Local governments are ruling on what people can do with their own land if it happens to be near seas recorded as rising at a frightening 1mm per year. Home owners are losing options and home value, not because of the rising water, but because of rising nonsense.
Let’s assume that IPCC projections might, incredibly, actually come to pass — why don’t the councils just get all residents to sign a clause before they buy or renovate. We the residents and potential residents, won’t mind signing that we have seen The Official Council Climate Warning:
—————————————————–
“The IPCC estimates the oceans may rise by (insert wild prediction here).
The council cannot be held responsible for the weather, and will not hold back the ocean.
Buy or renovate at your own risk!”
—————————————————–
Who has more incentive to assess the threats to a house (your house): a/ you, the homeowner who just hocked yourself to the grave and wants to live in it, hand it to your kids, or on-sell it for a decent quid; or b/ the local councillors who will never set foot in it, and won’t be councillors by the time said threat may or may not occur?
Not to mention that Councillors are equipped to assess complex coastal threats just like any bricklayer, newsagent, pharmacist, teacher, unionist or minor career politician would be. In other words — Not.
In a true free society, people could make up their own minds about the likelihood of the predictions made by UN committees which quote Greenpeace reports, and whose own lead authors say things like: “All the models are wrong” (but only when they don’t think anyone is listening).
If the IPCC are right, only silly skeptical fools will have wasted their money (and why would the council care about them?). If the IPCC are wrong, the only losers are the bed-wetting patsies who believed them and sold out a bit cheap to move for an uphill house. I say, let the people decide.
Fifty years from now, no one would blame the current council if erosion, or even a storm surge led to property damage. In 2062, disgruntled home owners who have to fork out for a small sea-wall certainly won’t be suing the 2012 Council.
It’s time elected representatives stopped treating voters as if they were children.
A blockbuster Chinese study of Tibetan tree rings by Liu et al 2011 shows, with detail, that the modern era is a dog-standard normal climate when compared to the last 2,500 years. The temperature, the rate of change — it’s all been seen before. Nothing about the current period is “abnormal”, indeed the current warming period in Tibet can be produced through calculation of cycles. Liu et al do a Fourier analysis on the underlying cycles and do brave predictions as well.
In Tibet, it was about the same temperature on at least four occasions — back in late Roman times (those chariots!), then again in the dark ages (blame the collapse of industry), then in the middle ages (the Vikings?), then in modern times (blame the rise of industry).
Clearly, these climate cycles have nothing to with human civilization. Their team finds natural cycles of many different lengths are at work: 2-3 years, 100 years, 199 years, 800 years, and 1,324 years. The cold periods are associated with sunspot cycles. What we are not used to seeing are brave scientists willing to publish exact predictions of future temperatures for 100 years that include rises and falls. Apparently, it will cool til 2068, then warm again, though not to the same warmth as 2006 levels.
On “tree-rings”
Now some will argue that skeptics scoff at tree rings, and we do — sometimes — especially ones based on the wrong kind of tree (like the bristlecone) or ones based on small samples (like Yamal), ones with aberrant statistical tricks that produce the same curve regardless of the data (Mann’s hockey-stick), and especially ones that truncate data because it doesn’t agree with thermometers placed near air-conditioner outlets and in carparks (Mann again). Only time will tell if this analysis has nailed it, but, yes, it is worthy of our attention.
Some will also, rightly, point out this is just Tibet, not a global average. True. But the results agree reasonably well with hundreds of other studies from all around the world (from Medieval times, Roman times, the Greenland cores). Why can’t we do solid tree-ring analysis like this from many locations?
Jo
Amplitudes, rates, periodicities and causes of temperature variations in the past 2,485 years and future trends over the central-eastern Tibetan Plateau [Chinese Sci Bull,]
Figure 5 Prediction of temperature trends on the central-eastern Tibetan Plateau for the next 120 years. Blue line, initial series; orange line, calibration series, 464 BC–834 AD; purple line, verification series, 835–1980 AD; red line, forecasting series, 1980–2134 AD. (Click to enlarge)
There are beautiful graphs. Have a look at the power spectrum analysis and the cycles below…
Cover: Australian Resources and Investment Dec 2011
The key messages are not lost on the bright and influential, and even if the mass-media avoid the evidence, the facts are quietly storming their way through the echelons of power. For the future historians, here’s a glimpse of how information networks grow and evolve behind the scenes.
Once upon a time, the missing hot spot and the water vapor amplification were virtually unknown. In Jan 2009 2010, Tony Kelly (a member of the Royal Society) met David and me privately in Perth. He grasped the implications of the model amplification in a flash. There’s a world of difference between the certainty of the 1.2 C direct effect of CO2, and the highly uncertain assumptions that push it up to 3.3 C. Three months later, not coincidentally, the Royal Society was approached by deeply concerned skeptical members, and had to formally reconsider its position.
In June this year, we were lucky enough to dine with Matt Ridley, who likewise picked up the message, and is spreading it — see his acclaimed speech in November. A few weeks ago, I noticed Lord Lawson and Lord Turnbull similarly argued the same meme (though I don’t know that we deserve any direct credit for that).
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Internet is the gift of gifts. How easy would it have been for the government departments, coopted scientists, and obedient media to have gotten away with the outrageous scam of forcing us to pay to change the weather? Their lock on the mainstream media would have made it easy to disguise the truth. And yet, it crumbles (all bar the Antipodes).
Then last week, I met Gina Rinehart at the Mannkal Christmas party, and she was keen to let me know that she’d mentioned David and the key points of evidence in an article for the Australian Resources and Investment publication.
A day later, Gina Rinehart was disappointed and surprised that the editors decided to cut her description of the scientific evidence — though those of us who explain science have learnt to expect that. (It’s as if editors are deathly afraid a scientific argument might bore the readers, when here, below, if readers didn’t already know it, are the blockbuster points that back up her claims.) It’s clear she is well versed. She’s carefully picked out the most important points. I’m grateful she’s given me permission to reprint the excerpts of her article, most especially the unpublished parts. Naturally, any credit for what Gina knows belongs to Gina, but — credit where credit is due — thanks to Monckton, Carter and Plimer too.
And lest anybody misunderstand, I take no credit at all for shifting Gina to a skeptical view — given that she’s been surrounded by Geologists for decades — it’s hard to imagine she was ever un-skeptical.
Resources the life-raft in an economic storm
By Gina Rinehart
Gina Rinehart
See the published article here. Below is the scientific evidence that was in the original, but not in the final printed copy.
“Australia was able to withstand the global economic crisis of 2008/2009 due to its fundamental strength in natural resources…
“Now as a recession approaches is not the time to burden Australia with carbon (dioxide) tax and MRRT, and nor is a carbon (dioxide) tax necessary in any event.
