. I know the Earth is not nearly as fragile as we tend to think it is. It has gone through climate change, it is going through climate change at the present time. The only question is, is there any evidence that human beings are causing that change?”
Chorus from the audience: “Yes!”
Schmitt: “Right now, in my profession, there is no evidence. There are models. But models of very, very complex natural systems are often wrong. The observations that we make as geologists, and observational climatologists, do not show any evidence that human beings are causing this. Now, there is a whole bunch of unknowns. We don’t know how much CO2, for example, is being released by the Southern Oceans as the result of natural climate change that’s been going on now since the last ice age.
“The rate of temperature increase on the surface of the Earth and in the troposphere is about the same over this period of time, particularly since the Little Ice Age, which was not caused by human beings. Nor was the Medieval Warm Period, preceding that, caused by human beings. So that’s the only skepticism I have: What is the cause of climate change?
Ponder the irony — MediaWatch is meant to be a media auditor, but it starts from the assumption that every government run collective is 100% accurate (at least on climate change). And unaudited UN committees are infallible too. Indeed newspapers have a duty to repeat what these committees say without questioning them. Host Paul Barry actually uses the word duty.
Once upon a time, the duty of investigative reporters was to to investigate, now their job is to be glorified marketing hacks advertising the latest government scheme to change the weather. What could possibly go wrong?
How about if governments set up all their institutes to find problems with CO2 and asked none of them to audit the others? What if whole government departments were tasked to slay the carbon dragon, and while exactly no groups anywhere were funded to find out if the sun controlled the climate instead? Using the MediaWatch Wand of Truth, only government scientists can criticize government scientists (and only then for five minutes until their uni trawls through their emails and sacks them). Thus and verily IPCC scientists should be obeyed.
MediaWatch marvels that the Australian Newscorp media can’t be bothered repeating the same overdone fake scare campaign for the 20th time. Could it be that, unlike the ABC, they can’t afford to bore their audience with a teachy-preachy zombie hypothesis?
Let’s vote for our laws of science then?
MediaWatch think science is done by counting papers and government paid scientists. After $100 billion in science funding it’s not hard to come up with 91 supportive scientists who haven’t been sacked yet.
So is McLean to be believed ahead of 91 leading experts and 6,000 peer reviewed scientific papers,…
On the other hand, there are 30,000 independent scientists, thousands of papers, millions of radiosondes and 4.5 billion years of history that show the IPCC is wrong. Skeptics include people with Nobel Prizes in physics, and men who walked on the moon. If Barry had done some investigating he would know that, and he could’ve phoned Ivar Giavar instead of giving the Union of Concerned Nobody’s time to discuss something that happened six years ago. Without any government funding, skeptics outrank and outnumber believers, but we don’t pretend that means something scientific because we know what science is.
Leaving no stone-age-trick unturned, MediaWatch are not just using ad homs, but inconsistent and cherry picked ad homs supported by strawmen and argument by authority. That’s what you get with Big Government funding. Stacked fallacies.
The IPCC demands for cash rest on freak data, empty fields, Fahrenheit temps recorded as Celsius, mistakes in longitude and latitude, brutal adjustments and even spelling errors. — says Jo Nova
Presumably, the MediaWatch team thought this quote looks bad for skeptics. Keep it coming, thinks Jo. Anyone watching with half a brain would notice that these mistakes sound detailed and not good, and that MediaWatch couldn’t find anyone to say that that these errors weren’t there. The meteorology experts got Fahrenheit mixed up with Celsius, can’t spell, and got the long-and-lat wrong? But this is OK because Steven Sherwood, UNSW, says we know about the problems already:
“turns up little if anything new, seems specifically motivated to discredit global warming…
Which only makes us wonder, if they knew — why didn’t they fix it? Don’t expect a government funded audit group to ask a government funded institute. Hadley gets £226 million a year to leave errors intact for 40 years but that’s OK according to MediaWatch. The real failing here is that some people question it. How dare they?
MediaWatch fooled by Hadley bait and switch
McLean found 70 problems, but according to Paul Barry, this is neutralized, because the dataset has 7 million datapoints. Nevermind that problems like site moves and quality control can apply to millions of points. One number is big and the other small and who cares about the units. That’s about as advanced as ABC investigation goes. Apples are oranges and the team with the most oranges gets $446 million to stop a problem that doesn’t exist or something like that…
Being functionally innumerate is practically a part of the ABC job description these days.
Would you like a character attack with that?
The MediaWatch strategy is and has long been essentially selective “Ad Hom” — they attack John McLean for something he said 7 years ago on a different topic. It’s the pagan Ad Hom Rule of Reasoning: if anyone gets any prediction wrong ever, then everything they say after that is automatically also wrong. By that reasoning the IPCC is toast. Climate models have failed for 24 years in a row on rain, humidity, clouds, Antarctica, the upper troposphere and global trends, but John McLean got one prediction wrong about the temperature of 2011, and therefore he can’t be trusted. Shall we talk about the time the Met Office predicted a BBQ summer and got torrential rain?
