Nominate your favourite blogs for the 2015 Bloggies — How many categories can skeptics win?

Click to nominate your favourite blogs

Bloggies nominations are open but only til Sunday this week. There is still no Science and Technology category, after 2013 when 4 out 5 finalists were skeptics. Protest by nominating science blogs for all the other categories that apply. As I’ve asked before:

Do these dumb awards matter? They bring in new traffic, and help bloggers tick credibility boxes with the media and with donors. So yes. If you bother (I know it’s a chore) it is a way to say thanks and to put your favourite sites further up the rankings lists. Think of it as a way to alert more people to the sites you feel deserve more attention. It’s free advertising for them. You might have a bit more sway if you also tick the box “I’d like to be on the panel of voters who choose the finalists”.

They may have axed the Science and Technology Category because too many skeptics kept winning it, but that only meant skeptical blogs won in other categories. The blogs you visit every day may not be just science blogs, but politics, education, entertainment, and topical blogs. They may also be New, Secret, Humorous, Groups, and they may be well designed, and well written. What I’ve said before still applies:

You might think the blogs in your usual science circle are not Education, Topical, Group, Secret, or Business blogs, but when you look at the past finalists (eg for Education: Science is beauty, or AMS Graduate Student) you will see that science blogs easily fit. In terms of science education, skeptical bloggers are doing more for the history and philosophy of science, the scientific method, statistics, rhetoric, and paleohistory than any national curriculum. Are skeptics blogs well known and promoted by the media, or are they all a best-kept secret? Which skeptic blogs started in 2014 and are new?

Nominations close on Sunday evening. To nominate click here, fill in at least three different URLs. But you can nominate any blog for several categories as long as they suit the category.

8.7 out of 10 based on 40 ratings

Man-made adjustments transform cooling to warming in Paraguay, South America

It’s not fossil fuels causing global warming, it’s man-made adjustments. Stop the adjustments!

In South America, there are hardly any rural land thermometers. GISS tells us the area is warming (see the map below). Paul Homewood looked at the raw data. There are only three rural stations currently operating in the area, Puerto Casado, Mariscal, and San Juan, and they all show a raw trend that falls. As in so many other situations, after adjustments, all three show a rising trend. The changes are breathtaking. In Mariscal raw temperatures of 25.5C turned out to be “really” 22.5C. (Those 1950 thermometers were hopeless 😉 ). In San Juan Bautista, and Puerto Casasdo the old thermometers get adjusted down by around two degrees. Perhaps there are reasons for the adjustments, but if old thermometers so so bad, and station changes have made such a difference, why does any scientist pretend we can calculate global temperatures accurately?

The GISS map of South America. Left: The warming. Right: The NOAA map showing “grey” areas with no coverage. See Notalotofpeopleknowthat for source links.

Paul Homewood describes what he found when he compared the raw data with the official set: Massive Tampering With Temperatures In South America. This is just one of his three graphs. They are all show similar transformations.

…

Christopher Booker discusses the implications in: Climategate, the sequel: ‘How we are STILL being tricked with flawed data on global warming’.

Although it has been emerging for seven years or more, one of the most extraordinary scandals of our time has never hit the headlines. Yet another little example of it lately caught my eye when, in the wake of those excited claims that 2014 was “the hottest year on record”, I saw the headline on a climate blog: “Massive tampering with temperatures in South America”

After telling us about Homewoods work, Booker describes how dubious so many of the surface temperature sets are:

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9.4 out of 10 based on 145 ratings

Weekend Unthreaded

Limestone beach cave, 3hrs north of Perth, WA | Click to enlarge.

9.4 out of 10 based on 32 ratings

The polarisation of the climate debate has gone too far, says Matt Ridley

Are we all intelligent adults in the room — can we discuss the weather without calling people names?

The state of the national conversation is pathetic.

Matt Ridley, best selling science writer, PhD, elected to the UK Parliament did the unthinkable and switched to become skeptical of carbon crisis a few years ago. This week he wrote about that transformation and the different behaviour of skeptics and those who disagree with them…

UPDATE: Attacking the man takes on an especially blunt meaning today. Bishop Hill reports that in comments Gary Evans, a Guardian author (aka Bluecloud) laid out his best scientific argument. Should that not be [Matt] Ridley’s severed head in the photo? Where else but that paragon of progressive ethics: The Guardian? Such is the intellectual parry of gullible believers: We would actually solve a great deal of the world’s problems by chopping off everyone’s heads. Why are you deniers so touchy? see More Greenpeace Death Threats? Nice of him to prove Ridley’s point.

From My Life As a LukeWarmer: Matt Ridley

In the climate debate, paying obeisance to climate scaremongering is about as mandatory for a public appointment, or public funding, as being a Protestant was in 18th-century England.

Matt used to believe (like so many of us did):

I was not always a lukewarmer. When I first started writing about the threat of global warming more than 26 years ago, as science editor ofThe Economist, I thought it was a genuinely dangerous threat. Like, for instance, Margaret Thatcher, I accepted the predictions being made at the time that we would see warming of a third or a half a degree (Centigrade) a decade, perhaps more, and that this would have devastating consequences

When he initially switched there was a genuine conversation. People did try to engage him in long exchanges, but he gradually grew more and more skeptical, and the conversation just got more and more silly.