Please consider the following scientific evidence:
1. The atmosphere currently has <0.04% CO2, in former times it was up to 30%. Six of the six great ice ages formed at a time when atmospheric carbon dioxide was far higher than now. Clearly, this did not drive warming.
2. For 80% of past geological time, planet Earth has been warmer than today, with far more CO2 in the atmosphere. Clearly, this warming was neither irreversible nor catastrophic.
3. At times in the past (Carboniferous, Cretaceous, Eocene) the Earth experienced sudden injections of CO2 into the atmosphere. In response, the planet warmed slightly but less than daily changes we experience now and not in an irreversible or catastrophic way.
What do skeptics have to do to break the spell of government appointed experts?
Many journalists are apparently trapped in a fit of ideological blindness — they can’t acknowledge emails leaked from their favourite scientists. What do you do when your religious idol turns out to be a mere fallible human — caught deleting emails, hiding data and pretending that their models are accurate when they privately admit they’re “all wrong”? The “overwhelming evidence” for the prophecies of a coming man-made disaster are exposed in the emails as based on biased research, petty trickery, flawed assumptions and an all too human desire to “keep me employed”.
The trance of big-government appointed prophets is so strong, skeptics such as Christopher Monckton and Craig Rucker (CFACT) are going to skydive into Durban to see if they can shake journalists out of their stupor.
The big jump will happen at 11am Durban time (5pm Perth, 8pm Sydney, 9am London, and 4am New York time.) Right now!
And if that doesn’t work, what next? Do they take off their clothes?!
From Marc Morano and Climate Depot:
Climategate 2.0 parachutes into COP17: – Skeptics risk life and limb free-falling from 3000 feet to draw attention to Climategate 2.0 — The skeptical skydiving team will land at Toti beach. Media and all interested persons are invited to the beach to observe the landing’ – (Parachutes will be double checked for potential sabotage by warmists 🙂
CFACT skydivers to tow banners into UN Durban conference
Lord Monckton, Craig Rucker, Climate Depot to parachute
Emails exposing biased science cannot be ignored
The Daily Telegraph exposed the NSW state government protecting the world from some dangerous scientific analysis of sea-levels. The officials pulled papers and posters within days of when they were due to be released, late in September 2011. Doug Lord examined 120 years of tidal data from Sydney Harbour, and found a 1 mm year on year rise which didn’t fit with the 900 mm rise projected by the Wizards of Climate Change at the Department. He finds the official figures exaggerate ten fold.
Ken Stewart has taken the dangerous data from 19 sites around Australia and finds it averaged 1.4 mm/year over the last 100 years. He finds about an 8-fold exaggeration. This is another sordid tale in the Science-perverted-for-PR category.
The mean sea-level rise recorded at 19 stations around Australia (warning, data is limited in the first half of the series). The trend is a steady rise. The last 20 years is not unusual.
Seas have been rising in a reasonably continuous trend around the world since 1800. The last two decades are not unusual.
The other headline I could have used: Jo Nova and Watts Up graphs used in UEA lectures!
It doesn’t get much better than this. Imagine finding out your work helped to support a university course in a place right at the center of the dogma and unscientific reasoning you are working to expose? Well I’m chuffed. 🙂
Allan Kendall is a lecturer at the University of East Anglia (UEA) with principles and an open mind, who gave his students the whole story. I applaud his brave approach, he would have known he risked castigation and exile in his workplace, and that there would be little reward.
Curiously a small storm erupted on Bishop Hill. Alan Kendall is defending UEA, saying that not everyone or every branch of research at UEA ought to be tarnished with the poor behaviour of the Climate Research Unit. And his behaviour rather proves his point, but many commenters at UEA are bagging him for expecting anyone to take UEA seriously, and in a sense they are right too. Therein lies the rub.
People of Kendall’s quality are either rare or silent at UEA. As long as the Chancellor of UEA continues to deny that it was wrong for the Climate Research Unit to hide and lose data and methods, or wrong to destroy emails subject to FOI’s, or wrong to hide declines, or wrong to manipulate the peer review process, then UEA deserves a shellacking in my opinion, even as Allan Kendall deserves high praise. It’s been a lonely battle for him. The world needs to see more of the UEA workers and students protesting that one small group is dragging their reputation down. Those other good workers like Kendall did not do anything wrong, and did not ask for this reputational disaster to be imposed on them, but the test has come. Will the workers of UEA stand up for the tenets of science? Will they allow their university to be called the “University of Easy Access”, and the name UEA to be synonymous with corruption?
Sadly it’s not just UEA where scientific standards are haphazard. Can anyone name a university anywhere in the world where the Science Department maintains good practices and speaks out against? My alma mater, the University of Western Australia, allows Stephen Lewandowsky to utter anti-science, bizarre, “psychological” comments on how anyone who dissents from the government-approved-opinion has a mental condition and a faulty brain. The Soviets would have given Lewandowsky a job in a flash. Yet UWA Science stands silently by as if breaking laws of reason is a fair thing. (See The death of reason at UWAThe hypocrisy of the annointed,Picasso Brain Syndrome and other of my posts about Lewandowsky)
Kendall was the lone voice of reason working with UEA to do the right thing
(See the Hammer link below, for more information on this graphic).
If there is one topic that trumps all others in climate science, it’s ocean heat.
If there is a planetary imbalance in energy, and Earth is acquiring more heat than it’s losing, we ought to be able to find that heat. Energy can not be created nor destroyed. It has to be somewhere.
On this Water-Planet, virtually every scientist agrees that the vast bulk of the extra energy ought be stored in the water. The oceans cover 70% of the surface, and are 4km deep; water has a high heat capacity (meaning it can store a lot of energy), and, because water flows quickly (unlike rock), turbulence and mixing can take that heat energy away from the surface.
Every skeptic (and taxpayer) ought to know that since 2003 (when we started measuring oceans properly) the oceans have been cooling: Douglass and Knox 2010.
Five years of planetary heating amounts to a massive amount of energy. That’s 2,000 days of the sun bearing down on an atmosphere with growing levels of CO2. According to the IPCC favored models, the extra heat stored should be 0.7 x 1022 Joules per year (or 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules per annum or 7,000 quintillion joules).
The oceans cause a lot of “noise” in our climate — the water is 4km deep and mostly close to freezing, even in the depths under the tropics. When the ocean is “stirred” cold water wells up and sucks the heat out of the atmosphere giving us a La Nina and a cooler year. When the ocean is calm, the massive stores of “cold” stay sequestered below, the surface water warms faster, and satellite record an El Nino warm spike. Figuring out the effects of CO2 with surface thermometers is difficult because of this noise and variability. But the vast oceans are the giant storage depots for heat content year after year.
