The Abbott government has at least grown enough backbone to not renew the Labor appointees Chairman to the CSIRO board, who have allowed scientific standards to decay so badly. It’s about time. As long as any director of CSIRO claims that “consensus” has any meaning in science, then the board is an unscientific failure.
UPDATE To clarify: There is no official policy to not reinstate people because they were appointed by Labor. But three directors/panelists say they have heard unofficially there is. I think board members should be sacked if they don’t serve the public, not because of who appointed them. It would be a silly thing for a Minister to say. But in the case of the CSIRO, the Labor appointee appears to be a political assignment rather than a scientific one, and should have been replaced long ago. See my comment #1.1.1 for names and more details.
Not surprisingly, this has angered everyone who wants an unscientific agency that promotes big-government policies ahead of rigorous science. The current Chairman, investment banker Simon McKeon, will be leaving in June. He says public servants do it for the love of it:
“The great majority of people who put up their hands to serve on a federal government agency are really doing it for the nation,” he said. “All I’m saying is we’re missing out on the corporate memory.
So let’s cut the salaries of middle managers and executives at CSIRO by half. They won’t mind, will they? It’s “for the nation”.
Back in its glory days, CSIRO had no almost no administrators and executives brought in from outside. It was run by scientists, and it’s work was far less impeachable. Now, a class of bureaucrats are paid more than the scientists to run everything — how ever did the organization cope without them, back in the day?
I wonder how much it easier it would be to find replacement scientists compared to replacement bureaucrats. Would there be able people willing to do the job of the CSIRO Chairman for half his salary? Yes there would. Would there be able people willing to do the job of any of the scientists in CSIRO for half their salary? You’ve got to be joking!
And why worry about corporate memory, when the corporation is dysfunctional? CSIRO is supposed to be a scientific agency. It has thoroughly compromised itself with releases of highly biased, politicized reports such as State of the Nation, which provide advice that is worse than useless because they are loaded with half-truths, hiding model failures, adjustments, and uncertainty from the paying public. There are good scientists at the CSIRO, but most have stood by and said nothing as the standards collapsed. If CSIRO can allow the nation to waste billions on futile schemes to change the weather, the agency is counterproductive and working against Australian interests. Close it down, split it up, and set up smaller newer ones.
McKeon was appointed in 2010, and interviewed in 2011 (below). His predetermined opinion on climate science was very clear.He was already a carbon activist in 2008. Do you suppose that was part of why the RGR government appointed him? He was passionate about changing the climate, but what we really needed was a chairman who was passionate about scientific standards:
SM: I never thought I would end up chairing a wonderful organisation like CSIRO. I’m not a trained scientist or a technical person. But I am very passionate about some of the great challenges affecting mankind, such as climate change and reducing global poverty, and how science can assist. In a way, not having a science background is a strength. CSIRO has a vital role in ensuring science is important to all Australians, not just those with science backgrounds.
SM: It is not appropriate for me to comment on the politics of climate change. But I will say that the research I see emanating from organisations such as CSIRO, the Australian Academy of Science and the Bureau of Meteorology continues to demonstrate the relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming. The science appears to me to be quite clear cut on this point.
Both political parties have shown a willingness to tackle the issue, but there’s little time to wait. And, most importantly, I appreciate the importance for Australia of retaining a strong element of international competitiveness and acknowledge that we’re a tiny polluter globally (although massive on a per capita basis). But as a prosperous country, we must be a leader in this space, not a freeloader.
It would have been better for the nation if Tony Abbott had paid out all their contracts in Sept 2013 and immediately appointed people who understand the scientific method instead. McKeon was lauded as “compassionate”, but we don’t need compassionate research so much as we need effective research that gives accurate predictions.
Back in 2010 McKeon effectively said CSIRO should have more political importance:
Naomi Orsekes’ big intellectual contribution to the climate debate is her fantasy that skeptics copy tactics from the tobacco lobby. It’s a trick to reframe real criticism — Dr A spots a real error, but Oreskes waves the “Tobacco tactic!” red flag. Stop the conversation!
Not only are these ad hom attacks tactics as old as the stone age, bone obvious, and used in every political hot-potato debate, but “tobacco tactics” are the stock and trade of Prof Naomi Oreskes. She’s make a whole career out of mimicking the tobacco industry.
Oreskes wrote an entire book designed to denigrate scientists based on tenuous links on unrelated topics with 20 year old documents. She is The Merchant of Doubt — it’s what she sells — “doubts” about the motivation of skeptical scientists. Her fantasies about skeptics using tobacco tactics is pure psychological projection. Perhaps she isn’t aware?
In a science debate about the climate, the only things that matter are evidence and reasoning about the climate. Those who can’t point out flaws in the science debate launch personal attacks from the gutter instead. What has tobacco got to do with Earth’s Climate? It’s not a forcing or a feedback, but the smoke sure clouds the public discussion.
A. O. SCOTT, NY Times,unwittingly writes a parody of Oreskes:
The pro-tobacco strategy also called for smearing critics and invoking noble ideals like personal freedom against inconvenient facts like nicotine addiction.
Oreskes “smears critics” and invokes the noble ideal that believers in man-made climate change are doing it to help the poor and the planet. That doesn’t fit the facts, where believers get paid three thousand times more than skeptics, and don’t care when the poor starve, or when their pet projects end up chopping and frying the wildlife they were meant to save. Hey, accidents happen, but it’s the response (or lack of) to the unintended consequences that telegraphs their real intentions.
The reference is to the long campaign to obfuscate and undermine attempts to make the public aware of the dangers of cigarettes. As early as the 1950s, tobacco companies were aware — thanks to their own research — that their products were hazardous and habit forming, but they waged a prolonged and frequently successful campaign to suppress and blur the facts. Their tactics included sending dubiously credentialed experts out into the world to disguise dishonesty as reasonable doubt. “We just don’t know.” “The science is complicated.” “We need more research.”
Who suppresses and blurs the facts in the climate debate? Could that be people who talk about tobacco instead of clouds and humidity?
Who sends out dubiously credentialed experts? Sounds like the Nobel Prize winners, who got “Peace” prizes because they weren’t smart enough to win a Physics prize (like theseskeptics did). Or worse, is it like people who didn’t even win a Nobel Peace Prize but like to pretend they did? Is that dubious enough?
As for telling the world the cop-out “the science is complicated” — it’s not what skeptics do, instead it’s the alarmist modus operandi. The science is so “complicated” only certified approved climate experts can see the future, and riff raff like brain surgeons, nuclear physicists, and Fourier mathematicians are too stupid to be able to form an opinion on something as complex as a climate model. Besides, thousands of these independent “non-climate-experts” are being paid by Phillip Morris to seed doubts. You’ve never seen a conspiracy theory as big as this one.
What’s remarkable is that Orsekes is playing the weakest of hands, yet some journalists, columnists, and “scientists” can’t see through it.
Oreskes, the Queen of Climate Smear, ignores the big money, has no evidence, throws names
The skeptics seed doubts by questioning the evidence and pointing to contrary results (isn’t this known as “discussion”?). Oreskes seeds doubts by digging through biographies, analyzing indirect payments of minor amounts, hunting through unrelated topics and tenuous associations from 20 year old contracts.
Oreskes can name virtually no significant funding for skeptics. Skeptics are almost all unpaid volunteers, working out of professional and patriotic duty, appalled by the illogical, anti-science sentiments of people like Oreskes.
The enormous “vested interests” are well over a thousand to one in favor of alarmism as measured by funding, yet Oreskes has not even considered them. The largest proactive skeptical organization (Heartland) has a budget that is one hundredth of Greenpeace and WWF’s combined. Funding for alarmist research since 1990 is at least $79 billion, and probably a lot higher. Funding for skeptical research is so small, no one can add it up. The oil giants like Shell and BP mostly supportalarmism and carbonmarkets. The global carbon market was worth $176 bn in 2011, about the same as the global wheat trade, and the renewables investments added up to $243 bn in 2010. These are very large amounts of vested interest. Because Oreskes is blind to the real money in the debate we can only assume she is an activist rather than a historian.
She resorts to twenty year old documents about tobacco funding to smear by association because she has so little real evidence of actual funding or misbehavior of skeptics. As it happens, Fred Singer was never directly paid by a tobacco company, has never doubted that smoking causes cancer, but corrected a scientific statistical error in a paper on passive smoking. He deserves thanks. Oreskes owes him an apology.
