Leonardo DiCaprio finally won an Oscar in order to give us a lecture:
“I just want to say this — making “The Revenant” was about man’s relationship to the natural world, a world that we collectively felt in 2015 as the hottest year in recorded history,” he said.
He may feel the heat, but the satellites didn’t “feel” a record, and nor would ice cores, stalagmites, corals, sediments, or any other part of the natural world that has existed for longer than 41 years. Meh.
“Climate change is real, and it’s happening right now,” DiCaprio said. “It is the most urgent threat facing our entire species, and we need to work collectively together and stop procrastinating.
We need to support leaders around the world who do not speak for the big polluters or the big corporations, but who speak for all of humanity, for the indigenous people of the world…and for those people out there whose voices have been drowned out by the politics of greed.”
If only DiCaprio would be right about the US election.
“The Titanic” star said the thought upcoming election would show where the U.S. stands as a nation on the issue of climate change.
We know where US citizens stand — they don’t care. So the election will be decided on other issues, except in the Republican camp where being a skeptic is now mandatory. In the last election Tom Steyer tried to make climate change a winning issue and converted 74 million dollars into almost no political effect. Perhaps Leonardo could try that again?
“I feel there is a ticking clock out there. There’s a sense of urgency that we all must do something proactive about this issue,” he said. “And certainly with this upcoming election, the truth is this: If you have do not believe in climate change, you do not believe in modern science or empirical truths and you will be on the wrong side of history. And we need to all join together and vote for leaders who care about the future of this civilization and the world as we know it.”
If you throw enough of other-peoples-money at something you too can neutralize top talent and produce mediocrity.
Where are the young Cleese’s and Idle’s now?
They [John Cleese and Eric Idle] say the British broadcaster would not be brave enough to take a risk on them these days.
Cleese says the BBC has completely “screwed up comedy” because it has become a bureaucracy and “bureaucrats shouldn’t be in charge of comedy”.
IDLE: “Executives do not on the whole do well with comedy. They can’t understand it, they can’t read it, they can’t spot it.”
CLEESE: “But they think they can because they spend their whole time talking to other executives about what’s working. It’s like a martian trying to understand sex.”
Cleese on political correctness:
“Political correctness is a bit like granny or your maiden aunt arriving at a party when you’re all having a good time,” John Cleese said.
“She comes in and they all start buttoning up and becoming self conscious and behaving properly and then when she leaves you can have fun again.
“Well a lot of humour is just about enjoying life, it’s spontaneity. We’re always teasing each other. It’s with affection. It’s nasty teasing we don’t want. There’s certain jokes that are mean and actually not funny.”
“Trying to communicate how hard it is to predict the weather a few months into the future, Niwa has turned to a mind blowing analogy to provide some idea of the complexity involved.
‘If you could imagine correctly predicting the outcome of every person on Earth tossing a coin 1000 times, you’d still be nowhere near the degree of complexity required to forecast seasons,’ the crown research institute says in a recent article.
Mind blowing indeed. Predicting seasons used to be a case of “Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring.”
But seriously… on the one hand predicting the outcome of seven trillion coin tosses is a snap — at least to the first 7 or 8 significant figures. It’s much easier than predicting one toss. On the other, if we assume they are talking about trying to predict the exact outcome of every single toss the odds are more like 0.0… (lots of zero’s)…014 or something so infinitesimally ridiculously small it’s synonymous with “impossible”.
How good is their grasp of statistics in the Met office? About as good as their grip on logic and reasoning.
Having told us it’s statistically completely impossible, in the next breath:
Despite those odds, each month Niwa staff do have a go at producing a three-month outlook.
Righto. So it’s impossible but we do it anyway? It’s a bit like changing the weather with windmills and solar panels — “impossible” but “worth spending billions”. Watch the socialist forecaster at work. What’s the cost benefit? (NIWA: The cost is yours, and the benefit is mine….)
Am I too cruel? I’m sure they are doing their best.
For an impossible job, the stats get spooky:
How accurate are the Niwa seasonal forecasts?
Mullan reckons Niwa gets long range rainfall forecasts right about 40 per cent of the time, and long range temperature right about half the time. In comparison, if predictions were made randomly, they would be right about a third of the time, given the three choices – below average, average, and above average.
With odds of 1 in a quadrillion bezillion, these guys manage a good 7% better than random luck? What’s that — Psychic?
Maybe they are the Nostradamet-Bureau, but whatever they are doing, it ain’t science.
What are the odds that there was no one in this whole chain of communication — Bureau, PR department and newspaper — that couldn’t see how self-evidently hypocritically silly this article was?
Predicting seasonal rainfall months ahead has surely got to be the Holy Grail of weather forecasting. Imagine the billions of dollars, the man-hours, and the anguish-prevented if we can do it. What if neural nets can be trained, validated, and used to help farmers, investors, and “Oi” — even Dam Managers?
Jennifer Marohasy and John Abbott were inspired to try a whole new approach to rainfall predictions after John’s car met a sad end in the infamous Brisbane flood. After five years work they’re keen to share the results, and their predictions. Check out those graphs below. The last one has a 3000 year range.
Read about how difficult it was for them to get useful data from the BOM, and how the BOM does not do proper benchmarking of their success rates. How serious are they? As usual, it’s those outside the stagnant pond of government approved science that are testing new ground. The government talks about innovation. Independent researchers do it.
***Jennifer Marohasy is speaking in Deniliquin NSW on Friday (tomorrow 6pm — details at the bottom)***.
…
She will be sharing the results of their research on using neural nets. How about this graph? That is quite some match — note one forecast (dotted orange line) versus the outcome (solid line). Note that sweet correlation.
….
I’m delighted to share some tantalizing results here. Thanks to Jen!
_________________________________________
Rainfall Forecasts Should be Benchmarked
Guest post by Jennifer Marohasy
According to Bill Gates, “You can achieve incredible progress if you set a clear goal and find a measure that will drive progress towards that goal.” This may seem basic, but it’s not practiced enough, and certainly not when it comes to rainfall forecasting.
The Bureau of Meteorology increasingly use their weather and climate forecasts to warn of looming catastrophe. This use of ‘forecasts’ to advance an agenda is common in politics, but it’s not something the Bureau should be engaged in.
A key Bureau goal should be the best possible rainfall forecast for the public. Their rainfall forecast should be presented and reported in a measurable and understandable way. Instead we are given vague probabilities, which research has shown are often misinterpreted by farmers.
Furthermore, there should be some follow-up. For example, at the end of a week, a month, or a season we should be told how reliable their daily, monthly and seasonal forecasts have actually been.
