JoNova

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

Lewandowsky peer reviewed study includes someone 32,757 years old

The worst paper ever published has competition. I was going to mock this, but it has all rather slipped beyond the Plains of Derision and sunk in a parallel universe. Researcher Jose Duarte is flummoxed, he simply can’t explain why a paper so weak was written, but moreso why it was ever published, and why everyone associated with it is not running for cover. It’s not so much about the predictable flaws, biased questions, and mindless results, it’s now about why UWA, The Uni of Bristol, PLOS, and the Royal Society are willing to wear any of the reputational damage that goes with it.

Lewandowsky, Gignac and Oberauer put out a paper in 2013 which was used to generate headlines like “Climate sceptics more likely to be conspiracy theorists”. The data sample is not large, but despite that, it includes the potential Neanderthal, as well as a precocious five year old and some underage teenagers too. The error was reported on Lewandowsky’s blog over a year ago by Brandon Shollenberger, then again by Jose Duarte in August 2014. Nothing has been corrected. The ages are not just typos, they were used in the calculations, correlations and conclusions. The median age was 43 but the mean age was a flaming neon 76. One wildly old person in the data skewed the correlation for age with nearly everything:

That one data point – the paleo-participant – is almost single-handedly responsible for knocking out all the correlations between age and so many other variables. If you just remove the paleo-participant, leaving the minors in the data, age lights up as a correlate across the board. Further removing the kids will strengthen the correlations.

Duarte remarks he would not sleep if he knew his work had a problem as major as this:

I don’t understand how anyone could let a paper just sit there if they know the data is bad and specific claims in the paper are false. No credible social psychologist would simply do nothing upon discovering that there were minors in their data, or a five-digit age. I’d be running to my computer to confirm any report that claims I’d made in a peer-reviewed journal article rested on bad data, fake participants, etc. I wouldn’t be able to sleep if I knew I had something like that out there, and would have to retract the paper or submit a corrected version. You can’t just leave it there, knowing that it’s false.

In any case, something is very wrong here. The authors should explain how the 32,757-year-old got into their data. They should explain how minors got into their data. They should explain why they did nothing for more than a year. This is a very simple dataset – it’s a simple spreadsheet with 42 columns, about as simple as it gets in social science. It shouldn’t have taken more than a few days to sort it out and run a correction, retraction, or whatever action the circumstances dictated. These eight purported participants allowed them to claim that age wasn’t a factor. It allowed them to focus on the glitzy political stuff, allowed them to focus on finding something negative to pin on conservatives.

They don’t tell you until late in the paper that conservatism is negatively correlated with belief in conspiracies – the exact opposite of what they claimed in the earlier scam paper that APS helped promote. Also note that we already know from much higher quality research that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to believe in the moon hoax, though it’s a small minority in both cases (7% vs. 4%), and that Democrats endorse every version of the JFK conspiracy at higher rates. I think some journals might be unaware that the pattern of these conspiracy beliefs across the left-right divide is already well-documented by researchers who have much higher methodological standards – professional pollsters at Gallup, Pew, et al. We don’t need junky data from politically-biased academics when we already have high-quality data from professionals.

Duarte describes how unusual this kind of simple mistake is. The software used to run the survey specifically asks researchers to set age boundaries and it automatically checks to make sure respondents fit within the accepted range.

What’s also exceptional is that Lewandowsky, Gignac and Oberauer managed to delete and filter out more than a quarter of their participants, yet somehow left in the person born in 30,000 BC. They ruled out one in four responses yet allowed minors to be included, which they don’t have ethical approval for, and given the political conclusions, don’t have a scientific reason to include either.

Duarte wonders where the accountability is:

Which brings us back to the previous paper. APS extended that scam in their magazine, fabricating completely new and false claims that were not made in the paper at all, such as that free market endorsement was positively correlated with belief in an MLK assassination conspiracy and the moon-landing hoax. Neither of these claims is true. The data showed the exact opposite for the MLK item (which we already knew from real and longstanding research) – free market endorsement predicted rejection of that conspiracy, r = -.144, p < .001. And there was no correlation at all between free market views and belief in the moon-landing hoax, r = .029, p = .332. APS just made it up… They smeared millions of people, a wide swath of the public, attaching completely false and damaging beliefs to them.

They’ve so far refused to run a correction. It’s unconscionable and inexplicable. The Dallas Morning News has much higher standards of integrity and truthfulness than the Association for Psychological Science. I don’t understand how this is possible. This whole situation is an ethical and scientific collapse.

He fears for his profession, and is writing a longer article for a magazine to discuss the corruption in science and the roles that organizations like APS, IOP, and AAAS play:

This situation is beyond embarrassing at this point. If anything were to keep me from running the magazine piece, it’s that it’s so embarrassing, as a member of the field, to report that this junk can actually be published in peer-reviewed journals, that no one looks at the data, and that a left-wing political agenda will carry you a long way and insulate you from normal standards of scientific conduct and method. This reality is not what I expected to find when I chose to become a social scientist. I’m still struggling to frame it.

What does “science” mean anymore and who is responsible for keeping the standards? Normally the host institution investigates allegations of scientific misconduct:

… the system appears to be broken. Lewandowsky has not been credibly investigated by the University of Western Australia. They’ve even refused data requests because they deemed the requester overly critical of Lewandowsky. That’s stunning – I’ve never heard of a university denying a data request by referring to the views of the requester. UWA seems to have exited the scientific community. Science can’t function if data isn’t shared, if universities actively block attempts to uncover fraud or falsity in their researchers’ work.