Positions of the floats that have delivered data within the last 30 days (AIC, updated daily)
The Argo buoy network uses 3,000 floating thermometers that spread through the worlds oceans and dive 2,000 m deep. They record the temperatures and radio them back when they surface every couple of weeks. It is the gold standard in measuring ocean temperatures. Argo became operational in mid-2003; before then we relied on erratic and highly uncertain measurements from boats. (See The UCSD Argo website.)
Figure 1. Ocean heat content from Argo (left scale: blue, original data; red, filtered) and ocean surface temperatures (right scale, green). Conversion of the OHC slope to W/m2 is made by multiplying by 0.62, yielding –0.161 W/m2. Figure 4 From Knox & Douglass page 1. OHC (Ocean Heat Content) From Douglass and Knox, 2010.
Sorting real journalists from sock puppets is not too tricky: real investigators tell you what the story is about; PR writers tell you what to think.
Do they “discuss” ClimateGate emails … without quoting the emails?
Who digs for details, and who hides the evidence?
The PR writers for Big-Government were quick to come up with excuses for ClimateGate II. Which is all very well, but it’s blindingly obvious where their own personal prejudices lie if they won’t print the emails that they are supposedly discussing. It’s not so much cherry-picking, but cherry-denial. “Don’t mention the radioactive cherries, but lets discuss how cherry farmers have been victimized, talk about the history of cherry tree farming, and hear their excuses and assertions that the cherries are an essential part of our diets. Don’t mention the Geiger counter. OK?”
The top 10 excuses for PR writers who pose as “journalists” to ignore ClimateGate emails
This is standard issue damage control for ClimateGate — protect the cheats and liars, attack the whistleblower, and use excuses and padding-fillers to cover a story without actually giving the public any information on the behavior of scientists who make statements that billions of dollars of public spending is guided by.
1. “The emails are old”
(No one has seen them before, and what makes two-year-old lies acceptable now?).
2. “The timing is suspicious”
(Alarmists release alarming stuff all the time in the lead up to big meetings, but look out, it’s suspicious when a skeptic releases alarming stuff about those scientists at the same time!)
3. “They’re out of context”
(We won’t explain the context, or quote the email, trust us, they just are, OK?)
4. “The emails show a robust scientific debate”
(But that is the whole point isn’t it? We were told the “science was settled”? It is dishonest to discuss uncertainties in private while you tell the public “the debate is over” and call anyone who questions that a “denier”.)
5.“They’ve been investigated”
(Even though the investigations didn’t have these emails, didn’t investigate the science, and were at least in one case, chaired by a windfarm expert, this point is supposed to have credibility?)
6.“They’re hacked” or “stolen”
(After years of investigation there is no evidence they were hacked. They could have been leaked. Police can’t or won’t say. Does this journalist “know” something the police don’t?)
7.“Aren’t the skeptics nasty people?”
(Crikey, imagine reading emails written by paid public servants on the job about their professional work? What victims! Those poor scientists can’t even threaten journal editors, conspire to ignore peer reviewed papers they don’t like, or discuss their ignorance in private… what’s the world coming too?)
8.“This doesn’t change the science”
(Since most of “the science” is merely a consensus of these same experts, whom we are told to respect, then actually it does change “the science” when they are caught cheating.)
9.The emails “mean nothing” according the scientists caught cheating
(The sock puppet earns bonus points if those same scientists also get to slur the whistleblower and skeptics with unsubstantiated implications that “they are funded by fossil fuels”.)
10. The public response is a “yawn”
(And given how few journalists are reporting the actual emails to the public, that’s entirely predictable eh? Circular reasoning strikes again.)
Real Journalists don’t try to hide the emails
Some journalists are not apologists for scientists who delete emails, hide results, talk about “the cause”, and try to get critics sacked. Bravo, and kudos to them and the news masts that invite coverage of both sides of the story.
Who are they sock puppets for? Take your pick: a political philosophy, their personal religion, possibly something more banal?
Richard Black, BBC: Leads the way in creative sock-puppetry , with the definitive whitewash within hours. Chalks up seven of the top ten excuses faster than virtually anyone else.
Associated Press (via The Australian and others): Does unabashed “damage control”. Publishes the responses of the accused without ever quoting the emails themselves. A.P. quotes the University of East Anglia spokesman, quotes Michael Mann, quotes Bob Ward (PR operative for the Grantham Institute). There is no effort to quote the hot-potato emails, to discuss their significance, or to phone up the people who might interpret the results differently from the accused. Associated Press (via CBC news) “‘Desperate climate change deniers’ blamed”.
Andy Revkin,New York Times.I think Revkin sincerely believes he is an investigative journalist, and he “investigates” in a half-hearted way: he links to a few skeptical sites, he asks “climate scientists” to respond to Pielke’s point, and asks the Norwich police how much they’ve spent. But there are no direct quotes of the emails, no phone calls to skeptics or people on the other side of the emails. By writing it all off as though the first emails were already “explained”, he implies that using tricks to hide declines is a reasonable scientific practice. If scientists distort the peer review process, bully and slur critics even as they hide their own debates and uncertainty, that’s apparently all fair too. Thus he is an apologist for corruption of the scientific process. His update relies on the intellectual vacuum of the precautionary principle: “You’re Driving a Bus Full of Kids With a Curve Ahead“.
(No Andy, just because we don’t know the magnitude doesn’t mean we automatically have to spend billions. We don’t know the magnitude of the next pandemic or asteroid hit either. Look up the phrase “cost-benefits”. The magnitude matters: is it 1, 3, or 5 degrees? We have to use the observations, with rigorous scientific process in the search for the best estimate we can make. The guys who lose data, delete emails, act deceptively and behave badly are estimating 3.3C. We can do better.)
Jason Samenow, The Washington Postalso won’t quote those emails, and uses at least five of the excuses above. (He scores a point for linking to skeptical sites, though he thinks he’s demonstrating “cherry picking”.)
David Wroe, Ben Cubby at The Sydney Morning Herald: Both were writing on climate change, Durban, the carbon tax and politics (here, and here) but won’t let the SMH readers know what the lead authors of IPCC reports have been caught admitting in private. There’s a few paragraphs of whitewash-in-passing from Adam Morton. Otherwise it’s almost complete denial from the rest of “team environment”. The SMH can spare column inches to tell us what Desmond Tutu thinks about climate change, but not what Professor Phil Jones thinks about the models (“They’re all wrong”.)
The Age: It’s a carbon-copy of it’s sister, the SMH. Climate-gate was announced in one whitewash story copied from Bloomberg with four of the top excuses, but no quote. There’s the same few paragraphs of whitewash-in-passing from Adam Morton. But, as with other politically incorrect topics, The Age readers are in the dark. They get no clues as to what lead authors of IPCC reports have been caught admitting in private. If a junior Exxon secretary had said: “We need to get rid of global warming” it would be a headline story repeated in their columns for decades.
The ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation):I can’t even find any mention of the latest ClimateGate release on the abc.net.au site. Can anyone else? They have a dedicated “science” team, but like the SMH they seem to be in denial that their thought leaders could have broken the law, lost key data, lied about the “certainty” and the reliability of the models — or else, and it’s worse, the journalists know the scientists are behaving badly, but still think “the science is right”, they know best, and the stupid public need to be shielded from “confusing” information.
ABC News thinks Australians are better served by knowing the details of Tim Flannery’s tour than knowing what the IPCC lead authors have been caught saying, even though the men at the forefront of the supposed “science” disagree entirely with the Flannery-PR when they write emails to each other.
Australians may rightfully wonder why they pay a billion a year in taxes for this blatant censorship.
Australian Climate Madness summed the media response up so much faster than I have. 😉
Send in more examples of sock-puppet journalists. They need to be named and shamed, and real journalists rewarded.
Another sign of the times. Mark this one in your history books for studies on the Rise and Fall of the Great Warming Delusion. Yes, it’s another well written piece on the religious nature of the faith some have in our ability to change the weather. But this time there are sounds of the death knell…
Jo
The climate religion fades in spasms of anger and twitches of boredom
How do religions die? Generally they don’t, which probably explains why there’s so little literature on the subject. Zoroastrianism, for instance, lost many of its sacred texts when Alexander sacked Persepolis in 330 B.C., and most Zoroastrians converted to Islam over 1,000 years ago. Yet today old Zoroaster still counts as many as 210,000 followers, including 11,000 in the U.S. Christopher Hitchens might say you can’t kill what wasn’t there to begin with.
Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen.
As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with religion, it comes with an elaborate list of virtues, vices and indulgences. As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term “climate change” when thermometers don’t oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other “deniers.” And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.
The 27-nation bloc said it accounts for about 11 percent of global emissions and that it can’t act alone on emissions blamed for damaging the environment.
As far as Durban goes, most the rest of the major emitters want to delay things.
The US, Russia and Japan were already arguing for a longer timeframe.
To the anger of small islands states, India and Brazil have joined rich nations in wanting to start talks on a legal deal no earlier than 2015.
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UPDATE: Durban Warning: Public Will Soon ‘Lose Confidence In This Travelling Circus’
…within hours of the summit’s start, most of the major players made clear their unwillingness to negotiate their positions.
In the high powered risky game of whistleblowing there are ways to make the the leaker a less attractive target.
Pointman analyzes the ClimateGate whistleblower’s tactics and explains why he, she or they probably released those other 200,000 emails but kept them hidden behind the 4000-8000 character almost unbreakable password. He points out there are no emails released yet between key scientists and people in power, hence the worst, most damaging emails may be kept under a ” dead man’s hand detonator”. If politicians are afraid of what might be in those released-but-hidden emails, they may not want to expose or attack the whistleblower for fear of unleashing the other emails. The hidden emails buy the whistleblower protection.
Jo
Some thoughts and some questions about the Climategate 2.0 release
Two years ago, I did what can only be described as a highly speculative profile of the climategate leaker. You can find it here. I strongly suggest you read it now or you’ll have some difficulty following the rest of this piece. Reading it again in the light of what more can be deduced about them from the second release, it holds up surprisingly well. Where it falls down very badly is not so much in its broad conclusions, which I think are basically in the ballpark, but in the whistleblower’s intensity. Boy was I wrong on that.
They’ve sat on the new material for two years and apart from one possible communication, the ”no deal was done” comment on a blog, we’ve not heard a word from them. In that time, they’ve no doubt seen their motivations both lauded and slandered and have never came forward to either accept the plaudits or defend themselves from the attacks. That shows a level of patience and self-discipline only someone on a mission has. We’re very definitely looking at a person driven by integrity and conviction, someone who can’t be bought or sold, either by common coin or by popular recognition. People like that never give up and they’re nearly impossible to either spot or stop.
“People like that never give up and they’re nearly impossible to either spot or stop.”
Keeping a secret that you know you can’t share with anyone else is a constant background stress. Keeping a very big secret is like having a giant boulder on your shoulders that gets heavier and heavier, grinding you down on a daily basis. It takes a huge toll on your resources but they’ve kept their secret successfully for two years. Believe me, that takes a mental and emotional strength that few people possess.
Looking at the “Background and Context” section of the readme file that came with the latest release, their motivation is plain for all to see, as are a number of other things. They are quite prepared to burn climate science down to its very foundations to stop it being used to justify environmental policies that they believe are killing people in the developing world. It is a motivation and strategy I share with them. My admiration of them is only tempered by my awe at the escalated level of risk they’ve now decided to take on.
A question I’ve always asked myself about the original climategate release and the new one too, is one that as far as I can tell, surprisingly no one else appears to ever have speculated on. I’ve never raised it publically because I feared it might intensify the hunt for them by forces more powerful than anything UEA or Norwich constabulary can bring to bear but as I’m now sure that with their latest release, they’ve taken care of that problem, I’ll share it now.
“These missing emails are the real dynamite at the secret heart of this release of climategate.”
Yes, they’ve given us all the top-level conspiratorial correspondence between the likes of Jones, Trenberth, Hansen, Mann et al but these are the very people who simply must have been communicating upwards to senior political figures or at least their most trusted advisers. Think about it for a moment, do you seriously think the latter plough their way through huge turgid IPCC reports and then hammer out policy and approach from them? No, of course not. These missing emails are the real dynamite at the secret heart of this release of climategate. We do not have a single one of those high-level political emails but they must of course exist.
I strongly suspect we now have them in our possession.
From the viewpoint of the political establishment, the original climategate was probably viewed as a squabble about the details of a branch of science and it was strictly confined to the blogosphere, since it was never reported on by the mainstream media. It looked like a one-off, so there was no ongoing political liability to worry about. Release 2 changes things, both for the whistleblower and the parties involved in the political emails. I’ve no doubt that at the time of the first release, the “scientists” assured the politicians that no significant political emails had been compromised and after two years of complete silence, it looked to be so.
With release 2, all bets are off. The release of explicit emails between scientists and senior political figures conspiring to deceive the electorate would not only be politically terminal but would also have to be reported on in the mainstream media. There’d be no way of ignoring them. The whistleblower is not going away and this means a real attempt is now going to be made to find them before they release any more emails. The last time, finding them was the last thing anyone wanted. This time, they simply have to be found and fast. Given the greater will and a lot more resources, there’s a real danger they’ll locate the leaker this time.
I don’t do conspiracy theories but have few illusions about what powerful political interests are capable of when they’re threatened, so I’ve no doubt that having located them, a point solution can easily be implemented. It would have to be something suitably grubby to completely destroy the credibility of the leaker. For instance, frame them up for downloading child pornography, try them, jail them and throw away the key. Who’d believe a word from a disgraced scientist sitting in cell because of their disgusting paedophile tendencies? Safely locked away and with absolutely no access to a computer, they’d be nullified. They simply wouldn’t be able to release any more material.