Its five years now since Brisbane flooded, so about five years since I started working with John Abbot and artificial neural networks to see if was possible to actually forecast the extraordinary wet season of summer 2010/2011 in south eastern Queensland.
Back in 2010, sea surface temperature and sea surface pressures profiles across the Pacific suggested we were in for a big wet. Yet the Wivenhoe reservoir upstream of Brisbane, a dam actually built for flood mitigation, was kept full of water.
John Abbot’s little red corvette sports car was drown in the Brisbane flood. It was in a river-side garage in St Lucia, Brisbane, and totally submerged for 36 hours. He was heartbroken. The loss spurred us to see if we couldn’t apply the technique he had used to make the money to buy that car, to rainfall forecasting. In particular, we were keen to see if artificial neural networks with the right algorithms, and high quality historical temperature and rainfall data, could have forecast the flooding. John Abbot regularly used artificial neural networks and historical trading data to successful forecast directional trends in the share market.
By August 2011 we had monthly rainfall forecasts for 20 sites across Queensland, and we wanted for compare our output from the best general circulation model (POAMA) used by the Bureau of Meteorology. But try as we might we couldn’t actually get the taxpayer-funded Bureau to give us the data we needed to make proper comparisons.
The Bureau were not doing the one thing that Bill Gates says is critical to improvement: benchmarking.
After flying to Melbourne, and threatening to jump out a sixth floor window if the data wasn’t handed over (well I exaggerate somewhat), we got access to only enough data to enable us to publish a series of papers. Indeed, the Bureau still refuses to make available the most basic of data which would allow their rainfall forecasts to be objectively scored.
Back in 2011 it was evident that John Abbot and I could do a better monthly rainfall forecast than the Bureau. To our surprise key science managers at the Bureau agreed: conceding that our forecasts were more skillful. But, they argued, climate was on a new trajectory so our method would not work into the future!
This claim is, of course, based on the theory of anthropogenic global warming. This is the same theory that continues to underpin all the forecasts provided by the Bureau through the use of general circulation models.
Neural Networks on rainfall
An alternative approach using artificial neural networks, fits under the umbrella of ‘Big Data’ and ‘machine learning,’ that relies on pattern analysis, and is proving successful at forecasting, where results are properly benchmarked, in fields as diverse as medical diagnostics, financial forecasting and marketing analysis.
Oops! CBC (the Canadian version of the BBC and ABC) have been caught out editing a story to make it more politically correct. CBC’s political bias is accidentally on display. The original message revealed a sacred truth that must not be spoken. How would most Canadians feel about being forced to pay money to change the weather if they knew most other Canadians also thought it was a waste of billions? As far as I can tell, the updated version was a complete rewrite of the first half of the article. There appear to be a lot of changes.
Is Earth getting warmer mostly because of human activities? 56% say NO.
Amazingly 39% of Canadians said the next question that they don’t think humans are even partially responsible.
Earth is getting warmer partly or mostly because of human activities. 39% say NO.
So CBC initially wrote a headline which said this:
Climate change: Majority of Canadians don’t believe it’s caused by humans
But thou mayst never admit that skeptics are the majority lest the masses awaken. Groupthink is so influential! So the headline was rapidly changed to an ambiguous muddy wording:
The hidden topic the public broadcasters don’t want to discuss
Everything hinges on the word “mostly” — is the climate mostly human driven and so we have to take action, or is the climate driven mostly by something else, and our action is mostly pointless? This is key to the billion dollar policy debate. What matters here is not the binary belief or disbelief in the entire spectrum known as climate change. That’s a strawman. But the BBC, CBC and ABC appear to want to keep the debate at this pointless level. As far as national action goes we need to talk about how much humans affect the climate, and whether cutting emissions is worth the pain.
The original headline was as accurate as most headlines are
It didn’t need any change to maintain normal headline standards, but it could be improved. The headline could have been changed to make it more accurate without hiding that most Canadians don’t agree with the 97% consensus of climate scientists*. Here are three minor changes that the CBC didn’t choose but would have solved any ambiguity:
Climate change: Majority of Canadians don’t believe humans control it
Climate change: Majority of Canadians think natural forces control it
Climate change: Majority of Canadians don’t believe humans are main cause
Did the Yale researchers play a role in editing the news?
The update claims the correction was due to a “clarification by the researchers”. So either CBC are making up excuses to hide their own partisan political editing, or worse, Yale are seeking politically correct spin on their research, and the CBC compliant journalists are too empty headed to see through their excuses.
The researchers, also from four U.S. universities, including Yale, surveyed a total of more than 5,000 Canadians over the last five years.
“The skepticism was a bit surprising,” said Érick Lachapelle, who co-authored the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication study, which is being submitted to a scientific journal for publication and has not yet been peer reviewed. “I think it is partly because Canadians are less knowledgable than one might think on the topic.”
Note the Yale communication geniuses know more about climate science than the surgeons, business owners, engineers and geo’s and others who make up “the public”. But if Érick Lachapelle was surprised at this result it’s only because he hasn’t done much research on their own speciality. Most surveys have shown the same thing (see those stats I put above). Canadians are just like the rest of the West.
The Editors note suggests the original story was wrong factually somehow. I’ve highlighted the key fudge words:
EDITOR’S NOTE: CBC has made changes to this story following clarification by the researchers. An earlier version said that a majority of Canadians surveyed didn’t believe that climate change was caused by humans. In fact, the study found that 61 per cent of respondents believed the earth is getting warmer partly or mostly because of human activities.
A study co-authored by University of Montreal researchers suggests that while 79 per cent of Canadians do not doubt the reality of climate change, 39 per cent don’t believe it is caused by human activity.
The researchers, also from four other universities, including Yale, surveyed a total of more than 5,000 Canadians over the last five years.
“We asked participants if they believed the Earth was getting warmer partly or mostly due to human activities as an indication of climate change,” said lead researcher Matto Mildenberger.
Erick is not so surprised now. That quote the GWPF recorded has disappeared:
“This is a complex issue,” said Erick Lachapelle, the co-author of the study, which is being submitted to a scientific journal for publication and has not yet been peer reviewed.
“It’s kind of normal that people would have more nuanced opinions.”
The study did not ask what people felt was causing climate change, if they did not believe it was caused by humans.
Researchers did not note whether the proportion of Canadians who thought climate change was caused by humans had changed over the five years of the study.
The clarification note that doesn’t clarify?