To this day Lewandowsky refuses to release his data for the junk moon hoax study. That’s completely unacceptable, and there is no excuse for Psychological Science and APS to retain that paper as though it has some sort of epistemic standing – we already know that it’s false, and the authors won’t release the data, or even the national origin, age, or gender of the participants.

Jose Duarte is a PhD candidate in psychology, who writes an excellent blog unpacking the weaker links in his chosen field. It’s really worth reading the whole gobsmacking description, and all the comments too, which are especially well informed.

Gullible media science writers who take mistakes and magnify them

The media, and specifically science communicators, ARE the problem. Instead of investigating and exposing bad science (or psychology), mainstream science communicators often make it worse. Barry Woods comments that PLOS One is proud about the coverage this paper received and lists it as if it were an achievement. But PLOS One would back away in an instant if the mainstream media mocked them in a mass protest for their pathetic “peer review” and disinterest in correcting the record. So would UWA, The Royal Society and the APS. We are in that most dangerous of places where is no brake on falling standards, but there is the illusion of one. What’s worse than no science communicators — ones trained to repeat mistakes, laud bias, and propagate fallacies.

In a normal world the PLOS One team would be as diligent in tracking down those papers and journalists below, apologizing and making sure they correct the record. All of the journalists who wrote the articles here should be contacted, and so too, should all the real journalists who might report on the failure of the other unskeptical science writers.

Guardian Environment Title: “Climate sceptics more likely to be conspiracy theorists and free market advocates, study claims”
NeuroLogica Blog Title: “Politics, Science Rejection, and Conspiracy Thinking”
Popular Science Title: “Surprise! Conspiracy Theorists Are More Likely To Disavow Vaccines, Climate Science And GM Foods”
Scientific American Blogs Title: “Motivated reasoning: Fuel for controversies, conspiracy theories and science denialism alike”
The Burrill Report Title: “Princess Di, Faked Moon Landings, and the Denial of Science -”
The Conversation Title: “Right, left, wrong: people reject science because …”
Times Live Title: “Conspiracy theorists, conservatives more likely to reject science”
Vaccine Nation Title: “Belief in a range of conspiracy theories predicts vaccine denial”
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9.4 out of 10 based on 104 ratings

Weekend Unthreaded

We had a an excellent few days holiday this week in the South West of Australia. What still surprises me is how these giant trees seem to sneak up on you. One minute you’re driving through normal forest and the trees don’t seem to “get big” but you suddenly notice the scale of everything has changed. Like the car and road shrank instead.

Karri trees are some of the tallest trees in the world. See the trunk girth of a medium specimen. Try to imagine this tree in your yard.

Karri Forest, Caves Road, Western Australia

They must be the most beautiful.

Karri Forest, Caves Road, Western Australia | Click to enlarge.

9.4 out of 10 based on 37 ratings

If the BOM was incompetent, the ABC would be the last to find out

According to the ABC the Bureau of Met tells us that Queensland has experienced “the worst drought in 80 years” and that “37.3% of the state was covered by the lowest rainfall on record”. (Watch it on iview if you can bear to).

These exacting facts are easy to check, and Ken Stewart did, but the 1.1-billion-dollar ABC did not.

Ken used the BOM’s own websites (Climate Maps and Climate Change and Variability) and shows that the current drought is the worst in 9 years, not 80, and even if it is very bad (heartbreaking for some) it’s not unusual.

Current low rain is not unusual.

The current drought is bad (see red blobs in Queensland):

NW Queensland has missed two wet seasons in a row

The Federation Drought, circa 1900, was much much worse:

(Federation Drought graphed only 1900 – 1902)

Ken wrote to the ABC, and Genevieve Hussey replied immediately — effectively saying the ABC repeat all BOM claims, no matter how hyperbolic, extraordinary, or repetitive they sound.

The information in our report was based on an interview with climatologist Mr Jeff Sabburg from the Bureau of Meteorology. He was also interviewed by the ABC Country Hour the same day as the annual climate statement was released and said:

“In terms of rainfall deficiencies the comparison is we haven’t seen this across Queensland at least since the 1927- 1929 depression drought. These heat waves we’re getting a number of days in a row above 30- 40 degrees Celsius and then not getting reprieve at night time that’s certainly contributing to the point where there’s nothing much to evaporate away.” —Genevieve Hussey

If millions of Australian citizens are misinformed, the ABC doesn’t seem too concerned. Not concerned enough to point at all the contradictions in their file footage of past droughts, or rainfall stats on the BOM’s own site. Not concerned enough to ask questions that 50% of skeptical Australians might be asking.

Any serious journalist would have asked the BOM whether it was misleading to call this drought the “worst”, when the rainfall statistics so clearly suggest the opposite. Hypothetically, if the BOM was wallowing in a bureaucratized religious group-think, cherry picking their data, and adjusting data with inexplicable methods, the ABC would be defending them. Serving big-government, not the tax-payer.

The point of the ABC is not to ask our public institutions any hard questions after all. It’s there to cover for them.

