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For everything else… Heatwaves have become a publicity tool. Far from there being a clear trend in Australian heatwaves, Geoff Sherrington shows that it’s also legitimate to claim heatwaves were worse 80 – 100 years ago in Adelaide and Melbourne and things are getting better. Those officials who cherrypick their claims might be technically correct, but it’s outrageously deceitful and unscientific at the same time. Just how hard is it to get a record heatwave? It’s so easy that if it’s summer in Australia, it’s hard not to set a record. That’s because heatwaves come in so many flavors — there are seven capital cities which can all have 3 day, 4 day, 5 day or 6 day heatwaves. Then there are the heatwaves over 40C, or over 38 C, or over 35C… already that makes 84 flavours of wave. If a hot spell doesn’t break one type of wave, it could easily break another. Then there is the pre-heatwave, and there would be another 84 types of heatwaves that we haven’t had, but might get, you never know. You might think I’m kidding, but pre-heatwaves get headlines already: “More Canberra heatwaves forecast”“A heatwave could return to Canberra next month, according to the Bureau of Meteorology.” Canberratimes.com.au January 20, 2014
Did we need to ask the Bureau of Meteorology if there might be a heatwave in February in Australia?
Guest Post by Geoff SherringtonPreparing for heat waves is important, for fire, health, and electricity supply. There is a message being spread that recent heat waves are getting worse, that global warming will make them more common. A BoM paper (N&F 2013, see below) tells us that
N&F 2013 also assert that –
Some regular temperature records start as long ago as 1850, yet this Alexander et. al. prediction concentrates on the years 1951-2003. I wondered what happened to the early years of data? So I looked at heatwave temperatures in Melbourne and Adelaide. These graphs summarize the hottest maximum temperature heat waves in each city.
Adelaide has a population about 1.3 million today. The main weather station (23090) is now at Kent Town, 34.9211S, 138.6216E, records from there or nearby West Terrace (23000) start from 1887. Melbourne has a population about 4.3 million. The main weather station (86071) is at 37.8075S, 144.9700E, with records from there or nearby from 1856 onwards. This graphic evidence suggests that if anything, we are having fewer heatwaves than we had before (say) 1975. And some less hot. I qualify this: “Australia’s past climate records are not good enough to support sophisticated analysis and accurate forecasting.” There is only so much that one can do with one Tmax temperature and one Tmin each day. Conclusions about heat waves depend on many factors:
![]() Green Fairy Gods of Economic Management Another unintended consequence of policies to control the climate. Who would have guessed? Laws aimed to disrupt the energy market, disrupted the energy market. Just like Germany, parts of Australia are now dumping expensive gas, resurrecting old coal burners, and voila: The Fairy Gods of Economics tinker — and get the opposite of what they intended. Here’s the chain of events as best as I can figure. The greener-governments raised the cost of all electricity, but tried to slap an advantage on some forms at the expense of others. The catch is that there is just not enough alternate energy to go around. More projects used gas, partly due to other state based green schemes like the Gas Electricity Scheme of Queensland. So gas demand rose and gas became more expensive. At the same time, those who owned gas found that export markets will pay more for gas for other uses. So it didn’t make sense to keep the gas for the power-stations here when they could sell it for a greater profit elsewhere. Meanwhile, other forces were also at play. The Green drive created a glut in fickle solar and wind power. On the one hand that makes gas stations more appealing because they cope with the fickleness, but on the other it made everyone’s power bills higher, so people used less electricity. Plus more red-tape, green-tape, and botched over-management of the economy helped drive Australian production down, which also meant business used less electricity. All this created an oversupply of electricity, and that created the big-squeeze on generators: despite the fact the consumer was paying more for electricity, the generator’s marginal profits were less (the government was taking a bigger cut, and making generators use less efficient practices). The bottom line is that thanks to fiddling with complicated multivariable free markets, the electricity generators face even more pressure to pick the cheapest supply. Hence coal wins. Reader Scott the trader explains that the opportunity cost makes coal much more appealing than gas:
True free markets obey no one.