The clarification note at the end of the article completely avoids saying that the original 56% figure was correct. The problem with it is that different people define “skeptic” differently and some might have interpreted the headline as saying that 56% don’t believe in any form of man-made climate change. Since billions of dollars and 97% of climate scientists say that humans are the dominant cause, it’s pretty obvious that the figure that matters most for public policy is that 56% of Canadians disagree.
Clarifications
An earlier version of this article said that a majority of Canadians surveyed didn’t believe that climate change was caused by humans. In fact, the study found that 44 per cent of respondents believed the earth is getting warmer because of human activities. The study found that 61 per cent felt it was partly or mostly caused by human activities.
It’s pretty stark — how much influence has science lost if “97%” of a specialty say something is for sure and beyond debate and yet more than half the population think they are exaggerating. Don’t expect to see that debate on any public broadcaster unless it’s framed as telling us how stupid the public are. If there is gross corruption, incompetence and unscientific behavior going on in the science industry, the last place we’ll read about it is in our taxpayer funded news agencies.
Sell the CBC. Sell the BBC. Sell the ABC. Use the money to pay off public debt that big-government loving agencies helped to create.
Requests to readers:
Can anyone find past studies by the same team to compare the number year on year?
Can anyone find a copy of the whole original CBC story in one link or cache? Can anyone get a screen cap of the original story?
h/t Ian Cameron, David, GWPF.
UPDATE: Paul Matthews found the twitter chain. People, including Leah Stokes, one of the researchers made a fuss about the “awful wording” and “terrible reporting”.
Hre is the original tweet from CBC with reply from Leah Stokes
CBC NewsVerified account
@CBCNews
Climate change not the fault of humans, indicates study of Canadians http://www.cbc.ca/1.3458142
Leah Stokes @leahstokes 19h19 hours ago
@CBCNews I wrote this study. This is not AT ALL what we said. Terrible reporting continues.
That most Canadians are skeptical of the IPCC and the “consensus” may not be what the annointed experts said, but it is what the survey showed.
News today: Nice. Boris Johnson decided to back BREXIT — the campaign to get the UK out of the EU. A bit of a bombshell apparently after weeks of speculation, and a very nice win for UKIP, Farage and silly people who think that in a democracy you are supposed to be able to vote for those who make the decisions.
Last week, when lots of other armchair experts didn’t, I correctly predicted that both men [Michael Gove and Boris Johnson] would inevitably vote out.
I’m very glad they did since I think it will make all the difference to the #Brexit campaign. Put it this way, had Gove and Johnson not come out for Brexit, the “Leave” camp would never have stood a chance of persuading wavering middle-ground voters to take the plunge. With Boris’s charisma and popularity and Gove’s intellectual heft to back it Brexit now stands a serious chance of becoming reality.
Apparently Johnson wants the top job (Camerons) and he may have noticed how well the Republican candidates are doing in the US by not “aiming for the centre”. The likely successor for Cameron is George Osborne who’s pro EU. Nice point of difference there for Johnson. (Read Dellers for the details).
In Australia, meanwhile, Turnbull is down in the polls — since both parties look so similar, the similiar polling fits. So there is suddenly talk of an early election.
“If you voted liberal in the last eleection, who’s your preferred Prime Minister now?
Tony Abbott 96%,Malcolm Turnbull 4%
And when people tell you of the power of consensus, just say “eggs”.
In other news, High-cholesterol diet, eating eggs do not increase risk of heart attack, not even in persons genetically predisposed, study finds. At least one egg a day is OK even if you are an APOE4 gene variant.
Benny Peiser lays out the situation in the UK and Europe in a long interview on GWPF. It’s interesting, and I agree (more on that below), except for the point when he says it’s too soon to do a review of the science. Dear Benny, in the politest possible way — that’s barking. The review of the science is not too soon, it’s too late — it should have been done 10 years ago, before we spent billions, and the Greens ought to be calling for one right now.
…[sceptics are treated like] a neo-Nazi or a racist, it’s as bad as that in certain circles.
Think about it: the future of the planet (galaxy etc.) depends on convincing people to cut carbon emissions, and skeptics are everywhere and growing in number. Is there any better way to quell the dissent? The end-of-the-world memes are failing and the only way to clear the decks is the old fashioned way — air it, have it out, do the battle, and may the best team win. Obviously, since climate scientists are the experts and 97% of them agree, it will be a lay down misère — all the misguided nuclear physicists, surgeons, math-heads, geo’s and engineer deniers will get publicly trounced, and for once and for all it will be settled. I can’t imagine why The Greens / Grantham institute / IPCC have missed this opportunity and allowed thousands of other scientists to seed so much doubt. For goodness sake, get skeptical scientists and not-so-skeptical-scientists on a joint platforms, and televise the whole thing. That’s “moving forward”.
Right now, skeptical commentators are scoring win after win just pointing out how cowardly the consensus crew are, and how they depend on toxic bullying and namecalling to silence critics. (Perhaps Benny is hoping to fool them into thinking we take them seriously?)
Andrew Foster on Benny Peiser:
Amber Rudd has ruled out a review of the science and Peiser concurs. “I think it’s far too early because it’s too fuzzy. All the national academies are still adamant that everything is right, they’ve got everything right and nothing has changed. I think we need more time before we can say with some confidence that something is seriously wrong.”
Predicting the climate may be “fuzzy” but the failure of the hypothesis is beyond “wrong” and into “legendary”. History books will be written about the tragic state of climate science in 2016. As I’ve said before — the models not only fail on global decadal scales, but on regional, local, short term, [1][2], polar[3], and upper tropospheric scales[4][5] too. They fail on humidity[6], rainfall[7], drought [8] and they fail on clouds[9]. The hot spot is missing, the major feedbacks are not amplifying the effect of CO2 as assumed. Indeed Evans has shown that current models are missing the obvious big major feedbacks completely, and ignoring the massive fields and fluxes off the Sun. Current modelers have entirely missed the possibility of cooling coming soon.
The failure is so complete we are scraping the barrel to imagine wild possibilities whereby the theory-of-man-made-climate-control might be not-completely-absolutely-dead. For it to be correct, the natural forces that pushed the climate up and down for the last 500 million years stopped in 1880 when the first coal station was built. Or rather, they phased out over the decades as human emissions grew so as to keep the rate of decadal warming exactly the same in the 1980s as it was in 1870s. Could be.
The Committee on Climate Change says the pause doesn’t change things: “Scientists are confident the temperature will rise more quickly again, as greenhouse gas emissions continue and current cooling influences subside. The pause does not substantially affect long-term projections.”
The pause doesn’t “affect” the long term projections inasmuch as it destroys the models. Those natural cycles that phased out in 1880ish phased back in 1999 to create the pause they can’t explain. (What bad luck for the models?)