More info:

Ken Stewarts post: Not the Worst Drought in 80 Years and ABC reply to my complaint.

9.6 out of 10 based on 92 ratings

Does ocean pH shift with the PDO cycle?

The man who uncovered the 80 years of missing empirical data on ocean pH is Mike Wallace. That hidden data suggested the ocean had been getting slightly more alkaline in the 20th Century –the opposite of the man-made acidification theory — but that pH change hasn’t been a linear shift. The pH has been cycling up and down, and on his blog back in February Wallace suggested that the pH of the ocean was varying naturally as the PDO cycled*.

It’s an interesting theory. He’s used the PDO index and his global ocean pelagic zone pH time series chart that was based on 1.5 million pH readings.

It’s nice to watch a real scientist at work. His blog is worth a look.

…

*PDO means Pacific Decadal Oscillation – the 15 – 30 year long cycles of warmer or cooler sea surface temperatures in the northern Pacific. In a positive phase the western side is cool and the east is warmer, it rains more in California and less in Australia. The negative phase is the opposite.

9.3 out of 10 based on 93 ratings

Skin in the game

Skin In the Game

Guest post by Rereke Whakaaro.

It has jokingly been said, that people can be classified into two groups. Those who classify people into groups, and those who do not.

On the subject of Catastrophic Climate Change, almost everybody ends up being classified, in one way or another, and such classification seems to be unavoidable. You are either a Believer or a Denier, and that is it.

Or is it?

Are there no other classifications that could be considered? It seems that there are.

wilde, ozone, UV, sun, climate, tropopause

Take for example, the group of people who belong to professions that make pronouncements on Climate Change, but who in reality have no “skin in the game”. These are people who will utter dire predictions and make forecasts, but are not held to account when their prognostications do not come to pass.

I am, of course, talking about journalists, who are paid to watch the world go by; and career academics, who are paid to explain how the world goes by; and the career bureaucrats, and other Government employees, who are paid to keep an eye on the intellectuals, and to implement the policies they recommend. Do these people have any “skin in the game”? Is there a down-side for being wrong, for this group? Likewise, consider economists and bankers; who are never held to account for any losses incurred by those who misguidedly take their advice, even when those losses are counted in millions.

Compare the folks in that group, with your own Lawyer, or your General Practitioner, both of whom can be held to account by their respective professional disciplinary committees. Or compare those folks with dozens of other professions, all of whom have the legal obligation of “getting it right”, usually mandated in law; Engineers, and Accountants being obvious examples. This is the second group.

Which group would you trust more? Those who are answerable for their actions, or the advice they give, or those who are not?

And what of the politicians? Where should we place them? In which group, do they belong?

Well, they certainly have “skin in the game”. That fact is tested at each and every election. It is also tested within caucus and by the party apparatus on an ongoing basis. No political party wants to give ammunition to the opposition. But, even so, it is difficult to place politicians in either of the first two groups.

So I place politicians in a group of their own. Where members are required to make judgements, and decisions, on behalf of us all, based upon theoretical concepts, supplied by academics; public opinion, manipulated by journalists; international market trends, surmised by economists; financial mechanisms designed by bankers, looking for new investment opportunities; and do all of this, within the overarching bureaucratic structure. I am surprised that politicians do as well as they do, in the circumstances.

Also, we have the organisations that make up the lobby industry, pushing their own political memes to garner support from members and charitable donations from groups and individuals looking to reduce their personal tax liability. These “charitable” organisations march to their own drum, towards an ideal nirvana that can never be achieved. But they gladly accept donations from Industry, Governments, and the UN, on the hypothetical route to the future. This is the fourth group.

And then of course, there is the blogosphere, and blogs such as this, with a self-imposed mandate to keep the other four groups honest, by publicly pointing out when they are not.

The Ancient Roman aristocracy understood the power of the people – the plebeian classes – and were afraid of them. So it is today. Ultimately it is the people who hold all the power. So those with no skin in the game, will eventually find themselves out in the cold, and feeling very sad.

Jo deserves her weblog awards. They were voted for, by people like us: We are the fifth group – we are the people and like the Roman plebeians, we cannot be ignored.

And let’s not forget it’s a new year. Please take a moment of time and some of your treasure and tip Joanne via the PayPal link at the home page. Joanne does this blog because it is the right thing to do. Please help support free speech and proper science.

9.4 out of 10 based on 119 ratings

25 years of unscientific “action” against carbon. Don’t wait for the science…

In 1988, way back before the data was in, the CSIRO was already push-pumping the public awareness campaign against carbon dioxide. There was never a debate about the science. Nobody checked the things that matter first, they just stepped straight into pointless action. (Why?) Twenty five years later, nothing has changed. There is still no one paid to make sure the science is right, too make sure Australians are not being taken advantage of. When will conservative governments recognise that they can’t leave this vital area to unpaid volunteers without staff, funding, access to scientific libraries and full government data?

BOM and CSIRO research that suggests billion-dollar policies must be checked and replicated independently by a group with no interest but finding holes in it. In a law court, there is a defense whose job is to poke holes in the prosecutor’s case, but in science and public policy it’s like being back in the Middle Ages with only the prosecution’s accusations getting a hearing. Only with a proper science defense will the Australian taxpayers and the environment be served.