A carbon market where the price is too low means coal outperforms gas:
But if the carbon price was high enough to drive the us to use gas then the country would become too poor to keep the indulgent Green Gravy trains running. The dilemma, eh? Keep reading → This news was so boringly predictable I almost didn’t post it, but numbers like this of actual outcomes of visionary Big-Government Experiments are hard to come by. Seven billion dollars works out to $350 per person, and $1,350 per household of four, for one year. If Bill Shorten (leader of the opposition) had to knock on doors to collect this tax, there would be a riot in the street tomorrow. The Australian reports that the $1,350 from your house for the year to Sept 2013, produced an emissions fall from 543.9 million tons all the way down to 542.1 .
But I hear some cry that it did help reduce emission from electricity:
However virtually none of the 11 million tonnes “saved” had much to do with the carbon tax. About 5 million tons was due to reduced economic activity (arguably, thanks to the effect the Australian Labor Party had on the GDP, perhaps the most effective form of carbon reduction they “arranged”). The rest of the reduction in emissions from electricity came from extra production from the Snowy Mountain Hydro Scheme, and less production at the Yallourn Coal Plant in Victoria thanks to industrial action and flooding. In any case, while electricity produced less CO2, the rest of the economy, mostly did not:
Australia has one of the most aggressive carbon reduction schemes in the world. If it achieved anything at all, it was an accident. Sucking $7billion out of the economy may have helped reduced CO2, not through people using “clean” energy, but because it lowered Australia’s GDP. Businesses gave up trying to produce useful things, and spent more time filling in bits of paper. Keep reading → These days people are practically getting post traumatic climate disorder after bouts of extreme weather. More pointlessly, some are getting pre-traumatic stress from events that haven’t even happened. Makes you wonder how humanity survived the ice ages every time a storm hit — no fire department, no Hurricane-Relief funds, no phones, no food stores, no doctors. Electricity out for 90,000 years.
There goes evolution…It’s hard to get more over the top that Lise Van Susteren a forensic psychiatrist and one of the report’s authors:
So humans survived in drippy caves through ice-age winters, super volcanoes, asteroid strikes, without antibiotics, and to top it off, a sea-level rise, not of 20cm but of 125 meters. For 99% of human evolution their children regularly died horrible deaths from diarrhea, septicemia and pneumonia. Genghis Khan came and went. The Black Plague raged. But now we’re falling apart because of fear of bad storms that might hit our 3 bedroom air-conditioned homes? There is some real pain in this story, and real deaths, and far be it from me to belittle that. What I mock is the idea that these storms never happened before, that we are sure they are getting worse, and that we could prevent all the natural disasters in the world by putting up windmills, paying more tax and stressing about our carbon footprint. I note that globally hurricanes are no worse than they were 30 years ago. All that CO2, and nothing much to show for it? Graph of Global Hurricane Frequency since 1976 from Policlimate I’m not suggesting that a major catastrophe is not awful and can’t wreak havoc on a persons life. But let’s get a grip. Even the IPCC doesn’t have much confidence it can predict extreme event trends. Articles like this are milking a baseless panic, making things worse. The alarmists are the ones causing alarmEven the shrinks admit that:
So climate activists are working themselves into a state. For their own health they need an emergency course in Aristotelian logic. Keep reading → @GalileoMovement has been leaked a peek of the main Catastrophic Climate Change keyboard. This is where the emergency response team arguments are generated for the public debate. For example: 97% of climate models didn’t predict the “pause”. The correct response is… … all of the above. h/t, credit to Paul Evans of The Gallileo Movement. ![]() The Age, sometimes the free press is not enough… Gay Alcorn suggests when voters get it wrong (and you are but a powerless columnist on a major daily paper) the answer is not “explain your case”, or “publish and study the views of the people who disagree” but be fiercer, get arrested and resort to civil disobedience and blockades. Meanwhile her “respected” CSIRO scientists let her step into an obvious scientific hole, and Naomi Klein spins a fantasy that Alcorn finds appealing. Ask all the wrong questionsThe journalists of The Age have read their own paper for so long, they don’t even know what questions to ask:
Gay Alcorn asks” What if you couldn’t accept the elected governments position”. She doesn’t ask: What if I’m wrong and windmills won’t stop floods? What if a tax won’t change the weather? Or how about, “If we make cheap energy more expensive – How exactly will that increase national productivity and help the economy?” She also doesn’t ask, “What if a few dozen scientists have got their key assumptions wrong about the climate, and the models grossly exaggerate the threat?” What if thousands upon thousands of scientists (and a large slab of the population) know that name-calling “deniers” is not a scientific argument, want real evidence and are protesting? What if the newspaper you read hides the other half of the story, and doesn’t tell you that 31,000 scientists disagree with the 62 who reviewed Chapter Nine of the IPCC report? What if The Age never reports that atmospheric physicists, solar astronomers, geologists and engineers are skeptical, and have excellent reasons to be so, not to mention 1100 papers?