Then a funny thing happened a few years ago. Those who disagreed with me stopped pointing out politely where or why they disagreed and started calling me names. One by one, many of the most prominent people in the climate debate began to throw vitriolic playground abuse at me. I was “paranoid”, “specious”, “risible”, “self-defaming”, “daft”, “lying”, “irrational”, an “idiot”. Their letters to the editor or their blog responses asserted that I was “error-riddled” or had seriously misrepresented something, but then they not only failed to substantiate the charge but often roughly confirmed what I had written.

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9.3 out of 10 based on 150 ratings

Marble Bar’s hottest day? Today might reach 49.1C again like it did 110 years ago

UPDATE: 6pm — Despite the hype, the BOM shows no towns making 50C in WA. Marble Bar was the hottest at 49.0C. At least, the BOM, WA Today, The Australian and the ABC have printed the old record correctly as 49.2C.

Will it be a hottest record at one of the hottest towns in the world today? The forecast for Marble Bar, Western Australia, is 49C. The record for Marble Bar stands at 49.2C or 120.5F recorded in 1905 and 1922. I guess if we give up our cars and airconditioners the temperatures in Marble Bar will go back to these ideal conditions?

Thermometer-spotting: the temperature has varied up and down.| The BOM page for Marble Bar: 48.3C at 2.54pm but the highest was 48.9C at 2:46 (8 minutes earlier?). | At 3:30pm the current temp is 48.4C but the highest as listed as 49C at 3:12pm. | Now at 3:50pm the temperature has fallen to 47.9C and it looks like the peak was reached just short of the old record.

Overexcited journalists get 50C into headlines already

Sat Jan 14, 1905

At least one journalist is so excited he predicted it’s “highly likely” one of the towns in the area will hit the magic 49.5C which can be rounded up to 50C! (Seriously, Anthony Sharwood says that. Marvel at the power of odd versus even numbers and rounding conventions. It is not as though our modern media can report to one decimal place in a headline after all.) And who needs rounding, or even a measurement? That same headline today already assumes the BOM are wrong and it will hit 50C. “It’ll reach 50 degrees in parts of Western Australia today”. Hey, it might turn out ~~to be right~~.(It didn’t). This article also gets the record maximum wrong saying it was 48.6C in 2008. It’s on the news.com site, but frustratingly it’s not clear which newspapers it was printed in or how many people saw it. Andrew Burrell from The Australian also gets 50C into the headline:“Pilbara miners brace for 50C scorcher “ and “Weather records set to tumble with temperatures in WA tipped to hit 50C “. How many people in Australia will already think 50C happened, even if it doesn’t.

Historic hot days in Marble Bar

Here are historic newspaper stories of the day the 120F records were set:

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8.8 out of 10 based on 68 ratings

A rare sighting of endangered scientific graph in newsprint

We skeptics get excited about unusual things. The Australian published Michael Asten today in the Op-Ed pages, and took the extremely rare step of publishing a scientific graph (!) with a few error bars and everything. Newspapers publish economic graphs all the time, so it’s nice to see the scientific debate getting a bit more sophisticated than just the usual “deniers are evil, government climate scientists speak the word of God” type of stuff. (In the Enlightenment, data was a greater source of authority than any human; how we pine for those days.) The only thing the story should have added was a note that reminds us that the not only was the “hottest” record not beyond the error bars but that it did not occur in satellite measurements. I’m sure a lot of people mistakenly think that NASA might use satellites, but they prefer highly adjusted ground thermometers next to airport tarmac instead.

The headline on that graph could have been “Climate scientists don’t know what caused most of the big moves on this graph”. Some mystery effect caused the warming from 1910-1940. In ClimateScienceTM it is OK to call that “natural variability” and pretend to be 95% sure whatever it was has now stopped.

The Australian

Angry summer alarmists all choked up without reading fine print

Blame me for the red scribble and arrows (which didn’t appear in the paper).

Red words and arrows added by me. Click to see the original.

Michael Asten juxtaposes a quote or two. The silliness speaks for itself when placed next to this graph:

John Connor, CEO of The Climate Institute, greeted the 2014 result with the comment “This data shows not only a series of alarming years but decades of warming to make an undisputable trend”

What does “indisputable” mean anymore? We’re not allowed to dispute it?

Asten reminds us that back in 2007 when Bob Carter mentioned the earliest warnings that the warming trends were not matching the predictions, he was scolded:

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9 out of 10 based on 109 ratings

BOM admits they got it wrong on “worst Queensland drought”

How much does the BOM care about misleading Australians? Not much apparently, unless they are caught doing it. Everyone makes mistakes, but what matters is what they do to correct it.

The BOM claimed (and the ABC broadcast) that this Queensland drought is the worst in 80 years, but Ken Stewart showed with their own graphs that it was only the worst for 9 years. Stewart politely informed both groups two weeks ago. The ABC excused themselves immediately because they always believe the BOM no matter what it says and never ask any hard questions (it’s not like they are paid to make sure Australians get the right information is it? what do you expect for $1bn?). The BOM took five days to fob the error off even though the “mistake” was obvious against the BOM’s own graphs.

But yesterday Maurice Newman mentioned the mythical 80 year drought in The Australian, lo, suddenly the BOM feel the urge to send another email to Ken and the ABC.

Dear Ken,
Further to our correspondence we can confirm that media statements made to the ABC by a Bureau employee on 6 January 2014 did not accurately reflect the relative severity of the current Queensland rainfall deficiencies. Unfortunately the Bureau spokesperson misinterpreted some of the information. We have advised the ABC of the inaccuracy and asked them for an opportunity to update the story, if possible.