The Australian, Graham Lloyd

“…the CSIRO and the Commission for the Future were at the forefront of international research and public awareness campaigns on reducing CO2 emissions by 20 per cent to 2005, as decided at the Toronto conference in 1988.

And as early as 1989 the Australian government was already paying to set up vested interest groups to push for carbon reduction.

“Following his landmark Our Country, Our Future statement on July 20, 1989, prime minister Bob Hawke wrote to ministers requesting a working group be set up to evaluate options to reduce emissions.

He said it was clear “we cannot afford to wait until we are certain of all aspects of global climate change before action is taken …”

What working group would ever produce a report saying that reducing emissions was a waste of money? These would become the paid lobbyists to propagandize the issue.

9.2 out of 10 based on 112 ratings

Oceans not acidifying – “scientists” hid 80 years of pH data

Co-authored James Doogue and JoNova

Empirical data withheld by key scientists shows that since 1910 ocean pH levels have not decreased in our oceans as carbon dioxide levels increased. Overall the trend is messy but more up than down, becoming less acidic. So much for those terrifying oceans of acid that were coming our way.

What happened to those graphs?

Scientists have had pH meters and measurements of the oceans for one hundred years. But experts decided that computer simulations in 2014 were better at measuring the pH in 1910 than the pH meters were. The red line (below) is the models recreation of ocean pH. The blue stars are the data points — the empirical evidence.

James Delingpole on ‘Breitbart’:

NOAAgate: ‘ocean acidification’ could turn out to be the biggest con since Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick

: …

[CFACT] Marita Noon:

The alleged fraud was uncovered by Mike Wallace, a hydrologist with nearly 30 years’ experience now working towards his PhD at the University of New Mexico. While studying a chart produced by Feely and Sabine, apparently showing a strong correlation between rising atmospheric CO2 levels and falling oceanic pH levels, Wallace noticed that some key information had been omitted.

Mysteriously, the chart only began in 1988. But Wallace knew for a fact that there were oceanic pH measurements dating back to at least 100 years earlier and was puzzled that this solid data had been ignored, in favour of computer modelled projections.

It has all the usual marks of modern bureaucratized science: scientists use a short stretch of data and computers to guesstimate a long “dataset”. Then when asked, they get huffy, hide the data, and insult the questioner. The poor sod seeking access to publicly funded data has to do an FOIA request, which in this case wasn’t successful, but then he got the data another way anyhow. Money was wasted hiding the data, it was wasted on bad policies, it was wasted defending an FOIA request, and dare I suggest, it was wasted training and paying the salaries of people who call themselves scientists but don’t act like them.

[CFACT] Marita Noon:

Feely’s chart, first mentioned, begins in 1988—which is surprising, as instrumental ocean pH data have been measured for more than 100 years — since the invention of the glass electrode pH (GEPH) meter. As a hydrologist, Wallace was aware of GEPH’s history and found it odd that the Feely/Sabine work omitted it. He went to the source. The NOAA paper with the chart beginning in 1850 lists Dave Bard, with Pew Charitable Trust, as the contact.

Wallace sent Bard an e-mail: “I’m looking in fact for the source references for the red curve in their plot which was labeled ‘Historical & Projected pH & Dissolved Co₂.’ This plot is at the top of the second page. It covers the period of my interest.” Bard responded and suggested that Wallace communicate with Feely and Sabine—which he did over a period of several months. Wallace asked again for the “time series data (NOT MODELING) of ocean pH for 20^th Century.”

Sabine responded by saying that it was inappropriate for Wallace to question their “motives or quality of our science,” adding that if he continued in this manner, “you will not last long in your career.” He then included a few links to websites that Wallace, after spending hours reviewing them, called “blind alleys.” Sabine concludes the e-mail with: “I hope you will refrain from contacting me again.” But communications did continue for several more exchanges.

In an effort to obtain access to the records Feely/Sabine didn’t want to provide, Wallace filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

We were told that coral reefs would crumble, crabs and molluscs would be unable to build their protective shells, the ocean food chain would collapse, and therefore the global food chain would fall apart.

Clearly the ten year moving average of ocean pH since 1910 has a slight upward curve. This means that in fact the alkalinity of the ocean has increased, not decreased. It has become LESS ACIDIC. The researchers Feely and Sabine would have known this. But it suited their purpose to truncate the data to start in 1988 to allow them to show a falling pH level over that relatively short period instead of the actual long-term increasing trend.

Wallace says: “Oceanic acidification may seem like a minor issue to some but, besides being wrong, it is a crucial leg to the entire narrative of ‘human-influenced climate change’.”

He adds: “In whose professional world is it acceptable to omit the majority of the data and also not disclose the omission to any other soul or Congressional body?”

What we have here is one of the basic foundations of the climate change scare, that is falling ocean pH levels with increased atmospheric CO2 content, being completely dismissed by the empirical ocean pH data the alarmist climate scientists didn’t want to show anyone because it contradicted their ‘increasing ocean acidity’ narrative.

Further information

Marita Noon runs a blog called Energy Freedom. Her post on this.
There is a petition set up by Wallace to restore the worlds ocean pH measurements
The man who uncovered this is Mike Wallace.
Read here for the full final draft of the most recent UN IPCC Report.
Read here for the extracts confirming the above points.

h/t to Joffa, Climate Depot, Heartland

9.5 out of 10 based on 140 ratings

NOAA Northern Hemisphere Ice Cover

Guest post by Eric Worrall

The following is a slideshow of images from the NOAA National Ice website, showing snow and ice cover over the Northern Hemisphere. The images are loaded directly from the NOAA site – I just provided the slide show mechanism.