While skeptical scientists always criticize the scientific claims of the Climate-Fear Lobby, Oreskes can’t fight back on that front, because she’s completely out of her depth. She wrote that a pH of 6.0 denotes neutrality (p. 67) and that Beryllium is a heavy metal (p. 29) and she blames “Oxygen-15” in cigarette smoke for being the cause of lung cancer, though she could not explain how this radioactive isotope is generated in cigarettes. She doesn’t realize it has a half life of 122 seconds. No wonder she trawls through the gutter instead of debating a guy like Fred Singer on the science. She wouldn’t stand a chance.
What if you lost, say, the Great Barrier Reef? No seriously, what if you woke up one morning and it was gone? Celeste Young is paid to worry about that and she’s written a whole article on climate grief. It has no data, and uses models and namecalling which makes it a perfect fit for The Conversation.
A variety of losses can be experienced. People may grieve due to the perceived future loss of something; for example, the type of grief often expressed via social media over the potential loss of the Great Barrier Reef. Individuals and communities may grieve for the loss of a loved landscape damaged by drought, fire or flood.
She adapts the famous Kubler Ross Five Stages of Grief (doesn’t everyone) to to deliver clichés in table form. But don’t rush to knock it, I think this is a new form of grieving, where people project the grief of their collapsing religion onto something else instead, like “the environment”. Let’s call it Parody-grieving. Does Young realize the parallels? The Climate-club are still stuck at stage one. They know something is wrong but the cognitive dissonance is killing them: their heroes hide declines and data, are too scared to debate anyone, and the equipment just keeps failing and needsadjustment. Their saints get imaginary Nobel Prizes for Peace instead of science, but even with every six-member-science-committee on the planet reciting the hymn, half the citizens on Earth don’t believe them, and never will.
For Celeste and her friends the news is bad. They used to think they could control the climate. Feel her pain.
Even with concerted efforts to reduce greenhouse gases, some climate change cannot be avoided…
She’s waking up to a world where the climate might change. The fantasy climate of her childhood dreams is evaporating. At least she can get some consolation that unlike most of the last 100,000 years of humanity, when the storms come, she has electricity, four wheel drives and hospitals.
That nine tenths of a degree of warming we’ve had is not so bad, Celeste, compared to an ice age.
The insights don’t stop:
Climate change does throw up some unique challenges because it is continuous change.
Continuous change — as opposed to what — the last 65 million years of volcanoes, asteroids, and wild swinging interglacials? There’s that utopia of the stable climate again. Humans had to grieve through the Dark Ages, the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. Somehow they grieved without an iphone.
This may result in people becoming overwhelmed as losses accumulate over time, or becoming “stuck” and unable to move through the grief process.
Grief Stage One – Some people deny we have a climate. Feel sorry for them. | (Click to enlarge).
Young sees three key psychological responses:
Clive Hamilton discusses some of these responses in a 2009 paper, and in his 2010 book Requiem for a Species where he proposed that denial, maladaptive (bad) coping, and adaptive (good) coping were the three key psychological responses to climate change.
As psychological reponses go, “adaptive coping” is good, but logic, reason and evidence are better. See my thoughts on Clive Hamilton and his blind hypocrisy on “ethics”.
I’m still grieving for the standards of Victoria University. Celeste Young states in comments to her article that:
just to clarify that climate denial is a term that has been used in the literature, l did not use the word climate denier in the article
Yet the table gives “Climate denial” as an example of the first stage of grief adaption, and underneath the table it says “Celeste Young, author provided”.
Victoria U – fifth-rate to the core.
From Ruairi in comment #14:
To believe in warming,for years,
Then be duped by climate change fears,
Then reach the conclusion,
It was all an illusion,
Is bound to bring warmists to tears.
h/t to Handjive and manalive
————————————————————————————
From Chapter 4, Young struggles to get a grip on even the most basic aspects of human psychology:
New study says going on about “moral duty” will convince the skeptics (Sure, load on the guilt trip)
Last weekend a Reuters IPSOS survey found that if you ask the right questions, a majority of Americans see climate change as a moral obligation. The brains trust inferred from this that the climate propaganda groups ought to load up on discussing values to convince conservatives as if that might be the magic key.
“The moral imperative is the way to reach out to conservatives,” said Rev. Mitch Hescox, president of the Evangelic Environmental Network, a large evangelical organization that advocates for action on climate change. “Talking in terms of values is the only way forward if we are to bring our fellow Republicans along.”
UPDATE: Results of the online poll 2,412
Thanks to Pat for finding the survey. How the full results change the picture. Half the population are skeptics. And most people distrust experts, politicians, and even UN scientists.
Q6. Which of the following people, if any,do you think can speak with authority
about global warming?
UN scientists
43%
Bill Nye (the Science Guy)
31%
Al Gore
18%
President Obama
18%
Neil deGrasse Tyson
13%
Pope Francis
10%
Democratic leaders in Congress
10%
Republican leaders in Congress
9%
Senator James Inhofe
4%
None of these
31%
The public don’t trust anyone much. When asked “Which of the following people do you think can speak with authority about global warming?” Politicians from both sides rated very low: Democrat leaders, 10%; Republican leaders , 9%. But look out: Pope Francis scored the same, 10%. The public trust the Pope as much as the average politician.
But wait, here’s the real shocker: UN Scientists 43%. How devastating! 57% of people don’t think UN scientists speak with authority on climate change. Wow.
More than half the population are skeptical. Reuters didn’t report that 52% — of all respondents think climate change is mostly natural or are unsure. 47% think that human activity is mostly to blame.
Nor did they say that 46% didn’t think the Pope should even talk about climate change, and 49% think he should stay out of politics.
If these results are accurate (it’s only an online survey) it shows those pushing man-made global warming have pushed too hard. They have burnt through a lot of the credibility of the UN and “scientists”. Pushing the meme through the Pope isn’t going to help.
Sure I say, let’s talk about “values”– bring it on.
Warming kills less people than cooling. How about our moral obligation to help people dying of cold, or the 1.3 billion people without electricity? In Niger, Africa, 17 million people use less electricity than Dubbo, NSW, a town of 40,000. Children in poverty are suffering from lung damage now. The Greens priority is to spend billions to stop them dying in 2100 from seas rising at 1mm a year. How many people does expensive electricity kill? (How many birds does it fry?) Biofuels led to nearly 200,000 estimated deaths in 2010. Let’s talk about feeding corn to cars instead of starving children?
As I’ve said before the opportunity cost is the killer:
The real price is often invisible. It’s all the things we won’t do that we could have: $3.4 billion dollars spent on carbon sequestration is not just “money”, it’s 46 million people who didn’t get cured of blindness and another 100 million who won’t get clean water — some of whom will die from cholera or dysentery.
The highest moral imperative is to speak the truth about what drives our climate, to have free debate, open science, and honest disclosure of the uncertainties.
Does anyone think world leaders have no moral obligations? Anyone?
The Rev. Mitch Hescox appears to think the “moral” message (ie. guilt trip) would be something to try. Where has he been for the last 3 decades?
The results were clear that approaching the issue of climate change from a moral standpoint could be more effective in swaying opinion, and this approach could even help unlock the endless debate in the United States. Those invested in fossil fuels have been resistant to those that seek to reduce carbon emissions in the United States, much to the disappointment and alarm of climate scientists in both the United States and around the world.
The extended guilt trip won’t make any difference to skeptics. We’ve heard it all before. What we want is honest debate and real evidence.
As far as the survey went, who knows what the questions were, as Reuters don’t link to the questions or results. But 2,827 2,412 Americans were asked some things in February about the climate (See the update above). We know people are quite good at guessing what the surveyors want them to say and two thirds earned a jelly-bean that day.
Two-thirds of respondents (66 percent) said that world leaders are morally obligated to take action to reduce CO2 emissions. And 72 percent said they were “personally morally obligated” to do what they can in their daily lives to reduce emissions.
The Daily Science Journal repeats the results, but doesn’t have a link to the questions either. Not so “scientific” then?
Does anyone think world leaders have no moral obligations? Anyone?
So 30% of people think world leaders are morally free to pour out as much CO2 as they want? That’s a fairly assertive skeptical statement.
POST NOTE: How bad are these questions?
