Weekend Unthreaded

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8 out of 10 based on 21 ratings

Get Headlines! How to find a heatwave in five easy steps

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 Sherrington

Preparing 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

“The number of heat-related deaths in temperate Australian cities is expected to rise considerably by 2050 as the frequency and intensity of heatwaves is projected to increase under climate change from global warming.”

N&F 2013 also assert that –

“While heatwaves are not unusual for Australians, the trend towards more frequent and intense heatwaves (Alexander et al. 2007) is of significant concern.”

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:

How you select places as examples. (E.g. Hobart is not so interesting lately).
Definition of ‘heat wave’. (E.g. 3, 4, 5 or 6 day, even longer, or more complex?)
Choice of weather station. (E.g. Kent Town versus Adelaide Airport 2009 heat wave).
Choice of weather record. (Do we use Acorn or “raw” data?)
Quality of data keeping. (In some datasets the max temperature is sometimes lower than the minimum on the same day.)
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9.3 out of 10 based on 71 ratings

Thanks to Green schemes Queensland dumps gas for coal

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:

“…ignoring thermal efficiency for the moment, burning coal at $2/GJ is obviously better than opportunity cost of $9/GJ gas for the same electricity revenue. Or put another way $2/GJ coal converts roughly to $20/MWh fuel only cost vs being able to sell gas at $9 which if you were using it for fuel would equate to ~$70/MWh.”

True free markets obey no one.

QUEENSLAND’S largest power generator will today declare that Australia is one of the world’s most expensive countries for energy and warn that the electricity market is being distorted by the carbon tax, mandatory renewables target and solar-rooftop subsidies.

After Stanwell took the extraordinary step yesterday of announcing it would mothball its biggest gas-fired power station and resurrect a coal facility built in the 1980s – sparking predictions that gas-fired power plants would be withdrawn in other states – it will today call for a scaling back of the renewable energy target.

Before the introduction of the carbon tax, the RET scheme and solar feed-in tariffs, the abundance of coal had made Australia a source of low-cost electricity, the company will say.

“These policies appear to have been implemented for ideological reasons with little analysis of the impact on electricity prices and economic growth,” Stanwell chief executive officer Richard Van Breda will say.

A carbon market where the price is too low means coal outperforms gas:

Origin Energy managing director Grant King has previously said it would take a carbon price of $40-$60 to create “fuel switching” — to make it more economical to build a gas-fired power station than a coal-fired plant for baseload generation.

National Generators Forum executive director Tim Reardon said that “as the gas prices increase trickles down into other states, we would expect to see other gas plant withdrawn”.

“The carbon price would need to be much closer to $100 a tonne before it changes the economics of electricity generation,” he said.

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?

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9.6 out of 10 based on 100 ratings

$7b paid in carbon tax to reduce CO2 by 0.3% and cool us by zero degrees

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 .

National greenhouse accounts to be released today show carbon emissions fell just 0.3 per cent in the year to September 2013. This was despite the carbon tax raising $7 billion over the period.

But I hear some cry that it did help reduce emission from electricity:

The Department of Environment figures, obtained by The Australian, show electricity emissions fell 5.5 per cent or about 11 million tonnes in the year to September.

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:

The Environment Department said the lower electricity emissions were driven by lower demand and changes in the generation mix. The figures show that overall emissions of greenhouse gas are largely unchanged since 2010. While emissions from electricity generation fell, emissions from stationary energy such as on-site power generation from industrial plants rose 1.7 per cent, emissions from transport rose 2 per cent and so-called fugitive emissions from mining activities rose 8.3 per cent.

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.

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9.5 out of 10 based on 110 ratings

Hulme tries to throw all scientists under a bus. It’s just “the debate is over”. Cook, consensus take collateral hit.

It’s another tiny marker on the road to reality. Mike Hulme has admitted that Cooks 97% study is “infamous” and “irrelevant”. He’s trying to wash himself of both the “Consensus” argument and Cook’s work which he can see are becoming a liability. But make no mistake Hulme is more alarmist than ever. He’s just trying to rebrand the gravy train.

In Science can’t settle what should be done about climate change he’s not trying to argue from scientific authority. But–watch the pea–it is just a different form of authority — his. He’s trying to chuck both sides of the science debate under the bus-of-oblivion and pretend that science is completely irrelevant. With his mere statement that the science is settled (according to him), he’s hoping to get the policies discussed and stop people raising awkward points about the science.

