We’ve all heard the dire prophesies: Rising seas will reshape the world’s coastlines, a one meter rise will inundate 7000 sq mi of dry land, and cost over $100 billion in the United States alone. Worse, we thought things were bad before, but now it’s even rising faster than we predicted. (“We” being the unvalidated computer simulations, and “rising”, as it turns out, being one interpretation of some highly adjusted, carefully selected data, all possibly “corrected” by one outlying tide gauge in Hong Kong).
Nils-Axel Mörner is here to point out that the raw satellite data shows barely any rise, and furthermore, the observations from places all over, like the Maldives, Suriname, Tuvalu, India, Bangladesh, Venice, and Germany show not much either. It’s close enough to zero to call it “nothing”. Oh.
But that’s only spots from The Atlantic, The Pacific and The Indian… there are other oceans. 😉
As we graphed before with Frank Lansner, most of the current “rise” is due to man-made adjustments, not man-made emissions. According to Mörner, it’s not that the sea levels are rising less than expected, it’s more like they aren’t rising much at all, and haven’t been for years . — Jo
At most, global average sea level is rising at a rate equivalent to 2-3 inches per century. It is probably not rising at all.
Sea level is measured both by tide gauges and, since 1992, by satellite altimetry. One of the keepers of the satellite record told Professor Mörner that the record had been interfered with to show sea level rising, because the raw data from the satellites showed no increase in global sea level at all.
The raw data from the TOPEX/POSEIDON sea-level satellites, which operated from 1993-2000, shows a slight uptrend in sea level. However, after exclusion of the distorting effects of the Great El Niño Southern Oscillation of 1997/1998, a naturally-occurring event, the sea-level trend is zero.
The GRACE gravitational-anomaly satellites are able to measure ocean mass, from which sea-level change can be directly calculated. The GRACE data show that sea level fell slightly from 2002-2007.
These two distinct satellite systems, using very different measurement methods, produced raw data reaching identical conclusions: sea level is barely rising, if at all.
Sea level is not rising at all in the Maldives, the Laccadives, Tuvalu, India, Bangladesh, French Guyana, Venice, Cuxhaven, Korsør, Saint Paul Island, Qatar, etc.
In the Maldives, a group of Australian environmental scientists uprooted a 50-year-old tree by the shoreline, aiming to conceal the fact that its location indicated that sea level had not been rising. This is a further indication of political tampering with scientific evidence about sea level.
Modelling is not a suitable method of determining global sea-level changes, since a proper evaluation depends upon detailed research in multiple locations with widely-differing characteristics. The true facts are to be found in nature itself.
Since sea level is not rising, the chief ground of concern at the potential effects of anthropogenic “global warming” – that millions of shore-dwellers the world over may be displaced as the oceans expand – is baseless.
We are facing a very grave, unethical “sea-level-gate”.
Monckton writes:
I first met Professor Mörner at a debate on the climate at the St. Andrews University Union – the oldest undergraduate debating union in Britain – in the spring of 2009. The Professor’s witty, eclectic and relentlessly charming speech captivated the House. It was not difficult to see why the citation for the award to him of the Gold Chondrite of Merit the previous year at an international sea-level conference at the University of the Algarve had spoken not only of his “contribution to understanding of sea level” but also of his “irreverence”. The undergraduates loved it.
When a true-believer in the New Religion of “global warming” got up and sneeringly advised the
Professor to see if he could get his ideas about sea level published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, his answer won us the debate: “Madame President, I do apologize that in a 40-year career I have only published 530 papers [now 547] in the peer-reviewed literature, most of them about sea level, but in the light of the Hon. Gentleman’s strictures I will undertake to try harder in future.” The House collapsed in helpless laughter…
The Graphs
The full paper explains the details in a very readable manner, but here is a sample. First — the observations don’t fit the models.
Figure 1. Modelled and observed sea-level changes, 1840-2010. The curve marked “Models” represents the IPCC’s combination of selected tide-gauge records and corrected satellite altimetry data. The curve marked “Observations” represents the observed eustatic sea level changes in the field up to 1960 according to Mörner (1973) and (in this paper) thereafter. After 1965, the two curves start to diverge, presenting two totally different views, separated by the area with the question mark. Which of these views is tenable?
This, amazingly, is the raw satellite data before it was adjusted:
So Monckton snuck onto a microphone and dared break the sacred tabernacle of climate. There are some things you just can’t say…
Tallbloke is having a caption contest for this pic.
E &E Newswire story
After the news conference, and as diplomats gathered for the climate conference president’s assessment of how close countries are to agreement, Monckton quietly slipped into the seat reserved for the delegation of Myanmar and clicked the button to speak.
“In the 16 years we have been coming to these conferences, there has been no global warming,” Monckton said as confused murmurs filled the hall and then turned into a chorus of boos.
One of the high points was getting this dangerous banner above through the security gates:
They confiscated the banner– but only after reading it. It contained the incendiary words: “No Kyoto 2. New science drives out old fears”. So the IPCC thinks Greenpeace has a scientific message, but eight people armed with 17 degrees (including 3 doctorates) and a tame banner was too much? After many pleas we got the banner back, and took it away…
I’ll never forget David Evans (my other half) smuggling it back in past the same armed guards 30 minutes later. The rest of us smuggled the lab coats through. (God forbid — lab coats?) A 7m banner is no small thing tucked into a backpack, and there were a lot of guards, and they did search the backpacks. He dazzled the guards by giving them all free copies of The Great Global Warming Swindle. They loved it. I’m sure Martin Durkin would be pleased no end. 🙂 See all those photos…
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UPDATE:The Video
This video clearly shows the moment Monckton dared make the sane point no one else in the room would make. But the sound is edited — complete silence from 0:48 – 1:03. And most of the mic’s in the room would be muted, so the crowd response would been mostly inaudible in any case. (Shame. It would be good to have had our own camera panning the crowd.).