The days chosen are the 1st day of the year (top left), the 90th day of the year (top right), the 180th day of the year (bottom left), and the 270th day of the year (bottom right). In a few cases images for that exact day are unavailable, so instead I display the nearest adjacent day.

I’m not making any particular statement about the ice. You can see the fall in Summer ice cover in the bottom right panel, which excited various parties into making dubious predictions about an imminent “ice free arctic”. You can also see a moderate recovery in ice cover in recent years.

The most remarkable feature of this series IMO is that minimal visible variation in winter snow and ice cover – so it seems we may have quite a long wait, until the “end of snow”.

Note that viewing the slideshow requires a fairly up to date web browser – if the images don’t update every few seconds, make sure your browser has been upgraded to the latest version available for your computer. For example, the slideshow won’t work if you use an old operating system such as Windows XP, but it should work in Windows 8, if your system is fully up to date.

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8.8 out of 10 based on 55 ratings

Weekend Unthreaded

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7.6 out of 10 based on 28 ratings

Songbirds detecting tornadoes two days ahead and fleeing?

These birds weigh only 9 grams, but they can apparently tell that the weather is going to get really nasty. Is it infrasound? And how often do thousands of birds split the scene for a false negative scare…

Songbirds fly coop long before tornadoes arrive in Tennessee

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – You might want to be careful about who you call a birdbrain. Some of our feathered friends exhibit powers of perception that put humans to shame.

Scientists said on Thursday that little songbirds known as golden-winged warblers fled their nesting grounds in Tennessee up to two days before the arrival of a fierce storm system that unleashed 84 tornadoes in southern U.S. states in April. The researchers said the birds were apparently alerted to the danger by sounds at frequencies below the range of human hearing

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7.8 out of 10 based on 50 ratings

Is the Sun driving ozone and changing the climate?

In 2015 the hunt for clues continues…

The central mystery in climate science is the Sun. The direct energy from the 1.4 million-kilometer-wide flaming ball stays remarkably constant. The radiation pours down on us but the relentless sameness of the watts can’t be causing of the swings in temperature on Earth. Something else is going on with the Sun. For one thing, the total light energy coming off the Sun stays almost the same but the type of light changes — the spectrum shifts — with more shorter wavelengths at one point in the cycle and longer wavelengths at the opposite part of the cycle. These have different effects. Shorter wavelengths (UV) generate ozone in the stratosphere and penetrate the ocean. Longer wavelengths don’t. But the Sun is also sending out charged particles and driving a massive fluctuating magnetic field, both of which affect Earth’s atmosphere.

But the tiny changes in total sunlight (TSI) may still be leaving us clues about other things going on with the Sun. David Evans’ notch-delay theory is that TSI is a leading indicator, and after solar TSI peaks, the temperatures on Earth follows with a peak roughly 11 years or so later (or one solar cycle). But what’s the mechanism? Stephen Wilde has a theory. Plug in your brain, and follow this chain of potential influence:

The Sun —-> UV or charged particles —- > ozone —-> polar jet streams —–> clouds —–> surface temperatures.

Stephen Wilde put forward the first version of this hypothesis in 2010. It is long past time to get into those details.

Summary of the Stephen Wilde Hypothesis

In essence: The Sun affects the ozone layer through changes in UV or charged particles. When the Sun is more active there is more ozone above the equator and less over the poles, and vice versa. An increase in ozone warms the stratosphere or mesosphere, which pushes the tropopause lower. There is thus a solar induced see-saw effect on the height of the tropopause, which causes the climate zones to shift towards then away from the equator, moving the jet streams and changing them from “zonal” jet streams to “meridonal” ones. When meridonal, the jet streams wander in loops further north and south, resulting in longer lines of air mass mixing at climate zone boundaries, which creates more clouds. Clouds reflect sunlight back out to space, determining how much the climate system is heated by the near-constant incoming solar radiation. Thus the Sun’s UV and charged particles modulate the solar heating of the Earth.

Figure 1: When the Sun is less active there is more ozone at the poles but less over the equator. Less ozone above the tropopause causes less stratospheric warming, allowing the tropopause up, which pushes the climate zones towards the equator. This causes the jet streams to be more meridonal, so more clouds are formed. Clouds reflect sunlight, so less solar radiation warms the Earth.

An active Sun increases ozone in the stratosphere:

“Changes in solar ultraviolet spectral irradiance directly modify the production rate of ozone in the upper stratosphere (e.g. Brasseur, 1993), and hence it is reasonable to expect a solar cycle variation in ozone amount. The global satellite ozone records since 1979 show evidence for a decadal oscillation of total ozone with maximum amplitude (~2%) at low latitudes (Hood and McCormack, 1992; Chandra and McPeters, 1994; Hood, 1997).

wilde, ozone, UV, sun, climate, tropopause

Figure 2: When the Sun is more active there is less ozone at the poles but more over the equator. More ozone above the tropopause causes more stratospheric warming, forcing the tropopause down, which pushes the climate zones away from the equator. This causes the jet streams to be more zonal, so fewer clouds are formed. Clouds reflect sunlight, so more solar radiation warms the Earth.