To sum up the MediaWatch analysis, two thousand Hadley employees rely on frozen tropical islands and junk data but we already knew about that apparently, which makes any problem OK. They junk-data-guys predict global doom and their predictions are right because McLean was wrong on a different topic 7 years ago and his audit was supervised by a man who was sacked and dedicated to one who said the IPCC was a farce? (Vale Bob Carter).
If only McLean had dedicated his audit to Kevin Rudd.
Beat up those Strawmen
To give it a wash of “sciencey” authority, they bring in some experts like Steven Sherwood to blandly declare McLean is wrong without showing any sign that Sherwood has even read the blog posts on it, let alone looked at McLean’s 135 page audit. After dismissing the findings as old news, he discusses something entirely different and waffles about the laws of physics.
“…its naive claims of alternative causes of global warming do not consider the relevant laws of physics and do not make sense.”
Which Law of Physics would that be? The Second Law of Data Collection? Conservation of Thermometer Units?
“Regardless of whether the PhD thesis work has any merit, the claims that this falsifies IPCC findings is wrong.”
Abram doesn’t seem to realize that the IPCC findings rely on climate models which in turn are trained on the Hadley data. If Hadley exaggerates the warming, so will the models. But then it’s not like she’s a climate expert... oh wait.
…the long term increase in global temperature is unequivocal. This is backed up by other globally recognised datasets all of which are run independently and find very similar warming.
They might be run independently, but they’re all dependent on BigGovernment. As I said yesterday:
They claim they are backed up by other datasets. but all the worlds temperature sets are juggling the same pool of measurements. If the shonky site-move adjustments start with national met bureaus, then get sent out around the world, all the global datasets combine the same mistakes and make similar overestimations.
Look who’s making a conspiracy theory…
News corp treats climate science and the threat to our planet with contempt, why is it so, presumably because Rupert Murdoch is a non-believer.
Naturally, the doubts of thousands of journalists are not because the IPCC keeps getting things wrong, or that climate change causes everything under the sun except “normal weather”, or that we’re perpetually tripping over tipping points, and it’s the last chance to save the world, again. Apparently, thousands of journalists and editors don’t obey the Met Bureau because they obey Rupert Murdoch instead. It’s all projection of the ABC’s failings. Maybe thousands of journalists just think for themselves.
Last week we exposed absurd errors, brutal adjustments and an almost complete lack of quality control (was there any at all?) in the key HadCRUT4 data. The IPCC’s favorite set is maintained (I’m feeling generous) by the Met Office Hadley Centre and the Uni of East Anglia’s CRU in the UK.
Finally the Hadley Met Centre team have replied to Graham Lloyd regarding John McLean’s audit. They don’t confirm or discount any of his new claims specifically. But they acknowledge his previous notifications were useful in 2016, and promise “any errors will be fixed in the next update.” That’s nice to know, but begs the question of why a PhD student working from home can find mistakes that the £226 million institute with 2,100 employees could not.
They don’t mention the killer issue of the adjustments for site-moves at all — that’s the cumulative cooling of the oldest records to compensate for buildings that probably weren’t built there ’til decades later.
Otherwise this is the usual PR fog — a few outliers don’t change the trend, the world is warming, and other datasets show “similar trends“. The elephant in the kitchen is the site move adjustments which do change the trend which they didn’t mention.
..
And while the absurd outliers may not change the trend (we don’t know yet) the message from frozen tropical islands is terrible. These bizarre mistakes are like glowing hazard signs that the dataset is neglected, decaying, essentially junk. What else might be wrong? How do we reconcile the experts urgent insistence that climate change is the greatest threat to life on Earth but it’s not important enough to bother checking the data? We must pay trillions, turn vegetarian, and live in cold rooms, but the actual historic measurements are irrelevant. Were some numbers left in Fahrenheit for 40 years? Nevermind.
They claim that automated quality control checks are done, as are manual checks, but we are still wondering what that means when they haven’t even done a spelling check and nor bothered to filter out the freak outliers which are hotter than the hottest day on Earth. These kinds of checks are something that a 12 year old geek could write the code for.
The Met Office protests that the database includes “7 million points”, but then, they do have a supercomputer that can do 16,000 trillion calculations every second. The ten-nanosecond-test for the new World Record Temperature would have fished out the silliest mistakes, some of which have been there for decades.
They claim they are backed up by other datasets. but all the worlds temperature sets are juggling the same pool of measurements. If the shonky site-move adjustments start with national met bureaus, then get sent out around the world, all the global datasets combine the same mistakes and make similar overestimations.
Britain’s Met Office has welcomed an audit from Australian researcher John McLean that claims to have identified serious errors in its HadCRUT global temperature record.
“Any actual errors identified will be dealt with in the next major update.’’
The Met Office said automated quality checks were performed on the ocean data and monthly updates to the land data were subjected to a computer assisted manual quality control process.
“The HadCRUT dataset includes comprehensive uncertainty estimates in its estimates of global temperature,” the Met Office spokesman said.
“We previously acknowledged receipt of Dr John McLean’s 2016 report to us which dealt with the format of some ocean data files.
“We corrected the errors he then identified to us,” the Met Office spokesman said.
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