Question 10 asked Has the Pope’s views on climate change impacted you in any of the following ways? Paradoxically, 47% said “No” that the Pope’s views have “not had an impact on my own views.” (It’s a double negative which may explain the paradox). When further prompted “I am now less skeptical of the scientific arguments about the existence of climate change”, fully 70% said “No”. So if half changed their minds, but 70% are not “less skeptical”, then the Pope made some people more skeptical. We’re at the overdone point and when even The Pope tells us to worry about the climate –– the punters know it’s junk-science.
The survey has the usual ambiguous loaded questions about “climate change” and “global warming”. Does that mean man-made climate change? Yes, if you are a UN employee; No, if you read a dictionary. Technically, I believe climate change is real (does anyone deny ice ages?) Any question with meaningless terms is not worth asking (unless you want a PR headline of the “right” kind).
The Last Word: Why didn’t Reuters give us the interesting bits in the press release?
Is Reuters a news service or a political advocacy group? These results were run through the half-truth sieve and only the parts that fitted the “story” were written up.
Here a result, below, that bundles people who “strongly agree” with people who “somewhat agree” and on a question that has a “most” in it. Is a somewhat-most, more than half, or less? The vagueness is then piled into a loaded sentence which includes a statement that was never in the question about mythical generic scientists saying it drives climate change.
Sixty-four percent of those polled agreed with the pope that human activities are largely responsible for the rising CO2 levels that scientists say drive climate change.
Readers of Reuters would not come away knowing half the population are skeptics, that 90% don’t think the Pope has any authority to speak on climate change, or that most of the public don’t even believe UN scientists do either.
The headlines are as inane as ever — stating the obvious, proving only that the modern media is mostly bread and circuses. Pretty much everyone agrees the world is slowly trending warmer, but it’s rolled out in the media as if someone somewhere is denying it, and as if mere proof of warming is “proof” it will keep warming. Watch the causal chain explode into climate astrology:
“THERE is no point in denying it: Australia is getting hotter, and it’s not going to stop. And we have the figures to prove it. “
If this proves anything about the future climate its that journalists are getting more gullible. They have figures too?!
Caroline Zielinski, of The Telegraph, dutifully repeats the PR line, that “2014 was the hottest ever on Earth”. She must have missed the press release that also said that NASA were only 38% sure of that. That makes them 62% sure they were wrong — just another global warming factoid, eh?
Zielinski tells us Western Australia had “several days of near-50-degree heat this summer.” Oh Yessity, Yes indeed. At Marble Bar a full century of global warming means it was almost as hot in 2015 as it was in 1905 and 1922. Back to the future we go.
To investigate the story, Zeilinski confirmed the big-government WMO press release by phoning the big-government BOM, as if either of these groups would contradict each other. Dr Karl Braganza at the BOM backed up the WMO, apparently not pointing out the awkward fact of the 62% wrong NASA press release, and not mentioning the data on Boulia either. Instead he went out on a limb with a brave theory that there was no climate change in Australia until 1950.
“Australia has warmed up most notably since the mid-20s century,” says Dr Karl Braganza, manager of climate monitoring at the Bureau of Meteorology.
“Prior to that, temperatures were reasonably flat — we didn’t have much of a trend.
“There was no clear trend prior to World War II — it’s from 1950 onwards that we’ve had a significant warming trend across Australia.”
There is a decided lack of convincing good temperature proxies for Australia, but proxies from pretty much everywhere else in the world show that the warming trend started two to three hundred years ago, long before man-made CO2 rose. That trend hasn’t changed much. In the last 16 years, the more CO2 we pumped out, the less difference it made.
Yes, it’s warming (a bit). The world has been warming for 300 years. So?
Everywhere we look there are signs the warming started around 1700 – 1800AD. In the Northern Hemisphere, 120 proxies show things started warming 200-300 years ago. Some 6,000 boreholes drilled on all continents (including Australia), show the same thing. Sea levels have been also rising for around 200 years. The water flowing past Indonesia started warming around 300 years ago. (The Makassar and Lombok Straits are the main throughflow from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean.)
But maybe Australia didn’t warm or cool? The seas just rose and fell, the oceans changed, and the other continents got warmer and cooler.
Boreholes can only show the general trends, but the trends are pretty clear. What caused the medieval warm period? The models don’t know. What caused that cool dip around 1700AD? The models don’t know. What caused the recent warming — the models don’t know. They got the last 16 years wrong, and everything else. They’re broken.
…
Sea levels have been rising for 200 years, though they were generally falling for the 7,000 years before that.
UPDATE: *Chris has been over the entire dataset again, and makes a correction that adjustments account for 30-40% of the rise. A bit less than half. Headline updated. See his site for the newer stats. March 9, 2015
Adjustments that cool historic temperatures have almost doubled Australia’s rate of warming.
CSIR published “Meteorological Data” 1855 – 1931
There was a time back in 1933 when the CSIRO was called CSIR and meteorologists figured that with 74 years of weather data on Australia, they really ought to publish a serious document collating all the monthly averages at hundreds of weather stations around Australia. Little did they know that years later, despite their best efforts, much of the same data would be forgotten and unused or would be adjusted, decades after the fact, and sometimes by as much as one or two degrees. Twenty years later The Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics would publish an Official Year Book of Australia which included the mean temperature readings from 1911 to 1940 at 44 locations.
Chris Gillham has spent months poring over both these historic datasets, as well as the BoM’s Climate Data Online (CDO) which has the recent temperatures at these old stations. He also compares these old records to the new versions in the BOM’s all new, all marvelous, best quality ACORN dataset. He has published all the results and tables comparing CDO, CSIR and Year Book versions.
He analyzes them in many ways – sometimes by looking at small subsets or large groups of the 226 CSIR stations. But it doesn’t much matter which way the data is grouped, the results always show that the historic records had warmer average temperatures before they were adjusted and put into the modern ACORN dataset. The adjustments cool historic averages by around 0.4 degrees, which sounds small, but the entire extent of a century of warming is only 0.9 degrees C. So the adjustments themselves are the source of almost half of the warming trend.
The big question then is whether the adjustments are necessary. If the old measurements were accurate as is, Australia has only warmed by half a degree. In the 44 stations listed in the Year Book from 1911-1940, the maxima at the same sites is now about half a degree warmer in the new millenia. The minima are about the same.
Remember that these sites from 1911-1940 were all recorded with modern Stevenson Screen equipment. Furthermore, since that era the biggest change in those sites has been from the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect as the towns and cities grew up around the sites. In some places this effect may already have been warming those thermometers in the first half of the last century, but in others UHI can make 5 to 7 degrees difference.
If Australian thermometers are recording half a degree higher than they were 70 – 100 years ago, we have to ask how much of that warming is the UHI effect? Common sense would suggest that if these older stations need any correction, it should be upward rather than downward to compensate for the modern increase in concrete, buildings and roads. Alternatively, to compare old readings in unpopulated areas with modern ones, we would think the modern temperatures should be adjusted down, rather than the older ones.
The Official Year Book 1953
Chris Gillham discusses the potential size of the UHI changes:
“In 2012 and 2013 it was anticipated that UHI warming in south-eastern Australia will continue to intensify by approximately 1C per decade over and above that caused by global warming (Voogt 2002), with tests in 1992 showing a UHI influence up to 7.2C between the Melbourne CBD and rural areas. [PDF]
Smaller but significant UHI influences were found in regional towns, with a 1994 test observing a UHI intensity up to 5.4C between the centre of a Victorian town and its rural outskirts.” [PDF]
The historic CSIR data: 226 stations from 1855 – 1931
The situation with adjustments stays roughly the same if we go back even further. Gillham compared 226 stations during the period from 1855 -1931 and the average is about half a degree less than what it is now — from 2000-2014.
The first station in the CSIR record, Melbourne, starts in 1855. Each year, new stations came online. By 1865 there are ten stations and by 1880 there are nearly 30.
Ideally we could compare 50 stations which didn’t move or start and stop over the same period, but even the ACORN dataset in the 1900s doesn’t do that, introducing new stations up to the 1970s.
It is hard to draw conclusions from the CSIR record as is. But neither can it be ignored. Roughly two thirds of the temperatures were recorded on Stevenson screens, but much of the data in the 1800s was recorded on screens, sheds and shades until Stevenson screens were introduced across Australia over the 20 year periodfrom 1887 – 1907. And scientists in the 1930s were very much aware of the effect of slight changes in screens as one long running comparison of different screens side by side had already been going for over 30 years in Adelaide. (I’ll write more on that soon).