The leaker’s solution to this problem, and I have to say it’s rather neat, is to release all the remaining material now. Release 2 contains the political emails and all it needs is the magic pass phrase to unmask them. It could be uttered at some phony trial on trumped-up charges, it could be uttered to a fellow prisoner, it could be disclosed to their lawyer. It could be left with a few trusted friends with instructions as to who to send it to if anything untoward should happen to them. Allowing for the very worst, it could even be in their last will and testament.
Gillard — the Australian Prime Minister — got the timing perfectly wrong.
Within two weeks of the Carbon Tax finally becoming Law, it’s becoming hard not to notice that the whole Global Scam is fragmenting. This Carbon ship is on fire, the lifeboats are leaving, the rats are jumping, and the Australian team just turned up with the family jewels. Their policies are “take no prisoners” and “bring no life jackets”. Their exit plan is to have No Exit.
Sergey Abramov (ship, 1960) ...By Leksey
It’s hard to imagine how the timing could have been more quintessentially insane, or their “Leadership of Clean Energy” more poignantly inane.
After subterranean lakes of Shale Gas were discovered two months ago under Lancashire in the UK , even half-tinted-Green governments started stepping backwards from diabolical renewables deals. Nearly everyone popped up and said No No No to Kyoto. “Let’s be frank” said EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard, “At best we could only get the EU, Norway and maybe two or three more countries to sign up for a second Kyoto period.” The Bloomberg article about the collapse of the Kyoto agreement discusses 14 nations and two continents, but Australia wasn’t one of them. So much for setting examples for the world.
Meanwhile, renewables are so openly on the nose that even the Duke of Edinburgh not only said windfarms are absolutely useless, but he got away with it. Windfarms are unpopular in Spain, the UK (here and here), Vermont, Scotland, New Zealand, and even the-iconic-home of-windmills the Netherlands. Solyandra sank like a concrete block. Google are pulling out of renewables, then on top all that, the IPCC shocked everyone by admitting they don’t know if the weather will get warmer or cooler for the next thirty years.
And that was just last week.
This week, FOIA popped up and released another 5,000 emails of self-serving scientists behaving badly (and another 200,000 encrypted ones, no password yet, just in case). Ross McKitrick put out a carefully cutting report on how the IPCC needs to be reformed or abandoned. Then another report pops out by Schmittner and co, saying that actually, the worst case scenario is just 1.7 – 2.6 degrees not 4 ,5, 6, or 11 degrees.
The EU is teetering on financial collapse, and panic selling sees the price of carbon is hitting record lows (€ 7.040 in the EU, and in New Zealand just $9US). The carbon price has dropped by half since June. There is an oversupply of carbon credits and trading houses are asking how low the price can go? UBS is suggesting a price of €3 (A$4). Australians will pay a fixed price of $15 per ton, set by people who keep telling us that a free market is the “best solution”. (If only they knew what a free market was.)
The word carbon is so unpopular that even the Carbon Market and Investors Association changed its name — they think “Climate Market” has a better ring to it (oh boy, do we have news for them).
Poetically, record snow is falling in the Northern Hemisphere (eg in Canada and Russia).
How times are changing
Headlines in The Australian newspaper rather put a fine point on it. The three stories below were all just on Friday; the top story about exaggerating the forecasts was on the front page. For the fans of man-made Global warming who say The Australian is biased in favour of skeptics, I say just wait until The Australian starts reporting the other side of the story for real (they look they might be working up to it). We haven’t seen anything yet. Fans of catastrophic warming prophecies will soon yearn for the days when The Australian only printed the occasional politically-skeptic article among their reprints of unquestioned government propaganda.
Behind the scenes, I’ve been playing with a new neat tool for hunting hypocrisy, corruption, bias and unprofessional behaviour and I’m pleased to announce its ready to share with the world. The kudos for this all belongs to, as usual, a skilled volunteer. Thanks to EcoGuy for turning his rapid-fire coding ability onto this.
On the EcoWho site he has helpfully placed all of Climategate I and II together into a combined searchable database. It’s fast, easy to scan, it copes with tricky search requests and provides a link to the full email from the results page of the search.
UPDATE: EcoGuy tells me that searches are coming in a stream about one-every-5-seconds. Do tell us what you find!
UPDATE: Ecoguy adds: you can put ‘.*’ between words you are looking for to find them apart but in the same order (i.e. paper.*fraud) – you can do what is called basic Regex matching, so if you know Regex you can really go to town. Putting a space at the beginning and end will just match the word enclosed only.
UPDATE: Ecoguy has just added in the ability to turn on matching by case or to restrict to just matching whole words – should make it easier to find exactly what you are looking for.
Up to £13.7 million in grants have been paid to Professor Phil Jones, from a number of funding bodies including the European Union, NATO, and the US Department of Energy. But the intellectual and philosophical climate is so weak that Jones doesn’t even consider himself to be paid to serve the citizens of those countries. No wonder he feels that people asking for “his” data are nuisances and pests.
Usually in Science-World, scientists don’t have to deal with pesky FOI’s — because they make their data and methods available for free upon request. It should never come down to legal action for citizens to get what is rightfully theirs.
Phil Jones is Director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), a Professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. He’s one of the key climate scientists behind the IPCC reports (he and James Hansen of GISS in NASA are the two leading alarmist climate scientists).
Emails released in ClimateGate II that show he deletes emails, rationalizes that he is a not really a public servant, and discusses ways to hide from FOI requests, even as he admits the models are all wrong.
Five hours ago, FOIA left a link on my blog to a Russian site (I had been away). Emails and comments are streaming through to let me know that the Tallbloke, and Jeff ID have also got them. Tallbloke has opened it and checked for viruses. Jeff ID confirms there are thousands of emails readable and 220,000 more locked behind a password. (H/t Foia (!) Ripper, hunter, RoryFOMR, Janet J,… thanks!)
Assuming (I stress) assuming that these are indeed real, and not an elaborate hoax, wow.
It appears it’s all on again. The sordid details, honest thoughts, and human folly on display. (If true, thank you to Foia.) We need confirmation.
The BBC likewise is reporting this, and confirming it — it appears the emails are from 2009 or earlier, and if that’s the case, it means these were probably held back from the first batch. This will be described as being “rehashed old news”, which committee’s have investigated, blah blah blah, but what it shows is scientifically even more damning than the first batch. All of these people were saying it was “settled” beyond doubt, yet agreeing with the “deniers” behind the scenes about the uncertainties, the failure of the models, their inability to predict clouds, and the tropospheric tropical temperatures (ie the hot spot)…
Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the
uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these
further if necessary […]
Jones:
Basic problem is that all models are wrong – not got enough middle and low level clouds.