New research reports a missing driver — energetic electrons

In October 2014 a paper by Andersson et al suggests another layer of action, again on ozone. Described as the missing driver in the Sun-Earth connection, energetic electron precipitation (EEP) dramatically affects ozone — but above the poles, not the equator. The EEP in the mesosphere is directed preferentially towards the poles along the magnetic field lines because the electrons are charged particles, which explains why the effect is strongest at the poles.When the Sun is active the energetic electron rain decreases ozone preferentially above the poles and in the mesosphere.

At the poles, the rules get strained through a singularity

At the north and south poles the magnetic field lines converge, the Earth drags the atmosphere around a single point, the tropopause is lower, and temperature inversions are common. Polar vortices occur when an area of low pressure sits at the rotation pole of a planet. This causes air to spiral down from higher in the atmosphere, like water going down a drain. (Polar vortices should not be confused with the circumpolar jet around the poles, which is often given the same name in the media.)

All this remarkable action means that above the poles even the high mesosphere affects the height of the tropopause. In the polar vortices the descending flow draws air down from the mesosphere, right through the stratosphere to the tropopause.

The presence of a layer of ozone in the stratosphere is the cause of the temperature inversion that forms at the tropopause. That layer of ozone is warmed directly by incoming solar radiation. It is warmer than the rising air coming up from the surface below, so it effectively puts a lid on convection.

Ozone variations affect the temperature of the stratosphere, which in turn affects the height of the tropopause. From page 14 of Zangl and Hoinka:

“Suppose, for example, that the surface temperature and the tropospheric temperature gradient are given and that the temperature of the stratosphere varies. Then, a cold stratosphere will be associated with a high tropopause (low tropopause pressure), and a warm stratosphere will correspond to a low tropopause (high tropopause pressure).”

If the tropopause rises or falls, it causes a change in the gradient of tropopause height between equator and poles. This in turn causes the jet streams to shift north or south, because it pushes around the climate zones beneath the tropopause. A lower tropopause restricts the available space for free movement of air horizontally beneath it. So a lowering of the tropopause above the poles when the Sun is less active (as implied in the Andersson et al paper) squeezes the air in the tropospheric climate zones towards the equator. We have seen that happen in the form of increased jet stream meridionality since about 2000, as the level of solar activity declined in the transition from active solar cycle 23 to much less active solar cycle 24. That is the reason for the observation of more frequent and intense incursions of polar air across middle latitudes in recent years.

The world is divided up into permanent climate zones, which align along the lines of latitude due to the Earth’s rotation. These zones can move poleward or equatorward, in response to changes in the Earth’s energy budget. Poleward shifting was observed during the late 20^th century warming, and it is well know that the zones shifted equatorward during the Little Ice Age.

Figure 3: A Jetstream can be more zonal (left) or meridonal (right).

Source.

The jet streams are high-level rivers of fast moving air threading between the climate zones, and are driven by temperature, humidity and density differentials between the different types of air mass:

An equatorward shift of the climate zones gives the jets more room to loop north and south, and that gives more meridonal jets (the north-south components of the jets).
A poleward shift of the zones pushes the jets poleward, forcing them to more closely following the lines of latitude, that is, more zonal jets (the east-west components).
Such shifts are also associated with the Arctic Oscillation, wherein a positive phase results in the climate zones being pulled poleward and the jets adopting a more zonal (straighter) pattern. A negative phase results in the opposite. A more frequent positive phase is associated with a more active Sun due to cooling of the polar stratosphere (less mesospheric ozone descending through the polar vortex) and consequent lifting of the polar tropopause. A more frequent or more pronounced negative phase (as observed to a record extent during the very low solar minimum between cycles 23 and 24) is associated with a less active Sun due to warming of the polar stratosphere (more mesospheric ozone descending through the polar vortex).

Wandering jets means more clouds

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9.1 out of 10 based on 130 ratings

Carbon tax cost $5310 a ton. $15 billion to abate almost nothing and cool the world by even less.

If the Greens cared about the environment, they’d call this scheme “a ghastly waste”.

The “price” of carbon was advertised as $24 (per ton emitted) but real price of reducing emissions by one ton was $5,000. It could only happen when people are playing with other people’s money. That’s the soft left idea of good maths and good business.

That the Labor-Greens boast that this spectacular failure was a success shows the carbon tax was never about the climate, nor about CO2 or the environment. Follow the money. The purpose of the tax was to reward friends and punish competitors. Anyone dependent on Big-Government is a “friend”, and anyone who can stand on their own two feet is a “polluter” or a “denier”.

If the Greens cared about the environment, they’d call this scheme “a ghastly waste”.

The $15 billion price tag is $670 per Australian, or $2,700 per household of four. The real total is much more (when will the government add up the real bill?), because that tally doesn’t include the money wasted on solar panels, windpower, or the whole “Department of Weather Change”. It doesn’t include millions in scientific research money poured down the sinkhole of climate models that don’t model our climate, nor the advertising, promotion and propaganda of all of the above.

A smart conservative government would add up the whole bill, then spend 0.1% (something like $20 million) paying skeptical scientists to audit, and check the evidence trail. They would trumpet their green credentials. This source of the river of gravy starts with the science. People who care about the poor and the planet would want to get that right.