Fusulo and Trenberth scored headlines around the world recently with a new paper that suggested that a few models got the relative humidity right in some tropical spots, and they also happened to be the models that predicted the hottest global outcomes.
John Christie pointed out that the models with the highest climate sensitivity are also the ones which are the worst at predicting future temperatures.
But there is more to this. It is a likely a case of twenty models predicting 40 parameters, and you can take your pick of the permutations and combinations which give one or two models a “success” here and there on one or two factors. But in the end, as Richard Courtney says, all the models are different so only one model can possibly be The Right One for the whole atmosphere, and quite likely they are all wrong.
In this case, they are still all wrong. The hot spot is still missing, and the region below it with which they scored some success is not that important.
The words hot spot and humidity over the tropics lead many commentators to think this was something to do with the hotspot, but lets make it clear: the (missing) hotspot is at a higher altitude than the area they are referring too. That prediction of warming in the upper troposphere is up around 200-300 hPa. This reduction in relative humidity is centered well below that, at 500Hpa.
Why does that matter? Because the most powerful greenhouse gas (water vapor) does its thing at the top of the troposphere (around 200 hPa) — that’s where it radiates energy out to space. Below that level the energy is effectively ricocheting back and forward — bouncing between molecules or causing collisions and generally rarely getting out to space where it is then gone for good.
This explains the paradox that humidity at lower levels can be relatively unimportant compared to the humidity in the top most layers of our troposphere. Water is so important that the wet part of our atmosphere has a different name to the dry part — that’s the troposphere versus the stratosphere above it. But for most of the thickness of the troposphere there is generally so much water vapor — even at low pressures — that the radiative effect of water is saturated. It’s only on the surface boundary, right at the top of the troposphere, that a change in humidity matters, because it changes the amount of energy that flows off the planet.
Note the strange technique in the graph below of doing relative humidity with the lower numbers on the right. The marketing department probably felt that a line of stars rising from left to right fitted the scare campaign better than a falling line would. This is PR-science, not science for scientists.
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In this graph the colours are for relative humidity, the contour lines are for model predicted cloud loss.
Figure 2: The zonal height structure over ocean of observed climatological annual mean RH from AIRS (2002–2007) (color scale), with model mean projected changes in cloud amount from the CMIP3 model archive (contour lines, 0.5% intervals, dashed for cloud loss). The cloud loss in a warming climate at about 40°N/S coincides with broadening of the dry zones, as indicated by the arrows. Figure 2 from FS12.
The Indians have gone home, The Chinese are being told off. Nobody else is very interested, except developing nations looking for a handout. The Australians already agreed to everything whatever it is. (Great negotiation ploy by our Labor Government that.) The EU wants to do what it’s already doing.
Mike Haseler at the Scottish Climate and Energy Forum says it’s all over, bar the shouting. Kyoto ends on December 31, and there is no treaty to replace it, and there can be no ratified treaty by Jan 1.
“Contrary to what many green NGOs are saying, the Kyoto commitment to CO2 reduction will cease effect on the 31st December. This is because the treaty requires amendments to be ratified well before they come into effect (by 3rd October). It took some 4 years for a quorum of countries to ratify Kyoto. Even if there were total agreement at Doha on any amendment (there isn’t) the earliest change to Kyoto is 2015. Without agreement the earliest if there were agreement at the end of next year is that a change to the Kyoto Commitment could come into force in 2016. “
Tory Aardvarkagrees:“The Kyoto Protocol ends on December 31st and the list of countries signing up for Commitment Period 2 (CP2) will not include Canada, Japan and New Zealand“. The USA has said there is no chance they will sign up. And Russia who said they won’t be signing up for Kyoto II a year ago, cynically made vague promises about a 25% emissions cut in June this year, but is backing away from that now.
Practically the only nation on Earth outside the EU and EFTA that wants in, is Australia. Joy.
But the shouting goes on
In the end the activist scientists, bureaucrats and Green NGO’s win even when there is no global agreement. As long as there is a two week mega-junket every year funded by the taxpayer, many of them and their friends enjoy a red carpet ride that few others will get. The rent-seekers get staff, PR agencies, interviews, media-time and reward trips. For renewable investors and carbon traders, someone else pays for media releases that could ultimately boost their investments and pressure governments into continuing the subsidies that their profits depend upon.
The COPs should be stopped.
There is no reason to keep funding a conference that’s proven to be such a failure at making scientific advances or at representing the people who pay for it.
In a competitive field it’s going to hard to beat this.
In 2007 the Victorian Government thought it was a good idea to spend $24 billion to build a humungously big desalination plant. There was a drought on at the time, and a specialist in small dead mammals said the drought would never end. But now Victorian households will pay up to $310 extra in water bills next year, and something like that every year for the next 28 years until it’s paid off.
Even the people running the plant say it’s too big,
Herald Sun EXCLUSIVE: THE French boss of the troubled Wonthaggi desalination plant has admitted for the first time that the plant is too big for Melbourne’s water needs.
Suez Environment chief executive Jean-Louis Chaussade told the Herald Sun the size of the plant was based on unrealistic rainfall expectations.
“The design was done to provide water to the full city of Melbourne in case of no rain during one year – which was not realistic … The details why it was 150GL per year, I don’t know,” he said.
Which bright spark believed the government paid advertising that said there will be endless droughts? Who came up with the 28-billion-dollar-idea that Melbourne, (Melbourne?!) would run out of rain for a year?