What’s amazing is that anyone falls for this nonsense at all. It’s a naked attempt to divert the national conversation with statements that are self evidently inane. He wants us to discuss how much money to spend to change the weather, but not discuss how much the weather is going to change. What, no discussion of value for money–how much for 1C of warming-avoided, Mike? Again, it’s as if the climate is a Yes or No question, and half a degree equals three degrees. Let’s run the country without any numbers shall we?

Here’s his bland argument from his own authority, with the Yes:No assumption built in.

“What matters is not whether the climate is changing (it is); nor whether human actions are to blame (they are, at the very least partly and, quite likely, largely); nor whether future climate change brings additional risks to human or non-human interests (it does).”

Then here’s the incredibly weak followup — where the fact that the highest projections of the scientists on the No case overlap with the lowest projections of the scientists on the Yes case, means we should give up on figuring out whether it’s half a degree or three degrees. Really? These people are not good with numbers.

“As climate scientist Professor Myles Allen said in evidence to the committee, even the projections of the IPCC’s more prominent critics overlap with the bottom end of the range of climate changes predicted in the IPCC’s published reports.”

So our policy on the climate doesn’t depend on the truth about the climate? Surprise me. It was always about the politics all along. Copenhagen redux anyone?

Toss out the science?

It’s like the pea is hidden under a clear plastic cup. Does he think we can’t see it? To state the bleeding obvious, the amount we ought to drain from the economy depends very strongly on whether the warming will be small or large. Small warming will help plants grow, give longer growing seasons, produce more crops, reduce winter deaths, and methinks we ought spend exactly no dollars to avoid. Large warming has a totally different cost benefit ratio, which is harder to predict, and yes, we might want to turn the economy inside out.

Mike Hulme posts the four questions he hopes we will discuss. It’s a wish list, and all of them have built into them the unspoken assumption that the warming will be large, that we need to do something, that even democracy itself needs to be discussed.

He poses as someone who wants “debate” while he quietly tries to sweep the most important debate under the rug. It’s about “seeming”, and not about sense.

“As I have argued elsewhere, the most important questions to be asked about climate change extend well beyond science. Let me suggest four; all of which are more important than the committee’s MPs managed. They are questions which people should and do disagree about and they have no correct answer waiting to be discovered by science.

How do we value the future, or in economic terms, at what rate should we discount the future? Many of the arguments about urgent versus delayed interventions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions revolve around how much less we value future public goods and natural assets relative to their value today. This is a question that clear-thinking people will disagree about.

If the warming is small, we don’t need to reduce greenhouses gases at all. Clear thinking people don’t ask what rate to discount nothing.

In the governance of climate change what role do we allocate to markets? Many arguments about climate change, as about environmental management more generally, revolve around whether commodifying nature, by pricing environmental “goods” and “services”, is part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

If CO2 doesn’t make much difference, we don’t need governance. (What politician wants to hear that?)

How do we wish new technologies to be governed, from experimentation and development to deployment? This question might revolve around new or improved low-carbon energy technologies (such as fracking, nuclear power, or hydrogen fuel), the use of genetically modified crops as a means to adapt to changing climate, or proposed climate engineering technologies. Again, these are not questions upon which science, least of all a scientific consensus, can adjudicate.

Renewables? We didn’t need to ask scientists in the first place, we just needed to let the free market work. If renewables were useful they’d make cheap electricity and everyone would want them.

What is the role of national governments as opposed to those played by multilateral treaties or international governing bodies? This requires citizens to reflect on forms of democracy and representation. They are no less important in relation to climate change than they are in relation to state security, immigration or financial regulation.

Yes, finally a question that does not need science. It’s answered by history pretty darn well. Big Government has killed and incarcerated millions, shall we do that experiment again? Even in it’s most benevolent kind form (aka the EU) we see productive economies reduced to flaming wrecks, with mobs in streets rioting over their lost hand-outs and 50% youth unemployment.

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9.4 out of 10 based on 89 ratings

Climate Change is making us mental — fear of “storms” undoing evolution!

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.

Americans’ Mental Health is Latest Victim of Changing Climate (Op-Ed)

For months after Hurricane Sandy sent nearly six feet of water surging into her home in Long Beach, N.Y. — an oceanfront city along Long Island’ s south shore — retired art teacher Marcia Bard Isman woke up many mornings feeling anxious and nauseated. She had headaches, and inexplicable bouts of sadness. She found herself crying for no apparent reason.