It’s rough but, as rough guides go, it’s the only data we have. Other peer reviewed papers have estimated Australia’s average temperature change to 0.09C in 1000AD based on two groves of trees in Tasmania and New Zealand. Wouldn’t thermometers be kinda useful?
One small piece of good news is that at least the early CDO records maintained by the BoM online appear to match the averages within the Year Book and CSIR tables. At least the copies of the original data put online are accurate as far as these rough tests go.
The Bottom line
There is a treasure trove of information in these historic documents for people interested in long-term climate.
The difference between the original records and the adjusted ACORN dataset suggests that the adjustments cooled original temperatures by 0.4C between 1910 and 1940, which means that around 45% of the modern “warming” trend is due to these homogenisations and adjustments which have not been independently justified and oddly appear to go in the opposite direction to what common sense would suggest might be necessary. In the older and larger CSIR tables, there is an overall cooling adjustments of 0.5C.
I’m calling for readers to send messages to their MPs. It does matter. The Coalition needs to hear from voters. It worked before, and it can work again. For foreign readers, yes, there are rumours of another leadership spill or challenge all over the Australian press. See my comment #10.2 for background.
Malcolm Turnbull could’ve stayed leader in 2009 — all he had to do was agree to delay the emissions trading scheme until the rest of the world acted. But he fell on his sword for a pointless scheme which benefits few outside bankers, brokers and the renewables industry. And he has never said he would do anything differently.
We can’t get rid of a carbon market. Why risk it?
Malcolm Turnbull is the leader that the ABC wants for the party that most in the ABC won’t vote for. If you follow the ABC and Fairfax and feel despondent about our national debate, don’t give in to apathy. That’s exactly what the “consensus” crowd wants — your submissive acquiescence. The same people who tell us a carbon trading scheme is inevitable are the now ones calling the government dysfunctional, even though it achieved its three largest goals in the first twelve months. Tell the government and the media what you think.
The problems of the Abbott government are real (which government was perfect?) but they are not on the scale of the debacle of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years — when a major economy-wide transformation was denied before the 2010 election yet was delivered after the election, and when surpluses were promised each year but were never delivered. Abbott solved problems in six months that dogged the Labor government for six years. Our national discussion is consumed with inane red herrings. Should we debate the massive Labor debt created during a mining boom, or agonize over knighthoods instead? (Hint: NZ and Canada survived the princely honors issue without calling out a lynch mob.) Should we discuss the all pervasive entitlement culture, or whether Triggs was offered another job?
Some Liberal party supporters (and perhaps some MP’s) risk being fooled by the ABC and Fairfax. The ABC ignored some of them for years but suddenly shone the prime time glow all over them when their message was anti-Abbott. Do they suspect they are being used?
As I said a few weeks ago – there is only one choice for a real skeptic
Malcolm Turnbull lost his leadership in 2009 because he wanted an emissions trading scheme. But that extraordinary wave may get reversed. Australia may still end up with an emissions trading scheme which will send billions in broker’s fees to bankers, won’t change the climate, and will be almost impossible to unwind. It’s not about free markets, it’s about fake ones. What’s worse than a carbon tax? A carbon market.
If you worry about the endless, inevitable rush to bigger government, more freeloaders and less individual freedom, do something — express yourself.
Australia needs a real conservative-libertarian party.
The state of the debate: Steve Kates says “I would never vote for a Coalition led by Malcolm Turnbull“. Sinclair Davidson, says I would never (again) vote for a Coalition led by Tony Abbott. I confess to being unmoved by Davidson’s reasoning- – there is nothing pro-Turnbull there, and although Abbott should’ve repealed 18C (it’s pure freedom of speach) there is no sign that Turnbull will repeal it either.
If Turnbull becomes PM, much of the passionate support base for the Liberal party will switch to other conservative or libertarian parties. Abbott has let down his base by pandering to the bullies and greens, but he can change that. Does anyone think Turnbull will take them on?
Abbott is decisive, loyal, focused on outcomes, writes his own speeches, engages intensely with people; he is principled, pragmatic, stubborn, in love with the military, romantic, a sportsman, courageous, has immense willpower, and is conservative and religious…
[But] each one of his positive characteristics, which could make him a fine prime minister, is also potentially a negative characteristic and limits his effectiveness.
In the end, a Turnbull led Coalition may lead to the rise of alternate parties or a new Australian version of UKIP which might be a boon in the long run, but the price may be a permanent emissions trading scheme which feeds financial sharks. Do we really want to risk it?
Please keep your messages to politicians and news editors polite.
A hard hitting article today from Graham Lloyd in The Australian. Finally the scientific debacle of climate records is being hung out like dirty laundry. For people who don’t read skeptic blogs it will be news that there are claims of scandal and corruption about temperature data adjustments around the world, against institutions that are (or were) respected household names.
Lloyd starts with a brilliant analogy from David Stockwell, who asks Would it be OK if we adjusted Don Bradmans batting average down? It won’t affect the global batting average…. (The Don is the legend of international cricket — those stats are sacred.)
Lloyd goes on to tell the tale of how temperature adjustments that make historic records cooler are commonplace, and suddenly under the spotlight around the world. To his credit, Lloyd realizes this has been coming for a long time — he explains the Australian and UK Met offices were caught discussing ways to make it hard for skeptics. He talks about Christopher Booker’s article on adjustments in Paraguay getting 30,000 comments, and the issue “exploding” internationally with questions about the misleading public declarations about 2014 being the hottest year on record, as well as the issue of Arctic temperatures. There is now a review into the Australian BOM, and even the prospect of a US Senate inquiry.
CRICKET legend Donald Bradman is a useful metaphor for the escalating global row over claims the world’s leading climate agencies have been messing with the weather.
Imagine, for instance, if some bureau of sport were to revise the Don’s batting average in Test cricket down from 99.94 to 75 after adjusting for anomalies and deleting innings of 200 runs or more.
What if the bureau then claimed another batsman had exceeded the Don’s revamped record to become the greatest ever?
Critics could be told the adjustments “don’t matter” because they had not affected overall global batting averages. Just as many batsmen had been adjusted up as down. And complaints could easily be dismissed as the “cherrypicking” of a few, isolated batsmen.
David Stockwell, Australian Research Council grant recipient and adjunct researcher at Central Queensland University, raised the Bradman analogy in his submission to a newly formed independent panel that will oversee the operation of the Bureau of Meteorology’s national temperature dataset.
Stockwell was highlighting public concerns at the BoM’s use of homogenisation techniques to adjust historical temperature records to remove anomalies and produce a national dataset called ACORN-SAT (Australian Climate Observations Reference Network — Surface Air Temperature). The panel, or technical advisory forum, which will hold its first discussions with BoM staff on Monday, was formed in December after a series of questions were raised publicly about the treatment of historic temperature records that has resulted in temperature trends at some Australian sites being changed from long-term cooling to warming.
Climategate emails show how long the climate scientists have been unscientifically hiding their work:
Even better, noted East Anglia University’s Phil Jones, was to give troublemakers a big package of data with key information missing, making it impossible to decipher.
Much of the background work and hard questions come from Jennifer Marohasy and the independent audit team who assembled around this website back in 2010, and who write guests posts here. Together we’ve written 41 articles on the BOM here.
But critics of BoM are already lining up to have their questions answered.
Research academic Jennifer Marohasy has accused BoM of using “creative accounting practices” in both the homogenisation of data to remodel individual series as well as the choice of stations and time periods when the individual series are combined to calculate a national average for each year.
Marohasy says BoM’s methodologies have turned a cycle of warming and cooling over the past century into one of continuous warming.
Ken Stewart has been tireless at independently checking BOM figures:
Self-declared “citizen scientist” Ken Stewart has been more pointed. “The apparent lack of quality assurance means ACORN-SAT is not fit for the purpose of serious climate analysis including the calculation of annual temperature trends, identifying hottest or coldest days on record, analysing the intensity, duration and frequency of heatwaves, matching rainfall with temperature, calculating monthly means or medians, and calculating diurnal temperature range,” he says.
“In conclusion, ACORN-SAT is not reliable and should be scrapped.
In a separate article this weekend, also by Graham Lloyd, the headline points out that a lot of warming in Australia is created by adding warmer and dropping cooler stations from long term averaged records:
BoM’s new stations ‘explain warming’ in Australia
ALMOST half of the 20th-century warming for Australia’s national average surface temperatures could be due to changes in the weather stations chosen for analysis, rather than changes in the climate, according to a submission to an independent review of the Bureau of Meteorology’s national records.