With only 150 years of rainfall data to go from, who could have possibly have predicted that it would keep raining?
The Wonthaggi Desal project impressed me with the sheer statewide scope of payments and precocious length of encumberment. Children not yet conceived will be paying one day too. The entire productive output scored highly for “Useless” and we already know its Flagrant before it’s even finished. There are few accidental offsetting benefits.
These are the nicest things people can say about it:
Because it will last for 50 – 100 years, even though it may not be useful it is ” an enormous investment in quality assurance.”
It has cost a lot to get something the people of Victoria may not need, but “The investment and effort has paid off and resulted in an extremely efficient and successful commissioning phase.” (If anyone is short of a Commissioning Phase they can get one in Victoria.)
It is insurance against the next drought: “Are you sure that in the coming 30 or 50 years you will not have a drought? Are you willing to bet on that?” (Jo thinks: How much does a drought cost, it might be cheaper?)*
The other alternative is to wait for the drought and buy up some water. When you have $24 billion to spend we might be able to fly in crates of Mt Franklin Spring Water from Hobart.
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I know there will be other contenders for the 2012 Most Useless Flagrant Flop Of Government (MUFFOG). There are probably also contenders for Brand New Meaningless Award Acronym. Do send ’em.
PS: “Mr Chaussade’s company is suing the State Government for $1 billion to reclaim losses from the job.”
*Jokes aside. Droughts cost more than money. Which is why we need climate models that predict them.
Oh Joy and Goody. Imagine if decisions about the global internet were made by the same institution that thought the rights of the downtrodden would be best protected by Col. Muammar Gaddafi? Hands up who wants another group of people you have no control over, making decisions for you and behind closed doors?
Of course, they will tell us the new regulations are there to help us, to stop spam, keep the internet fair and open. Then sooner or later, as with all human institutions, politics and ambition will mean the power is misused.
The people who will suffer the most are those in third world dictatorships. But free speech is the thing that stops the first world from turning into the third world. It’s hard to see how we get more than one shot at this. Once the net stops being open, imagine the fun trying to get that freedom back. Think of how fast protest groups can be arranged online through Facebook and email. Then think about how hard that gets if you have no e-help? The protests favored by the establishment get the free pass. What does everyone else do? Make thousands of cold phone calls? Use direct mail?
That’s why we have to protest while we still can, at the merest hint that anyone would dare change the way the Internet works. Ten minutes of effort now could help save our children from being forced to spend years fighting the system, just to get back what we have right now.
Thank God for the internet; skeptics would not have won many “climate” battles without it.
From https://www.whatistheitu.org/ The era of pamphleteering in the late 1700s was the same. The governments used repressive legislation and printing press breaking gangs to prevent the populace from using the written word as a means of dissemination and organisation. Do not be complacent, the failure of the AGW Paradigm is a blow to the centralising tendency, and the UN is planning a backlash against the medium which exposed its hidden agenda.
I wrote about the pamphleteers here as I toiled to get back online after a lack of funds had left this site prey to hacks and attacks. (Thanks to donors who help us cover the increased security costs). Bloggers today are the pamphleteers of 250 years ago. Except we are luckier. Back then, people were jailed. Others died protesting for them in the street.
The ITU wants to control the internet, and this week they get another chance.
It’s a feel good thing, to read some of the latest medical news.
Stem cells are the child-like cells within us that could theoretically be converted into almost any tissue we need. But getting them is difficult. Embryonic cells pose all kinds of dilemma’s. We’ve already managed to get adult cells from skin, but that requires a biopsy. Now researchers have obtained stem cells from blood. It makes things just that much easier. They can also be stored and frozen. Handy to have as a back up in years to come; more flexible because they don’t have to be converted into the powerful Induced Pluripotent Stem (iPS) cells straight away.
One day, your GP will take a blood sample and send in an order for blood vessels, heart valves, muscle tissue — if you need a new bladder, people are already working on creating them. There won’t be so many waiting lists and prayers for donations, and there won’t be any need for immunosuppressant therapy either. Your body will be happy to have your own cells back.
Ponder how much we could achieve if we focused on solving real problems instead of fake ones.
This is the kind of research that we could be doing more of.
Dr Amer Rana and his colleagues at the University of Cambridge grew patients’ blood in the lab and isolated what are known as ‘late outgrowth endothelial progenitor cells’ (L-EPCs) to turn into iPS cells. The iPS cells can then be turned into any other cell in the body, including blood vessel cells or heart cells — using different cocktails of chemicals. Scientists use these cells to study disease, and ultimately hope to grow them into tissue to repair the damage caused by heart and circulatory diseases.
Dr Amer Rana, of the University of Cambridge, said of the research: “We are excited to have developed a practical and efficient method to create stem cells from a cell type found in blood. Tissue biopsies are undesirable — particularly for children and the elderly — whereas taking blood samples is routine for all patients.
Shannon Amoils, Research Advisor at the BHF, said: “iPS cells offer great potential — both for the study and potentially the future treatment of cardiovascular diseases. As iPS cells are made from the patient’s own tissue, they can be used to study diseases and hopefully one day to repair damaged tissue without being attacked by the body’s immune system.
“Being able to efficiently produce iPS cells using cells from a blood sample will make it easier for researchers to push this technology forward. But there are still many hurdles to overcome before this kind of technique could be used to treat patients.”
While cancer patients will have to pay more or wait longer for treatment, the Department To Fix The Weather handed out nearly 1 billion dollars in 2010-2011, some* of which was used to “educate” people about energy efficiency and the benefits of government policies.