“I would feel really sad, and that’s just not me,” she said. “I felt like the joy was out of my life. I still haven’t recaptured it.”

What Isman is experiencing is one of the little-recognized consequences of climate change, the mental anguish experienced by survivors in the aftermath of extreme and sometimes violent weather and other natural disasters. The emotional toll of global warming is expected to become a national — and potentially global — crisis that many mental health experts warn could prove far more serious than its physical and environmental effects.

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:

“We are undoing millions of years of evolution, and the situation is a catastrophe,” she said. “Climate activists on the front lines are desperate to convey this to the public, but are told to be wary of paralyzing people with fear. Compounding the issue is that people often generally are not ‘good’ at knowing they are anxious, or, if they do, often don’t know why.

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 alarm

Even the shrinks admit that:

And the psychological damage is not only over what is happening now, but what is likely going to happen in the future.

“This kind of anticipatory anxiety is especially crippling and is increasingly being seen among climate activists — in some cases rising to the level of a kind of ‘pre-traumatic’ stress disorder,” she added.

So climate activists are working themselves into a state. For their own health they need an emergency course in Aristotelian logic.

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9.5 out of 10 based on 88 ratings

We are 95% certain you are a big-tobacco funded anti-semitic denier: alarmist keyboard leaked.

@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…

Alarmist Debating Keyboard

… all of the above.

h/t, credit to Paul Evans of The Gallileo Movement.

9.2 out of 10 based on 85 ratings

The Age columist says democracy, free press not the answer for climate damage

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 questions

The journalists of The Age have read their own paper for so long, they don’t even know what questions to ask:

The Age: “Applying heat to Canberra’s climate stance”

“There are a few barely questioned principles that most citizens assume in a representative democracy such as ours. One is that, whichever party you voted for, you accept the result of an election and give thanks for a peaceful transfer of political power.

But what if there was an issue where you couldn’t accept the elected government’s position, believing it so wrong, dangerous, and damaging to the country’s economic and social future that to treat it as just part of the argy-bargy of politics would make you complicit in that wrong?

Climate change is that issue.”

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?

The evidence is that we are seeing its impact on our environment and our lives now. In our patch of the world, we’re into the second heatwave of the year in parts of southern Australia, following a year that was the hottest on record, and a decade between 2001-10 that was the warmest on record.

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:

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9.2 out of 10 based on 127 ratings

Weekend Unthreaded

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7.9 out of 10 based on 26 ratings

Prince Charles says headless chickens should have more blind trust in science

“Baffled”

Switch off your brain, Prince Charles has said you are a headless chicken if you do not accept what political committees tell you to think.

PRINCE Charles has called people who deny human-made climate change a “headless chicken brigade” who are ignoring overwhelming scientific evidence.

Thus Chicken Little yells “headless chickens”, and climate sensitivity must be 3.3C. Right?

The heir to the throne, a dedicated environmentalist, accused “powerful groups of deniers” of mounting “a barrage of sheer intimidation” against opponents.

So one of the richest men in the world, future ruler of nations, feels bullied by unfunded volunteers? Such bravery from our next Head of State. (I’m not Monarchist or Republican, but if Charles keeps talking, that could change.)

This is the same old argument: authorities want us to believe authority, while stupid punters ask for data instead.

Using all the inductive reasoning he could muster, Charles admits he cannot figure out why everyone does not accept the pronouncements of people who hide declines, data, emails and methods:

Charles said it was “baffling … that in our modern world we have such blind trust in science and technology that we all accept what science tells us about everything – until, that is, it comes to climate science”.

We can only assume this eloquence and insight is a product of the best education the British Isles establishment could offer. That’s not just one, but two forms of namecalling, you headless chicken deniers. How could you possibly disagree?

Photo: Wikimedia Image Dan Marsh.

9.2 out of 10 based on 165 ratings

Australia has lowest number of tropical cyclones in 1500 years?

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://
atoc.colorado.edu/research/wavelets/)..

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).

The Australian region seems to be experiencing the most pronounced
phase of tropical cyclone inactivity for the past 550–1,500 years. The
dramatic reductions in activity since the industrial revolution suggest
that climate change cannot be ruled out as a causative factor. This
reduction is also in line with present projections for the late twenty first
century from global climate models, yet our results suggest that
this is occurring much sooner than expected. However, we cannot say
whether this downward trend in activity will be sustained.

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.