Merrick Thomson, a retired certified practising accountant, has asked the independent panel to investigate how and why stations were selected for inclusion to make up the national trend.
The panel of experts, headed by Ron Sandland from the CSIRO, will begin its review of BoM’s national temperature data next week, amid growing controversy about the homogenisation of climate records worldwide.
In his submission to the review panel, Mr Thompson said when the BoM transitioned to the new ACORN-SAT system it had removed 57 stations from its calculations, replacing them with 36 on-average hotter stations.
“I calculate this has had the effect of increasing the recorded Australian average temperature by 0.42 degrees Celsius, independently of any actual real change in temperature,” Mr Thomson said.
“Of the 57 stations removed from the calculation of the national average temperature, only three of these have actually closed as weather stations,” he added.
Mr Thomson asked that the review panel investigate why the mix of stations changed with the transition to ACORN-SAT, and why this was not explained and declared, particularly given that it has resulted in a large increase in the 2013 annual temperature for Australia.
The BOM were invited to write for The Australian, but declined.
This is a very long feature, with interviews of Judith Curry and Richard Tol. Don’t just run down and buy a copy of The Australian — subscribe to it. You certainly won’t get this information from Fairfax or The ABC. Graham Lloyd has done a great job, bravely following the hard questions — as has Jennifer Marohasy, in relentless pursuing this for so long, and so many of the other unpaid, and independent minds who expect the answer provided by the BOM to make more sense. My thanks to everyone who has put in long hours. I have a lot more material to share from them — it’s hard to do it all justice.
It’s so cold in the Northern Hemisphere the ocean has frozen in Nantucket. The Great Lakes are 85% frozen over. Cold weather is breaking records in the US. Snow in the southern states of the US has meant 200,000 homes in North Carolina have no electricity. More seriously, 124 people died in Avalaches in Afghanistan. It’s winter.
The witchhunt over tenuous connections to fossil fuel funding wants to do a lot more than just silence a few people. The aim is to maintain the global chill over all of academia. That’s why it’s so important we support the individuals under fire, and don’t give in.
Congratulations to Richard Lindzen, John Christy, Judith Curry, Steven Hayward, Roger Pielke, David Legates, and Robert Balling. All of them have been named to be investigated and lined up for character assassination like Willie Soon. Obviously they are effective and convincing speakers, and a threat to the climate-industry.
“Let’s start by axing a simple question: If I say “two plus two equals four,” does the truth of that proposition depend on whether I’ve received a grant from the Charles G. Koch Foundation? Apparently it does for Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), the ranking member of the House Committee on Natural Resources. He has sent letters to seven universities targeting seven academics who, according to the Democratic spokesman for the committee, were chosen because they seem “to have the most impact on policy in the scientific community.”
Even a tiny step beyond the approved line will be punished
Consider how hard-line the inquisition is. Roger Pielke Jr. accepts most of the consensus IPCC positions, even calling for a carbon tax, and supporting Obama’s proposed EPA regulations, but he’s under fire as much as those who question everything. The aim here is much larger than just stopping Pielke — the real audience are the thousands of silent borderline skeptical academics watching on. Imagine if they spoke their minds? The message to them is “don’t even think it”. All academics must be 100% believers, and even the smallest deviation from the permitted line will receive the same treatment.
The harassment and pressure work on whistleblowers. We are all human. Sadly even Pielke admits, despite having tenure, that the harrassment means he has changed the way he writes and researches:
The incessant attacks and smears are effective, no doubt, I have already shifted all of my academic work away from climate issues. I am simply not initiating any new research or papers on the topic and I have ring-fenced my slowly diminishing blogging on the subject.
The real conflicts of interest in climate science matter for people waving unreplicable models
Judith Curry discusses the conflict of interests and points out that it not as relevant in climate science as in other areas where things are not so easily replicable:
The issue is this. The intense politicization of climate science makes bias more likely to be coming from political and ideological perspectives than from funding sources. Unlike research related to food and drug safety and environmental contaminants, most climate science is easily replicable using publicly available data sets and models. So all this IMO is frankly a red herring in the field of climate science research.
I would argue that many of the results used in climate science are not replicable in practice. They come from mysterious black box models or detailed homogenization methods, which even if the full code were available, would take individuals months of work to replicate. In the total absence of funding and grants, no one independent is going to replicate them.
In other words, the people who have conflicts of interest that really need exposing are not skeptics reporting on public datasets which can be replicated, but climate modelers and temperature adjusters who make public announcements with billions of dollars and lives resting on them, but which have not been independently replicated. And when I say “independently” replicated, I don’t mean by another group with the same conflict of interest.
If the evidence was so solid, and the models so reliable, climate scientists would be demanding and welcoming funding to outright skeptics to settle the issue. Instead, fans of the complex unskilled and failing models know that their assumptions are dubious and unsupported, and if a truly skeptical scientist were given equivalent resources to replicate it, they would probably tear it to shreds, exposing how fickle the projections were and how dependent it all was on a few key, baseless, guesses.
The antidote to pressure and intimidation is the support of the crowd
Send Pielke, and all the others your messages of thanks and support, through emails or on their blogs and here below. It does matter. No one should stand alone against the big-government grinding machine. Let those who bravely speak their honest minds know how much you appreciate it.
The wall of money is enormous, and the media oblivious to the real flow from taxpayers to corporate welfare freeloaders.
The wall of money, part 23
Citigroup promised to spend, invest and loan $50 billion in 2007 and found it so easy, it managed to do it by 2013, three years ahead of schedule. This month it promised to send another $100 billion more towards “sustainability”.
How much of this is about being a green corporate citizen? Not much apparently. Citigroup are making the Citigroup buildings energy efficient, but what they didn’t say was whether they would stop investing in or taking money and profits from their fossil fuel customers. As it happens Citigroup might Big-Green, but they are also Big-Ungreen too, they were one of “the top providers of funding for the most damaging practices of the U.S. coal industry last year. “ Not that any journalist mentioned that when they repeated the press release.
The banks can sniff out a good subsidy — it’s money for jam, and they are happy to feed the machine that feeds them.
Easy money for “sustainability” will also generate thousands of scary press releases from each and every sub-project as they start up and report. Not only do banks thus get a slice of the $70 odd billion in annual subsidies, but every new renewable project instantly becomes another “vested interest” in the climate scare, and another lobbyist for big-government subsidies. The cycle feeds on itself. The constant media promotion counts as free advertising for corporate welfare. In addition, Citibank will profit handsomely if a global trading scheme takes off. The brokers in those markets make money on every trade, no matter the price.
So Citigroup use this as a way to paint themselves as green corporate citizens while they are actually sweeping in the profits of taxpayer funded subsidies which forcibly shift resources from the middle class to the elites. Don’t expect these banks to ever take the side of the taxpayer and protest about uncompetitive corporate welfare. Don’t expect most news outlets to do that either.
New York – Citi announced today a landmark commitment to lend, invest and facilitate a total of $100 billion within the next 10 years to finance activities that reduce the impacts of climate change and create environmental solutions that benefit people and communities. Citi’s previous $50 billion goal was announced in 2007 and was met three years early in 2013.
Newspapers as advertorials pretending to be news
Who would question the intentions of major finance houses promoting themselves as “green” community players? Not most journalists, who repeated the Citigroup press release without a single skeptical question.
Siri Srinivas at The Guardian dutifully cut and pasted the press release and found a few activists who pretend that there is large investor demand. In reality 97% of investor demand for renewables dried up in Australia as subsidies shut down, but don’t expect the old media to join those dots.
Ehren Goossens (Sydney Morning Herald) parroted the press release and gave an activist non-profit group some free advertising space too.
The media is the problem. How many subscribers of these media-houses realize they are paying to be fed advertising disguised as “news”, and how many realize that the advertising is selling them pointless schemes that they have to pay for with taxes? If the media told subscribers how many hundreds or thousands of dollars a year they personally pay on fantasy programs to change the weather, the subsidy gig would be up in a few weeks.
This is about much more than just Willie Soon. The fans of man-global warming know they can’t win a polite science debate. They know the biggest threat to the green gravy train is for competitive research, free debate, and independent funding for scientific research. The anti-science brigade want to stamp out and starve independent research. Where once companies would be lauded for their philanthropy, now they are forced to hide it knowing they’ll be targeted, and no matter how good the research work and publications are the results won’t even be discussed if smear-fans can talk about “funding” instead.