*UPDATE: While there are a lot of “education” grants in 2012, there are some research grants going to the CSIRO (eg in 2012 at least $13m of the $40m that year was for research at CSIRO). In 2010 (the big dollar grant year) many more of the grants were for “strategies”, for IPCC matters, for universities and the CSIRO — though none of the grants I’ve seen on a random sample add up to anything like the total outgoing.)
Is this advertising by any other name? Instead of running an ALP campaign advert, they award money to groups which promote their policies and get disguised third party ads by NGOs who collect donations and are seemingly the voice of the community (what percentage of these non-profits comes voluntarily from the community and what percentage comes via forced payment from tax?).
“Do Something” picked up $800,000 to become a type of GONGO and run a website that will apparently duplicate many of the messages taxpayers are already paying for on government sites. Other grants go for “efficient” lighting, which obviously isn’t economically efficient, or it wouldn’t need a government grant. Why are taxpayers in Roma, say, paying for hot water systems for councils in Glen Eira? Don’t the residents of Glen Eira pay for that in their rates? These layers of cross payments between different levels of governments and to allow seemingly “independent” groups to become disguised wings of government are a burden on Western Civilization. Every step that makes the payee more distant from the outcome makes it less likely money will be used wisely.
– Jo
Guest Post: Geoff Sherrington
The ARC (Australian Research Council) is not the only Australian government body to fund science research. The Department of Climate Change & Energy Efficiency also funds climate related projects.
Here is a table showing some spending and estimates of future spending on grants, a little old but still indicative.
Table 3.2.10: Schedule of budgeted administered cash flows (for the period ended 30 June)
What does a Department of Climate Change etc do with nearly a billion dollars a year? Why, it gives it away. I wonder how much income it earned, as opposed to was allocated.
Accountants can make better use of this than I can, but look at the annual grant payments 0f $919 million and $496 million. The lower spending in future times means little. It might simply represent a ‘saving’ that the Government can claim before its next election. It’s easy to make it bigger, later.
Tim Flannery says renewables will run the economy:
“What we can now see is the emerging inevitability that renewables are going to be running the economy…”
And I say: Prepare for economic armageddon. Picture an Australia where we all have jobs — jobs digging holes, mucking out the stables, and chopping those last few remaining trees down. We may lead the world installing chinese-made solar panels, but they won’t help us make anything that anyone else wants to buy. Anton gives us some numbers no one seems to have mentioned to Tim. Like, it takes 1,000 new wind towers to kinda equal one coal plant. – Jo
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Guest Post: Anton Lang
Get ready — this is how much the 25 most recent, powerful, high-tech wind plants generate. Not the red line — that’s how much electricity we used. Look at the expanse under the blue line — every bit of that (“bit” being the word) is all thanks to those brand spanking new wind turbines.
Courtesy of the National Electricity Market. (NEM)
The red line at the top shows total electricity demand for NSW, Vic, Qld, SA, and Tasmania over 2011. The blue line the total generation from the 25 most recently constructed Wind Plants in that same 5 State area.
Note how the total demand average is between 22,000 and 28,000MW. Wind power from those 25 new plants generates as much as 650MW (the blue line). That’s 2.6%. This is from a total Nameplate Capacity of 2072MW being generated from those 25 Wind Plants which are made up of 985 huge towers.
The killer here, however is not shown on this graph. That is the absolute 24 hour requirement for power, the baseload or 17,000 MW running day and night.
There have been suggestions that Jo Nova might be trying to hide or ignore the most recent boreholes graph from Huang et al. So here it is. This is the last 2,000 years according to 6000 boreholes, with the last 100 years also using the “instrumental record” which gives us that hockey-stick uptick at the end. Below I explain the pros and cons of this study and update my thoughts.
Huang and Pollack 2008: Their latest boreholes published study
A borehole sounds like a bit-of-a-stretch as a proxy. How could we tell if the world was warmer in 1066 by drilling a hole in the ground? Yes, fair point. But what makes boreholes useful is that they are global and there is a lot of data: specifically 6,000 holes all over the world.
I’ve been looking at boreholes in more detail, analyzing them in the light of newer proxies. When all the evidence is considered, boreholes turn out be not-much-use at giving us meaningful numbers in degrees C, and in my opinion, not-too-hot at telling us the “when” of an event either. Too much depends on assumptions.
But what are they good for is that, when combined with other proxies, they can help show whether a temperature swing was regional or global.
The basics of Boreholes
Heat from the surface slowly sinks deep into the Earth. Theoretically a hot decade will warm the rocks below and that wave of heat will travel slowly downwards. Rather annoyingly, heat from the boiling hot magma at the center of the Earth is moving up at the same time. As the wave of heat moves down from the top it gradually spreads and blends with cooler decades, information is lost and resolution fades. But if we dig holes down to 2,000m below the surface it’s possible to see signals that appear to be from the Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warm Period, and the Holocene Optimum — going back 20,000 years.
“That is worse than anything Alan Jones said. ” Follow Graham Young on twitter.
A bad-taste joke by Alan Jones in October created a national storm. These comments in the “science” show were supposedly considered, deliberate and researched.
This morning on the “science” show Robyn Williams equates skeptics to pedophiles, people pushing asbestos, and drug pushers. Williams starts the show by framing republicans (and skeptics) as liars: “New Scientist complained about the “gross distortions” and “barefaced lying” politicians come out with…” He’s goes on to make the most blatant, baseless, and outrageous insults by equating skeptics to people who promote pedophilia, asbestos and drugs.