Says Peiser: “I think everyone will be observing what will happen to the temperature over the next five years or so.” If temperatures don’t shoot up, science faces a crisis.
Science faces a crisis? No, the crisis is here: funding is near 100% monopolistic, lacking in diversity, and politically correct; scientists have been sacked, exiled, abandoned at airports, and public data is hidden, or adjusted with secret methods. Peer review permits the junk and blocks the replies that fix the mistakes. Meanwhile the last backup in the failure of the science industry are the science writers. But they laud the scientists who hide their methods and who have a vested interest in the results, while they attack the volunteers who do honest work for free.
“Science faces a big test. If it turns out to be wrong – and I’m not saying it is but there’s a slight chance – then people will ask, ‘How is it possible that science failed us to such an extent, it shut down the debate, and forced governments into these billions and trillions of damaging policies?
Science faces a big test? No. What people call “the science” is not even science. It’s a political movement that has rebadged itself as “science” and taken the funding from people who use the scientific method. There is no part of real science that says that if the predictions fail then the theory is correct and the data needs to be changed.
I think they [scientists] have failed already, even if they’re right. I think it was a mistake to suppress critical views because science works best when it is tested all the time.”
Hear Hear.
On politics and policy Peiser is sharp:
Peiser thinks the Paris agreement has been over-hyped. “Paris has essentially failed just as much as Copenhagen, except the PR was better.” But David Cameron said it was a “historic deal” and legally binding. “That’s right – legally binding to meet again. The only legally binding thing is the process – it’s legally binding to meet again and to review every five years and to reassess the pledges. But there is nothing about the actual CO2 targets.” –
He thinks EU leaders will probably abandon their unilateral approach to emission reductions. “
My concern with Paris that Peiser doesn’t mention is the possibility where weak Paris waffle gets used as one half of a two pronged legal pincer movement. Some countries have legally binding domestic legislation that was waiting for a “global agreement” of the sort that the toothless Paris deal may trigger.
Peiser captures how things have changed in the last ten years:
Despite the headlines, there was no paranormal extreme in Perth last week — just a game called heatwave bingo
Perth set a sort of record last week for four days in February above 40C. The BOM and media paraparazzi glorified the latest heatwave, chasing it like it was a celebrity Kendall-Jenner-type-event when it was not that different to the heatwaves we’ve had before. Before it came, there were headlines about how it was coming, there were minute-by-minute graphs of degrees C, stories of people cooking cupcakes in hot cars, and there were projections about hypothetical bigger, longer heatwaves that might come, maybe one day, someday: look out for “Temperatures into the fifties”!
Chris Gillham points out that this record was made at the Perth Metro station. Few seemed to mention that 9km away, at Perth Airport similar kinds of heatwaves were pretty common and things had been hotter and lasted longer in years gone by. This year the four day average at the airport was 42C but in 1956 there were 5 days at an average scorching 43.7. In 1933 there was a six day heatwave of 42C average in Perth city. And there were other heatwaves a lot like this a couple of weeks earlier, in January. But who cares about January when we can talk about the effect of climate change on February…
With Heatwave Bingo, every year’s a winner
With bingo, someone has to win. Sooner or later one combo comes up. The secret with BOM Bingo is to have lots of bingo cards. The more combinations the better. Because heatwaves have no official definition, the meaning of the term can change each day. And there must be 400 flavours of 4, 5, 6 or 7 day heatwaves which are split by town, state, season or month. The cut off can be 35C, or days over 37C, 38C, 39C, or 40C. We are multicultural, we can do “100F” records too. Then there are so-called “Perth” heatwaves which apply to one site, one thermometer, and which may not exist at other sites in the same city. Some heatwave days the maximum temperature barely falls over the line, whatever the arbitrary temperature cutoff is this week, and maybe for only 20 minutes, but it counts in media inches, even if it doesn’t count any meaningful scientific way.
The permutations and combinations go quite feral. If we felt like it we could also dig into the minima and mean records — was it the hottest summer night ever? (Not so, indeed the week before had the coldest February morning ever since 1935, — Thanks Warwick, Lance and Chris. Funnily, we didn’t hear about that record on the news, though it did get one minor line near the bottom this article. Imagine if it had been the hottest February night…)
Heatwaves by averages versus the arbitrary cut-off kind
Instead of counting days over a line, we could look at the average maximum temperature during clusters of hot days — it’s less arbitrary.
Which kind of heatwave is worse, one with four consecutive days with maxes above 40C, or the type with six consecutive days with an average maximum of 42C. The kind measured by averages may have a cool 34 degree day in the middle of a six day run of 43s (see Jan 1933)? What’s worse — apparently, whichever one is occurring now.
For dozens of research scientists and investigative journalists, the 399 odd non-records each month get a non-mention. Those losing bingo cards go quietly back in the box til next year, when their lucky combo may come up.
Here’s a graph of the worst 4-day average-maximum-heatwaves in Perth at the airport — (the data from before 1944 comes from the Perth CBD. See the footnote). Automatic electronic sensors were also installed in the last two decades, and they appear to artificially record higher temperatures. (See Bill Johnston’s analysis of the introduction of the automatic system and Perth temperatures]. So despite all the urban warming effect, and the electronic sensors, the hottest and longest average max heat-waves were in 1933, 1956 and 1961. If climate change caused the second worst February heatwave in central Perth, did it also cause the overall number of average-max-heatwaves to fall?
The hottest four day heatwaves in Perth 2016 was not so special. *See Footnote for details.
No luck on the five day bingo this year:
…
Spot the trend? No prizes for anyone saying that heatwaves are getting cooler in Perth:
…
Graphs with help from Geoff Sherrington
From Chris Gillham:
A bit more re Perth’s heatwave and supposedly most extreme summer ever … it’s worth reading The West Australian 11 Feb 1933 for a wrap on the 1933 heatwave including its four consecutive 40+ days which Perth equalled this week.
As noted in the story, the 1933 heatwave was also six consecutive days in which the temp exceeded 100F (37.8C), which beat the previous record of five consecutive 100F days in December 1899.
Perth Metro 1994-2016 has never had five consecutive days above 37.8C, let alone six.
It’s also worth comparing overnight minima in the first 11 days of 1933. They averaged 4.7C warmer than 2016 which is experiencing its most extreme summer in history at the peak of a supposedly large El Nino and with Indian Ocean SST above average.
The first 11 days of Feb 2016 included 9.9C, the coldest Feb night since 1935, and the first 11 days of 1933 included 29.3C, the hottest Feb night ever recorded in Perth (and 1.6C warmer than the hottest Feb night ever at Metro in 2004).
