Australia considers keeping some industry, mining, lights…
In a radical move, an Australian PM stands up for Australia (somewhat).
Finally, for the first time since Tony Abbott was PM we see Australia not rushing to adopt everything a foreign unaudited committee tells us. The IPCC has overreached — the economic neophytes and b-grade scientists are calling for the fantasy wipe-out of Australia’s main source of electricity, one of our top two export industries and a 100% write off of a resource that could last for the next 300+ years.
This appears to be a government wide policy — not only Morrison, but the Treasurer, and Environment minister, all in agreement. It’s a good but minor sign. There would have been a mutiny if the conservatives kowtowed to the UN.
We still have an obscene 26-28% target for the reduction of CO2. (And we still have the UN and anti-Australian ABC). But at least, no more “nonsense” money poured into climate conferences and “that big climate fund”. We live in hope.
Scott Morrison has rejected a rapid global phase-out of coal-fired power and declared his government will not be bound by a landmark climate study, amid concern its blueprint for curbing temperature rises would see the “lights go out on the east coast of Australia”.
The Treasurer:
The Morrison government yesterday welcomed the report but stood by coal-fired power generation and defended Australia’s record in meeting its international emissions reduction targets.
“If we take coal out of our energy system, the lights will go out on the east coast of Australia — it’s as simple as that,” Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said.
No more Big Climate Fund gifts that work directly against Australia’s interests?
“We are not held to any of them at all, and nor are we bound to go and tip money into that big climate fund,” Mr Morrison told 2GB radio.
Since when were “climate scientists” the go-to experts for national energy policy?
Federal Environment Minister Melissa Price has argued some of the world’s leading climate scientists are “drawing a long bow” in calling for an end to coal power in a bid to limit global warming.
Speaking on the ABC’s AM program in her first broadcast interview since taking up the role, Ms Price argued that: “Coal does form a very important part of the Australian energy mix”.
“We make no apology for the fact that our focus at the moment is getting electricity prices down,” she said.
The Worlds Greatest Patsy may have a backbone?
It’s only a small one. Instead of just saying “it’s a long bow”, we should point out we are doing the world a favor. The CO2 emissions from Australian coal are a free gift to the world, increasing crop yields, reclaiming deserts, and adding to forest biomass. “Burn coal and feed the starving masses.”
Australia should be coal’s biggest advocate. Most years we are the world’s largest exporter of coal.[2] Australia contributes fully one third of the entire global coal export trade. Coal also makes up 3% of our entire GDP, employs near 50,000 people, is one of our top two exports, and brought in $54 billion dollars last year.[3]
The IPCC have gone full apocalyptic: “Coral reefs would decline by 70 to 90 per centwith warming of 1.5°C…”And this catastrophic prophesy will unfold sometime around 2040. (See the graph).
This news will come as a shock to corals on the Great Barrier Reef which are obliviously living across a range of 2,000 kilometers and a span of five degrees Celsius from 27 to 32°C. But these are magic numbers apparently, and half a degree hotter (which is all we are talking about) it will be 27.5 to 32.5°C which is numerology hell where baby corals go to die.
You and I might think that corals might just emigrate since they shed sperm and eggs in mass spawning events visible from space and have 112 sites known to reseed all damaged areas. But what would we know?
Corals survived the rock that killed the dinosaurs. They survived Toba, the super volcano that left a crater 100km long. Corals survived a 125m sea level rise at the end of the last ice age. And they survived the ice age — and the fifteen before it. They also survived the super cyclones that have been hitting the coast of Queensland for the last 5,000 years and there is no sign that storms are getting worse. (see Nott 2001 and Hayne 2001.)Who knows what handy genes corals carry after 200 million years of climate change?
University of New South Wales climate scientist Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick says “virtually all” coral reefs would start dying off if global temperatures increased by 2C. — The Australian
…whereas more than 99 per cent would be lost with 2C.”
However, as the seas return to where they have been scores of times before, apparently corals will be wiped out, just like they never have been.
…
Corals have been around through all this:
We are worried about a half a degree…
,,,
Note that these are polar temperatures on the graph. But that’s the thing, if tropical temperatures had this kind of volatility, how could corals have made it this far? Instead, because the tropics have their own evaporative air conditioner they don’t get too hot, and as long as we are not in a Snowball Earth scenario, they don’t get too cold either. Water evaporates quickly above 30C.
So the tropics expands and shrinks as the climate changes but it doesn’t go away, and nor have corals.
Things the ABC BBC and CBC won’t tell you about coral reefs:
Lewis, S.E., et al., Post-glacial sea-level changes around the Australian margin: a review, Quaternary Science Reviews (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2012.09.006 [abstract] (paywalled).
Hayne, M. and Chappell, J. (2001) Cyclone frequency during the last 5000 years at Curacoa Island, north Queensland, Australia. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology168: 207-219. [Abstract] [Discussion Hayne and Chappell (2001) ]
The fate of the planet is at stake, but the key temperature data set used by climate models contains more than 70 different sorts of problems. Trillions of dollars have been spent because of predictions based on this data – yet even the most baby-basic quality control checks have not been done.
Thanks to Dr John McLean, we see how 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.
Why. Why. Why wasn’t this done years ago?
So much for that facade. How can people who care about the climate be so sloppy and amateur with the data?