Regards,
Climate Analysis Section

Ken Stewart spent today doing their job and contacting other media outlets that the BOM should have.

The message ladies and gentlemen is that we ought send as many letters as we can bear to editors and journalists of all the major daily newspapers and commercial radio stations pointing out BOM mistakes. CC your letters to the BOM.

The next question then is whether the ABC takes the quietest road possible or issues a new story of equal prominence — in ABC Radio Country Hour, ABC TV 7.00 p.m. News, and the Queensland Country Life — pointing out the BOM spokesman gave the wrong message, that droughts have been worse in the past, and despite helpful people pointing this out to the BOM, they still took an extraordinary two weeks to correct it.

We await reports from Queensland.

If we surveyed the punters in two weeks time, how many ABC viewers would say “the hottest year” and “the worst drought”?

9.3 out of 10 based on 115 ratings

New small study: Wind farms show health effects – why wasn’t this done before?

This is the tiniest of most preliminary studies on the health effects of wind turbines, but it made it to the front page of a major newspaper. It is really just laying the groundwork for setting up a proper study. But at the end of 2012, according to the Global Wind Energy Council, there were 225,000 wind turbines operating around the world. So the real question is why has it taken so long to do an eight week study on six people in three houses looking at the effects of very low frequency ultrasound?

The Greens and Labor Party are supposed to be concerned about the effect of industry on people and cuddly animals, so where was their angst? If wind turbines ran on uranium, or the turbines were erected in inner-city areas, would the Greens have been so quiet?

Pacific Hydro deserves credit for funding and cooperating with the study which took place at Cape Bridgewater in Victoria.

Turbines may well blow ill wind

Graham Lloyd, The Australian

PEOPLE living near wind farms face a greater risk of suffering health complaints caused by the low-frequency noise generated by turbines, a groundbreaking study has found.

The study by acoustics expert Steven Cooper is the first in the world in which a wind turbine operator had fully co-operated and turned wind turbines off completely during the testing.

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9.4 out of 10 based on 111 ratings

Maurice Newman: conservatives outsmarted — they apologise where they should demand apologies

A wake up call from Maurice Newman. The gravy train of bigger and bigger government is grinding to its inevitable halt, and Greece is the destination the Western Express is headed for. Those who promised that big-government could solve everything have bought votes, while using schools and universities to train a generation to hate free market competition. Young people were raised to blame the system and demand the handout, rather than take responsibility. The soft-west has gone too far left. The weak right has rolled over and tries to be a mini-left, settling for being the team B of “progressivism”. Newman’s best line is that the conservatives apologize where they should demand apologies. So true.

To illustrate dismal standards in science and the media, Newman cites joannenova.com.au (thanks Maurice), and thousands more Australians find out a small part of the scandalous failure of academia (specifically, Lewandowsky at UWA) and the ABC. The stories he refers too are: “Lewandowsky peer reviewed study includes someone 32,757 years old” and the “ABC got it wrong, BOM not concerned with Australian public being misinformed“. Ken Stewart at Kenskingdom deserves credit for catching out the ABC and BOM. Readers, when you want to throw your shoe at the ABC (or BBC or CBC), find the quote, and send it in (likewise for Fairfax and CNN etc). It is worth writing to these organizations and journalists, if only to expose how pathetic their answers are. Have confidence, we are getting to them. They still believe they are pro-science and real journalists. It pains them every time we expose their anti-science philosophy and catch them pandering to false-god “experts”.

Would-be journalists don’t want to wear the Useful Idiot badge — a real journalist would hate to think they were mere puppets of corrupt officialdom and crony capitalism. It hurts for them to hear the truth. We need to focus not on the answers they get in interviews, but more so — the questions they didn’t ask. And we need to remind them — at every step — that the opposite of skeptical is gullible.

The Australian “The Left’s gravy train derailing “

Maurice Newman

IN the battle for ideas it is now clear the Left controls the commanding heights. In everything from the economy to sport, the prevailing direction is left. After decades of stereotyping, indoctrination and the clever use of language, Western voters have been conditioned to accept the beneficence of the state.

Politically this has set the stage for governments to see “market failure” in everything. It has become an excuse for an avalanche of regulations and regulators and allowed leftist intellectuals to incessantly bash the very essence of “capitalism”.

They have successfully implanted the notion that free market capitalism is synonymous with profiteering, greed, unequal wealth distribution and, the entrenchment of privilege which must be restrained.

Yet there is no competition commissioner to control the predatory actions of the state, or regulator to rein in reckless central bankers.

Voter acquiescence has been bought by both sides of politics, but conservatives everywhere have been politically outsmarted. They are apologetic when they should demand apologies.

Rather than be true to their values, they have too easily rolled over and allowed the Left to set the agenda on economics and social issues, incapable of arguing an internally consistent position. Quite often conservative policies are indistinguishable from their progressive counterparts.

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9.1 out of 10 based on 125 ratings

Will Steffen in denial of entire Holocene?

Either Will Steffen thinks humans didn’t exist five thousand years ago, or he hasn’t heard of the Holocene. The Herald Sun tells us the extraordinary news that:

“Humans are living in the hottest temperatures they have ever lived and I can guarantee this will only get worse.”

Will Steffen also says the climate is “complex”, and “impossible to entirely predict”. I guess that means his guarantee that it will get worse comes direct from God, since it’s not possible through science. I don’t know why Matthew Dunn, technology editor of the Herald Sun, didn’t ask more about that — obviously that would be big news.