Jones:
I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process
<1473> McGarvie/UEA Director of Faculty Administration:
As we are testing EIR with the other climate audit org request relating to
communications with other academic colleagues, I think that we would weaken that case if we supplied the information in this case. So I would suggest that we decline this one (at the very end of the time period)
<1577> Jones:
[FOI, temperature data]
Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we
get – and has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (US Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.
<4085> Jones:
GKSS is just one model and it is a model, so there is no need for it to be
correct.
Wils:
What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably […]
<1485> Mann:
the important thing is to make sure they’re loosing the PR battle. That’s what the site [Real Climate] is about.
Bradley:
I’m sure you agree–the Mann/Jones GRL paper was truly pathetic and should never have been published. I don’t want to be associated with that 2000 year “reconstruction”.
Cook:
I am afraid that Mike is defending something that increasingly cannot be defended. He is investing too much personal stuff in this and not letting the science move ahead.
Barnett:
[IPCC AR5 models] clearly, some tuning or very good luck involved. I doubt the modeling world will be able to get away with this much longer
<1982> Santer:
there is no individual model that does well in all of the SST and water vapor
tests we’ve applied.
<5111> Pollack:
But it will be very difficult to make the MWP go away in Greenland.
<5096> Cook:
A growing body of evidence clearly shows [2008] that hydroclimatic variability
during the putative MWP (more appropriately and inclusively called the
“Medieval Climate Anomaly” or MCA period) was more regionally extreme (mainly
in terms of the frequency and duration of megadroughts) than anything we have
seen in the 20th century, except perhaps for the Sahel. So in certain ways the MCA period may have been more climatically extreme than in modern times.
Blitzed in the polls, the Australian Labor Party have picked the communist solution — straight from the Soviet rule book of Free Speech. Goskomizdat revived as a kind of Goskoshopfront. It’s more desperate and simplistic band-aid legislation to benefit the ruling class and not the people. Surprisingly, the media seems to be silent on this scandalous attack on free-speech.
The Gillard Government tells us the tax’s effect will be minimal, but they are clearly terrified of the blowback.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has been directed to enforce accurate business promotions with a $1.1m dollar fine, and team of 23 “carbon cops”, to stop Australian businesses from posting any signs telling the public how much extra they are paying due to the Carbon Tax, or having a “Pretax sale”. Imagine the travesty of transparently letting customers see a breakdown of their invoice, or of warning customers of price rises to come?
A simple repeated message like the one below can take on a life of its own. (And we all know what animal the crowd will think of if we say: “Don’t think of an elephant”):
Of course, some will wave this away by explaining that they just want to stop people making incorrect claims. But do the smell test, and see who this legislation is designed to protect. What customer would be hurt by buying goods cheaper pre-tax? What customer suffers if they “think” the price increase they pay is due to the Carbon Tax, when it’s really partly due to the Mining Tax or creeping inflation? The truth is that the only people “hurt” by a mistaken tax increase claim, o-the-tyranny, would be the an unpopular rulers.
If a company mistakenly blames other price rises on a Tax that had a popular mandate, the company would a) be advertising how much it’s prices had increased, and b) be seen as whinging, not caring about “pollution” and not being a team player. If Gillard had done what she promised (that is, wait for a community consensus on the climate) the whole problem of naughty anti-c-tax-business-signage would have been avoided, not least because that consensus would never have happened, but because even if it had, what business would want to look like a sour-puss, complaining about a fair tax that most of the community saw a need for?
Rulings like this one don’t serve the country. It’s an advertisement for rulers interested in their own welfare above that of their citizens.
For those who argue the ACCC is largely toothless, bear in mind, that no company need be fined $1.1million to have a stifling effect. Calculating the exact cost of the Carbon Tax will be near impossible for anyone other than the direct importer or producer (as Willis Eschenbach points out on Watts Up). Further down the chain, people will have to rely on statements from their suppliers (if any are provided). Few companies will want to push their luck. Most will underestimate the costs, or say nothing.
But censorship has ways of having the opposite effect. If companies can’t advertise that customers “buy air conditioners now, because the prices will rise by x% next month” they can still make contact with journalists and bloggers who can remind the public to put their orders in before June 30th. Unfortunately, those journalists may now find it very hard to get named quotes, or press releases that list dollar estimates. Can someone tell me, here in the Socialist States of Australia, whether journalists are still allowed to list “anonymous sources” or publish industry rumours?
There is easy potential for shop-sign and invoicing dissent. Where previously in a land with free speech there might have been dull annoying messages like “Costs up 10% due to the Carbon Tax”, now there is all kinds of potential for creative skullduggery and political sabotage. Watts Up kicked off the call for alternative “permitted” signs. So here are a few on-the-silly-side from me. (Click for full size images).
…
And some bumper stickers or rubber stampers from Speedy:
Excess winter deaths are more than triple the number killed on the road.
Indur Goklany compares average daily deaths for each month in Australia and New Zealand and shows that in both countries (like in much of the rest of the world) there are more deaths in the cooler months.
While climate change legislation aims to make the world cooler, statistics show that the cooler months consistently have higher mortality.
In the unlikely event that legislation might succeed in reducing global temperatures, based on past statistical records, thousands of extra people may die as a result. In study after study, it’s clear that more people die in the colder months than in the rest of the year. The trend applies even in warm countries like Australia.
Average daily deaths for each month in Australia (left axis, black numbers) and New Zealand (right axis, grey numbers) over a ten year period.
The statistics indicate that:
For the 10-year period, 1998-2007, Australia had excess winter deaths of 6,779 per yr out of a total of 131,613 deaths per yr (avg.) This works out to 5.2% of all deaths per yr (on avg).
For the 10-yr period, 1999-2008, NZ had excess winter deaths of 1,542 per yr out of a total of 27,792 deaths per yr (avg.) This is equivalent to 5.5% of all deaths per yr (on avg).
The excess deaths in winter are roughly more than 4.5 times (Australia) and 3.75 times (New Zealand) the annual road toll.
AND UPDATED: The Australian reports the leaked IPCC review, AND a radio station just announced it as “IPCC says we don’t know if there is a reason for the carbon tax”. See more below.
———————————-
...
This is another big tipping point on the slide out of the Great Global Scam. IPCC scientists — facing the travesty of predictions-gone-wrong — are trying to salvage some face, and plant some escape-clause seeds for later. But people are not stupid.
A conveniently leaked IPCC draft is testing the ground. What excuses can they get away with? Hidden underneath some pat lines about how anthropogenic global warming is “likely” to influence… ah cold days and warm days, is the get-out-of-jail clause that’s really a bombshell:
“Uncertainty in the sign of projected changes in climate extremes over the coming two to three decades is relatively large because climate change signals are expected to be relatively small compared to natural climate variability”.