I’ve no idea how the Perth population is surviving this biblically extreme 2015/16 summer 🙂
There’s also been a media buzz about The “most extreme summer” ever with seven 40+ days
Chris Gillham does the numbers and finds again that Perth Airport has had many summers with such a run and hotter averages.
It’s correct that the seven 40+ days in the summer of 2015/16 beat the previous records of six 40+ summer days at Perth Metro and Regional Office since 1897. However, at Perth Airport there have also been seven days of 40+ this summer averaging 41.8C, and these can be compared with records since the airport site opened in 1945:
Seven 40+ days averaging 40.6C in 2010/11
Eight 40+ days averaging 41.7C in 2009/10
Eight 40+ days averaging 41.4C in 2006/07
Eight 40+ days averaging 41.5C in 1997/98
Seven 40+ days averaging 41.3C in 1995/96
Seven 40+ days averaging 42.6C in 1990/91
Seven 40+ days averaging 41.2C in 1983/84
Seven 40+ days averaging 41.0C in 1974/75
Ten 40+ days averaging 41.2C in 1961/62
Eight 40+ days averaging 42.5C in 1960/61
Eight 40+ days averaging 42.0C in 1955/56
Look at the long hot summer of 1962
From Lance Pidgeon some Bingo fun of a different kind — January 1962 was relentlessly above 30C. That month in 1962 there were only 5 days with maximums below 30C at Perth Metro. But in 2016 there were 11 of these “cooler days” in Perth. [Is that climate change at work asks Jo?] 2016 had nearly twice as many days below 20C minimum as Jan 1962. (Wasn’t the greenhouse effect supposed to make nights warmer?)
Perth Metro shows two 2016 days with a January minimum below 15 C. Perth Regional shows only one for 1962 .Maximums for January above 40 C are the other way around with two in 1962 and only one in 2016. 1962 had only 11 days below 20 Deg C minimum. 2016 had 20.b The highest minimum for January 1962 was 26.2, That is 0.6 warmer than 2016’s -25.6.
Februrary 1 2016 may have set a new record for the lowest daily Feb minimum temperature at that site (Perth Metro).
February 3 1962 holds the all time highest minimum daily temperature for any month that site (Perth regional).
*Heatwave graphs were compiled from BOM Tmax raw (not ACORN). Start 1/1/1897 at station 9034 (Perth regional office) to 2/6/1944. Then from Perth Airport 9021 to 2014. According to the BOM online data there was no heatwave in Feb 2014 or 2015. Comparing 9034 with 9021 in 1980 and 1992 Ave temps in Feb are 2C warmer at the airport. (We should see more records in recent times).
What do people who care about the poor do: A) Copy success, or B) Start a carbon market?
Some people are conflating issues here.
New research shows that more than 5.5 million people die prematurely every year due to household and outdoor air pollution. More than half of deaths occur in two of the world’s fastest growing economies, China and India.
Power plants, industrial manufacturing, vehicle exhaust and burning coal and wood all release small particles into the air that are dangerous to a person’s health. New research, presented today at the 2016 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), found that despite efforts to limit future emissions, the number of premature deaths linked to air pollution will climb over the next two decades unless more aggressive targets are set.
Raymond Pierrehumbert, the man himself and author of the “gold standard” textbook in climate science, thinks so big he’s run out of universe. It’s not just the black tailed antechinus we are threatening with our climate meddling — it’s all Sentient life in the Galaxy. Perhaps we’ll become extinct, because we didn’t build enough industrial wind towers or coat the Earth in the blessed Arc of solar panels.
…There’s no limit to what we can accomplish as a species.
But we have to make it through the next two hundred years first, and this will be a crucial time for humanity. This is where Destiny Studies and our paper on the Anthropocene come together. The question of why we should care about the way we set the climate of the Anthropocene is far better answered in terms of our vision for the destiny of our species than it is in terms of the broken calculus of economics and discounting.
For all we know, we may be the only sentience in the Galaxy, maybe even in the Universe. We may be the only ones able to bear witness to the beauty of our Universe, and it may be our destiny to explore the miracle of sentience down through billions of years of the future, whatever we may have turned into by that time. Even if we are not alone, it is virtually certain that every sentient species will bring its own unique and irreplaceable perspectives to creativity and the understanding of the Universe around us.
Thinking big about our destiny, think of this: the ultimate habitability catastrophe for Earth is when the Sun leaves the main sequence and turns into a Red Giant. That happens in about 4 billion years. However, long before that — in only about 500 million years — the Sun gets bright enough to trigger a runaway greenhouse effect and turn us into Venus, sterilizing all life on Earth. We waste half the main sequence lifetime of the Sun.
However, if we last long enough, technology will make it easy to block enough sunlight to save the Earth from a runaway, buying us another 4 billion years of habitability.
Thus speaks one of the most respected brains behind the Great Global Warming Scare. This is the man who wrote The Textbook every larval climate scientist is currently fed. He’s the one who captured in writing (without naming it) the invisible mental model that is the application of “basic physics” to estimating sensitivity to increasing Co2. He gave us a glimpse of the holy grail source code that drives the implacable belief that atmospheric CO2 Must Cause Global Warming with a climate sensitivity of 1.5C – 4.5C.
At this point, I have to mention (go on, forgive me) that David Evans recently found a couple of ahh, minor problems with the basic mental model (mental being the most appropriate word, h/t Steve Milloy). Fixing these mistakes reduces climate sensitivity by a factor of ten; the whole CO2 was due to a simple modeling error; who forgot a class of feedback loops? David’s work is laid out here. For a shorter summary see the updatedSynopsis. The mistakes, specifically: The Rerouting Feedback, and Omitting Feedbacks that are not Temperature-Dependent.
Jo
H.t Jim Simpson who says: For those on a ‘short fuse’ Click here for the executive summary (of just 2.35 minutes), or for those with a little more time to spare, engage your laughing gear (again), sit back with a beer or two or three or more and let this 27 minute full version of ‘A Tsar is Born’ wash over y’all![That’s the one above – Jo]
We’re launching headlong back into the New Science series with a major post
Lots of things will fall into place — as befits a potential paradigm step forward. For decades, people have been looking to see if the Sun controlled our climate but the message was perplexingly muddy. In the long run, solar activity appears linked to surface temperatures on Earth. (Solar activity was at a record high during the second half of the 20th century when temperatures were also high.) But when we look closely, firstly the solar peaks don’t exactly coincide with the surface temperature peaks, and secondly, the extra energy supplied during the solar peaks is far too small to do much warming. So how could changes in surface temperature be due to the Sun?