“What if I told you pedophilia is good for children, or that asbestos is an excellent inhalant for those with asthmatics, or that smoking crack is a normal part and a healthy one of teenage life, to be encouraged? You’d rightly find it outrageous, but there have been similar statements coming out of inexpert mouths, distorting the science.”
“These distortions of science are far from trivial, our neglect of what may be clear and urgent problems could be catastrophic and now a professor of psychology at UWA has shown what he says is the basis of this unrelenting debauchery of the facts…”
Stephan Lewandowsky goes on to defame
This is degradation and a malicious attack on skeptics with misinformation:
“They were rejecting the science not based on the science... but on other factors…
what we basically found was the driving motivating factor behind their attitudes was their ideology.
People who endorse an extreme version of free market fundamentalism …
They are also rejecting the link between smoking and lung cancer, and between HIV and AIDS…
Ladies and gentlemen it’s time to get serious. Both Williams and Lewandowsky are ignoring the scientific evidence, denigrating their opponents, destroying rational conversation and honest discussion before it can even start. We can’t let them get away with this.
They are paid public servants who use taxpayer funds to push their personal ideology. It has to stop.
Robyn Williams, what you do is not science. It’s crass tribal warfare.
Stephan Lewandowsky, skeptics base their arguments on evidence. You are in denial. We don’t deny AIDS or that smoking causes cancer, and we never have. Your tactic of deliberately seeking out a few nutters (or fakes) to interview, then besmirching the names of serious commentators is blatant, obvious and documented.
Name-calling in order to suppress debate
The class of people who use regulations to control others, rather than persuasion and voluntary competition, have resorted to name calling for years to suppress the free and fair debates that they cannot win. Now they are employing that technique in other areas.
What they road-tested on skeptics, they now use in the wider political debate against their political opponents — such as Tony Abbott and Alan Jones. With each success they are becoming more loud, aggressive, and obnoxious.
The mainstream media makes this cheap tactic successful. As long as they promote these anti-science, baseless smears as if they were serious commentary the media is the problem.
When are the MSM going to stop treating the names as serious content, because they are so transparently untrue and designed simply to smear opponents? Indeed, when are the MSM going to stop being complicit or even active partners in the name calling? Perhaps we could start with demonstrations at ABC offices…
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PS: PERTH people — come and meet David and me, and David Archibald tonight at the Floreat Athena Football club in Mt Hawthorn for a relaxed event with like-minded people. Use the code word Nova to get a $10 discount when booking. 7pm start
It is hard to believe, just at a moment of heightened sensitivity about offensive speech, and only a week or so after the commonwealth government announces a royal commission into the sexual abuse of children. Even harder to believe is that he specifically links former ABC Chair Maurice Newman into his comments and refers to his ideas on climate change as “drivel”.
Indeed it is worse than that. The government, via the Australian Research Council is involved in suppressing dissent.
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Heads must roll over this, including Williams’. But the problem is obviously more widespread and involves the University of Western Australia, where Lewandowsky holds his chair, the ARC, the ABC, and possibly even the government.
Firstly — there is the usual nonsense, the must-have-caveats, the litany, that allows a brave journalist to write something that’s pretty obvious, but political incorrect. So first we-the-reader apparently needs to know (again) that: 1/ CO2 has hit record highs, 2/ Some large government report tells us that is awful and 3/We’re not doing enough, and 4/ Sandy the big-storm is “widely cited” by some unnamed sources (which means activists, not scientists) as evidence of climate change will make storms worse.
Then, good news, the MSM can admit that things are not accelerating (or even rising) as planned:
[Graham Lloyd] “…the most recent global temperature record, released this week, shows the average global temperature fell last year for the second year.
In short, there is agreement that the rising trend has stalled.
Many scientists accept there are natural processes at work that are not properly factored into the global temperature models.
German environmentalist Fritz Vahrenholt, a former Social Democrat Party senator, founder of wind-energy company REpower and president of the German Wildlife Foundation, has been particularly outspoken.
“According to the IPCC climate models, there should be an increase in global temperature of 0.2C per decade,” he says.
“But if you look at the data series of satellite-based temperature measurements and the data from the British Hadley Centre (HadCRUT), you find that since 1998 there has been no warming; the temperature has remained at a plateau. We know how mainstream climate scientists would answer this question: 15 years is not a climate signal; it must happen for 30 years,” Vahrenholt says, “But there must be an explanation for the unexpected absence of warming.”
Vahrenholt’s answer is that the exclusion of solar activity and decadal oscillations from climate models leads to erroneous results. Vahrenholt’s point is not that climate change shouldn’t be addressed but that fear-driven energy policy works against the interests of nature, the poor and economic good sense. He says there is time to find solutions that work.
This is the background against which governments will meet in Doha…
Give Vahrenholt a medal.
PS: PERTH people — come and meet David and I, and David Archibald tonight at the Floreat Athena Football club in Mt Hawthorn for a relaxed event with like-minded people. Use the code word Nova to get a $10 discount when booking. 7pm start 🙂
Just one of the emails that crossed my desktop today. From Eric Fleay to corporate affairs @ the ABC, CC’d to myself, The Bunyip, Catallaxy, MichaelSmith, and Pickering. (Thank you Eric, such praise, for bloggers and commenters)
I would not have said things this way myself, but for all those who claim the ABC is not biased and shows no favors to the Labor Party, where is the ALP-green-voter-anger at the ABC? Do they complain that the taxpayer is forced to pay for a news service that does not cover environmental or green issues, or represent the voices of people who want more big-government hand-outs and regulation? Where are the calls from those who benefit from the gravy train to “purge” the ABC because it ignores them, denigrates, name-calls, and misinforms them with one-sided views and incompetent news? – Jo
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Dear Ms ABC,
I have long bypassed television, radio and newspapers in favour of the internet to stay abreast of what is happening in the wider world. What I find amazing is that surely the ‘quality’ journalists touted by the MSM here in this country must go on the net themselves. Surely? That they must, means that they are all, generally speaking, either stupid or corrupt, and if corrupt, either morally or venally so. I mean, how could anyone otherwise peddle the nonsense one gets on the ABC when they have access to real news?