There are cases of tropical islands recording a monthly average of zero degrees — this is the mean of the daily highs and lows for the month. A spot in Romania spent one whole month averaging minus 45 degrees. One site in Colombia recorded three months of over 80 degrees C. That is so incredibly hot that even the minimums there were probably hotter than the hottest day on Earth. In some cases boats on dry land seemingly recorded ocean temperatures from as far as 100km inland The only explanation that could make sense is that Fahrenheit temperatures were mistaken for Celsius, and for the next seventy years at the CRUno one noticed.
Dr McLean audited the HadCrut4 global data from 1850 onwards for his PhD thesis, and then continued it on afterwards til it was complete:
“I was aghast to find that nothing was done to remove absurd values… the whole approach to the dataset’s creation is careless and amateur, about the standard of a first-year university student.”
– John McLean
His supervisor was Peter Ridd, famously sacked for saying that “the science was not being checked, tested or replicated” and for suggesting we might not be able to trust our institutions
Data is incredibly, brazenly, sparse
The Hadley Met Centre team have not even analyzed this data with a tool as serious as a spell checker.
For two years the entire Southern Hemisphere temperature was estimated from one sole land-based site in Indonesia and some ship data. We didn’t get 50% global coverage until 1906. We didn’t consistently get 50% Southern Hemisphere coverage until about 1950.
McLean’s findings show there is almost no quality control on this crucial data. The Hadley Met Centre team have not even analyzed this data with a tool as serious as a spell checker. Countries include “Venezuala”,” Hawaai”, and the “Republic of K” (also known as South Korea). One country is “Unknown” while other countries are not even countries – like “Alaska”.
The real fault of the modern day institutes is not so much the lack of historic data, but for the way they “sell” the trends and records as if they are highly certain and meaningful.
The HadCRUT4 dataset is a joint production of the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre and the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia.
The CRU data covers 10,295 stations, but 2693 – more than a quarter – don’t meet the criteria for inclusion described in Jones et al 2012, which is considered to the best description of what should and shouldn’t be included.
It is impossible to know exactly which sites are included in the final temperature analysis, and whether a site’s records have been adjusted. (If only we could do our tax returns like this?)
The sub-parts of the datasets contradict each other. The land set and the sea set should combine up to be the global set, but they don’t always match. Which one is right?
“It seems like neither organization properly checked the land or sea temperature data before using it in the HadCRUT4 dataset. If it had been checked then the CRU might have queried the more obvious errors in data supplied by different countries. The Hadley Centre might also have found some of the inconsistencies in the sea surface temperature data, along with errors that it created itself when it copied data from the hand-written logs of some Royal Navy ships.”
— John McLean
Cooling the past one hundred years later?
In probably the worst systematic error, the past is rewritten in an attempt to correct for site moves. While some corrections are necessary, these adjustments are brutally sweeping. Thermometers do need to move, but corrections don’t have to treat old sites as if they were always surrounded by concrete and bricks.
New original sites are usually placed in good open sites. As the site “ages” buildings and roads appear nearby, and sometimes air conditioners, all artificially warming the site. So a replacement thermometer is opened in an open location nearby. Usually each separate national meteorology centre compares both sites for a while and figures out the temperature difference between them. Then they adjust the readings from the old locations down to match the new ones. The problem is that the algorithms also slice right back through the decades cooling all the older original readings – even readings that were probably taken when the site was just a paddock. In this way the historic past is rewritten to be colder than it really was, making recent warming look faster than it really was. Thousands of men and women trudged through snow, rain and mud to take temperatures that a computer “corrected” a century later.
In theory, a thermometer in a paddock in 1860 should be comparable to a thermometer in a paddock in 1980. But the experts deem the older one must be reading too high because someone may have built a concrete tarmac next to it forty oreighty years later. This systematic error, just by itself, creates a warming trend from nothing, step-change by step-change.
Worse, the adjustments are cumulative. The oldest data may be reduced with every step correction for site moves. Ken Stewart found some adjustments to old historic data in Australia wipe as much as 2C off the earliest temperatures. We’ve only had “theoretically” 0.9C of warming this century.
While each national bureau supplies the “preadjusted” data. The Hadley Centre is accepting them. Does it check? Does it care?
No audits, no checks, who cares?
As far as we can tell this key data has never been audited before. (What kind of audit would leave in these blatant errors?) Company finances get audited regularly but when global projections and billions of dollars are on the table climate scientists don’t care whether the data has undergone basic quality-control checks, or is consistent or even makes sense.
Vast areas of non-existent measurements
In May 1861 the global coverage, according to the grid-system method that HadCRUT4 uses, was 12%. That means that no data was reported from almost 90% of the Earth’s surface. Despite this it’s said to be a “global average”. That makes no sense at all. The global average temperature anomaly is calculated from data that at times covers as little as 12.2% of the Earth’s surface”, he says. “Until 1906 global coverage was less than 50% and coverage didn’t hit 75% until 1956. That’s a lot of the Earth’s surface for which we have no data.” – John McLean
Real thermometer data is ignored
In 1850 and 1851 the official data for the Southern Hemisphere only includes one sole thermometer in Indonesia and some random boats. (At the time, the ship data covers about 15% of the oceans in the southern half of the globe, and even the word “covers” may mean as little as one measurement in a month in a grid cell, though it is usually more.) Sometimes there is data that could be used, but isn’t. This is partly the choice of all the separate national meteorology organisations who may not send in any data to Hadley. But neither do the Hadley staff appear to be bothered that data is so sparse or that there might be thermometer measurements that would be better than nothing.