Otherwise, nearly every proxy that’s ever been proxied suggests there were a lot of warmer times in the period 5,000 – 8,000 years ago. Ice cores say it was hotter in Greenland, barnacles, corals, sea worms, and “swash” tell us sea levels were something like 2 meters higher in stable West Australia* and nearly 1m higher in Hawaii and Polynesia, oceans were 2 degrees warmer around in Indonesia, and 6,000 boreholes sunk in the oceans all over the world show it was a global deal. Australian Aboriginals apparently struggled through a 1,500 year mega drought about 6,000 year ago (see McGowan). CO2 Science lists references from South-East Asia to the Sahara, from Antarctica to America. I am barely skimming the surface.

It was even warmer 120,000 years ago when Antarctica was over 2 degrees hotter, and seas were 3 -5 m higher and even more in some places. I’m pretty sure that homo sapiens was around then, and somehow they survived the heat without electricity, cars, hospitals or four-bedroom houses.

Here’s a few graphs of the scores I could use. Greenland has been warmer many times over the last 10,000 years*. The Roman warming of the European region was also fairly significant. Those Romans didn’t get by with togas for nothing.

…

In Western Australia — one of the oldest, most stable pieces of land in the world — sea levels have been falling for 7,000 years.

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9.1 out of 10 based on 105 ratings

Gavin Schmidt now admits NASA are only 38% sure 2014 was the hottest year

I said the vaguest scientists in the world lie by omission, and it’s what they don’t say that gives them away. The “hottest ever” press release didn’t tell us how much hotter the hottest year supposedly was, nor how big the error bars were. David Rose of the Daily Mail pinned down Gavin Schmidt of NASA GISS to ask a few questions that bloggers and voters want answered but almost no other journalist seems to want to ask.

Finally…

Nasa climate scientists: We said 2014 was the warmest year on record… but we’re only 38% sure we were right

Nasa admits this means it is far from certain that 2014 set a record at all

Does that mean 97% of climate experts are 62% sure they are wrong?*

The thing with half-truths is that they generate a glorious fog, but it has no substance. Ask the spin-cloud of a couple of sensible questions and the narrative collapses. This is the kind of analysis that would have stopped the rot 25 years ago if most news outlets had investigative reporters instead of science communicators trained to “raise awareness”. (The media IS the problem). If there was a David-Rose-type in most major dailies, man-made global warming would never have got off the ground.

The claim made headlines around the world, but yesterday it emerged that GISS’s analysis – based on readings from more than 3,000 measuring stations worldwide – is subject to a margin of error. Nasa admits this means it is far from certain that 2014 set a record at all.

Yet the Nasa press release failed to mention this, as well as the fact that the alleged ‘record’ amounted to an increase over 2010, the previous ‘warmest year’, of just two-hundredths of a degree – or 0.02C.

The margin of error is about a tenth of a degree, so those error bars are 500% larger than the amount pushed in headlines all over the world. Gavin Schmidt of course, is horrified that millions of people may have been mislead:

GISS’s director Gavin Schmidt has now admitted Nasa thinks the likelihood that 2014 was the warmest year since 1880 is just 38 per cent. However, when asked by this newspaper whether he regretted that the news release did not mention this, he did not respond.

I’m sure he’s too busy contacting newspapers and MSNBC to make sure stories from NASA GISS are accurate and scientifically correct.

Weekend Unthreaded

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More beach holidays. Apologies to Northern Hemisphere readers. We’ve had three beach holidays in two weeks with various friends and relatives. January in Australia is tough. 😉

I love the colors of the Western Australian coast. The sky really is that intense blue, and the water is that clear. We fed stingrays at Hamelin Bay at sunset too. This is a seven year old boy hand-feeding a tame eagle ray which must have weighed twice as much as him. That one had no tail, but others did. Remarkable. Click to enlarge shots.

8.9 out of 10 based on 37 ratings

Volatility from Vega – Why math models can’t predict the future

Guest post by Eric Worrall

How can we predict the climate, when we can’t even predict financial markets?

US Subprime House Price Crash

Financial markets are a high stakes battle between teams of skilled traders, armed with powerful computers. [In a perfect market] The factors that affect market prices are well known, and for mathematicians, surprisingly simple to describe. Yet with all this underlying simplicity, traders don’t attempt to predict the future, because they know from bitter experience that predicting the future is futile. Instead, they use their models to gain a deeper understanding of the present.

Say you are trading financial options. Options are a right to buy or sell an underlying commodity (gold, shares in a company, tons of beef, whatever) at a future point in time, for an agreed price. The exact rules vary in different places, but essentially – your option gives you the right to buy an ounce of gold in one month, say, for $1000.

If so, and the price of gold is $1,200 per ounce, then your option is worth $200, right?

Wrong. In one month, the price of gold might be $800, in which case your option is worthless – there is no point using the option to buy gold at $1,000, when you could simply buy it on the spot market for $800. Or in one month, the price of gold might be $1,400, in which case your option will be worth $400, double the $200 it would be worth if you exercised the option (activated the trade) at the current price of $1,200.

How do you price something based on a future price which you can’t foresee?

The answer is you try to estimate the likelihood of the price shifting significantly from its current value. You add an estimate of gold price volatility to your calculation, based on the current range of prices, how much the price of gold is jumping around in a day’s trade, versus the length of time left on the option (1 month).