Anyway, to get to the point; I have long realised that that same deficiency applies vis-a-vis affairs here in Oz, and so truly sickening the bias that infects the ABC, I have over the years maintained only a casual interest in national affairs. That is, until earlier this year when friends called my attention to the websites copied to this email.
My bedtime reading is now a joy, tootling off to pleasant dreams after perusing the truly astonishing number of articulate, funny, well informed and insightful fellow Australians who regularly fill the comments sections of these wonderful sites.
I am now certainly a part of that growing groundswell of ordinary citizens who would support, to the hilt, the most ruthless possible purging of the ABC by any new Prime Minister.
To paraphrase Lady C.:
I take no leave of you, Ms ABC. I send no compliments to your management. You deserve no such attention. I am most seriously displeased.
Our award-winning treasurer is forcing the nation to spend $8.9 billion on wind-turbines, to generate electricity which will be3- 4 times more expensive than coal powered electricity, probably won’t reduce CO2 at all, and which definitely won’t change the weather. Victoria’s windfarms have saved virtually no coal from being burnt. South Australian windfarms have saved 4% of their rated capacity in fossil fuels at a cost of $1,484 per ton.
MORE than $8.9 billion will be spent importing wind turbines because of the blowout in the Gillard government’s renewable energy target, providing few if any benefits to local industry, one of the nation’s biggest electricity generators warns.
The Australian can also reveal that a new Frontier Economics analysis commissioned by Macquarie Generation has found that the renewable energy target could slash the value of coal-fired power stations by between $11.3bn and $17.3bn – potentially having a greater impact than the carbon tax, which includes industry compensation.
In a new submission to the Climate Change Authority, Macquarie Generation said that 2500 wind turbines – costing $12.7bn – will be needed to comply with a scheme that is set to blow out the amount of renewable energy in the system to about 26 per cent by 2020, from the original 20 per cent.
Of this, more than 70 per cent of the cost would be to purchase overseas-manufactured turbines, the submission says.
PRIVATE hospitals are warning of nationwide cutbacks to chemotherapy services – and one of the nation’s largest regional cancer treatment centres faces closure – over a decision to slash federal government funding for chemotherapy drugs.
He said to recoup costs, private hospitals would have to charge patients about $100 extra a treatment. Some patients required several treatments a week.
“In the majority of cases, private hospitals won’t be able to pass those on to private patients because our contracts with health funds prevent that,” Mr Roff said.
He said the outcome would vary from hospital to hospital depending on how they were supplied. “Some hospitals will be able to continue providing service,” he said. “Some have indicated they will limit the types of services that are provided. Some have indicated they are looking at capping the number of treatments they provide to minimise the hospital’s financial exposure. And some have indicated that they have no option but to cease providing chemotherapy services altogether.”
A well managed, smart country balances priorities to maximize the health and well-being of it’s people. Throwing effort and money at frivolous, unsupported whimsies ultimately kills people. We may never be able to say exactly whose death could have been avoided, and there are valid questions about the effectiveness of some cancer treatments as well. But nothing about either of these decisions is based on a cost-benefit analysis and empirical evidence. That is the grand shame of it all. The same people who tell us we need insurance for the planet don’t realize that the “insurance” comes at a cost. The precautionary principle cuts both ways.
Me, if I was PM I’d be putting MRI’s into every town and city to find those cancers early while they are still cheap to treat.
The ABC tv program Catalyst was quite special last Thursday. Was that a science report, or an advertorial?
Brisbane was recording temperatures with modern Stevenson Screens in 1890, as were some other stations, but the BOM often ignores these long records.
Forget gloom and doom it’s “kinder” climate now
The ABC team have shifted gear. They heard they should stop being all gloom and doom (it’s climate fatigue you know) and make it simple. So they did, and everything was delivered in a cheesy canter, like an episode of Playschool. Smile everyone! Floods will increase, but we won’t hammer you with ominous music, instead we’ll show Jonica-the-presenter cleaning the floor of her very own home, joking about the pesky trickle in the living room (To paraphrase: It’s flooded again — can you believe?).
Dr Jonica Newby reckons things have changed since she bought her house. It’s simply unthinkable that the climate now is not exactly the same at her house as it was when she first moved in — way back in the historic year of… 2000. (Gosh, eh? I wonder why the BOM don’t publish a paper on it?) Now our national debate is reduced to presenters, not presenting evidence, but just telling us what they reckon. She has lived there for twelve long years after all, and in just another 18 years it’ll be a whole climate data point. Need I say more?
With this kind of mindless anecdotery, it’s fair to ask: is Catalyst still a science show?
If a skeptic said the weather hadn’t changed at their house for 12 years, wouldn’t Catalyst accuse them of mindless cherry picking, ignoring the big picture, and being unscientific?
Speaking of cherry picking: what about the endless droughts that were predicted, or the dams that would not ever fill again, or the four expensive desalination plants in Australia that are not being used? Doesn’t that tell us something about the state of climate science?
How about some statistical chicanery?
Newby tells us that we’ve had … 330 months of above average temperatures (from this NOAA report). It sounds awfully scarey. What are the odds of that? Dr Mark Howden tells us that there is only (gasp) a 1 in 100,000 chance of that happening in “the absence of human influence”.