How many heatwaves did they miss? For example, on the 6th of February, 1851, newspaper archives show temperatures in the shade hit 117F in Melbourne (that’s 47C), 115 in Warnambool, and 114 in Geelong. That was the day of the Black Thursday MegaFire. The Australian BOM argues that these were not standard officially sited thermometers, but compared to inland boats, frozen Caribbean islands and 80 degree months in Colombia, surely actual data is more useful than estimates from thermometers 5,000 to 10,000km away? Seems to me multiple corroborated unofficial thermometers in Melbourne might be more useful than one official lone thermometer in Indonesia.
While the Hadley dataset is not explicitly estimating the temperature in Melbourne in 1850 per se, they are estimating “the Southern Hemisphere” and “The Globe” and Melbourne is a part of that. By default, there must be some assumptions and guesstimates to fill in what is missing.
How well would the Indonesian thermometer and some ship data correlate with temperatures in Tasmania, Peru, or Botswana? Would it be “more accurate” than an actual thermometer, albeit in the shade but not in a Stevenson screen? You and I might think so, but we’re not “the experts”.
The 135-page audit with more than 70 findings is available for $8 from Robert Boyle Publishing. You can help support months of work that should have been done by official agencies years ago.
McLean’s report could scarcely have come at a more embarrassing time for the IPCC. On Monday, it will release its 2018 Summary for Policy Makers claiming that the global warming crisis is more urgent than ever. But what McLean’s audit strongly suggests is that these claims are based on data that simply cannot be trusted.
–read it all.
___________________________
Main points:
The Hadley data is one of the most cited, most important databases for climate modeling, and thus for policies involving billions of dollars.
McLean found freakishly improbable data, and systematic adjustment errors , large gaps where there is no data, location errors, Fahrenheit temperatures reported as Celsius, and spelling errors.
Almost no quality control checks have been done: outliers that are obvious mistakes have not been corrected – one town in Colombia spent three months in 1978 at an average daily temperature of over 80 degrees C. One town in Romania stepped out from summer in 1953 straight into a month of Spring at minus 46°C. These are supposedly “average” temperatures for a full month at a time. St Kitts, a Caribbean island, was recorded at 0°C for a whole month, and twice!
Temperatures for the entire Southern Hemisphere in 1850 and for the next three years are calculated from just one site in Indonesia and some random ships.
Sea surface temperatures represent 70% of the Earth’s surface, but some measurements come from ships which are logged at locations 100km inland. Others are in harbors which are hardly representative of the open ocean.
When a thermometer is relocated to a new site, the adjustment assumes that the old site was always built up and “heated” by concrete and buildings. In reality, the artificial warming probably crept in slowly. By correcting for buildings that likely didn’t exist in 1880, old records are artificially cooled. Adjustments for a few site changes can create a whole century of artificial warming trends.
Gory details of the worst outliers
For April, June and July of 1978 Apto Uto (Colombia, ID:800890) had an average monthly temperature of 81.5°C, 83.4°C and 83.4°C respectively.
The monthly mean temperature in September 1953 at Paltinis, Romania is reported as -46.4 °C (in other years the September average was about 11.5°C).
At Golden Rock Airport, on the island of St Kitts in the Caribbean, mean monthly temperatures for December in 1981 and 1984 are reported as 0.0°C. But from 1971 to 1990 the average in all the other years was 26.0°C.
All the info later on Sunday Australia time, first thing in the morning for most of the world. Just in time for the IPCC report Monday. Do come back. :- )
It’s not often we see a report that turns things on their head quite like this.
Wind turbines may cause more local warming than global cooling in the next century.
Photo: Jo Nova
If the US were to install a lot of turbines, Wind power could warm the United States by 0.24 degrees Celsius instead of cooling it, because wind turbines “redistribute heat” in the atmosphere. They mix the surface layers. (0.24C would be equivalent to two decades of recent warming.) The largest effect is at night where wind plants can warm the local area by 1.5C.
At least 10 previous studies have now observed local warming caused by US wind farms. Keith and Miller compared their simulated warming to observations and found rough consistency between the data and model.
Major downer. The power density of wind energy is up to *100 times* less than predicted.
The new research suggests we can’t put too many turbines to close together or the whole group become far less efficient. That means we need 5 – 20 times as much land as previously thought (at least as thought by academics). Shame the US built 57,000 wind towers before they realized.
The power density of wind is just too low, and there’s an effect where the more we construct the worse it gets. A large wind shadow follows wind turbines, reducing the output from other turbines downstream. The larger the area of the wind plants, the worse their performance — the energy per meter squared falls by 75% as wind farms increase from 15km2 up to 150km2.
Wind is worse than coal for the environment in the next ten years?
Wind farms may be worse than coal for first ten years of operation, and increasing local warming for the first one hundred! But hey, people one thousand years from now might be grateful.
“If your perspective is the next 10 years, wind power actually has — in some respects — more climate impact than coal or gas. If your perspective is the next thousand years, then wind power has enormously less climatic impact than coal or gas.” — David Keith
What’s the discount rate on one thousand year time-frames?
Hmm. Wind power warms local air, and cools globe, maybe, possibly
On the one hand theoretically wind turbines cool the world, on the other hand, they warm the local area. Which effect wins?