Of course, there’s more to it that that. Instead of buying and holding the option, you could have put the money into a high interest bank account. So the interest you could have earned if you put the money into a savings account is part of the cost of owning the option – that has to be factored into the value of the option. And if you want to be really precise, you have to consider counterparty risk (the risk that the issuer of the option will go bust, and won’t honor the deal), market liquidity(whether there are enough buyers and sellers to ensure a “real” market, or whether the scarcity of market participants will allow big players to fix prices to maximise their profits at the expense of other participants), sovereign risk (the risk the government will step in and ruin your trade with hostile new laws), and the cost of making a trade (tax, market fees, your time, etc).

But I just said traders don’t use their models to predict the future, and isn’t what I described sounding an awful lot like predicting the future?

The point is, the model can’t tell you what the price of gold will be – it can only tell you what the price of gold might be, to give a range of outcomes with their probabilities as you see it.

So traders use their models to explore possibilities. To protect themselves from the $800 risk, they cover themselves by buying a complementary option – for example, they might buy the right to sell a large quantity of silver at $20 / ounce – the opposite kind of option to their right to buy gold option. The price of silver more or less tracks the price of gold, so buying a right to sell silver means that if the price of gold drops, rendering their gold option worthless, the price of silver will also most likely drop. If the trader gets the right deal when buying the silver option, the trader can still make a profit if the gold price (and the silver price) falls, by buying silver at a low price, and selling it at the locked in silver option price of $20. If the trader has done their job, in the event of a price drop, they will make enough profit from their silver trade to more than offset their loss on the now worthless gold option.

The skill of the trader is exploring the landscape of possibilities, to use the models to help discover paired complementary deals which can lock in a guaranteed profit, regardless of what happens to market prices.

Of course, real trading strategies are generally a lot more complicated than this simplistic example. With all the competing teams of highly skilled traders crawling over the possibility landscape all hours of the day or night, the opportunity for a profit from a deal that simple should disappear before it properly had a chance to manifest.

My point is, the models are not used to predict the future, they are used to explore the landscape of future possibilities, to discover ways to lock in guaranteed profits, and to provide alerts if the portfolio of options and other instruments has an unexpected weakness – to identify scenarios in which traders’ portfolios become exposed to a serious risk of loss, so they can patch the holes in their positions before they become a problem.

Nobody is daft enough in the financial world to believe they can predict the future. The models are only used to answer “what if” questions, to help close loopholes in their complex web of trades which might lead to dangerous losses.

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9.2 out of 10 based on 51 ratings

2014, NOAA NASA produce weakest science on hottest fantasy in modern record

The Art of Lying by Omission

Back in the old days, when scientists had standards, they would never get excited over one hot year and certainly not over one meaningless hundredth of a degree.

The NOAA and NASA spinmeisters are parsing their press releases carefully, using vagueness to speak in half-truth-tongues. They utter no outright lie, yet misinform the crowd with lies by omission.

NOAA and NASA don’t say their models still don’t work, that the world was supposed to be a lot warmer and the “pause” continues. Nor do they admit that it has been warmer before many times in history. They don’t say the warming trend started long before we pumped out CO2. They don’t mention how tiny the “record” is, so tiny it could, and probably will, disappear with the next man-made adjustment. They don’t mention that the record depends entirely on which dataset you pick, and better instruments, satellites, show it wasn’t a record. NASA may launch satellites, but they prefer a thermometer in a carpark or beside a runway for measuring temperatures.

All major global datasets, up to date. The pause is clear enough. The lower two lines are from satellites. Jan 2015 | Graph, Dr David Evans.

They don’t mention how much hotter it was than the last record. That’s because it looks very uncool — scientifically speaking — to get excited over two hundredths of a degree, when the error bars are 500% bigger. It’s called “noise”, in real scientific publications.

Get a grip on how much a few hundredths of a degree matters in this graph. “Get excited”.

Panic! \
Image created by Robert A. Rohde / Global Warming Art

If it was the hottest in 130 years, who cares? It was hotter 7,000 years ago, hotter 120,000 years ago, and hotter for most of the history of life on Earth. It doesn’t mean CO2 caused the last hot spell. It doesn’t mean warming is bad. It doesn’t mean it will continue to warm. And it doesn’t mean we understand what drives the climate.

But it does mean some people who want to seem-scientific want more of your money.

The Vaguest Scientists in the world

While NOAA and NASA declare that “… 2014 temperatures continue the planet’s long-term warming trend…”

If they had wanted to they could have said the opposite and it would be true too. It’s a fact that we’ve been in a long term cooling trend since human civilization developed. In this case the not-to-long term trend they refer to is 135 years long, but it has been running for 300 years. They don’t mention that either. It is equally true to say “2014 temperatures continue a warming trend that started circa 1700”. There were no coal fired power stations until 1882. Coal power is so dangerous that it causes heating 200 years before it starts producing carbon (sic).

The El Nino Spin

NOAA and NASA are pointing out that ” 2014’s record warmth occurred during an El Niño-neutral year.” What they don’t say is that this is exactly what we would expect for an object that started off warm and continued to stay warm. The world has been in pretty much the same warm zone for 16 – 25 years (depending on how you measure it). In other words, El Nino-in, El-nino-out — we don’t need to add much more energy, in the big-scheme, to raise it by a hundredth of a degree.

But if I were a marketing and promotions agent, and not interested in science, I would make a big deal out of the non-el-nino which didn’t happen and doesn’t matter.

NASA wants your money

Here’s the line early in the press release which is the real point of the story:

“NASA is at the forefront of the scientific investigation of the dynamics of the Earth’s climate on a global scale,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The observed long-term warming trend and the ranking of 2014 as the warmest year on record reinforces the importance for NASA to study Earth as a complete system, and particularly to understand the role and impacts of human activity.”