Welcome to the dark world of manufactured petty smear campaigns against scientists.
Where was the outrage when a lead author of an IPCC report was paid by Greenpeace?
What we need is a science debate, but if “science writers” want to talk money, I say Yes Please. Lets talk about the wall of money distorting science from monopolistic government funding. This one vested interest is running at almost 100% purity in climate science. How many grants are there for skeptical scientists to audit, check, and critique one intergovernmental committee report issued from Geneva? None. But there was $30 billion (plus) from the US government to find a crisis.
Other monster conflicts distort the public science debate: Big Bankers had a carbon scheme worth nearly $200 billion a year until it went out of fashion and shriveled. Financial houses hanker for the broking profits of the 2 trillion dollar global carbon market. Bank of America even promised to spend $50 billion to save the world — but it’s all selfless philanthropy, right? No questions asked. The numbers get exponentially silly. In 2012 Big-Renewables were getting nearly a billion dollars a day in investments, much of which depended on government subsidies, and the EU improbably promised 20% of it’s whole budget to control the weather.
But Justin Gillis and John Schwartz of the New York Times, and Susanne Goldberg of The Guardian don’t worry about these influences and conflicts, instead they are “shocked” when an independent thinker indirectly receives 0.003% of the money dished out by the biggest vested interest in the game.
Thank goodness some corporate giants want to fund independent science
We need more independent funding, not less. Praise those companies!
Real fans of science would applaud more independently funded science.
Spot the Big-government vested interest
If the sun controls our climate, big-government can’t tax us to stop it or slap levies on the Sun itself. But if humans control the climate the bureaucrats “have” to have a global bureaucracy, more money, more junkets, more rules and more power. What’s not to like? Would bureaucrats want control of an even larger section of the free economy, while paying themselves whatever they think they are worth?
What government minister wants to fund research that shows their portfolio is pointless? What government-funded-scientist wants to announce that 97% of their whole field made an error, and that their models are useless, and that grants should be funneled instead to other scientists in different specialties (like astronomers working on solar activity)?
Any fan of real science would welcome corporate donors and philanthropy
More money means more research. To stop this being abused, all we need is open public debate. Even if the donors are funding research they hope will produce results that contribute to their profits, the work stands or falls by its data and reasoning. If Willie Soon has done biased, incomplete or erroneous work, let the critics speak up. The fact they attack funding and dubious ethical claims shows they have nothing.
What they are really afraid of, terrified of, is that coal power might grow some balls and actually throw serious money at real independent scientists. How would it look if the coal industry not only produced the energy that allows us to live a rich modern life, but it also advanced scientific knowledge?
In a normal world, electricity providers like Southern Company would be bragging about being good corporate citizens funding real research. If they funded weak scientists who couldn’t produce the goods, those scientists would be embarrassed in the public science debate, and Southern Company would not get much value, and take its funding and offer it elsewhere. But there is no free market in scientific research — and the activists want to keep things that way.
Here’s the ethical announcement all government funded climate science researchers should be making
Government-funded science is often used to increase government revenue. That conflict of interest is almost never disclosed.
The Conversation used to promote deceptive disclosure statements like this one below:
Disclosure Statement
Stephan Lewandowsky does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.”
I explained how ridiculous that was. Coincidentally (or not) the next month the disclosure statement from Lewandowsky dropped the false claim, and was more carefully worded fog.
Here’s what government-dependent scientists should be declaring:
This research is funded by grants from a government that has a fixed public position that man-made global warming is “a serious threat”. Both the government, and my academic institution will benefit financially from results which help to sell government policies and promote demands for increased revenues from taxpayers.
Or …
This research is funded by an organisation which has jobs, reputations and billions of dollars staked on the scientific hypothesis. The odds of this research confirming that is 10 raised to the power of a global carbon market.
The bottom line – character assasination is not science
Real scientists want open debate, a free market in the funding and to talk about the evidence. When skeptical scientists criticize other scientists, it starts with their science, and only then discusses the money.
People who want to “milk science” for money and power start and end with character assassination (because they can’t do logic and reason). If Willie Soons work is flawed, disproven, and riddled with errors, then the conflict of interest matters. If he’s done good work, by definition, potential conflicts are irrelevant. Good work is good work.
It’s easy to launch ad homs when intellectually weak media outlets like The Guardian and the New York Times are happy to promote namecalling one-sided attack pieces by “science writers” who don’t seem to know what science is. The real intellectual debate has moved to blogs and a few old media publications like The Daily Mail, The Australian, The Financial Post, and The Wall Street Journal.
Matt Briggs asked the New York Times author, Justin Gillis to state whether he has ever received funding from Greenpeace or other environmental groups. Gillis’ answer was to block him. Who cares about conflicts of interest?
We need more scientists like Willie Soon
Joseph Bast, president of The Heartland Institute sums it up:
“The Heartland Institute stands four-square behind Willie Soon. He’s a brilliant and courageous scientist devoted entirely to pursuing scientific knowledge. His critics are all ethically challenged and mental midgets by comparison. We plan to continue to work with Willie on future editions of Climate Change Reconsidered and feature him at future International Conferences on Climate Change, including the next one, the tenth, scheduled to take place in June in Washington, DC.”
The facts on Cyclone Marcia: the top sustained wind speed was 156 km and the strongest gust 208 km/hr. These were recorded on Middle Percy Island in the direct path before it hit land and apparently rapidly slowed. The minimum pressure recorded after landfall was 975Hpa. BOM and the media reported a “Cat-5” cyclone with winds of 295 km/hr. To qualify as a Cat 5, windspeeds need be over 280km/hr. The UN GDACS alerts page estimated the cyclone as a Cat 3.
The damage toll so far is no deaths (the most important thing), but 1,500 houses were damaged and 100 families left homeless. It was a compact storm, meaning windspeeds drop away quickly with every kilometer from the eye, so the maps and locations of the storm and the instruments matter. See the maps below — the eye did pass over some met-sites, but made landfall on an unpopulated beach with no wind instruments. It slowed quickly thereafter. The 295 km/hr wind speed was repeated on media all over the world, but how was it measured? Not with any anemometer apparently — it was modeled. If the BOM is describing a Cat 2 or 3 as a “Cat 5”, that’s a pretty serious allegation. Is the weather bureau “homogenising” wind speeds between stations?
What will happen when Australians living in cyclone areas have to prepare for real Cat 5s? How much respect will Australians have for the BOM (and the ABC) if they find out that supposedly dispassionate and impartial scientists have been hyping weather events to score political points? Will the BOM issue any clarifications and corrections?
What does a Cat 5 mean anymore?
The headlines are still calling Marcia a “Cat 5″ cyclone three days later. But today there are many questions about that, and very different debates have broken out on the old media and the new. On the mainstream media, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk is already defending the BOM after the Marcia “surprise”. But she is talking about the sudden escalation of a Cat 1 or 2 up to a 5, and whether the BOM gave residents enough warning. On the Internet people are asking why it was called a Cat 5. As Jennifer Marohasy points out, the top speeds recorded showed the cyclone was a Category 3. “Middle Percy” was under the path, and out to sea.
There is a weather station on Middle Percy, and it recorded a top wind speed of 156 km/h, the strongest gust was 208 km/h, and the lowest central pressure was 972 hPa. This raw observational data is available at the Bureau’s website and indicates a category 3 cyclone.
As commenters unmentionable and Ken recorded here, none of the observed wind-speeds came remotely close to being Cat 5. By strange coincidence, two guest authors here, Ken Stewart and TonyfromOz, live north of Rockhampton and both “walked in the eye” last Friday. I’ve spoken to both this morning, and fortunately their houses and families are OK, though still without electricity.
The US Navy’s Joint Typhoon Warning Centre was tracking the cyclone and, like me, noted the surface observations from Middle Percy Island. The US Navy had been estimating wind speeds based on the Dvorak modelling method. This method is considered much less reliable than aircraft reconnaissance, with surface observations (from anemometers and barometers) historically the ultimate measure of a tropical cyclone’s wind speed and central pressure. For example, in the case of Cyclone Yasi, a barograph at Tully sugar mill recorded a minimum central pressure of just 929 hPa, and this is the value in the final report from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology confirming that Yasi was a category 5 system.