We haven’t measured the outcome of a million wind turbines on planetary temperature. What if the assumptions of the effect of CO2 are wrong by a factor of a hundred too? Like, say, if the hot spot is missing, the rainfall estimates are skillless and the cloud cover predictions are voodoo?
That’d mean we were paying all this money to install equipment that tried to stop heatwaves by increasing local warmth…
If the USA builds lots more wind turbines it will have to wait a hundred years for any cooling effect? | Click to enlarge
Seriously. Wind won’t be “reducing “temperatures” for one hundred years?
Long after todays wind turbines have died, their great-grandchildren-turbines will amount to something.
The Harvard researchers found that the warming effect of wind turbines in the continental U.S. was actually larger than the effect of reduced emissions for the first century of its operation. This is because the warming effect is predominantly local to the wind farm, while greenhouse gas concentrations must be reduced globally before the benefits are realized.
Luckily CO2 emissions are irrelevant and mild warmth is probably beneficial. Who knows, if the sun cools us, wind farms might have some useful outcome, just not the one anyone expected. Can they keep the frost off crops?
Kiss goodbye to land, wilderness, quiet farms
The Harvard Gazette tells it as nicely as it can with a heavy seasoning of pro-renewables cliches. But the real implications are unsaid. Tucked far into the paper itself are some killer statistics. To power the US electrical grid based on the measured power densities wind power would have to cover fully 12% of the Continental land area. To power all the US energy needs wind turbines would have to cover 72% of the country.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wanted all the Canadian provinces to do their own carbon tax, and threatened to do a weapons-grade national tax if they didn’t and they aren’t. Ontario, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland all said No. Now the Premier of Manitoba has done some spectacular backflipping to join them.
A mere few weeks ago he was Trudeau’s best friend promising to start collecting a $25-a-ton tax on December 1. Brian Pallister was hoping that his smaller tax would stop Trudeau from hitting them with the big one — a tax that started at $10 and added $10 each year until it reached $50 in 2022. But Trudeau said he’d make them pay twice, and now Pallister has said “No thanks” too. Not only has he pulled the pin on his own tax, but he’s going to fight Trudeau next year to stop The Big One as well.
To appreciate how big a flip this was, ponder that Pallister had been planning to bring in his carbon tax for a year, and even had a special scheme for the big six corporates there to dodge his tax with their own private cap-N-trade scheme. Only small companies needed to save the world. Big ones needed a discount, and possibly grants of saleable carbon credits too. As the Axe The Tax Team in Canada said “In Manitoba, two Carbon Taxes, One Giant Racket. Things have shifted so far, Pallister is going “to look at” the Saskatchewan and Ontario plan to use legal action to stop the Big Bad National Carbon Tax.
I didn’t really know what a blog was then. I had no history of commenting, no experience moderating, and somehow didn’t even have a list of blogs I read daily. For the first year my posts were often two weeks apart and I remember wading into the trenches in comments consuming hours to research and defend arguments. As with many new blogs, there were heated battles. It was a bit of a Grad Dip on steroids in the climate debate. Fortunately the sparks attracted a great class of respondents, and soon I had help to answer questions and help to moderate. Sometime I must write about the processes that seemed to work best with cultivating a good community discussion. In the end, it was useful to imagine we were all in a room, and ask whether that behaviour would be OK face-to-face?
The blog and Skeptics Handbook got me into The Australian, speaking in New York and Washington, (and hopefully Germany and Norway next month). I’ve been in an ABC documentary and on SkyNews. Best of all I met true gems — the insubordinate thinkers; people I admired for years like Mark Steyn, Matt Ridley, James Delingpole. I had a wild time making mischief in the media tent at the UN in Bali and the master climate front liners Marc Morano, Christopher Monckton. I’ve hugged Andrew Bolt.
Thanks to so many who I learned so much from, and thanks to the team of moderators which evolved and made it possible for me to write more posts. They get no public rewards, no pay. I’m so grateful to them and to all of you who share your wit and expertise here.
Thanks especially to everyone who helps support this blog and my work. We still have to pay the bills and every bit helps.
Unfalsifiable theories and no dissenting ideas allowed
A kind of social snakeoil is being pushed upon us….
a culture has developed that make only some conclusions allowed.
Three left wing academics wanted to expose the political corruption in feminist, sexuality, queer, gender, race and fat studies. They hoped to bring back some rigor and reintroduce skepticism to peer review. They submitted 20 outrageously fake papers (like a feminist rewrite of Mein Kampf), got seven accepted so far, but outed themselves. They found they could get ridiculous things published as long as they framed the idea in politically fashionable terminology.
Project Summary: ○ This problem has arisen within a culture in which dissenting ideas have not been admitted or tolerated, often resulting in legitimate criticisms being denigrated on moral grounds. For example, questioning tenets of feminist philosophy might get you branded sexist or accused of carrying internalized misogyny. Questioning critical race scholarship is written off as exhibiting “white fragility” (Robin DiAngelo, 2011, 2018), “white ignore-ance” (Barbara Applebaum, 2006), a form of intentional ignorance, a form of resistance, or seeking white approval. Of note, it is impossible to counter such claims, and attempts to do so are taken as proof of guilt.