What if none of the CSIRO scientists was willing to be bluntly honest and remind you that none of these heatwaves or warm records was unusual in the long run, and none of them show that the warming is man-made? If the warming was natural, we’d get heatwaves, wouldn’t we? But instead of honest or forthright admission, the CSIRO scientists feed the unscientific pap that any warming is proof that CO2 caused the warming. So much for this respected institution. Few will respect it ten years from now, when it becomes obvious how much it has cost us.
Was that a lie a wink and a nod, or was it just a response to global bullies?She points at the apparent contradictions of conservatives who say they believe but appear not to act, but misses the obvious reasons why:
Keep reading → A new paper suggests there is an “unprecedentedly” low number of tropical cyclones around Australia at the moment. (How much should we spend to avoid this dreadful outcome I wonder?) I am a little skeptical of how we can be so sure of the cyclone activity in, say, the year 900 AD. But nonetheless, the study is worth a look. Haig et al took stalagmites from two places in Australia (Chillagoe, Qld, and Cape Range, WA) and got very nice long year-by-year records of 18O and 16O data. They calibrated these against observational instrumental records — though I note these are but a tiny 20 years of data (1990 – 2010), and that during a period described by mainstream climate science (cough) as “unprecedented”. Assuming that it is possible to pick apart normal rain and cyclonic rain, and that cyclone activity did not just shift to be more than 400 km away (where these stalagmites won’t record the cyclones) then it does appear that there are usually more cyclones in Australia than now. Note the top graphs are the WA site which go back to 500AD, and the lower pair are the QLD graphs “only” going back to 1300AD. Both graphs show an increase in storm activity during the Little Ice Age around 1700AD. If things do get cold in the next 20 years, will we get more cyclones and will fans of man-made global warming still be blaming CO2 if we do? ![]() Figure 3 | CAI over the last 1,500 and 700 years. a, c, Cape Range (a) and Chillagoe (c); black line indicates smoothing of the series using ref. 31 (smoothed data were not used in the statistical analysis). Grey shading indicates the r.m.s.e. of the model. Four values, which were more than 1 s.d. outside the d18OA range specified in Fig. 1, were removed from the series. b, d, Wavelet power spectra (Morlet wavelet) of Cape Range (b) and Chillagoe (d). Power increases from blue to red, black contours indicate regions above the 95% confidence level, and the white areas are regions subject to edge effects. The spectra have lag-1 autocorrelation coefficients of 0.75 (Cape Range) and 0.78 (Chillagoe). Software provided by C. Torrence and G. Compo (http:// The paper has the usual obligatory vague claims pretending to connect this to anthropogenic causes, when there is nothing definitively unnatural shown in this long study, and given that the Earth has 1500 year and longer cycles, the long data is still not long enough anyway. We all know the debate is over and the science is settled, but note the 95% certainty is not quite evident in the conclusions (see my bolding).