Translated: The natural climate forces are stronger than we thought, and we give up, we can’t say whether it will get warmer or colder in the next twenty years.
This multipurpose prediction means that in the future, if it’s colder, they’re right; if it’s warmer, they’re right; and they have it covered for more or less storms, floods, droughts, blizzards and frost too.
And then there’s the perpetual-motion aspect of the threat. Greenhouse gases might not be dominant now (like they’ve been saying for the last 20 years) but they will be, they tell us. They will be! Look out! The storms are coming, we’re all doomed. (Well we definitely absolutely might be.) Got that?
If the century progresses without restraints on greenhouse gas emissions, their impacts will come to dominate, it forecasts:
“It is very likely that the length, frequency and/or intensity of warm spells, including heat waves, will continue to increase over most land areas…
“It is likely that the frequency of heavy precipitation or the proportion of total rainfall from heavy falls will increase in the 21st Century over many areas of the globe…
“Mean tropical cyclone maximum wind speed is likely to increase…
“There is medium confidence that droughts will intensify in the 21st Century in some seasons and areas…
“Low-probability high-impact changes associated with the crossing of poorly understood thresholds cannot be excluded, given the transient and complex nature of the climate system.”
Then look for the segue where the scientists and activist-journalists, quietly shift the goal-posts;
It’s impossible to read the draft without coming away with the impression that with or without anthropogenic climate change, extreme weather impacts are going to be felt more and more, simply because there are more and more people on planet Earth – particularly in the swelling “megacities” of the developing world that overwhelmingly lie on the coast or on big rivers close to the coast.
That’s an EXIT clause and it reads like this: We might have been wrong about CO2 causing the disasters, but disasters are still coming. More people are going to die from climate catastrophes because there are lots more people! See, “we were right all along to be concerned about the climate”. (Just not quite right about the cause).
This is a handy excuse. Al Gore tried a segue like this out a couple of years ago — pretending that he was just fine tuning his altruistic saintly concern by saying quietly that CO2 wasn’t as bad as he’d thought but Black Carbon (!) was awful pollution. In other words, he’ll never admit he made a bad call, or has been caught pushing a scam, he’ll just say he was right all along, “carbon is still the issue, it’s just a slightly different form”.
These IPCC scientists are using the same technique: Climate Disasters are still the issue — it’s just a slightly different reason.
Repeat after me: AGW is still bad, skeptics are still wrong, and look over here at this slightly new twist on the predictions of disaster.
For free, and just because I’m a nice person, I’m going to help Michael Bachelard with his science articles.
He’s a Walkley Award winner writing for the two largest “broadsheet” circulation papers in Australia. He knows indigenous issues, politics and industrial relations, so “climate science” was the … er, obvious next step, right?
The Age (and by default, it’s sister The Sydney Morning Herald) decided to pretend to investigate the most burning climate questions the public could offer. But their investigations apparently amounted to phoning up government agents and fans of the policy, and asking them what to write.
Poor Bachelard is out of his depth in the science trying to answer Stephen Harper and Harry Hostan’s questions. For an investigative journalist he had odd ideas about how to get answers, almost never contacting the people or groups he wrote about directly. Who knows, maybe the servers at Fairfax don’t allow emails out to non-lefties at the moment, because he doesn’t seem to have contacted anyone who could have helped him get the information right.
PR example number 1: Totally wrong, and with no research!
Forced by a skeptic to notice the massive Petition Project, Bachelard “debunks it” with something that isn’t true. He claims the “institute does not release the full list of names, so it can’t be verified”. But it takes two minutes of searching online to turn up the full list of 31,500 names listed alphabetically, and also arranged by State (it makes that verification easier). Could someone show Bachelard, Bing, Yahoo, or Google?
For further confirmation, I emailed Art Robinson, the man who knows more about the project than anyone, to make sure that all the names were listed and got a reply within hours. Yes, they certainly are.
Dismissing the 9,000 PhDs and 22,000 science graduates, Bachelard offers mindless handwaving: the Petition it seems “has been given credibility by conservative and sceptical commentators”, as if leftie commentators were correct somehow for actively ignoring it. (If only those could think of a good reason why they keep saying “there is a consensus” when clearly there isn’t.) Instead, the Petition got credibility the only way that counts, the hard way, by amassing an enormous list, which includes eminent, highly qualified award winning physicists, as well as professors, doctors, engineers and geologists. Rather than being a two minute web survey, the organizers also published a detailed paper reviewing its highly considered position. It’s been up for years now, if there were fake names, or non-scientists, they would have been exposed.
The list has so much credibility, and is so hard to attack, Bachelard has to resort to saying things are aren’t true and making petty ad hominem attacks on the size of the Institute. The fact that this extraordinary project grew out of one man’s passionate work, starting from his farm, only makes the Petition more authentic. (If it had come from a large institute, presumably Bachelard would have dismissed it because it was well funded, right?)
Make no mistake, scientifically, the petition proves nothing, but politically, it blows the consensus out of the water.
The sloppy journalist misses the real revolution
There has never been an uprising of scientist-whistleblowers like this one, and the petition is just the tip of the iceberg of the revolution online that is changing the way science is being done. Like much of the internet activity, the Petition was done by volunteers, paid for with individual private donations, and all the volunteers and many of the donors are PhD scientists. If Greenpeace could name 9,000 PhD’s on their team it’d be in headlines, across posters, and on bumper stickers too.
PR Example number 2: Invent wacko statements from skeptics
Because lazy journalists think they “know” what skeptics say by only talking to their alarmist buddies, they misrepresent the skeptics. (Note to Bachelard: seriously, if you value your reputation, you can email skeptics, we don’t bite, and we speak English too. We can save you from looking like a sock puppet of a self-interested government agency.)
The basics of greenhouse chemistry are agreed on by most skeptics and the IPCC, it’s a non-point. So it’s a tad embarrassing that Bachelard inadvertantly paints the Prize winning brilliant meteorologist, Richard Lindzen, as a “denier” of basic physics, when Lindzen is strictly in the same camp as the IPCC on this point. Bachelard implies Lindzen alone does not think water vapor “is the most effective agent of global warming”. Ha ha, what a joke. This is high school physics, and shows how far behind the main game Bachelard is. Every tri-atomic molecule like CO2 and H2O is a greenhouse gas (count the atoms: 1,2,3). H2O is 25 – 100 times as abundant as CO2. In his entire five decade career, Richard Lindzen would never have uttered such nonsense. Bachelard wants to paint Lindzen as a loner, extremist, dare I say it — denier?
Bachelard probably excuses himself by thinking he’s helping the planet (the rocks won’t thank you Michael), but these kind of poorly researched PR statements make him just another patsy tool of tricksters, sloppy thinkers, and religious zealots who come to take away honest citizens money for spurious causes.