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9.5 out of 10 based on 42 ratings

Pattern Recognition Journal to be relaunched

Over a week ago Christopher Monckton sent this letter below to the Editor of Copernicus Publications, suggesting they reconsider their hasty decision to close the journal, and informed Martin Rassmussen that unless he heard from him about that or about copyright issues within 7 days, Monckton would take over the title Pattern Recognition in Physics and relaunch the journal. There was no response from Copernicus, so Monckton is now free to pursue this. I think it is a good development, and hope it will lead to a dispassionate discussion of the scientific ideas that were raised.

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
Martin Rasmussen, Esq.,
Copernicus Publications.

Dear Mr. Rasmussen,

Closure and reopening of the learned journal
Pattern Recognition in Physics

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.

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9.1 out of 10 based on 102 ratings

Tax funded namecallers? Clive Hamilton, The Conversation are the same: beyond reason

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-Chancellor’s Chair at Charles Sturt University, and is a former candidate for The Australian Greens.

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 inspection

Hamilton 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 tap

Sensible 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?

The Conversation is funded by CSIRO, Melbourne, Monash, RMIT, UTS, UWA, ACU, ANU, Canberra, CDU, Curtin, Deakin, Flinders, Griffith, JCU, La Trobe, Massey, Murdoch, Newcastle, QUT, Swinburne, Sydney, UniSA, USC, USQ, UTAS, UWS and VU.

Does this article represent the standards of these universities?

First up, our national institutions need to stop supporting name-callers and start speaking English

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9.7 out of 10 based on 124 ratings

Climate change violates Newton’s Third Law of Experts

Climate change violates one of Newton’s Laws

First published on OnlineOpinion Dec 2007 and unfortunately still very applicable.

by William York

The claim that the science debate over cimate change is settled violates the most important of Newton’s Laws. This violation is not of the famous Laws of Motion but of a little known set of derived bylaws, Newton’s Laws of Experts, a major contribution to understanding social dynamics.

Newton’s Laws of Motion may be simply stated as:

First Law: every object persists in its state of rest or uniform motion unless acted upon by an external force;
Second Law: the rate of change of momentum is directly proportional to the applied force; and
Third Law: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

The bylaws, Newton’s Laws of Experts, are as follows:

First Law: every expert persists in his state of rest or opinion unless acted upon by an external grant;
Second Law: the rate of change of opinion is directly proportional to the applied grant; and
Third Law: for every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.

The First Law of Experts is well known and can be demonstrated in countless universities, institutes and research bodies. There are two major influences. First, the need to appear relevant to the wants of society means engagement in the great issues of the day. This has been brought on by well intentioned but misguided policy that assumes innovations, financial, technical or other, spring fully developed from academic research and national needs should determine the areas of research interest.

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8.7 out of 10 based on 95 ratings

UK poll: 62% don’t believe in man-made climate. Educated high income classes more skeptical than unskilled

Last week a new ComRes/ITV poll came out in the UK. The poll of 2,047 people from across the country shows that the population is split roughly into thirds. A third are skeptics, a third are believers, a third don’t know. Overall about 60% of UK citizens are not convinced that humans are changing the weather.

What was also really interesting but unreported about this study is that the wealthiest and most educated are more skeptical and those with the lowest income or shortest education were more likely to believe that humans are affecting the climate. In the upper middle class 36% think the floods are due to human activity, and virtually the same percentage — 35% are skeptics. In the manual worker and less skilled social bracket 44% think humans are to blame, and only 28% are skeptics. The skeptic message is winning over the upper class, better educated bracket. Presumably the rest will follow.

Firstly, most people think the weather is getting worse (red bar) — 65% of all the population. This belief is most common in the lowest income and less educated bracket.

Figure 1: Results from the question “Weather in the UK seems to get worse every year” graphed according to social grouping.

A belief that the weather is getting worse does not necessarily mean that it is due to man-made emissions, and “weather” can mean storms and floods rather than hotter or colder temperatures. The next few questions provide more definition, though two of them still use the confounded and almost useless term “climate change”. We don’t know if people answer the question using the literal meaning or the coded one where all climate change equals man-made change.

But we can see that when people say the weather is getting worse, quite a lot of them are are referring to storms and floods, but about 15% are thinking of hotter or colder weather or don’t think this is a a true change in the climate, or a man-made effect but perhaps is only a natural patch of bad weather.