Who cares about accuracy or serving the public. The only decimal places that matter to these NASA scientists are the ones on the numerous grant cheques.

Gavin Schmidt knows that it is naughty to make a fuss over one hot year:

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9 out of 10 based on 136 ratings

Forgotten extreme heat, El Nino of 1878 — when miners would “knock off” at 44.4C!

What really happened in 1878?

The raw data at Nobby’s near Newcastle (graphed below) shows monster heat in 1878, 1879, and 1883 — far hotter than modern times. Its unlikely that it was recorded with modern equipment, so it’s hard to compare. Was it really hotter? We don’t know when the Stevenson screen was installed. I went hunting through our wonderful historic Trove archive of old newspaper records. It doesn’t help us make any accurate comparisons, or even tell us about annual averages, but there is a remarkable story of exceptional heat and dryness in January 1877 that few Australians know. Let’s revisit the times of forgotten people who lived when CO2 was perfect and the climate was ideal.

How hot were the 1800s in Australia? My favorite quote is about the miners near Braidwood (in the mountains between Canberra and the coast). It reached 108F but look at the cultural norms:

“Years ago in the valley the miners always ‘knocked off’ if the thermometer registered 112 degrees (44.4C) in the shade, but times and wages are changed now, and the poor men are willing, to work on days like last Friday 18.1.78″ (see the Freeman’s Journal link below for the full quote).

Piecing together the quotes I found below, it looks like an El Nino probably formed in 1877, which caused a widespread drought right across Australia. Rivers all over NSW were running dry, and so presumably was the soil, which may explain the heat. When soils are dry they gain heat faster because there is less evaporative cooling, and less humidity in the air. Wetter soils limit the heat gains. January 1878 was described as “intensely hot” in many places, with temperatures recorded “in the shade” at Walgett of 120F, Coonamble, 113F, Sydney 114F and at Hay 117F. Later in January it reach 119 at Gunndah, and 129F at Coonamble.

The rivers of NSW were empty: At Lachlan ” the water-supply has given out and residents are reduced to great straits”. The Namoi River also dried up. And the ” upper part of the Moruya River, is completely dried up in some places — in other parts it consists of a chain of ponds.”

….

Jan 5 1878

WALGETT, Thursday. . The weather to-day is intensely hot, and water is very scarce. The river is drying up fast, and stock are dying. There is no appearance of rain. Tho temperature in the shade to-day was 120.

COONAMBLE, Thursday. The thermometer’s average for six weeks has been 102 in the shade. To-day it registers 113. There are no signs of rain. The grass which sprang since last thunderstorms has been quite burned up. There were no stock passings to report.

GRAFTON, Friday. The weather is intensely hot.

The Riverine Grazier (Hay, NSW : 1873 – 1954)

Saturday 12 January 1878

“The heat is now the current topic at Hay. Business, where not entirely suspended, receives very little attention. Scarcely a soul is to be seen in the streets; and even in the stores, those who are not enjoying the cool of the cellar, may be found lolling on the counters, talking about the weather, and occasionally scrutinizing the thermometer. On Thursday the glass indicated 117 degrees of heat in the fair shade, on a wall on which the sun never shines at noon ; in the sun the glass indicated 154 degrees. We know of one case in which a gentle man fainted in the shade, and we fear that next week will bring its records of sunstroke. On the Lachlan, the Darling, amid the Billabong, the water-supply has given out and residents are reduced to great straits. At Hay, fortunately, there is no fear of failure in this direction, but a few more days of this weather will certainly lead to a serious exodus to cooler latitudes.

The SMH 21 Jan 1878

“The weather has of late been somewhat,warm, in fact on Tuesday last I may say it was hot, considering the thermometer stood 114 in the shade. A southerly-burster set in about 10 o’clock at night, but the houses of our citizens were so intensely heated that even this wind did not cool them, and consequently but little sleep could be obtained during that night. Wednesday and Thursday were moderately cool, but today, we have had another scorcher. A gentleman informs me that had never experienced the ‘heat so much as he did in Sydney, on Tuesday, but even that extreme was surpassed in Maitland to-day, where the heat was far greater. We have at Newcastle, “nearly at all times, a breeze from the sea, which our northern friends are deprived of.

Cootamundra Herald (NSW : 1877 – 1954) Tuesday 22 January 1878

Gunnedah. — Friday. “The weather is excessively hot, and the thermometer registered 119 in the shade to-day. The Namoi River has dried up, and there is no water suitable for drinking purposes. A meeting has been held for the purpose, of’ sinking wells on the river bank, to obtain water for the inhabitants. Coonamble, — Friday. — The thermometer to-day was 129- in the shade. The birds are dying in hundreds. There is no sign of rain.

Freeman’s Journal (Sydney, NSW : 1850 – 1932) Saturday 26 January 1878

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9.4 out of 10 based on 99 ratings

Sea level rise was less than thought (skeptics were right)

Skeptics, and particularly Nils-Axel Mörner have been saying that sea level rise, as recorded by tide gauges has been much slower than widely advertised. They’ve also pointed out how the rates of sea-level rise have either stayed the same or slowed down. There’s been no sign of the acceleration needed for the wildly speculative hypothesis that your SUV, and China’s coal plants are warming the ocean.

This week a new Nature paper (Hay et al) shows the skeptics were right — but did that view make it to any news broadcast?