Grievance studies does not continue the work of the civil rights movement, it corrupts it…
Their fake study into rape culture of dog parks, was honored as a leading scholarship. Though “The reviewers were worried we did not respect the dogs privacy.”
Fake academic scandal:Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf words used in embarrassing journal hoax
The trio went public with the project after The Wall Street Journal uncovered it, saying a paper which claimed dog parks are “petri dishes for canine ‘rape culture’” was ridiculous enough to pique the publication’s interest.
We intentionally made the papers absurd and used faulty methods to see if they could pass scrutiny at the highest level of academia. Concerningly, they did,” James Lindsay, one of the authors of the papers, said.
“A rambling poetic monologue of a bitter, divorced feminist written by a teenage-angst poetry generator shouldn’t be accepted as a scholarly article worthy of publishing.”
In US humanities departments an academic with seven papers published within seven years is awarded tenure, an indefinite academic appointment. The trio completed these seven papers within 10 months.
Boghossian, a professor at Portland State University, said he had been targeted professionally for questioning several of the fields in the past and expected to be fired or disciplined for his role in the papers, but denied he was motivated by a personal grudge.
Professors could today fall from grace,
Causing snowflakes to run for safe space,
If they dared to break free,
From groupthink P.C.,
On climate-change, gender or race.
“Feminist Mein Kampf” Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism Accepted by Adolf Hitler:
Journal of Women and Social Work, leading feminist social work journal
Note: The last two thirds of this paper is based upon a rewriting of roughly 3600 words of Chapter 12 of Volume 1 of Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler, though it diverges significantly from the original. This chapter is the one in which Hitler lays out in a multi-point plan which we partially reproduced why the Nazi Party is needed and what it requires of its members. The first one third of the paper is our own theoretical framing to make this attempt possible.
Summary: Feminism which foregrounds individual choice, responsibility, female agency, and strength can be countered by a feminism which unifies in solidarity around the victimhood of the most marginalized women in society.
Purpose: That we could find Theory to make anything (in this case, part of Chapter 12 of Volume 1 of Mein Kampf with buzzwords switched in) acceptable to journals if we put it in terms of politically fashionable arguments and existing scholarship. Of note, while the original language and intent of Mein Kampf has been significantly changed to make this paper publishable and about feminism, the reliance upon the politics of grievance remains clear, helping to justify our use of the term “grievance studies” for these fields
Good news. There is hope for average Americans; not so much for academics.
It’s bad news for the Eco Worriers though who were hoping that constant displays of extreme weather would finally convince conservatives — a flood here, a Cat 6 there, a hottest first Sunday of Lent. It all washes over Conservatives. The weather-porn won’t convince them.
But the most interesting and novel discovery here is buried in the third paragraph from the bottom and barely mentioned. The researchers are only interested in how to “convince conservatives” and not remotely concerned that the media may be misleading a lot of the population by hyping up the weather.
Apparently media propaganda has convinced 40% of the US population that they’ve lived through a drought that didn’t happen and 10% think they’ve lived through a hurricane that wasn’t.
I graphed the differences between perceived events and real ones. Below, red columns show the percentage of people who said they had lived through droughts, tornadoes, hurricanes and floods. Blue columns show the percentage of those same people who were living in counties which NOAA said had actually experienced those events.
A lot of people think they’ve been in a drought or a hurricane than NOAA data suggests. Perceived events (red): Real events (green)
Experiencing extreme weather is not enough to convince climate change skeptics
Political bias and partisan news reporting influence whether people report experiencing certain extreme weather events, the research suggests.
But Americans who lived in areas where a variety of extreme events were recorded — flood, tornado, hurricane, and drought — were ultimately no more likely to share the same beliefs about climate change as scientists.
Dr Ben Lyons, from the University of Exeter, who led the research, said: “”Extreme weather plays a limited long-term role in forming people’s beliefs about climate change. Instead, their views and beliefs can alter the way they perceive the weather. We have found when an extreme weather event is ambiguous, as with polar vortex and drought, people are more likely to see the event through a partisan lens. If there is grey area, people are more comfortable applying their preferred label.”
Then Lyons thinks he is testing how people perceive the weather, but he is testing keyword recognition:
The University of Exeter, University of Michigan and University of Texas research found that Republicans were less likely to report experiencing a polar vortex, while those exposed to liberal media were more likely.
All this means is that the Liberal media go on about polar vortexes a lot and poor Liberal viewers repeat the same mistakes. The Polar Vortex was the code for scary weather in 2014 and most of the time the media got it wrong. Every cold blast is not a polar vortex, but Liberal viewers were told it was. Lyons thinks conservatives are denying an extreme weather event that technically didn’t happen. Who’s the denier?
However the weather can be sometimes so extreme that it overshadows personal views — the researchers found that partisanship and media use did not affect the way people in the American Northeast — where the 2014 and 2015 polar vortex events hit hardest — reported the weather they had experienced.
The Liberal media is so partisan some people who watch it think they’re experiencing a drought, even when they’re not:
Those who favoured liberal news sources such as the Huffington Post or the Daily Show reported experiencing drought more often than national weather data would suggest they actually did.
Thank the Liberal media for imaginary droughts. The media release doesn’t mention the imaginary hurricanes and the magnitude of the misinformation on droughts is hidden — the numbers are carefully separated in dense text below. Ninety percent of people who thought they’d lived through a drought, had not.