Sid Maher, The Australian

THE carbon tax cost $5,310 for every tonne of emissions abated during its two years of operation, new government analysis shows.

The release of the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory last week shows emissions for the economy, excluding the land sector, fell 1.4 per cent in 2013-14 and 0.8 per cent in 2012-13. When the land sector is included, as is the case under Kyoto accounting, Australia’s emissions fell from 567.1mt in 2012-13 to 563.5mt, a drop of 3.6mt. Between 2011-12 and 2013-14, emissions fell 0.5 per cent or 2.9mt (there was a small rise the previous year).

No one can call this a success. Australian emissions were falling before the carbon tax came in. The big 1.4% fall only came after the figures of the year before were adjusted up. The 0.8% reduction they talk about for the previous 12 months does not exist after the figures were changed, yet they are still citing it. The current count of emissions will most likely be adjusted up itself, and the 1.4% figure is mere noise in the data — in past years the post hoc adjustments have been larger.

Opposition climate change spokesman Mark Butler told the ABC the report proved Labor’s policies were working. “The National Greenhouse Gas Inventory — dropped by the government in the lead-up to Christmas in an effort to bury the report — showed that the emissions count for the overall year of Labor’s climate policies reduced by 1.4 per cent,” he said.

“That compares to a decline in emissions of 0.8 per cent for the previous 12 months, which shows that Labor policies to reduce emissions were working — to say otherwise is laughable.

Shame the Greens hate the environment.

Edit April 2015: First sentence changed to make it clearer and more useful. Was “It takes skill to figure out a scheme where you set the price at $24 for something and end up paying $5,000.”

9.3 out of 10 based on 104 ratings

Happy New Year

That date line is rolling around the world. May 2015 bring you happiness and good health.

Cheers!

9.6 out of 10 based on 48 ratings

High risk for a heart attack? Might be better if your cardiologist is away at a conference

Researchers at Harvard wondered if high risk heart patients were more likely to die if they turned up at the hospital during national cardiology meetings when most of the experts are not around. Instead, it turns out that mortality rates during the conferences fell from 70% to 60%. Oops.

Who do you want to see if you’re sick? In this situation, possibly not your specialist.

High-risk patients with certain acute heart conditions are more likely to survive than other similar patients if they are admitted to the hospital during national cardiology meetings, when many cardiologists are away from their regular practices.

Sixty percent of patients with cardiac arrest who were admitted to a teaching hospital during the days when cardiologists were at scientific meetings died within 30 days, compared to 70 percent of patients who were admitted on non-meeting days.

“That’s a tremendous reduction in mortality, better than most of the medical interventions that exist to treat these conditions,” said study senior author Anupam Jena, assistant professor of health care policy at HMS, internist at Massachusetts General Hospital and faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. There is substantial ambiguity in how medical care is practiced, particularly for these complex patients, he said. “This study may help illuminate some of those gray areas and suggest ways we can provide better care for those high-risk patients.”

To be fair, this only applies to one very specific subgroup of patients, and hopefully this red flag will help us figure out what needs to change. Possibly expert cardiologists are doing a bit too much to try to help their patients. But don’t feed me that line that experts are always right:

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9 out of 10 based on 29 ratings

Australia has had megadroughts for the last thousand years says ice core study

A new study of Law Dome Ice cores tells us that droughts are common in Australia, and that there appears to be eight mega-droughts over the last thousand years, including one that lasted a whopping 39 years from 1174- 1212AD. By their reckoning the 12th Century in Australia was a shocker with 80% of it spent in drought conditions. Things weren’t so bad from 1260 – 1860, at least, as far as they can tell. The researchers are convinced theirs is the first millennial-length Australian drought record. It does seem significant.

The researchers, sensibly, think we might want to pay attention to the Pacific cycles and store a bit more water. Without fanfare the paper also suggests that droughts were worse in medieval times.

“this work suggests Australia may also have experienced mega-droughts during the Medieval period that have no modern analog. Therefore, management of water infrastructure in eastern Australia needs to account for decadal-scale droughts being a normal feature of the hydrological cycle.”

h/t to Paul Homewood at Notalotofpeopleknowthat

The ABC reported this largely as a water management story, without asking whether their past stories that blamed CO2 for droughts were less likely to be true. They also didn’t talk about how natural climate change could be worse than the current “man-made” variety. Nor did they discuss the uncomfortable idea that if there were naturally more droughts when CO2 was ideal, perhaps the droughts now might be natural ones too? At least The Australian and Graham Lloyd put the emphasis on the idea that current droughts are par for the course.

Figure 4 (see Caption in footnote to blog).

So how does a study find droughts in Australia with a hole drilled in Antarctic ice?

A very good question — and though the study is corroborated with historic studies, and instruments in Australia as much as it can be, the bottom line is that we really need millenial proxies from Australia, but at the moment, this is the best we have. Law Dome is a spot in East Antarctica that is almost due south of Perth, Western Australia. Researchers looked at sea salt in the ice to estimate wind speed, and in this case, it means specifically winds from the Indian Ocean sector of the Southern Ocean. Those winds correlate with the strength and position of the Antarctic High and circumpolar trough (among other things). Law Dome has such good resolution they can even identify summer patterns from winter ones. The age uncertainty is ±1 y at 1000AD. It’s just flat out remarkable. Other researchers have used these sea salts as a proxy for Eastern Australia rain.