So where does the 1 in 100,000 estimate come from?
According to the production notes, the number comes from Kokic et al 2012 (submitted). So it’s unpublished. Without seeing the paper it’s impossible to know, and there is no pre-print I can find. But even without the calculations we know that to calculate any probability at all, they would have to start with assumptions we know are wrong.
Nonsense assumptions: either temperatures are flat, or climate models can predict the natural part of the current warming trend.
The temperature of the world is not and has never been “flat”. Obviously, see this graph, or this graph, there is no “flatness” nor a meaningful global average temperature — there is only change. Moreso, things have been warming since the depths of the Little Ice Age in 1680, so centuries before our CO2 became significant some warming factor kicked in (90% of our emissions are post-1945). Their models don’t know what that factor was. Since the world has been warming for 300 years, above-average months are hardly unusual, instead they are expected. (Unless of course, you used the average temperature of the Holocene, but that’s another story).
As it happens, most of the warming in the last 50 years probably comes from one step change in 1977. Of course, averages after that step up would be higher than those before, and it has nothing to do with CO2.
Howden and Newby don’t even try to name any evidence that man-made emissions cause significant warming. They just assert this is the case. I asked for any observational evidence in support of catastrophic warming 34 months ago. If the observations were overwhelming, it is odd that no one seems to have found the mystery paper yet, though the Earth apparently depends on it?
Then there is the thing about our short records. The climate rolls in a 60 year cycle where temperatures warm for 30 years then cool for thirty years, so getting 27 years of above average temperatures would be — not unusual. Climate scientists tell us that 30 years makes a “trend” but in these Kokic et al calculations, it appears every month pretends to have significance. As Ken Stewart points out, the Australian share index has also been “above average” for 330 months or more. Is that evidence of “unnatural forces”?
If we start with the wrong assumptions, there are all kinds of ways to get 330 meaningless “highs” in a row.
The real meaning of heat deaths and “harvesting”
Talking about Black Saturday, Newby points out that during that heatwave, it wasn’t just the fires that killed, ” it turned out an extra 370 people died during that week than you’d expect. Essentially, it means that they were tipped over the edge by heat stress. There’s a rather confronting in-house term that’s used for this. They call it ‘premature harvesting’.”
What Newby doesn’t realize is that it’s called “harvesting” because it’s often those who are close to death who succumb to the heat. It’s well known that after the heat wave and the spike in mortality, there is often a fall in deaths for the next few weeks [for example see here and here]. It’s also called the “mortality displacement effect “. In other words, sometimes a heat wave only shortens a life by a few weeks. That is not the same in a cold snap, where there is no reduction in mortality afterwards. (See Kysely et al 2009 and CO2 science. )
Catalyst warned us of the recent record temperatures: “Melbourne hit 46.5 degrees. Hopetoun hit 48.8.”
Dr David Jones
We broke the Victorian record by 1.6 degrees. You know, these are records going back over 50 years. You know, you’re not breaking ’em by… by, you know, a few tenths of a degree – you’re breaking ’em by whole degrees or more.
Newby knows that the BOM have records going back 100 years (and more) but didn’t think to ask why Jones says “50 years”. What happened to all the thermometers before 1962? The truth is that the BOM has far hotter records, like these astonishing ones of 50C temperatures in 1896, and an amazing 53.9C recorded by none other than Charles Sturt in 1828. The independent volunteers on the BOM audit team have found dozens of examples of warmer temperatures in Australia, and seemingly, longer more widespread heatwaves. They also found examples of bird deaths en masse from the heat.
And the “other Presidential contest”, the Chinese leadership transition is taking place today. In 2015, China should take its pilot emissions trading scheme national.
In total around sixty per cent of the world’s GDP is either subject to a carbon price today, or has one legislated or planned for implementation in the two or three years ahead.
International carbon markets will cover billions of consumers this decade. Ask the bankers at your table whether they want Australia to clip that ticket. We’re going to help them get their share.
So that’s the work of coming years, that’s what preoccupies my thoughts as I think through the agenda for this country.
I skimmed this line on Andrew Bolts blog, but it didn’t really register until a friend from Europe emailed it to me. (Thanks Stefan). Surely it was a slip, but then she follows it by saying “that’s what preoccupies my thoughts”.
So this is the new-ALP- out goes the workers-party, in comes the bankers-party? Ho Ho Ho
How this for a hypothetical test? What if she knew of poor workers funds going missing, say, being misused through union corruption, would she launch an investigation immediately to recover the funds? Would she leave no stone unturned to make sure that unions were staying within the law and doing the right thing for those working families? Or could she be too busy making sure that all workers across Australia were coerced into paying a tithe to bankers and bureaucrats in a scheme to change the weather?
It’s purely hypothetical of course. Julia denies everything.
How many images have we seen of drought-stricken cracked land, or been told this is the future? How many headlines have suggested that global warming causes droughts?
Since the end of World War II humans have produced some 85% of all their CO2 emissions, but here is a new study showing that for all those emissions, and for all that warming, droughts back then were just as bad globally as they are today.
Essentially, researchers thought that the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) was the way to measure global drought levels, and they thought that warming would increase global drought conditions. But the PDSI considers only temperature, not humidity, sunlight and wind. This paper shows that when these factors are included, worldwide drought is about the same now as it was in 1950.
Researchers are finally accounting for the fact that a warmer world usually means more evaporation (especially from the ocean) and thus more rain. It’s good to see that someone has crunched those complex numbers on a global scale. Credit to Sheffield, Wood & Roderick.