The researchers keep admitting that media coverage has an effect, but don’t seem to realize the media get things wrong and what they are studying is not Conservatives “denying” extreme weather, but Liberals who are easily tricked. Even partisan biased media can’t fool all the people all the time (though its easier if they have a PhD in mass communication).
Dr Lyons said: “Very extreme weather accompanied by constant media coverage is harder for people to deny. But on the other end of the scale, droughts can take longer to have an effect, so people have some difficulty perceiving their onset and this may allow them to bring their biases to the table.”
It takes constant media coverage to convince people of a fake idea. Here’s the buried numbers:
Academics surveyed 3,057 people in the USA to ask them about the extreme weather they had experienced over a five-year period, and also if they believed in climate change, human causation, and the scientific consensus on the matter. They also asked where they lived. The experts were then able to compare these answers to official weather reports for that region for the same time period.
Data about the weather was taken from the Storm Events Database compiled by NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS). The data included droughts, floods, tornadoes, and hurricanes. A total of 21.7 per cent of respondents reported experiencing a polar vortex, 41.0 per cent a drought, 19.8 per cent a tornado, 29.3 per cent flood, and 16.7 per cent a hurricane in the past five years. However the data shows 21.3 per cent lived in a county where a flood was recorded over the time period, 25.3 per cent a tornado, 4.3 per cent a hurricane, and 4.4 per cent drought.
40% of the US is very skeptical
No wonder they put this at the bottom. Fully 40% of people did not even believe there was solid evidence the world has warmed in the last 30 years — a box even I would tick:
A total of 59.2 per cent of respondents agreed that “there is solid evidence that the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades.” Of respondents who agreed with this statement, 74.2 per cent agreed that the Earth was warming mostly due to “human activity such as burning fossil fuels.”
Dr Lyons said: “This research shows people’s perception of extreme weather can be processed through partisan lenses. This means efforts to connect extreme events with climate change may do more to rally those with liberal beliefs than convince those with more conservative views that humans are having an impact on the climate. “However, it’s important to note that we take a big-picture look rather than focus on specific events. Particularly intense events — a 100-year flood or catastrophic hurricane — might be most capable of influencing attitudes.”
Only a Liberal would think the big-picture is a one in 100 year flood. By definition, since homosapiens started building mud huts on floodplains there have been 100 floods of that caliber everywhere on land on Earth.
This useless analysis was funded by the H2020 European Research Council [grant number 682758].
Another good reason for Brexit. The UK gives good money the EU and then gets back money to do surveys like this.
It is likely to be the most critical and controversial report on climate change in recent years.
Scientists are meeting this week, right now, to try to save the world or to produce a PR and marketing excuse, whichever comes first. After 20 meetings just like this one even slow journalists like Matt McGrath at the BBC know exactly what the scientists will say before they have said it.
When is news not news:
After a week of deliberations in the city of Incheon, the researchers’ new report is likely to say that keeping below this limit will require urgent and dramatic action from governments and individuals alike.
When is news totally fake news:
These researchers, who are unpaid, have reviewed the available scientific literature on the feasibility, impacts and costs of staying under 1.5C.
This is true Pravda quality press. Does any one of these 86 researchers, getting a paid trip to South Korea to write a 15 page document, not have a fully paid up job at home? Time to tell Ofcomm, or better yet, cancel some salaries. The IPCC may not be paying them, but government grants almost certainly do, yet here is McGrath making out that they are some kind of volunteers?
Be swept away by accidental new insights:
One scientist told BBC News that our lives would never be the same if the world changed course to stay under 1.5C.
So true it must be a misprint.
If we changed course to obey the IPCC, life would change as we razed even more forests, eliminated Western manufacturing, and wiped out the last untouched wilderness to grow palm oil and soy beans. The old folks can die of pneumonia in cold rooms while the young clean the solar panels.
86 people will work all week on a 15 page report and we already know what it says?
It’s a banal committee meeting, no skeptics invited, but Matt McGrath is constructing epic mythology. With industrial sniveling like this below, what are the odds that he will ever ask one hard question?
The IPCC has been in existence for 30 years and produces detailed assessments of the state of the climate every six or seven years. This special report has been almost three years in the making.
Schmoozing unlimited:
“What is really important for the work of the IPCC is the respect for the integrity and scientific rigour of the authors – that is at the heart of the work of the author teams,” said Valérie Masson-Delmotte, a co-chair of the body.
“If one can imagine the governments holding the hands of the scientists, this means you don’t know how science works!”
Someone tell McGrath about ClimateGate and Michael Mann’s “Respect for integrity”.
Because so many people are involved, and all these review comments have been taken on board, the IPCC has a reputation for being rather conservative, producing reports that have a very broad consensus.
A reputation according to who?
This week in Incheon, the scientists and government delegates will go through the final, short, 15-page Summary for Policymakers, the key distillation of the underlying scientific reports.
This will be done word by word, to ensure everyone – scientists and governments alike – are in agreement on the text.
And anyone who doesn’t agree gets sacked at dawn.
Spot the science
As usual, the entire scientific premise is that its been hot lately compared to the last 1% of human civilization.
McGrath is so excited about the flashy graphics, he forgets 4 billion years of history:
Source: Robert A. Rohde/Berkeley Earth. Map built using Carto
Note all the new evidence that coal changes the weather:
1. All new flashy moving graphics. Those graphs don’t just say “warming” they wriggle it and hide all those awkward pauses.