In the case of Marcia, the US Navy acknowledged that their Dvorak estimates were higher than the surface observations from Middle Percy Island. In particular their real time “warning”, no longer available on the internet, noted an “intensity of 110 knots” based on the anemometer on Middle Percy. This corresponds with the highest wind gust recorded on Middle Percy Island as Marcia passed over. The maximum sustained wind speed, however, never exceeded 156 km/h, and the central pressure was never less than 972 hPa. This makes Marcia a category 3 based on the Australian system, and only a category 2 based on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale.
Yet the bureau continued to report the cyclone, not as it was, based on the surface observations, but as they had forecast it in a media release the previous day: “Tropical Cyclone Marcia to reach Category 5 system at landfall”.
News.com meanwhile said yesterday that Marcia battered Yeppoon with 295 km winds. The SMH said yesterday at Yeppoon, “winds had reached 285km/h.” Yeppoon wasn’t even directly under the eye. With the BOM and others wearing out the Cat 5 label, and the two-hundred-plus winds, I predict it’s just a matter of time before Cat 6 and 7 are added (that’ll be worth a press release “Cyclones now so bad the Bureau has to add a new category!”).
This is what Cyclone Tracy did to Darwin on Christmas in 1974.
This is what Marcia “Cat-5” did in a direct hit to Rockhampton in 2015.
There are photos of houses that have collapsed, with many poles and trees downed. What I can’t find are aerial shots to convey the overall damage.
[Photo coming] I am searching for an aerial shot, please help if you find one…
It is estimated 1,500 homes across the state were damaged by Cyclone Marcia and an estimated 100 families left homeless. (Source: ABC) Cyclones just aren’t what they used to be, or we are much better at building houses and trees are a lot stronger. See the full photo set on the ABC. There is no doubt it was destructive, and there is pain and suffering in central Queensland, where thousands are still without power, but there are also no photos of damage even remotely like the ones of Tracy. One of the reasons is that houses have been built to cyclone standards in recent years (see the new report discussed below). But no cyclone has hit Rockhampton since 1949, and there are houses from the 1950s and 1960s that survived this cyclone just fine. Presumably, there would have been less flying debris which would help too.
The path of the cyclone is important, we are most interested in the wind measurements that come from right under the eye.
…
Wind speed measurements came in from Middle Island (of the Percy Group) and from Samuel Hill. The distance from Rockhampton to Yeppoon is 40km by road. This radar shot of the landfall from TonyfromOz shows that the eye (headed south for Rockhampton) must have passed very close to Samuel Hill. Unmentionable kept track of measurements from Williamson, Samuel Hill, and Middle Island (of the Percy Group).
For what it’s worth TonyFromOz tells me he has never experienced winds like it, but that the leading half before the eye was much worse than the trailing half. He felt the cyclone was slowing as it passed over. So perhaps the Cat 5 was a “spike” that came and went unrecorded by anything on the ground. But will this cyclone be counted a “Cat 5” in graphs showing the trends in landfalling cyclones? Will the same modeling that finds brief spikes in cyclones be applied to past cyclones, or will the new homogenization lead to rising lines on graphs that are supposed to represent severe storms but instead represent trends in methods of cyclone observations?
…
The new rapid assessment report has been released
Thanks to Martin Clark and LittleDavey in comments for this link.
Essentially the cyclone sped up and slowed down a lot faster than anyone expected. The damage to houses was not so bad because houses are built better. But even this group share concerns that the public need to be given accurate information about wind speeds.
According to a new study released by Nature Climate Change we are, remarkably, at the very peak of conditions for wheat growth worldwide — and it’s all downhill from here. (What are the odds?) The last 15 years, which have been the “hottest on record” and saw massive human CO2 output, were the peak time for wheat. But all that is about to fall off a cliff if we do … more of the same.
To demonstrate that millions will starve: take projections of extremes from broken climate models, and put them in wheat crop models, and then assume we take no adaptive measures for the first time in human history. Ignore that even the IPCC doesn’t think extreme events are necessarily changing: “Climate models are unable to predict extreme events because they lack spatial and temporal resolution. In addition, there is no clear evidence that sustained or worldwide changes in extreme events have occurred in the past few decades. “
There’s been no increase in drought globally in the last 60 years either. Pouring free fertilizer into the sky, along with better agricultural practices, has produced a global boom in crops (See CO2science for scores of studies on biomass gain, and photosynthesis). But from now on it’s doom, gloom and pain — even though in a warmer world the air will be more humid and the temperatures more stable (the extremes of hot and cold happen under clear sky conditions). Nevermind. Give me another grant.
See this graph? It’s all over, the crash is coming, you better believe it. Nature Climate Change says so:
Peter Oborne resigned from the UK Telegraph because it was scandalously holding back negative stories about HSBC, a major advertiser. His plea is an eye opener:
The coverage of HSBC in Britain’s Telegraph is a fraud on its readers. If major newspapers allow corporations to influence their content for fear of losing advertising revenue, democracy itself is in peril.
So much for the illusion of free press.
A friend said this has nothing to do with a science blog. I said, Why not? Science journals are publishing houses too, and worse, their main advertiser is also their biggest subscriber. The journals live where a monopsony meets a monopoly. The largest customer of many science journals are government funded university libraries and academics. The advertisers are often the same organizations. A new Nature journal was even set up this month in partnership with a university. Independence is not just a blurry line out there, it’s deep fog. There is dominant government funding from beginning to end.
The government doesn’t have to heavy hand the journals, as HSBC did. It doesn’t need to be overt at all. In fields like climate research nearly every single employee in the chain of people who send in material, review the material, buy the subscriptions, and pay for advertising are predominantly paid from the public purse. How many of them, do you suppose, would be active critics of big-government and of big-spending policies?
Perhaps the blog model of science publishing is the purest form of publishing — one that only answers to the readers.
Reports are coming in that the BOM and ABC are spinning the Queensland cyclone. This is the thread for those comments. I’ll add more detail as the situation “clears”.
When it comes to our rare high-quality historic records, and the real long term trends of Australian weather, the silence is striking. There are some excellent historical records of long term temperature data from the late 1800s in Australia, which lie underused and largely ignored by the BOM.
For the BOM, history almost appears to start in 1910, yet the modern type of Stevenson screen thermometer was installed across Australia starting as early as 1884 in Adelaide. Most stations in Queensland were converted as long ago as 1889 and in South Australia by 1892. Though states like NSW and Victoria were delayed until 1908.
Here’s a photo of the ones in Brisbane in 1890.
Brisbane was recording temperatures with modern Stevenson screens in 1890, as were some other stations, but the BOM often ignores these long records.
The BOM don’t often mention all their older temperature data. They argue that all the recordings then were not taken with standardized equipment. The BOM prefers to start long term graphs and trends from 1910 (except when they start in 1950 or 1970, or 1993).
The BOM was set up in 1908. Before that there were Stevenson screens going in all over Australia, but somehow these records appear uninteresting to climate researchers. Could it be that the late 1800s would have been more captivating if they were colder? In the late 1800’s there was the widespread heatwave of 1896 killing hundreds of people and recording 50C plus temperatures across the continent as well as the infamous Federation Drought?
Figure that if the BOM were curious about long term natural trends, it would not be impossible for a PhD student to compare the distant past and estimate those long trends. (If two stands of trees in 1200AD are accurate to 0.1C, why not actual, but non-standard thermometers in 1890?)
Not only were some stations using Stevenson screens in Australia, but other types of non-standard but common screens were documented, along with sites, and there were studies of overlapping data. (Though there were also some highly irregular sites that would defy analysis). More to the point, with millions in government grants available for research, the BOM could even recreate some historic sites and do modern side-by-side comparisons. Surely in the space age we can figure out the temperature differences of wooden boxes?
Suppose for a moment that the old records showed cool summers, or demonstrated that Australia had warmed by two degrees instead of one? Wouldn’t there rather be a flood of papers adjusting and homogenising Glaishers and Stevensons, and perhaps even sheds and octagons? Whole new museums could spring forth, recreating sacred meteorology stations from 1862. School children would file by and gasp!
The British CRU (University of East Anglia) reports Australian trends from 1850
Above, the year that Nicholls 1996 describes “most” stations as being shifted to Stevenson screens.
There were a few late exceptions to these dates.
Although there were many sites, especially in NSW and Victoria that didn’t get Stevenson screens until sometime in 1907, vast areas of Australia in WA, Queensland and South Australia have accurate older data. When “hottest” ever records for these states are announced, why are the older high quality measurements almost invisible?