Watch the sea-level scare mutate

Even in The Australian the spin from the propaganda machine gets a running, and the previous slow rise is used to pump the scare that the modern “acceleration” is even scarier. What the Australian (and selected sea level “experts”) don’t mention is that the tide-gauges don’t show any acceleration, and nor did the raw recordings from satellites. The 3mm rising sea claims apparently come from satellites that were calibrated to one subsiding tide gauge in Hong Kong.

It’s cherry picking par excellence. We might finally accept tide gauges up to 1990, but after that the tide gauges don’t count — bring in the “adjusted” satellites.

[The Australian] SEA levels increased at a slower rate last century than previously thought, according to new research.

A fresh analysis of tide-gauge records, published in the journal Nature, found that the sea level rose by 1.2mm a year from 1901 to 1990, compared with earlier estimates of between 1.6mm and 1.9mm a year.

Researchers said this meant the acceleration in sea-level rise to 3mm a year over the past two decades was greater than previously thought.

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9 out of 10 based on 77 ratings

The Sun and solar physicists go quiet

Sometime around 2007 or 2008 the sun’s magnetic field should’ve become more active again as part of the cycle it had been roughly following for at least 80 years. Instead it fell. The current solar cycle is not like all the other ones…

David Archibald has drawn my attention to the Ap Index and just how remarkably different the current solar cycle is. He also points out that solar physicists were cranking out predictions about this cycle during the last cycle, but now hardly anyone wants to stake a claim on what the sun will do in the next cycle.

Ap Index 1932 – 2014 | Click to enlarge

From David Archibald

The Ap Index is a measure of geomagnetic activity from eight stations around the planet and reflects disturbances in the horizontal component of the Earth’s magnetic field. Activity for the current solar cycle has peaked at about the floor activity for the prior solar cycles back to early 1930s.

David Archibald writes that solar physicists have hit a quiet cycle too.

“The solar physics community has gone very quiet. There are almost no predictions of Solar Cycle 25 maximum.

At this stage during 23, there were more than 50 predictions of cycle 24

Either people have given up on their models or there is too much reputational risk.

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9 out of 10 based on 89 ratings

ABC got it wrong, BOM not concerned with Australian public being misinformed

In a followup to the post If the BOM was incompetent, the ABC would be the last to find out, Ken Stewart has a reply from the BOM.

The news story run by the ABC said the current Queensland drought was the worst in 80 years. When Ken pointed out that the BOM’s own graphs showed that the drought in 2003 was even worse, and the conditions were not that unusual, the ABC effectively said they were parroting BOM statements which, ahem, is all any public broadcaster could be expected to do, right? It’s not like we pay the 1.1 billion-dollar-ABC to ask our bureaucrats hard questions, is it?

Ken wrote to the BOM, who have now replied, and he’s posted it: “How not to admit a mistake”. The BOM blandly point him at their official drought statement which contradicts what their spokesman said:

The current drought in Queensland is comparable to the 2002–2003 drought, which was perhaps more severe in terms of rainfall deficiencies that occurred at times over a very large area. Historical data shows that the current drought is perhaps a one in ten or twenty year event over a significant part of inland eastern Australia (see for example the 24-month deciles map for 2013–2014), but very severe in some places. For example, some location in central Queensland the present deficiencies are the most severe on record, and in addition have been accompanied by record high temperatures. See: 24-month maximum temperature deciles map for 2013–2014.

So both the ABC and the BOM are palming off responsibility for misinformation being broadcast to the public. Neither are quoting the news story, but cite other documents which were not part of the broadcast, as if the invisible caveats makes this OK.

Ken has some questions for the BOM:

I will email them again asking for a specific reply, preferably Yes or No, to the questions:

Was Mr Jeff Sabburg correct in saying “In terms of rainfall deficiencies the comparison is we haven’t seen this across Queensland at least since the 1927- 1929 depression drought”?

Was Mr Sabburg correct in saying “37.3% of the state was covered by the lowest rainfall on record”?

If the answer to either of these is “No”, will the Bureau immediately issue a correction in a media release?

I would like to know if the BOM is concerned that the ABC has misinformed the public about a climate factor. Is it part of the BOM charter that it provides accurate information to the Australian public? For all the farmers who are making major life and investment decisions based on BOM information and news of fictitious “drought trends”, will the BOM be compensating those who suffer financially?

Will the ABC?

9.7 out of 10 based on 91 ratings

Those Green Australians! Our emissions per person fell 28% since 1990

Get ready for the startling news that Australians have been great corporate “green” citizens — on a per capita basis, all of us are so much more carbon-efficient (sic) than we were 25 years ago. Back then, in those dark days, people frivolously heated and cooled their homes without a thought to how many sinful cyclones they were creating in the Philippines. They drove recklessly in fossil fueled cars, and windmills were used to pump water a mere 10 metres, not to stop floods in Pakistan.

The amazing thing is that Australia’s population has grown by a whopping 38% since 1990. And our emission have grown with that, but the emissions per person has declined by 28% per person. Why aren’t the Greens more excited?

As with all these statistics, watch the pea for the real story. Most of that decline is not due to solar panels, pink batts, bird blending wind towers, energy efficiency, or even economic trends — it is predominantly due to cutting down fewer trees. The “improvements” are in the “land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF)” sector, of which the “LUCF” basically means deforestation, afforestation and reforestation. The decline is mostly thanks to farmers like Peter Spencer, who was not allowed to cut down trees on his land (and who, by the way, will be back to finish his case against the Commonwealth in February).