These waffly phrasings of uncertainty will be studied one day as a comment on the politically distorted scientific culture of the early 21st century. There are a couple of caveats, one is that normal rain and cyclonic rain are difficult to tell apart. The other is that these stalagmites can only record cyclones within 400km of the cave. Keep reading →
The scandal remains that Copernicus did not close the journal because of any scientific flaws. They first and foremost closed the journal because it “doubted” the IPCC, as they baldly declared in their original emails and official statement. That Copernicus then post hoc claimed there was a fault with the reviewing process doesn’t change the fact that a major scientific publishing house took the extraordinary decision that the IPCC can not be questioned and naively admitted it, as if it was acceptable. It reveals the utterly unscientific mindset of the gatekeepers of Peer Review. My position is that Peer Review is a bureaucratic process so corrupted with this poisonous attitude, that the most important aim of any skeptic is not to try too hard to play an inherently crooked game, or to pander to its dictats, but to tell the world how crooked it is. Peer or Pal is not the point. The point is that science is done by evidence and reason not by private review. Whether or not the papers lead on to fruitful developments in our understanding of the sun is another matter entirely. It was no concern of Copernicus Publication when they terminated the journal. On another point, curve fitting (as speculative as it is) is a form of pattern recognition, and thus speculation about curves is would seem appropriate in a journal called Pattern Recognition. Most new theories in science, both the successes and the failures, start out as curve fitting. (Some later progress to a model whose elements are based on physical observations or theories, and some finally progress to a further stage where the curve can be calculated from the known physics of the elements of the model.) Monckton also makes the rather savage point that while the journal was axed because it doubts the “accelerated warming” of the IPCC, the IPCC itself doubts the accelerated warming it once predicted, and no longer predicts any acceleration in the next 30 years. – Jo Selected excerpts below, Monckton’s full letter here. From: The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley 20 January 2014 Dear Mr. Rasmussen, Closure and reopening of the learned journal My kind friend Professor Niklas Mörner of Stockholm, who in close to 50 years has published approaching 600 papers in the reviewed and general scientific literature, is an internationally-renowned expert on sea level and is one of the most gifted instructors of students I have ever had the pleasure to work with, has copied me in on your sad and, indeed, bizarre decision to bring to an end the excellent learned journal Pattern Recognition in Physics, less than a year after its first publication in March 2013. Professor Mörner, who is usually the most genial and even-tempered of scientists, is plainly furious not so much at your decision to axe this promising journal, which was already galloping towards the forward frontiers of research in the physical sciences, as at the extraordinary reason you have given for your decision. Keep reading → What we need is a mature national discussion. But what The Conversation (and the Business Spectator) gives us is logic-according-to-Clive, which is a black and white world where complex debates are reduced to yes or no answers and there are no shades of gray. How much will our climate warm? Clive says “Yes”. Clive Hamilton is an Australian “intellectual” a Professor of Public Ethics and holds the Vice- Maurice Newman talked about the IPCC, the satellites, Climategate, Renewable Schemes and $100 billion dollar funds. Clive responds: “Now unleashed, Newman is in full flight mimicking the anti-vaccinators.” Clive does not refute a single point that Newman makes. He calls him names and merely declares what Newman said was “bizarre”. Clive obviously has no answer and no evidence — he can’t point to models that work, or predictions that were correct, the best he can do is a pop-psychology analysis of “tactics”. It amounts to smear by association. Like saying that Attilla the Hun rode horses, so if you ride a horse you are mimicking Attila. Indeed the tactics he cites are so meaningless and common, he uses them himself. “Deniers” he says, may portray themselves as David vs Goliath. (And which academic makes out they fight against monster Fossil Fuel interests against a conservative media?) “Deniers” spread theories about cover-ups, and conspiracies. You mean, like saying that Fossil fuel companies are “the most powerful industry lobby we’ve ever seen in Australia”, so powerful that politicians dance to them, and “they’ve captured universities“? (Or they have their own political party and sometimes form government? That would be the Greens.) Who thinks the ABC is biased in favour of skeptics, thanks to “political pressure”? (What kind of bias means skeptics almost never get any airtime and when they do, the editors take the trouble of editing skeptics sentences to produce quotes they never said?) His thesis of deniers who can’t be persuaded