PR Example number 3: Only show the public what they are “allowed to see” (hide those weather balloons!)
The ocean acidification threat is a big can of worms. I asked Professor Brice Bosnich to help create a quick reference page on the chemistry and was pleased he could find the time to help. Here’s everything you wanted to know about the basics…
He explains what pH means, and points out that:
Ocean pH varies by 0.3 naturally.
Claims of acidification since 1750 are based on dubious models and few observations.
There are reasons to assume that marine life will not be overly affected by an increase in ocean acidity due to atmospheric carbon dioxide:
Ocean life evolved and survived far higher levels of CO2 for millions of years in the past.
Marine organisms actively create carbonate shells (using energy) which means crustacea, corals and molluscs aren’t automatically prey to pH changes in the same way that say a limestone rock would be.
The world’s oceans may have warmed a mere 0.17C since 1955, hardly a significant threat to marine life.
We also find out that acidic water is added to the ocean from rainfall and floods (and he explains why raindrops will always be acidic).
There are more pressing threats. — Jo
———————————————————–
Guest Post by Professor Brice Bosnich
The Chemistry of Ocean pH
BACKGROUND
Pure Water and its pH
The water molecule is comprised of three atoms – two of hydrogen (H) and one of oxygen (O). Each of the hydrogen atoms is linked to the oxygen atom by a chemical bond, and hence the water molecule is symbolized as H2O, see picture below. At 25oC, in the case of a very small number of water molecules, one of the hydrogen atoms breaks off (dissociates), thereby forming equal numbers of two charged species, a negatively charged hydroxide ion (OH–) and a corresponding positively charged hydrogen ion (H+) called a proton. The size of the respective charges is equal to that carried by an electron. Notwithstanding this dissociation, nearly all of the water continues to exist in the form of the water molecule, H2O.
Pure water is neutral, namely neither acidic nor basic (alkaline). Acidity occurs when there are more protons present than hydroxide ions and conversely, water is basic or alkaline when hydroxide ions are in excess. The concept of pH was first introduced by the Danish chemist, Sorensen, in 1909. He defined it as the relationship;
pH = log10 (1/[H+]) = – log10 [H+] (1)
where [H+] is the (molar)1 concentration of protons. Because the molar concentration (M) of protons in pure water at 25oC is 10-7 M, the pH of water is 7. Thus a pH value less than 7 refers to an acidic solution, whereas a value higher than 7 indicates a basic solution.
Water exposed to air slowly becomes mildly acidic, because atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) dissolves in the water. When dissolved in water CO2 reacts with water to give carbonic acid, H2CO3, as shown by equation (2):
H2O + CO2 ⇌ H2CO3 (2)
As indicated by the two-way arrows (⇌), this chemical reaction is reversible; water and carbon dioxide generates carbonic acid which also breaks up (rather slowly) to regenerate water and carbon dioxide. The equilibrium lies to the left so that there is much more CO2 dissolved in water than H2CO3.
The amount of CO2 that is dissolved in water depends on the temperature of the water, and on the concentration present in the water and the pressure of CO2 in the air above the water. The warmer the water, the less CO2 will dissolve in it. Because cold water will absorb more carbon dioxide, it follows that if water containing dissolved CO2 is warmed it will release CO2 into the air. (Consider the effect when a warm bottle of beer is opened!) The more CO2 that is present in the air above the water, the more CO2 that will dissolve.
Carbonic acid is an acid in water because its hydrogen atoms (H) can dissociate to release protons (H+), equation (3):
H2CO3 ⇌ HCO3– + H+(3)
The bicarbonate ion, HCO3–, can also dissociate its hydrogen atom to give a proton and the carbonate ion, CO32-. Carbonic acid and the bicarbonate ion are said to be weak acids because, unlike hydrochloric acid in water solution, the hydrogen atom is not fully dissociated. For slightly complicated reasons carbon dioxide dissolved in water will generate; H2CO3, HCO3– and H+. Because of the presence of the proton derived from carbonic acid [equation (3)], water that has been exposed to carbon dioxide in the air will be mildly acidic, about pH = 5.7. Raindrops become acidic for the same reason.
The figure below shows the fraction (alpha) of various species in solution with varying pH. At lower pH more carbonic acid is present (left), at higher pH more carbonate exists (right), at about pH 8.5 the maximum fraction of bicarbonate is present and at this pH it is essentially the only species present.
Sea water acidification
The pH of sea water can be measured2 although there are complications due the presence of dissolved salts and other factors. On average, surface sea water is mildly basic, about pH of 8.1, although the measured pH can vary by as much as 0.3 pH units at different times in the same area and from area to area. There is a mathematical relationship between pressures of CO2 (pCO2) and the resulting pH of pure water3. This relationship is the basis for the calculation of ocean pH values. Caldeira4 employed such a formula to conclude that the pH of the oceans had changed by about 0.15 of a unit since 1750. He assumed, without providing any empirical evidence, that the pre-industrial pH was 8.25. This work has been challenged because it is not consistent with observation3. The ocean is a very complicated system and does not yield to simple modeling.
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Yes, they’ve given us all the top-level conspiratorial correspondence between the likes of Jones, Trenberth, Hansen, Mann et al but these are the very people who simply must have been communicating upwards to senior political figures or at least their most trusted advisers. Think about it for a moment, do you seriously think the latter plough their way through huge turgid IPCC reports and then hammer out policy and approach from them? No, of course not. These missing emails are the real dynamite at the secret heart of this release of climategate. We do not have a single one of those high-level political emails but they must of course exist.
Pure water is neutral, namely neither acidic nor basic (alkaline). Acidity occurs when there are more protons present than hydroxide ions and conversely, water is basic or alkaline when hydroxide ions are in excess. The concept of pH was first introduced by the Danish chemist, Sorensen, in 1909. He defined it as the relationship;
Australian sea level rises exaggerated by 8 fold (or maybe ten)
The Daily Telegraph exposed the NSW state government protecting the world from some dangerous scientific analysis of sea-levels. The officials pulled papers and posters within days of when they were due to be released, late in September 2011. Doug Lord examined 120 years of tidal data from Sydney Harbour, and found a 1 mm year on year rise which didn’t fit with the 900 mm rise projected by the Wizards of Climate Change at the Department. He finds the official figures exaggerate ten fold.
Ken Stewart has taken the dangerous data from 19 sites around Australia and finds it averaged 1.4 mm/year over the last 100 years. He finds about an 8-fold exaggeration. This is another sordid tale in the Science-perverted-for-PR category.
Sea Level Change in Australia: What’s Likely?
The mean sea-level rise recorded at 19 stations around Australia (warning, data is limited in the first half of the series). The trend is a steady rise. The last 20 years is not unusual.
Seas have been rising in a reasonably continuous trend around the world since 1800. The last two decades are not unusual.
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