Figure 1 | Global average time series of the PDSI and area in drought. a, PDSI_Th (blue line) and PDSI_PM (red line). b, Area in drought (PDSI ,23.0) for the PDSI_Th (blue line) and PDSI_PM (red line). The shading represents the range derived fromuncertainties in precipitation (PDSI_Th and PDSI_PM) and net radiation (PDSI_PM only). Uncertainty in precipitation is estimated by forcing the PDSI_Th and PDSI_PM by four alternative global precipitation data sets. Uncertainty from net radiation is estimated by forcing the PDSI_PM with a hybrid empirical–satellite data set31 and an empirical estimate. The other near-surface meteorological data are from a hybrid reanalysis–observational data set(31). The thick lines are the mean values of the different PDSI data sets. The time series are averaged over global land areas excluding Greenland, Antarctica and desert regions with a mean annual precipitation of less than 0.5mm d-1.
The paper notes AR4 was wrong about this too:
“The Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) summarized the evidence in the following terms: ‘‘More intense and longer droughts have been observed over wider areas since the 1970s, particularly in the tropics and subtropics. Increased drying linked with higher temperatures and decreased precipitation has contributed to changes in drought’’.
…
Figure 2 | Trends in the PDSI and PE. a, c, e,Non-parametric trends for 1950–2008 in annual average PDSI (averaged over the results using the four precipitation data sets and, for the PDSI_PM, also over the two net radiation data sets) fromthe PDSI_Th (a)andthePDSI_PM(c), and their difference (e).b,d, f,Non-parametric trends for 1950–2008 in annual average PE from the Thornthwaite equation (b) and the PM equations (d), and their difference (f). Values are not shown for Greenland, Antarctica and desert regions with amean annual precipitation of less than 0.5mmd21. Statistically significant trends at the 95% level are indicated by hatching. The difference in trends in e and f and its statistical significance are calculated from the time series of differences between the two data sets.
It’s good to see this being reported on The Conversation, ScienceNews, and NewScientist. Naturally, this dangerous information could be misinterpreted (unlike most previous drought studies eh?) so caveats are rampant on The Conversation. The caveats take the usual meaningless and vague catch-all approach:” this paper should not be misconstrued as evidence that climate change is not happening” type of warning. Where were these caveat-writers when all the photos of cracked plains were showing on the evening news?
Now we find that “Drought has not been an effective way of measuring climate change over the past 60 years,” he said. [Michael Roderick, The Conversation]
Perhaps that’s because things were a bit circular in drought science?
Roger Pielke Jr of the University of Colorado in Boulder says that since the PDSI uses a formula that assumes higher temperatures cause more droughts, it was hardly surprising that it finds a link. [ NewScientist]
Kevin Trenberth doesn’t think this new method is right:
Simon Brown of the UK Met Office in Exeter says Sheffield’s analysis is probably right. “There has been a growing acknowledgement that the PDSI should not be trusted when doing climate change studies,” he says. But one of the lead authors of parts of the 2007 IPCC report, Kevin Trenberth of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, is sceptical. He backs work by Aiguo Dai of the State University of New York, Albany, who reported last year that using the Penman-Monteith equation “only slightly reduces the drying trend”. [ NewScientist]
There are other scientists who are not convinced either:
The finding comes in stark opposition to the results of several recent studies. “It presented a somewhat different view of the drying trend for the last 60 years,” says Aiguo Dai, an atmospheric scientist at the State University of New York at Albany, whose own research suggests that the two equations yield very little difference in drought estimates. Dai says the new study fails to consider trends in soil moisture and other variables. He also claims that the new study relies on outdated weather records and questionable radiation data. However, Sheffield and colleagues attribute the disagreement to inconsistencies in the weather data used by Dai and others.[ScienceNews,]
But if it’s right, the new results may have wider implications:
Sheffield’s findings raise important questions, says Steve Running at the University of Montana in Missoula. “If global drought is not increasing, if warmer temperatures are accompanied by more rainfall and lower evaporation rates, then a warmer wetter world would [mean] a more benign climate.” [ NewScientist]
Actually Fred Pearce at NewScientist has done a respectable job of canvassing opinions from all sides. It’s good to see.
If the paper stands up to scrutiny lets hope the information reaches a wider crowd. If they are right there is 20 years of propaganda to undo.
Little change in global drought over the past 60 years
Justin Sheffield1, Eric F.Wood1 & Michael L. Roderick2
ABSTRACT
Drought is expected to increase in frequency and severity in the future as a result of climate change, mainly as a consequence of decreases in regional precipitation but also because of increasing evaporation driven by global warming1–3. Previous assessments of historic changes in drought over the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries indicate that this may already be happening globally. In particular, calculations of the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) show a decrease in moisture globally since the 1970s with a commensurate increase in the area in drought that is attributed, in part, to global warming4,5. The simplicity of the PDSI, which is calculated from a simple water-balance model forced by monthly precipitation and temperature data, makes it an attractive tool in large-scale drought assessments, but may give biased results in the context of climate change6. Here we show that the previously reported increase in global drought is overestimated because the PDSI uses a simplified model of potential evaporation7 that responds only to changes in temperature and thus responds incorrectly to global warming in recent decades. More realistic calculations, based on the underlying physical principles8 that take into account changes in available energy, humidity and wind speed, suggest that there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years. The results have implications for how we interpret the impact of global warming on the hydrological cycle and its extremes, and may help to explain why palaeoclimate drought reconstructions based on tree-ring data diverge from the PDSI based drought record in recent years9,10.
REFERENCE
Sheffield, Wood & Roderick (2012) Little change in global drought over the past 60 years, Letter Nature, vol 491, 437
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