collapses in a hole upon the smallest inspectionHamilton argues skeptics can’t be persuaded, but if he’d bothered to do any research he’d know that many leading skeptics used to think CO2 might cause a crisis, or used to be active Greens themselves, like me. What about former Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore, or conservationist David Bellamy? Margaret Thatcher set up the Hadley Met Centre, but later become openly skeptical. Environmentalist Lawrence Solomon, or Peter Taylor (who wrote Chill, A Reassessment of Global Warming Theory) are hardly conservative commentators making ideological calls. My other half Dr David Evans, used to work for The Australian Greenhouse Office. “What kind of denier changes their mind? The kind that aren’t deniers. There are virtually no former skeptics who have become believers, instead there is only a pretender — Richard Muller, who dishonestly makes out he was skeptical, despite obvious quotes of him praising the consensus and calling CO2 “the greatest pollutant”. Time to turn off the tapSensible people would just ignore Hamilton, but it’s time those who channel our tax funds to him need to start explaining how we get value out of his unresearched, untested pop-psychology, used to denigrate half the population and reduce our national debate to name-calling. Charles Sturt University needs to explain if this is the kind of logic it applies to the rest of it’s science research departments. Do they allow Hamilton to teach students? Will they censure him for abusing English and being irrational? The ARC likewise, and all the universities that fund The Conversation, mostly using your money. Academia in Australia is an irrational swamp and it’s time the bog was drained. The Conversation is the megaphone over the mud. Are you an alumni of any of these? Can you write to the VC and ask why it supports this kind of baseless, fallacious reasoning, abuse of English and derogatory namecalling?
First up, our national institutions need to stop supporting name-callers and start speaking English
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Let’s see if we can get them to put Science and Technology back in 2015?
Filed under: Skeptics are winning.
The EU was always the leader in the Great Green Push, and announcements on Wednesday are an excellent sign. Both the media and politicians are finally coming around, dragged by reality. This is the good news. The bad news is it’s cost hundreds of billions, and there are still renewable targets when there shouldn’t be, but we are over the peak…
Today is a big day in Brussels as the EU has begun the gradual process of rolling back its bankrupting climate and green energy policies. Of course this modest climbdown is not the end of Europe’s climate hysteria that has dominated Brussels for 20 years. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is the beginning of a much deeper retreat of its unilateral approach in coming years. –Benny Peiser, 22 January 2014
The talk is for an “ambitious” 40% target by 2030, but really this is about dropping the legally binding nature of the targets. So as usual in warmist politics, no one is up front and honest. It’s a face-saving move as the green reality falls.
European Commission to ditch legally-binding renewable energy targets
Climbdown on setting mandatory national targets, enforced in the EU courts, will be welcomed by Britain
“A 2009 EU directive set the objective of ensuring that 20pc of the energy used by 2020 should come from renewable sources. ”
“The binding target for renewable energy has probably had more impact on how power is generated and the bills paid by households in Britain than any other single piece of EU legislation.”
The media is turning around: more than half the stories in the UK are negative about renewables.
“A study by British public relations consultancy CCGroup analysed 138 articles about renewables published during July last year in the five most widely circulated British national newspapers: The Sun, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and Daily Mirror, which enjoy a combined daily circulation of about 6.5 million.
“The analysis revealed a number of trends in the reporting of renewable energy news,” the study found. “First and foremost, the temperature of the media’s sentiment toward the renewables industry is cold. More than 51 per cent of the 138 articles analysed were either negative or very negative toward the industry.”
More than 80 per cent of the articles appeared in broadsheet titles The Times, The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, the report says, “but 55 per cent of these articles were either negative or very negative about the industry”.
Two weeks ago, the Czech government decided to end all subsidies for new renewable energy projects at the end of this year.
Now that the Spanish government has dramatically curtailed these subsidies…
Germany has the most expensive energy, “26.8 euro cents (40c) a kilowatt hour”. It has half the world’s solar panels, but while they make up to 40% of the countries electricity in summer, they make nearly 0% in winter, when energy is most desperately needed. Germany is building 20 new coal plants, and its CO2 emissions are rising. This despite the enormous bill most electricity users are paying.