Without accounting for regrowth of trees since 1990, our per capita emissions would only have declined by 8%.

Australia per capita emissions CO2 2014, fall 28% LULUCF.

Dept of Environment, Australian Emissions of CO2 per capita. (Click to enlarge)

Unfortunately the graph in the report does not go back to 1990 when per capita emissions were 33.4 t.*

The details for the Quarterly update:

In 2013-14, national inventory emissions per capita (excluding LULUCF) were 23.2 t CO2-e per person, compared to 25.2 t CO2-e in 1989-90, representing a 7.8% decline.
When LULUCF activities are included, the 2013-14 estimate is 24.1 t CO2-e per person, compared to 33.4 t CO2-e in 1989-90, representing a 27.9% decline.
Australia’s population grew strongly over this period, from 17.1 million in June 1990 to over 23.5 million in June 2014 (growth of 37.8%).

LULUCF is a nice euphemism for letting farms and native bush go to pot, largely unmanaged, and reach a state of high-fire-risk bonanza fuel loads. They hold a lot of carbon, but it’s only until the next blaze releases it all back to the sky. We live in a land of eucalyptus that love fires.

This week, as fires threatened outer suburbs of Perth, West Australian Firefighters are calling crown land fire laws absurd.

Vice President of the Association of Volunteer Bush Fire Brigades, Dave Gossage, said holes in the law have allowed governments to get away with neglecting to adequately manage bush land that presents fire risks without accountability.

“Under the Bushfires Act in WA; that Act does not bind the Crown,” Mr Gossage said.

About 93 per cent of WA’s land area is classified as Crown and include areas that were fire-ravaged.

The Bullsbrook fire affected land managed by local, state and federal governments as well as private property.

As the governments are not bound by the legislation, the land can be neglected by the relevant agency and that agency will not be held accountable.

“So you’ve got this situation, as has been previously reported, a private landowner can get fined for not doing their fire breaks but yet on the other side of the fence, on Crown land, they don’t have to do anything,” Mr Gossage said.

“And yet that will be more of a risk than what is on the private property.

“It’s bit like with the Bullsbrook fires.

“You’ve got federal land, there’s no legal requirement for them to do anything and it’s absurd.”

Remember, in Australia if you personally try to clear a firebreak on your land to protect you from Crown mismanagement, you could go to jail

That’s what happened to Maxwell Szulc.

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9.1 out of 10 based on 60 ratings

Solar cycle affects human fertility and lifespan

David Archibald points at a very interesting paper that suggests that children conceived during solar activity peaks were less likely to survive and had a whopping 5 year deduction from their lifespan. But don’t panic if you were a peak baby, the affected people were born to poorer women in Scandinavia in the 18th and 19th century. Mortality was 8% in the first year. One in twelve babies didn’t make it. Things were different then. Richer women were somehow able to compensate, or repair the damage. The authors seem fairly sure it has something to do with UV, but I’m not convinced. Solar effects include magnetic effects, solar wind, neutron bombardment, and cosmic rays. There are plenty of things to choose from. Lots more papers to come on this.

Marvel that the sun might influence our lifespan and fertility, but not “do much” to the climate. ;- )

There is much to discuss in comments — many of us wondered if there is a dietary connection, but this effect does not seem to be due to famine, or less food (wheat was cheaper at solar maxes).

— Jo

Guest Post by David Archibald

Solar Activity At Birth

It is now more than 20 years since David Juckett and Barnett Rosenberg published their paper “Correlation of Human Longevity Oscillations with Sunspot Cycles” in the journal Radiation Research. They had found an interesting correlation between the level of solar activity at birth and lifespan, with lower solar activity resulting in longer lifespans. From the abstract of that paper:

“An examination of past human mortality trends revealed that the mean longevity of birth cohorts from 1740 to 1900 for United States of America (U.S.) Congressional Representatives exhibited oscillations that coincided with the 9- to 12-year sunspot cycle. Cohort mean longevities were 2-3 years greater during times of low sunspot activity than at peak activity. This phenomenon was confirmed in data from members of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom Parliament and from University of Cambridge alumni. An additional longevity oscillation with a longer period was visible in the data and may also be related to sunspot cycles.”

A new paper on this subject has just been published by the Norwegian trio of Gine Skjaero, Frode Fossoy and Eivin Roskaft in the journal Proceedings B of the Royal Society: “Solar activity at birth predicted infant survival and women’s fertility in historical Norway”. From the abstract of that paper:

“Using data on temporal variation in sunspot numbers and individual-based demographic data (N 8662 births) from Norway between 1676 and 1878, while controlling for maternal effects, socioeconomic status, cohort and ecology, we show that solar activity (total solar irradiance) at birth decreased the probability of survival to adulthood for both men and women. On average, the lifespans of individuals born in a solar maximum period were 5.2 years shorter than those born in a solar minimum period. In addition, fertility and lifetime reproductive success (LRS) were reduced among low-status women born in years with high solar activity.”

….

Relative to the Biblically allotted span of three score years and ten, a 5.2 year reduction in average lifespan relative to those born during solar minimum is 7.4% shorter. What is new about the Norwegian study is that they also looked at the effect on female fertility. On top of lifespan, being born in a solar maximum period also significantly reduced fertility for women born into the poor category, but not for wealthier women or for men. The effect of socio-economic status on the relationship between solar activity and fertility suggests that high-status pregnant women were better able to avoid the adverse effects of high solar activity.

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8 out of 10 based on 31 ratings

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