One question asks if the recent storms and floods show climate change is really happening, and the 65% who thought the weather is getting worse falls to 50% who think the climate is changing. Note the stark divergence across social groups continues. I’ve colored the more skeptical answers in blue and those more likely to be concerned about concerned about the climate with the red bars.

Obviously, the IPCC message rings with uneducated and low income groups. The more educated and the higher the income, the less convinced people are. Alarmists would probably say that rich people are more likely to be deniers and the poor are more concerned, the predictable spin. But I say this has more to do with education and information sources.

Looks to me like skepticism is driven by those who can read and are online. Those who rely solely on TV news will be the last to find out. (Can anyone find a older version of a study like this so we can see how the proportions of social groups are shifting? Since skepticism is growing, but a predisposition to selfish “denial” in the population probably stays the same, it would be a safe assumption that the more educated are driving the rise in skepticism.)

The propaganda message that CO2 is “pollution” is failing first in the well read classes. The intellectual debate is being played out in the influential upper middle classes.

Figure 2: Results from the question “The recent storms and flooding in the UK show that climate change is really happening”, graphed according to social grouping.

Turn the last question inside out and a curious thing happens. The number who believe climate change is real and causing floods and storms drops from 50% to 44%. So for at least 6% of the population any statement of belief in climate change vanishes if the opposite question is asked. The change appears to occur in the lesser skilled, lower income groups. These are what I call “passive skeptics” — they tick boxes on surveys saying “yes” to propaganda, but if given the merest excuse to dump the official approved line, it’s dropped. Climate activists don’t know these people exist, because they never discuss the skeptical view with any approval so they don’t realize how fickle some of their “fans” are. They never see the other side.

Again, unskilled workers, the unemployed and pensioners are more likely to say that storms and floods are due to “climate change”. Again, the divergence is obvious, the highest proportion of skeptics are in the upper middle class. Those who believe, are in the low income, less educated groups. Interestingly the most uncertain group are the lower middle class — perhaps caught between knowing the official dogma, but hearing increasingly skeptical messages from friends or colleagues in the influential wealthier more educated group?

Figure 3: Results from the question “The recent storms and flooding in the UK are no worse than they have been in the past and are probably not a result of climate change at all” graphed according to social grouping.

Finally, thankfully, there is one question that uses the phrase, “human activity”. And now the 44% drops to 38% who agree with the officially approved conclusion. Fully sixty two percent of the population are skeptical. The stand-out feature of the responses graphed below is that there are fewer skeptics and more belief in the official line among the poorest and least educated.

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Unthreaded Weekend

For all those other thoughts…

7.2 out of 10 based on 35 ratings

Bloggies 2014 nominations — science category gone due to political correctness, pick a different category

Last year the Best Science or Technology Weblog category was dominated entirely by climate science blogs, and 4 of the 5 were skeptics. Not surprisingly Watts Up won for the third time (congrats to Anthony). Tellingly, Skeptical Science withdrew even though the skeptics vote would have been split. (I guess they know their traffic stats.)

This year, the bloggies has quietly announced “Best Science or Technology Weblog has been discontinued”. Ho hum? Have the organizers succumbed to political correctness for fear of letting skeptics win the award again? Seems so.

Now we could lodge a protest, or we could just nominate our favourite blogs for other categories couldn’t we? So here are the categories (below). You might think the blogs in your usual science circle are not Education, Topical, Group, Secret, or Business blogs, but when you look at the past finalists (eg for Education: Science is beauty, or AMS Graduate Student) you will see that science blogs easily fit. In terms of science education, skeptical bloggers are doing more for the history and philosophy of science, the scientific method, statistics, rhetoric, and paleohistory than any national curriculum. Is global warming topical? Do I even have to ask? Are skeptics blogs well known and promoted by the media, or are they all a best-kept secret? Which skeptic blogs started in 2013 and are new?

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

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

Categories in 2014

Secret
New
Lifetime

Weblog of the Year

Let’s see if we can get them to put Science and Technology back in 2015?

9.3 out of 10 based on 70 ratings

Don’t miss the EU transformation on renewable energy

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

Telegraph

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.

Benny Peiser – The Australian

“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…

No country was in deeper than Germany

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.

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9.3 out of 10 based on 113 ratings

A survey of skeptics by skeptics

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.

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8.9 out of 10 based on 52 ratings

Bushfire predictions in 2070 are nonsense on stilts. Models can’t predict rainfall

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

The Australian

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.

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9 out of 10 based on 43 ratings

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Climate change violates one of Newton’s Laws

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