Stephan Lewandowsky is back, reminding us why argument-by-distant-unrelated-topic is a quick way to get confused.

Should we spend money trying to change the weather? Spin the wheel: Did smoking cause cancer? “Yes!” Was that money well spent? “Yes!” Is climate sensitivity 3.3C! “Yes” . The heck, it must be, because some different scientists were right about a different topic, in a different subject, in a another era. Look at how similar the problems are?  No one was sure if any particular lung cancer was due to smoking, just “like” no one will ever know if Sandy was caused by your SUV. Climate starts with “C” and so does Cancer. Spooky eh?

The answer to planetary dynamics comes from tactical analysis of PR strategies by people who oppose The Consensus. Why do we even bother with satellite measurements, cloud microphysics or ARGO buoys?

No atmospheric evidence will convince Lewandowsky, he’s  looking for code words in the commentariat.

The tobacco industry claims that smoking does not cause cancer, preferring instead to think of medical science as an “oligopolistic cartel” that “manufactures alleged evidence” linking smoking to cancer.

Climate deniers likewise accuse climate science of being “riddled with corruption” and of manipulating or misrepresenting “real-world scientific observations.”

Both claims smell of desperation and appear laughable to anyone who has only the slightest acquaintance with how scientific research is conducted.

“Slightest acquaintance” with research? Stephen, research starts with numbers, and the only numbers you have are polls. We have real numbers.

Can someone pop over to the ABC and ask for our money back? An editor somewhere thought this was worth publishing?

For all the data we can scrape out of rocks, shells and cylinders of ice, what we really need to know, in detail on a planetary scale, is how much energy comes in and how much goes out. That can only be measured (even roughly) with satellites.

This paper rattles the whole table of key numbers, with empirical results. It puts core numbers into a new perspective, numbers like the 3.7Watts per square meter that a doubling of CO2 is supposed to add to the surface budget.

The models are hunting for imbalances and build-ups in planetary energy. But according to the observations, the longwave (infra-red) energy coming onto the earth’s surface, the infamous back radiation, is 10 – 17 W/m² higher than in the famous Trenberth diagram from 1997. So the models are trying to explain tiny residual imbalances, but the uncertainties and unknowns are larger than the target. The argument that “only the forcing from CO2 can fill the gap in the models” is not just argument from ignorance rhetorically, but factually too.

Another major implications is that water is churning up and falling out of the sky faster than the experts thought. The Earth’s evaporative cooler is lifting more water, taking more heat, and dumping that heat in the atmosphere. At the top of the atmosphere heat is radiating off the planet to offset the radiation coming in. On the water planet, it really is all about water.

(Click to enlarge) Figure B1 | The global annual mean energy budget of Earth for the approximate period 2000–2010. All fluxes are in Wm–2. Solar fluxes are in yellow and infrared fluxes in pink. The four flux quantities in purple-shaded boxes represent the principal components of the atmospheric energy balance.

The main observational data comes from the  ARGO ocean buoys, and the ERBE and later CERES satellites.

  An update on Earth’s energy balance in light of the latest global observations

[Nature Geoscience]

Climate change is governed by changes to the global energy balance. At the top of the atmosphere, this balance is monitored globally by satellite sensors that provide measurements of energy flowing to and from Earth. By contrast, observations at the surface are limited mostly to land areas. As a result, the global balance of energy fluxes within the atmosphere or at Earth’s surface cannot be derived directly from measured fluxes, and is therefore uncertain. This lack of precise knowledge of surface energy fluxes profoundly affects our ability to understand how Earth’s climate responds to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases. In light of compilations of up-to-date surface and satellite data, the surface energy balance needs to be revised. Specifically, the longwave radiation received at the surface is estimated to be significantly larger, by between 10 and 17 Wm–2, than earlier model-based estimates. Moreover, the latest satellite observations of global precipitation indicate that more precipitation is generated than previously thought. This additional precipitation is sustained by more energy leaving the surface by evaporation — that is, in the form of latent heat flux — and thereby offsets much of the increase in longwave flux to the surface.

The effect of CO2 forcing “is lost in the noise of uncertainty”.

Keep reading  →

The Clean Energy Council is an industry group promoting renewables. Not surprisingly it defines “success” as being the amount of money it has diverted from other causes into the coffers of its members. Good for them. They are free to lobby. But the RET or “renewable energy target” was set up by the government. They dictated rules to generate a false market in a product that few sane investors would invest in (remember how the same government keeps talking about how we need a “free market”?).

You and I might define success in terms of more peaceful, healthier and longer lives. Or lives where we get to spend more time with our kids and less time in a rat race. Ultimately, this is $18 billion in investments that could have been used to build houses, hospitals, medical research centres and schools. A visionary government could have made it easier for markets in Australia to develop safer, more effective vaccines, or better and earlier cancer detection, or crops with better yields, and higher essential vitamins and minerals. Total NHMRC (National Health and Medical Research Funding in Australia) is in the order of $800 million per year. $18 billion could have doubled our research budget for a decade. We missed the chance to lead the world in medical research, instead we might reduce world temperature by 0.00C.

Somewhere during the next decade good people will languish in hospitals who could have been treated. They might wait for an organ donation that may or may not come in time, while an expert researcher waits for funding to follow up an idea for regenerating that same tissue from stem cells. Who knows. The patients might not be in Australia. That’s the thing about medical discoveries. When you can reduce pain and suffering, there’s a market all over the world for your exports.

Gillard knew eight months before the last election that the public did not want an emissions trading scheme (ETS):

(Former Labor MP and ABC presenter) Maxine McKew writes that Ms Gillard met Mr Rudd at Kirribilli House in early January 2010.

“Gillard had a blunt message for her Prime Minister,” she writes. “She told Rudd that under no circumstances would she support the case for an election based on the need for action on climate change.

She didn’t want to offer an ETS, and later declared in the campaign “there will be no Carbon Tax”, but after the election she gave us both. Her poor  supporters have been left to weasel and whine post hoc that the public voted for carbon action in 2007. Apologists dissembled on whether the carbon tax is a “tax” or a “fixed priced scheme for an  ETS” pretending that a lie was not a lie, that Gillard was doing what the people wanted and not breaking her word. It all comes to nothing.

Gillard cares for working families by giving them what they asked not to get and deceiving them about what a vote for Gillard means. This is “moving forward” right? Forward to where — a third-rate autocratic state?

In 2010 eighty percent of Australians voted for parties promising no carbon tax. It’s not just that Gillard felt that an ETS was unpopular with the people, she didn’t even think it was worth trying to convince the people it ought to be popular.

How could Gillard run for another election? There is no promise she could make that anyone can believe.