A few researchers noted an esoteric correlation of long solar cycles with lower temperatures in the next solar cycle, but mostly those papers were left on the shelf, ignored. Dr David Evans’ notch-delay solar delay theory can explain this odd pattern.
To unravel the connections David took a new approach which cleared out the dead-end complexity of the current climate research. Instead of trying to predict everything from a bottom up detailed approach, he worked “top-down”, treating the Earth as a black box, as a simple Energy-In-Energy-Out type problem, and used the kind of maths that makes modern electronics work. It was an odd combination of factors that came together: David would have to be the only professional modeller on Earth who has a high level PhD in Fourier transforms, experience in electrical engineering in Silicon Valley, and a science blogger as a wife to focus him on this problem (and raise barely enough funds to pay the bills while he worked — it’s been three years full time work now).
This was an Oooh-look-at-that moment. Eleven Years?!
The light in the darkness was this extraordinary pattern that turned up in the Fourier analysis. It lit up a strange path, and following it uncovered the papers that had been largely ignored. Suddenly the disparate observations which had made no sense in conventional models fitted the new theory.
The light on the new path was finding a “notch” filter (it’s a common garden-thing for an electrical engineer, but probably unknown to climate scientists). That notch filter was published here 18 months ago. With one minor proviso, almost all that work there remains intact, and stronger. The proviso is that at the time we thought the notch guaranteed a delay, but we now know that while notch filters can work with a delay, it’s not obligatory. That difference is mostly immaterial now, because the evidence found for a delay turned out to be so strong.
The notch was “the dog that didn’t bark“, the big clue. Somehow at the peak of solar incoming energy, there was a sudden shift in the way Earth responds to incoming sunlight. The extra energy (which is very small but detectable with Fourier analysis) is reflected or not absorbed by the system. This is a screaming red flag that some important change is going on, through a mysterious unknown mechanism.
If there was a delayed action creating this notch filter pattern, further analysis showed that spookily, the delay was 11 years. Crikey, send up the fireworks — it was unmistakably the exact same length as the average solar cycle. This was an Oooh-look-at-that moment. Eleven Years?! And when I say spooky, I mean spooky. This is not just the usual type of “delay” where some effect takes 11 years to be big enough to notice, or the effect gets smoothed out — it’s like there is an 11 year memory built in to the system, a 11 year gap between two discrete events. A fall 11 year ago correlates better with the present than a rise 5 years ago. It’s just weird. Tantalizing, but odd.
The delay may just be the missing key to understanding the Sun’s effect on Earth. Earth’s temperature seems to follow the pattern of rises and falls in solar energy, but with an 11 year average delay. Looked at this way, suddenly the correlation improves, the observations fit. (More specifically, in each cycle the length of the delay seems to wax and wane with the length of the solar cycle).
But there were still mysteries to solve. Make no mistake, it’s not as if the energy from the Sun is arriving on Earth in eight minutes and then taking 11 years to reach thermometers. No way. Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) is not the cause of global warming, rather it is a leading indicator. What on Earth was the mechanism? David and I (and many others before us) had looked for an accumulation effect, or a smoothing pattern — where the extra energy was stored and took a few years to show in thermometers. It didn’t make much sense. Not many things on Earth would operate on that kind of cycle. Not ocean currents, not jet streams, not ice melting , and not arctic tundra growth. And it certainly wasn’t cicadas. I like the idea of a biological process — it made sense that phytoplankton or plants would be adapted to this cycle that had run for millions of years. But still, that didn’t explain a delay — it explains a smoothing process, but not a gap of a decade.
At some point David realized, from the electrical analogy, that the timing was suspiciously precise. Because the delay was the length of a solar cycle, and the notches were synchronized to the Sun, the cause of the delay wasn’t on Earth — but inside the Sun. The delay was not a smeared out thing, but a literal delay — the effect due to a change in TSI only begins to act one sunspot cycle later, and quickly affects the surface temperature here on Earth. The flickering signals from total sunlight are a clue that precedes some other change in the solar dynamo. We’ll talk about the possible mechanisms in future posts, because there are a lot of fields, fluxes and particles coming off the Sun that could potentially affect our climate.
In this post David goes through paper after paper that we found along the path, once we knew we were looking for a delay of one solar cycle. Don’t miss this part. It’s the reason we are now sure that some other factor on the Sun is key to understanding Earth’s climate, and it occurs one solar cycle after TSI changes. Below that, he updates the notch filter which proved so useful (get into that beautiful graph in Figure 2, all you maths-heads and engineers). In future posts we’ll use the delay to predict what seems to be coming for us climate wise. This new theory can be tested soon. It’s falsifiable — unlike the carbon religion. More on that soon too.
Thanks to all the supporters who help us keep paying the bills
This kind of independent research is being strangled at universities by the government monopoly and political correctness. Government science needs competition. And we need your help.Be a part of the team, and fund independent research. Thanks!
And to the moderators who help manage the site, and the readers who send me ideas and information — Thank you too. There are lots of ways to contribute.
PS: The first part of the New Science series (on the flaws in the architecture of conventional climate models) are summarized on the project home page. The conventional models are stuck in a rut, they don’t even include the possibility that feedbacks might allow the energy to reroute to space via water vapor. And they overestimate the sensitivity to CO2 by a factor of five to ten. The synopsis was updated this week with several new diagrams of the atmosphere, illustrating the rerouting feedback and movements in the water vapor emissions layer.
This post makes the case for a delay of ~11 years or one sunspot cycle between a change in smoothed TSI and the corresponding change in surface temperature. And we mean an actual delay between two discrete events, not just a corresponding gradual surface warming smeared out through time as the effect of the change in TSI builds up.
(By the way, what motivated us to look for a delay, which is a novel thing to do? Well we had initially thought that the notch filter found in post 21 implied that there must be a delay, but this was based on an incomplete analysis that indicated that a notch filter is necessarily non-causal (see the old blog posts). Such a non-causal transfer function requires an accompanying delay to make it physically realistic. But a notch filter can also be causal, as insisted upon by blog reader Bernie Hutchins, and as a complete analysis later showed.** In retrospect this was a lucky mistake to have made, because once we started looking for evidence of a delay we found rather a lot of it.)
Observational Evidence for a Delay
A delay of ~11 years from changes in smoothed TSI to corresponding changes in surface temperature has been found independently several times, though apparently mostly interpreted as delays in the propagation of heat around the Earth. Few, if any, appear to have considered the delay might be in the Sun itself.