2. The gender nearly-neutrality: there are (wow) 86 lead authors from 39 countries, of which 39% are female (which curiously, is 33.5 women). Worryingly, LGBT percent and melanin content of the team are unstated. (If they were 61% white men, would that make them wrong?)
4. New twist on old conspiracies: “This has led some critics to conclude that important aspects are being downplayed to suit the interests of countries with major fossil fuel industries, such as the United States, Saudi Arabia and Australia.” Isn’t this just business-as-usual at every international trade meeting since the Neanderthal era? So some countries downplay things to look after their own interests. This is called “negotiating”. Australia probably won’t.
How do we know this is agitprop?
The BBC interviews the science experts at Greenpeace, but forgets to phone Nobel Laureates who are skeptics.
“The overall big question in this report is how we can still get to that 1.5C goal? What does it take?”, said Kaisa Kosonen from Greenpeace.
“There are those for whom 1.5C is a matter of life or death and they want the message to be clear. Others might want to suggest that there is not scientific certainty and the messages, for example on rapid fossil-fuel phase-out, should not be so straightforward.”
Everyone knows what they will decide, but they will hammer it out anyway. Oh the drama!
Will sparks fly at this meeting?
Quite likely, yes!
IPCC sessions are closed from the public, to allow governments and scientists to speak freely.
Governments often seek to make changes to the text – the scientists are there to ensure that if changes are made, they are consistent with the research.
“I’ve never been to an approval session that didn’t go well after hours; it’s kind of IPCC working practice now,” said Prof Skea.
Closed sessions? Because thermometer readings and weather balloons need to be concealed? Or lest the public finds out how uncertain, debatable, and politically contrived it is.
While Elon is charging up the EV to save the world, in China somewhere coal-fired steam trains live on, burning coal, hauling coal, spewing coal up in the air.
Get a load of this industrial marvel. This is the Fossil Fuel Nightmare Express. Raining live climate destruction at 6pm.
This display, while incredible, shows how desperately ill-maintained these steamers are. The coal burning steamers tend to build up ash, especially with the kind of coal that’s dug up in Sandaoling. These ashes get collected in the ash pan underneath the firebox and also tend to get caught in the flues, especially when the locomotive is working hard. Standard procedure dictates that the ashes get dumped every 12-24 hrs. and the flues get cleaned about every year or so. With these locomotives sparking the way they are, I’d venture to guess that they almost never get their ash pans dumped as evidenced by the way these “eruptions” occur only when the engineer throws the throttle open and the flues get cleaned very rarely.
The ‘Fossil Fuel Nightmare Express’,
Must cause warmists unbearable stress,
A fire spitting dragon,
Full of coal in each wagon,
But all lovers of steam trains impress.
Ex-chairman of BHP (1997-99), Jerry Ellis (left) ex-chancellor of Monash University, and an ex-director of ANZ Bank, has called for Australia to dump the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Ellis’s intervention puts cat among climate pigeons.
The alarmists like to lie that sceptics are a fringe group. Ellis is hardly fringe. His former BHP continues to promote the story about human-caused catastrophic CO2 warming, as does Monash University. Ellis is an awkwardness for both.
By coming out against climate alarmism, Ellis, 81, is giving added respectability to scepticism, much as ex-PM Tony Abbott did with his London sceptic speech of last October.[i] The credibility of the sceptic case, of course, rests not on authority figures but data such as the more than two-fold exaggeration of warming since 1980 by the climate models on which the CO2 scare is based.
Here is Ellis’s statement on Paris.
Why Australia should Clexit Paris Treaty
It is clear that the push to meet the Paris carbon dioxide emission targets is leading to higher power costs, and hence prices, and unreliable supply.
It is also a fact that the predictions of the warmists have not happened.
One of the fieriest and most apt speeches in Washington was surely from Senator Graham. Since ABC viewers have missed this, I thought I would help out.
If the Democrats get away with this (so they can do it again) only a kevlar-coated-narcissist would want to run for public office.
Question for the #Metoo movement. When the mob rules and evidence is irrelevant, which gender will be less likely to want to play the game?
Weapons grade bullying is a good way to keep good men out of politics but it’s even better at keeping good women out. Good one gals.
Americans may wonder why other nations don’t understand them:
Today tens of thousands of Australians will feel certain that they saw the key moments of the hearing and they will know that Kavanaugh is an abuser because the ABC told them so, right in the first line. Ford was there to warn Senators, Kavanaugh was an abuser. (The ABC actually said that). Her claims were portrayed in graphic detail, and she was painted as a victim from the second line. In contrast, Kavanaugh’s words were only “what he sees”. He is a guy who said she was mistaken, but then (by implication) was proved totally wrong, the doofus, because she was “100% sure” and the ABC played that twice. Case closed.
Sure enough they showed Kavanaugh emphatically denying the claims. But if Ford was asked any hard questions about her 36 year old uncorroborated allegations, the ABC left them on the cutting room floor.
Those same Australians who get their news from the ABC will be baffled by US Republicans or convinced they must be spawn of the devil to vote for this terrible man.
Such is how a national propaganda outlet creates polarization and misunderstanding.
Selected transcripts from the Australian ABC correspondent Phillip Williams:
Dr Blasey Ford came to Washington to warn senators Brett Kavenaugh was an abuser.