Finally the mainstream press is starting to report the real pain. Cons are always cloaked in good intentions. And this is no different. A stupendous swindle dressed up as being good for the poor and the planet has instead extracted money from the poor towards some of the wealthy. Nearly a million people have lost access to one of the most basic essential services, electricity, thereby rolling back one of the great advances of the last century.
Keep reading →
Mike has been an active skeptic in Scotland, and has designed a demographic and opinion survey that I think would give us interesting results. It’s very reasonable, I hope you can take a few minutes (it is short) please try to finish it if you start it. – Jo
I am writing to you on behalf on the Scottish Climate & Energy Forum, we are conducting a survey of those interesting in the climate debate. The aim of the survey is to understand the nature and background of those interested in the climate debate online. It will provide an invaluable insight into the education and work experience of participants, test the relevance of politics in forming views and assess employment and social factors for their relationship with views on climate.
We would be very grateful if you would take the time to complete the survey. The responses are confidential.
The url is: http://scef.org.uk/survey/index.php/868721/lang/en.
Keep reading →
Showing that academics can cost the country more than they return, ANU’s Geoff Cary posits that there is an 80% consensus (an unmeasured, meaningless statistic) that there will be more fires in Australia 60 years from now.
This is an opinion about opinions of experts who use models that we know can’t predict temperatures. Not only is this “fact” already piled three layers of nonsense deep, the most abjectly stupid point is the fourth layer, the pretense that these models might, in their wildest dreams, be able to predict rainfall — which is an order of magnitude harder than just predicting global temperature. Predicting bushfires is dependent on knowing not just total rainfall in one region, but how that rainfall is spread throughout the year. Not to mention that bushfires depend on wind speed, wind direction, land-use (fuel load), and humidity.
Everyone knows that different climate models predict both higher and lower rainfall in the same areas at the same time, and the type of phrases used to describe the ability of climate models are: “low confidence” (National Centre for Atmospheric Research), “irrelevant with reality” (Koutsoyiannis ), or an “absence” of skill (Kiktev). Compare the different projections of climate models below, which model is right.
Predictions of changes in bushfire 60 years hence are thus equivalent to alchemists attempts to turn lead into gold. These are National Tea-leaf Readers, and they are not only afforded nice salaries and all the accoutrements, but given space in our national news as if they had something remotely useful to say.
Climate change means more fires: academic
Australian National University’s Geoff Cary said a projected lift in temperatures of more than 2C would probably mean much more bushfire activity across the country.
“There’s an 80 per cent consensus indicating that increased fire activity into the future is highly likely,” he told reporters in an online Australian Science Media Centre briefing.
Associate Professor Cary said in areas with wet climates, like Tasmania, bushfire risk could double over the same period.
“In the Tasmanian climate, the future scenario for 2070 which is warmer and drier suggested a … 70 to 100 per cent increase in area burnt,” he said.
However, he predicted bushfires would burn far less area in central Australia by 2070 as hotter, drier, weather reduced the amount of fuel blazes had to feed on.
“We predict a significant decrease in the area burnt,” he said.
On rainfall, there is almost always one model that is “right” because there are so many models and they all say different things.
Figure 2.Projected changes in temperature and precipitation for the 2050s. Left: United Kingdom Hadley Center. Right: Canadian Center for Climate Modeling and Analysis. Source:Rosenzweig and Solecki, Climate Change and a Global City, 2001.
Source: Columbia .edu
Here are comparisons of 5 different models over Australia. Is CSIRO Mk 3.6 the “right” model?
Figure 2.1.1: Leading mode of annual rainfall variability over Australia, from observations (Bureau of Meteorology), the CSIRO Mk3.6 and Mk3.5 climate models, and three leading international models: HadGEM1 (United Kingdom), GFDL CM2.1 (USA) and MIROC 3.2, medium resolution (Japan).
Source: Indian Ocean Climate Initiative
The IPCC AR4 report shows that over most of Australia precipitation increases and decreases are only shown in two-thirds of all the models, in other words, up to one third of the models might predict no change or the opposite result in exactly the same area.
Keep reading →
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