The debt Australia owes to Clement Wragge and Sir Charles Todd
The Stevenson screen was championed by Clement Wragge. He installed the first Stevenson Screen in Australia at Adelaide in 1884 and cheered on others like Charles Todd in 1886. Todd compared the Stevenson screen to other types and concluded in 1898 that the Stevenson was more useful. (Thanks to Lance for that history and trove links!)
Lance Pidgeon discussed Todd’s extraordinary attention to detail and his work with different screens on this site. Adelaide has one of the longest running temperature records of the Southern Hemisphere. Todd’s meteorological plan started way back in 1856. As Pidgeon quotes, Todd was responsible for setting up the telegraph network in four states, and connected Australia to the world in 1872 through Darwin. He set up meteorology stations along the telegraph lines and collected the data coming in down the lines:
“With the building of the Overland telegraph in 1855, Charles Todd, aged 30, as Superintendent of Telegraphs, established meteorological stations on every route where he constructed telegraph lines in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia’s Northern Territory and Darwin. Todd organised the real time collection of the data by telegraph and began the preparation of synoptic maps. By the 1870s, and throughout the 1880s and 1890s, the meteorological data from the telegraph stations saw an increasing use of synoptic charts of pressure, wind, temperature and rainfall for daily weather forecasting.”
Jennifer Marohasy describes how he drove the installation of these instruments at post offices in South Australia and the Northern Territory.
Australia’s telegraph and meteorological networks owe a huge debt to electrical engineer, meteorologist and astronomer, Charles (later Sir Charles) Todd, who was employed by the South Australian government initially as superintendent of telegraphs, arriving in Adelaide in November 1855. He soon had a telegraphic line operating from Adelaide to Melbourne, and by 1872 he oversaw completion of the overland telegraph line from Adelaide to Darwin connecting Australia to Europe via Indonesia. By 1877 each state had tapped into this network.
In 1870 the post office and telegraph departments were amalgamated and Charles Todd was appointed Postmaster General and Superintendent of Telegraphs. This institution, established in 1870, became a Commonwealth department at federation on 1st January 1901, and was administered from Adelaide until 1975.
For Charles Todd the telegraph and post offices were a means to an end. His first passion was meteorology, and everywhere he established a telegraphic office he established a weather station and trained the staff in the operation of the equipment. The telegraphic officers in South Australia and the Northern Territory were required to report temperatures and rainfall on a daily basis to his observatory in Adelaide.
By 1860, Charles Todd was receiving temperature data from 14 stations in South Australia and the Northern Territory. By 1879, he was publishing weather maps, which resemble current synoptic charts.
In Queensland the state meteorologist Clement Wragge took up the Stevenson screens, very quickly installing them across Queensland during 1889.
In Western Australia people tended to take their cues from Todd in South Australia, using the same octagonal design at Perth Botanical Gardens as was used in Adelaide, and single louvre wall shade screens in most other stations in the colony. William Cooke, the first Government Astronomer of the Colony, replaced most meteorological stations with Stevenson screens “before the end of 1897” (Nicholls, 1996). Lance Pidgeon wrote about the comparisons of the octagon designs and the Stevenson screens, and I’ll do a post soon talking about comparisons of Glaisher and Stevenson screens.
In Victoria and NSW temperatures were recorded in a mix of “sheds” or “stands” that are quite different to the Stevenson screen. But plans for some of these are available, and it would be possible to build and recreate similar structures to compare the different types of screens.
In Tasmania meteorologists used shelters or sheds til 1895, then installed Stevenson screens after that. So screens were installed reasonably early, though Nicholls notes “but they were in disrepair by 1907”.
The striking lack of curiosity
The BOM sweat to issue press releases telling us how serious “climate change” is, and how it will hit Australia harder than the rest of the world. They make sure Australians know all the infinite details of projections from climate models we know are broken. But when it comes to our rare high quality historic records, and the observed long term trends of Australian weather, researchers mostly seem to have something better to do. It’s OK to adjust modern Stevenson screens with stations 300km away to rescue a signal, but the old data is apparently beyond hope. Who wants to add 10 or 20 extra years of data? The interminable tedium of those long term natural trends!
Years of toil and diligent care collect dust in backroom archives. “Nothing to see here”.
Welcome to “science journalism” at The New York Times where climate forces are not so much about sunlight and cloud cover, but about “deniers”, “doubters”, and “disinformers”. While our climate is supposedly the crisis the world must face, the NY Times solution is not to investigate and debate the leading ideas, but to ask what names we toss at Nobel Prize winners who don’t endorse the approved establishment line. Pravda would be proud.
Most surveys and polls show 50% of the population are skeptical. A real newspaper that was leading and shaping the public debate would find the most informed views from both sides and put them forward, shaping and hammering out the public debate. Instead, the NY Times discusses petitions pushing namecalling.
Justin Gillis asks: What to Call a Doubter of Climate Change? What indeed, I wonder? Does any single real person doubt that the climate can change? I have not met such a person (though many believers of the dominant government-endorsed paradigm seem to think the climate was stable and perfect before emissions of man-made CO2). The UN redefined the boringly obvious term “climate change” to be a coded shorthand for “man-made global warming”. Justin Gillis has fallen for that cheap rhetorical trick (as the UN knew many gullible “reporters” would). Who needs a dictionary when you can just blindly repeat agitprop?
If Gillis used accurate English, he might wonder what to call people people who were unconvinced of the hypothesis that humans control the climate. The only term is “skeptical”. Those who support the theory can be called “scientists” if they provide empirical evidence — how about some observations of strong positive water vapor feedback for starters? Alas, there are no “scientists” who can provide this evidence. Even the IPCC admits there is “high confidence” that most models overestimate this largest feedback factor, and explains the gap between observations and predictions as an “elusive” bias.
Until a scientist names observations to back their theory, skeptical scientists remain skeptical, and the scientists with broken models, faith, and hope should be called “unskeptical scientists” (as I’ve been saying for five years). Hey, it’s accurate English, if you care about that sort of thing.
Maybe “opponents of climate science” are those who call people names instead of discussing the evidence? Just a thought.
Gillis ought to learn how to Google
“The scientific dissenters object to that word [denier], claiming it is a deliberate attempt to link them to Holocaust denial. Some academics sharply dispute having any such intention, but others have started using the slightly softer word “denialist” to make the same point without stirring complaints about evoking the Holocaust.”
Some skeptics do object to the Holocaust allusion (which is exactly how some name-callers use it), but this skeptic just objects to the abuse of English (Defining “denier”. Is it English or Newspeak?). In this science debate, a denier ought to deny something — I’ve been asking for evidence for five years. What observation do “deniers” deny? Be my guest Justin, lay it right out. You can have a guest post on my blog. Please.
Gillis refers to those who ask questions about government publications as “opponents of climate science“, as if climate science itself is defined by government press releases rather than logic and evidence. But the opponents of climate science are those who want to stifle real debate by declaring the debate over before it starts. The only point of promoting the activist’s namecalling petition is to stop debate by denigrating alternate opinions. It’s a cheap smear article designed to let readers know they are not permitted to ask questions, lest they be seen as a brainless crank, right wing ideologue, or reprehensible “denialist” (aka rock-for-brains or a fan of Hitler).
Those without evidence preemptively call themselves the winners, and toss childish names at their opponents. Real science is about observations and logic, not ad hominem attacks. Obviously, if Gillis could find the scientific observations to back up his devotional faith, and win a real debate, he wouldn’t namecall to denigrate opponents.
An enlightened discussion of the petition could discuss the scientific method instead. But Gillis just uses it as a mindless label:
“The petition asking the news media to drop the “climate skeptic” label began with Mark B. Boslough, a physicist in New Mexico who grew increasingly annoyed by the term over several years. The phrase is wrong, he said, because “these people do not embrace the scientific method.”
Since the scientific method works by discussing observations rather than discussing names, it’s Mark Boslough who doesn’t embrace it. It is the exact opposite of the scientific method to accept a hypothesis on the authority of an opinion poll of experts and Bill Nye the Science Guy.
Gillis — bringing you the news ten years after it happened (the “olds”?)
“It is perhaps no surprise that many environmentalists have started to call them deniers.”
Started? Environmentalists have been calling anyone who disagrees with their religion a denier for more than a decade. Perhaps he’s heard of George Monbiot, who was tossing out the term in the media in 2005? Desmog blog started in 2006 and hasn’ t missed a day of denier namecalling since.
Readers, help me, when did the denier term start? Is Gillis ten years late, or twenty?
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