– 10 Year Delay to Tropical Atlantic Sea Surface Temperatures
Willie Soon (2009, pp. 156-157, [1]) found a good correlation between changes in 10-year-delayed TSI to changes in the tropical Atlantic sea surface temperature from 1870 (see his Figure 4), and ascribed it to delays in heat propagation in the oceans: “The chosen delay time of 10 years is only a rough estimate for the thermal-cryospheric-salinity and mechanical wind stress effects occurring within the Arctic and northern North Atlantic basins to propagate southward. But it is clear from both empirical evidence … and careful ocean modeling … that a physical delay of some 5 to 20 years is reasonable.”
– 12.42 Year Delay to Sea Surface Temperatures Near Iceland
Moffa-Sanchez, Born, Hall, Thornalley, and Barker (2014, [2], Supplementary, p. 5, Fig. S3) found a lag of ~12.42 years from changes in TSI to correlated changes in North Atlantic surface temperatures derived from a marine sediment core in the Iceland Basin, from 900 AD.
– 12 Year Delay to Northern Hemispheric Ground Temperatures
Usoskin, Schuessler, Solanki, and Mursula (2004, [3], p. 21) found that the correlation coefficient between the northern hemisphere ground temperature from Mann and Jones (2003) and sunspot numbers reconstructed from Be-10, from 850 AD, was greatest when the temperature lagged the sunspot numbers by ~12 years (see their Fig. 3).
– Delay of One Sunspot Cycle to Northern Hemispheric Ground Temperatures
The correlation between temperature and the length of the previous sunspot cycle (“solar cycle”) is one of the strongest correlations in climate science, unexplained to date and largely disregarded, but the notch-delay hypothesis offers support and explanation.
Friis-Christensen and Lassen (1991, [4]) found that the length of a sunspot cycle correlates well with the northern hemispheric surface temperature on land during the following sunspot cycle — the longer a sunspot cycle, the cooler the Earth during the following sunspot cycle — from 1861. (The correlation is strong to 1970 in their data then there is a dispute. Damon and Laut (2004, [5]) claim they mishandled their data and that the correlation from 1970 instead predicted level temperatures while in fact they went up strongly, thereby breaking the correlation and supporting the CO2 theory. However this is strongly disputed by Friis-Christensen and Svensmark (2004).)
Butler and Johnston (1994, [6]) found the correlation applied to temperatures at the Armagh observatory in Northern Ireland from 1795.
Archibald (2010) showed the correlation applied to the 350 year Central England temperature record, the De Bilt data from Holland, and temperature records at a number of places in the northeastern USA: “in the latter, the relationship is that each 1-year increase in solar cycle length corresponds to a 0.7°C decline of atmospheric temperature during the following cycle”. David Archibald also proposed using the correlation as a predictive tool. He has been championing this correlation in recent years.
The duration of the ascending part of a sunspot cycle (roughly its first half) is anti-correlated with the peak sunspot number of the cycle, which is known as the Waldmeier effect. However the strength of this negative correlation depends strongly on the measure of the rise time and which index of sunspot numbers is used (Dikpati, Gilman, and de Toma, 2008, [7]). Higher sunspot numbers correlate with a higher peak of TSI, so from the Waldmeier effect we deduce that a longer sunspot cycle correlates with lower levels of TSI during the cycle, which correlates with lower surface temperatures during the following sunspot cycle.
Thus lower TSI during one sunspot cycle correlates with lower surface temperatures during the next sunspot cycle. The delay implied by this correlation is roughly one sunspot cycle, or ~11 years.
Note also that the existence of the correlation supports the notion that the Sun has a major influence on temperatures.
– Delay of 10–12 Years to Surface Temperatures in Norway and the North Atlantic
Solheim, Stordahl, and Humlum (2012, [8]) found that a lag of 10–12 years gives the maximum correlation between sunspot cycle length (SCL) and surface temperatures in Norway and the North Atlantic, from 1880: “This points to the Atlantic currents as reinforcing a solar signal.”; “it is reasonable to expect a time lag for the locations investigated, since heat from the Sun, amplified by various mechanisms, is stored in the ocean mainly near the Equator, and transported into the North Atlantic by the Gulf Stream to the coasts of Northern Europe”; “They also found that temperatures shifted 11years back in time, correlated better with SCL measured between minima than between maxima.”
Recent History Suggests a Delay
Lockwood and Froehlich (2007, [9]) found that four measures of solar activity — sunspots, TSI, coronal source flux, and neutron count due to high energy cosmic rays — all peaked around 1986 and 1987 after rising since at least 1970, once the usual fluctuations of the sunspot cycle were removed by a smoothing process. Global surface temperature rose until peaking in 1998 (or maybe 1997 if the effect of the 1998 El Nino is smoothed out), before leveling off.
This suggests a delay of ~11 years from changes in TSI to corresponding changes in surface temperatures. Indeed, without a delay it is difficult to see how TSI could be signaling the major influence on the surface temperature. (The Lockwood and Froehlich paper is often held by the establishment as evidence for the lack of solar influence on global temperature.)
Observations are Suggestive of a Delay
We constructed a composite TSI record and a composite temperature record by splicing together the data mentioned in post 21 on the notch. Fig. 2 below shows global temperature versus 11-year-delayed TSI, back to 1800, where the TSI is 11-year smoothed to remove most of the effect of the sunspot cycle (the smoother simply averages the values in a centered 11-year window; if the sunspot cycle was exactly 11 years such a smoother would remove all cyclic behavior). With the obvious exception of the 1950s through early 1980s, which we discuss in a later post, the temperature and 11-year-delayed TSI trend up and down mainly in unison — which is suggestive of an ~11-year delay. Be aware that the data is from proxies before 1850 for temperatures and before 1979 for TSI.
…
Figure 1: Global temperature and 11-year delayed TSI, both 11-year smoothed, have mainly trended together. (For the the composite TSI from standard sources replaced by Leif Svalgaard’s reconstruction, see here.)
They warn that the results may floor you. Strap yourself in. The National Centre for Science Education (NCSE) surveyed 1500 teachers across the US, and were shocked that a third bring dangerous climate material in to the class.
“At least one in three teachers bring climate change denial into the classroom, claiming that many scientists believe climate change is not caused by humans” says NCSE programs and policy director Josh Rosenau.
Frankly I am amazed. After twenty years of repeating the consensus message how is it that so many teachers are still unable to recite the permitted phrasing? (And especially in a survey where everyone knows what the right answer is!).
Put on your helmet. As many as half of US teachers actually allow students to discuss the controversy. Unthinkable!