She was terrified but determined to tell a story that’s already taken its toll. “My family and I have already been the target of constant harassment and death threats. I have been called the most vile and hateful names imaginable…”
“I believed he was going to rape me, … he put his hand over my mouth… I thought he was accidentally going to kill me…”
Before this hearing President Trump and Brett Kavanaugh had suggested Dr Ford might have been confused about the identity of the attacker. Question to Ford: With what degree of certainty do you believe Brett K assaulted you? Ford: “One hundred percent.”
Brett Kavanaugh arrived seething with what he sees as a Democrat character assassination…
Some points here that the national media may not have shared. Supreme Court Justices in the most powerful Democracy on Earth may be at the point of being selected by character assassination. Evidence is so old fashioned…
Truth, due process, evidence, rights of the accused: All are swept aside in pursuit of the progressive agenda.
In Orwell’s world of 1984 Oceania, there is no longer a sense of due process, free inquiry, rules of evidence and cross examination, much less a presumption of innocence until proven guilty. Instead, regimented ideology — the supremacy of state power to control all aspects of one’s life to enforce a fossilized idea of mandated quality — warps everything from the use of language to private life.
Newspeak and Doublethink
Statute of limitations? It does not exist. An incident 36 years ago apparently is as fresh today as it was when Kavanaugh was 17 and Ford 15.
Presumption of Innocence? Not at all. Kavanaugh is accused and thereby guilty. The accuser faces no doubt. In Orwellian America, the accused must first present his defense, even though he does not quite know what he is being charged with. Then the accuser and her legal team pour over his testimony to prepare her accusation.
Evidence? That too is a fossilized concept. Ford could name neither the location of the alleged assault nor the date or time. She had no idea how she arrived or left the scene of the alleged crime. There is no physical evidence of an attack. And such lacunae in her memory mattered no longer at all.
The ABC reports that finally the people of SA can find out what the emergency Tesla battery cost — $56 per person, or $220 per family, just for the purchase, not for the operation. Hands up South Australians, who would have rushed to sign up to be the Star Renewable State if they had to sign the checks themselves and their electricity bill had a item called: “The price of renewables”.
South Australia didn’t need a battery when it had coal power:
A 505-page report released by Neoen this month ahead of an initial public offering suggested the battery cost around $90 million, at the current exchange rate.
The giant 100-megawatt lithium ion battery near Jamestown in the state’s mid-north commenced operation late last year.
“It actually costs taxpayers’ money. There’s a cost of $4-5 million a year to have the battery in place.
“There are more costs than that involved.
Where does Giles Parkinson think these “revenues” come from?
However, Giles Parkinson said the battery was on track to “make revenues of about $25-26 million in its first year”
The battery makes no electricity. All it does is shift supply at the wrong time to the right time, a problem the state didn’t have til it tried to run off the wind.
China said it would stop coal power construction, but CoalSwarm activists have caught it restarting construction at many plants it said it would close. It’s a tsunami of coal plants according to EndCoal. We’re talking about new capacity of 259GW, equivalent to the entire US coal fleet or more than ten times the total Australian coal fleet (23GW).
Newly released satellite photos appear to show continuing construction of coal plants that China said it was cancelling last year, according to CoalSwarm.
In January 2017, China announced that it was canceling more than 100 coal plants across 13 provinces. At the time, a researcher familiar with Chinese politics said that regional officials might try to skirt the central government’s order.
The Huadian Plant was suspended in Jan 2017, but look at those cooling towers…. (Slide the centre line left and right).
Building work has restarted at hundreds of Chinese coal-fired power stations, according to an analysis of satellite imagery.
The research, carried out by green campaigners CoalSwarm, suggests that 259 gigawatts of new capacity are under development in China. The authors say this is the same capacity to produce electricity as the entire US coal fleet. The study says government attempts to cancel many plants have failed. … there was a surge in new coal projects approved at provincial level in China between 2014 and 2016. This happened because of a decentralisation programme that shifted authority over coal plant construction approvals to local authorities. The report says that at present China has 993 gigawatts of coal power capacity, but the approved new plants would increase this by 25%.
The surge in new projects will exceed China’s current Five-year-plan coal cap of 1100 GW.
Apparently this will create more white-elephants. The genius of communist planning:
“Given that China’s coal fleet operates less than half the time, 259 GW additional coal power capacity is unneeded and represents US$210 billion in capital expenditures that could instead fund nearly 300 GW of solar PV or 175 GW of onshore wind power.”
Coal prices are not supposed to be rising as governments tighten environmental controls, but that’s precisely what is happening at the premium end of the coal market where prices have soared.
Over the past six months, the price of top quality thermal coal exported from the Australian port of Newcastle has risen by 25% to $115 a ton, a move reflected in the share prices of Australian coal exporters, such as Whitehaven Coal, which is up 27% over the same time, and Stanmore Coal, which is up 16%.
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As far as we can tell this key data has never been audited before. (What kind of audit would leave in these blatant errors?) Company finances get audited regularly but when global projections and billions of dollars are on the table climate scientists don’t care whether the data has undergone basic quality-control checks, or is consistent or even makes sense.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wanted all the Canadian provinces to do their own carbon tax, and threatened to do a weapons-grade national tax if they didn’t and they aren’t. Ontario, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland all said No. Now the Premier of Manitoba has done some spectacular backflipping to join them.
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