The paper also reconstructs the IPO — the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (the big cousin of the PDO*) and also talks about the effect of Antarctic Rossby waves on rainfall in Australia. They used a combination of annual snowfall and sea salt to reconstruct the IPO. They combine the sea-salt rainfall proxy with the reconstructed IPO cycles to estimate when the droughts hit, and confirmed as many of these as they could with other studies.

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9.1 out of 10 based on 74 ratings

The carbon tax figures are in: Australians paid $14b to reduce global emissions by 0.004%!

We can finally assess (sort of) the carbon tax in Australia. It ran for two years from July 2012 to July 2014 and cost Australians nearly $14 billion. The National Greenhouse Gas Inventory Office released Australian emissions statistics for the June Quarter of 2014. The headlines hitting the press this week are saying we reduced our emissions by 1.4%. The Greens are excited, but neither the journalists or the Greens have looked at the numbers. Not only is this reduction pathetically small on a global scale, but it’s smaller than the “noise” in the adjustments. Like most official statistics the emissions data gets adjusted year after year, and often by 1 – 2%. We won’t really know what our emissions were, or what the fall was, for years to come… (if ever).

Spot the effect of the Australian carbon tax in the graph of emissions by sector below. It operated for the last two years. The falls in electricity emissions started long before the carbon tax (and probably have more to do with the global financial crisis, a government unfriendly to small business, and the wild subsidies offered for solar power).

australian greenhouse emissions drop by sector electricity, industrial, agricultural

(Click to enlarge)

Did Australian industry “reduce” their emissions a year ahead of the carbon tax? Maybe. In anticipation of the pointless expense and increased sovereign risk, they may have shut down or moved overseas. Should we celebrate?

The cost-benefits of using a tax to change the weather

During the carbon tax period we “saved” something like 17Mt of CO2. That’s how much less we theoretically emitted compared to what we would have been produced if our emissions had stayed at the annual level they were at in June 2012 (subject to adjustment). Australia’s emissions are 1.5% of total human emissions, which are 4% of global emissions*. Those global emissions from all sources during the two years of the tax were roughly 416 Gt. Thus the carbon tax may have reduced global CO2 emissions by 0.004% and global temperatures by less.

The carbon tax is often framed as “revenue” or money raised, as if the government created some wealth. It should always be called a cost. And it’s not money from “polluters” — it’s money from Australians.

The carbon tax cost Australians $6.6 billion in 2012-2013 and cost $7.2 billion (projected) in 2013-14.
Over the two year period, that’s $13.8b for an average reduction of 0.004%.
The carbon tax was projected to cost $7.6 billion in 2014-15 if it had not been repealed.

The story of shifting data

Despite the headlines of “record falls” in Australian emissions, the data keeps changing, and the fall was about the same size as the adjustments. Each quarter, the numbers may be revised by up to 2%. In four of the last six years the annual emissions were announced and then were later raised. In two years the original estimate was similar to the last.

In other words, any 1% change is mere noise (in so many ways). Some of the time the headlines will have announced a fall in emissions that later vanished with data revision.

According to the most recent Excel data statistics I can find (subject to change), over the two years of the carbon tax our emissions started at 555Mt, fell to 550Mt and fell again to 542 Mt. As you can see by reading across the rows, the emissions may be adjusted for years after the fact. Who knows what Australia’s emissions of 2014 will be listed as 10 years from now.

Table 1: Running adjustments

As reported in June Q reports	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012x	2013x	2014x
Emissions in year to June 2008	544	551	549.5^	…	548.9	545.5	552.4
Emissions in year to June 2009	…	544	548	…	547.9	541.3	554.2
Emissions in year to June 2010	…	…	548	548	545.4	540.1	548.3
Emissions in year to June 2011	…	…	…	546	551.2	541.2	552.8
Emissions in year to June 2012	…	…	…	…	550.9	546.2	554.9
Emissions in year to June 2013	…	…	…	…	…	545.9	550.2
Emissions in year to June 2014							542.6

These figures don’t count land use changes and forestry.

2014x, 2013x and 2012x are the Excel figures released with their respective June Quarterly reports – these are original emissions, not adjusted for seasonal effects or weather normalized. The other figures are “preliminary estimates” (like the 2014 figure) and come from the summaries and overviews issued each year. If they are adjusted for the weather or seasonality, I couldn’t find the note telling us so.

The Greens Leader Christine Milne thinks this 1.4% fall in emissions is embarrassing for the Abbott government. She looks at this graph and sees “success”. Its just as likely the cause of any flattening in our emissions is due to the Labor Party and Greens, or simply the GFC.

Spot the difference Australia’s Carbon tax made. Anyone?

Other quarters may look different but for the June Quarter this is what “success” looks like:

….

Figures from the Dept of Environment.

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Recent Posts

Gullible media science writers who take mistakes and magnify them

What happened to those graphs?

Further information

In 2015 the hunt for clues continues…

Summary of the Stephen Wilde Hypothesis

New research reports a missing driver — energetic electrons

At the poles, the rules get strained through a singularity

Wandering jets means more clouds Keep reading →

The cost-benefits of using a tax to change the weather

The story of shifting data

Spot the difference Australia’s Carbon tax made. Anyone?

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