Worse, half of the surveyed teachers have allowed students to discuss the supposed ‘controversy’ over climate change without guiding students to the scientifically supported conclusion.” Scarier still: three out of five teachers were unaware of, or actively misinformed about, the near total scientific consensus on climate change.
Sorry, did I say controversy? I meant “controversy” (any resemblance this debate may have to a real debate is purely coincidental).
Students are obviously too immature to be allowed to make decisions on something so complex. Indeed, after years at teacher’s college and nightly reminders from NBC even 60% of teachers are not old enough either. (Get ye a double degree. Send them back to university!)
Scarier still: three out of five teachers were unaware of, or actively misinformed about, the near total scientific consensus on climate change.
The consensus is total. Scientists who think differently to most other scientists are not scientists, of course, but bloggers, shills or Republicans.
If half the teachers are allowing children to talk about issues, things really are grim. The indoctrination program is not succeeding. Free speech still exists somehow in the USA.
Luckily, at least there is no independent thought left at the National Centre for Science Education.
A new nature paper shows how little we know about the oceans and the whole carbon cycle. A paper (with 64 names!) suggests that phytoplankton might be sucking out extra CO2 from the sky and dumping it in Davy Jones’ Locker at the bottom of the deep blue sea.
Who needs a global carbon market? Apparently plankton are doing it for free. And all those windmills just got a bit more pointless.
Lots of living things absorb carbon, but phytoplankton seem to be more important than the others. The best predictors of sinking carbon were viruses of certain cyanobacteria. Few of the “thousands of phytoplankton species have been studied in this way”.
The ocean’s power to rein in carbon and protect the environment is vast but not well-understood.
But now, an international team of scientists has begun to illuminate how the ocean plucks carbon from the atmosphere, where it contributes to global warming, and shuttles it to the bottom of the sea.
The new study establishes the important role of plankton networks in removing carbon from the atmosphere and depositing it deep in the ocean. And it opens up opportunities for caring for the ocean in ways that encourage it to absorb more carbon.
Track the logic. We took long showers which made more CO2, the Earth warmed and so more cats have kittens out of season. The answer then is to take cold showers to change the weather and save the Black-tailedAntechinus. Then again, we could give the cats the cold showers instead…
When Kristina Vesk started working at the Cat Protection Society of NSW in 2006, she rarely saw kittens in winter. Now warmer weather means cats are breeding all year round, increasing the numbers of unwanted kittens and the threat to native wildlife from strays and feral cats.
Hold that thought — there is another theory. Conflict coming:
Vanessa Barrs, a Professor of Feline Medicine at the University of Sydney, said … breeding can be influenced by photoperiod, the number of available daylight hours, and “cats artificially exposed to 12 hours of light indoors … can be induced to breed all year round”, she said.
So that would be all the CFL and LED blue light bulbs that light up our homes, cause insomnia, are keeping Spots up too?
What has changed more since 2006 — the temperatures in NSW or the type of light globes we are allowed to put in our homes?
What to Do? We can blame coal miners and set up a global carbon market, or blame the Greens/ Malcolm Turnbull and bring back incandescents. Let’s think…
For me it’s unmissable. Mark Steyn is top of my gifted-writers-list, and is the most fearless pundit in the West today. One of the things I most admire is his classy ability to cut down dumb ideas without also cutting down the humans behind them. Steyn genuinely seems to like humanity for all its outrageous flaws. His writing is elegant, cutting — he’s an artisan experimenting with words, punctuation and ideas. His ability to transfer an abstract concept from one brain to thousands is a gift.
Contemplate the impossible challenge of communication — one soul has a pattern of neuronal activity and we want to trigger a similar synaptic pattern to other distant brains. Our only tools are a series of vibrational pulses in air molecules, or a coded spectral pattern in light. It’s a hell of an engineering task. Steyn is a master.
The standouts like Mark Steyn who deal with the front line flak may always seem cool and collected, but it’s a lonely battle on the front line, and they can’t do it without the support of fellow footsoldiers. Be it money, research, or just a kind word, never underestimate how much a little support from you can help. Steyn is in the trenches on several fronts.
Good memes, ideas and people need to be fostered, championed and carried. If you like something, feed it and it will grow.
The Steyn Tour
You do need to book, only pre-registered people can come. Tickets are available online for Cloncurry and Sydney. For other cities get in touch with Rachel at The IPA, even though the event may be listed as booked out. There are waiting lists and Rachel is very helpful. She was suggesting they may offer spots for people willing to stand at the back and sides, and I said I’m sure there would be plenty willing to do that. Unfortunately tickets are especially hard to get for Brisbane, Melbourne, and Canberra.
If you have booked and can’t make it, please let the IPA know, so they can offer a spot to others. Due to security, you can’t send someone in your place. Tickets are non-transferrable. Such is the way…
They will be filming the tour and putting that up online afterwards.
What would we do without the IPA? There is no other group like them in Australia.
The hysteria continues. Some public servants might get sacked. It’s unthinkable. But after the fuss, there will still be 5200 odd staff at CSIRO. The big evil here, apparently, is that we are choosing between two different sorts of scientists.
The lame arguments flow (especially in The Guardian). Prof Neville Nicolls says we need $90m-dollars-worth-of-climate-scientists to stop us being minnows at the “big table”. Maybe baby-climate-scientists have aspired to eat with the science guru’s, but I don’t think the average Australian has the same dream.
Tony Haymet was the Policy Director at CSIRO — and he thinks it’s like shutting down Australian cricket team (not one for exaggeration eh?). David Karoly — Shane Warne, what’s the difference? He also said, it’s a “kick in the guts” to farmers, fishermen and the navy, which it would be if only the climate models could predict things like rain, currents, and sea ice. Haymet barrells on — “We’ve only seen the beginning of climate change. We don’t know what the heck is waiting for us”.
Try to rationalise the statements “97% of scientists agree” with “we don’t know what the heck…”
If a certain Labor government hadn’t vaporised those scientist’s future salaries on windmills, pink batts, and $800,000-tin-sheds for schools, perhaps we could employ those same scientists now. Did any of these CSIRO geniuses protest at government waste? Did a single one point out that windmills won’t save the Spotted Quoll, or hold back the tide?
Thanks to John Spooner | The Age
To quell the fuss, CSIRO released a statement on the job cuts. Total CSIRO staff levels are 5200 and staying that way. There are 420 staff in Oceans and Atmosphere work, and after the shift there will still be 355.
False Flag at Cape Grimm
One of the pet projects held up as a sacred cow to be sacrificed is the CO2 monitoring station at Cape Grimm. That was the worst thing this apparently anonymous scientist could warn us about in The Guardian:
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.Ok
Recent Comments