This is a post for those who like the intellectual stimulation of unraveling the cause and effect links at the bleeding edge. It’s a weekend puzzle.
Frank Lansner (of Hidethedecline) wants to toss out his latest thoughts and findings for discussion. With a very simple equation he’s managed to recreate a curve just like Hadcrut temperature profile, using just the Nino 3.4 data (see Fig. 1). If it stands up, this would imply the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) pretty much determined a significant part of the climate — which is not a shock, but nonetheless there’s not a lot of room for CO2. The turning points do seem to match well (unlike the temperature versus CO2 “turning points”). As William Kininmonth reminded us, the oceans cover 70% of the planet, and are 4km deep, and most of that water is very very cold, even under the equator. If the surface of the central pacific cools by 1 degree does that drop global temperatures by 0.1C?
Of course, the mystery of what drives the PDO still stands. On that score, Frank looks at Siberia and Alaska, and finds an interesting correlation with the Nino3.4 when it is lagged by 15 -18 months. He’s chosen four zones in the Pacific and is looking for repeated sequences.
As I said, this is all speculation, but kind of like a climate crossword, only no one has the solution yet. It’s heavy stuff, but I know some people will enjoy the challenge of testing Frank’s ideas. The Dane and his insatiable curiosity.
Fig1. The SST of the Nino3,4 area (5S-5N / 120-170W) in the Pacific Ocean seems to hold information on how global temperatures evolve, at least since 1920 where the first somewhat reliable SST data from the Nino3,4 area begins.
The SST of the Nino3,4 area (5S-5N / 120-170W) in the Pacific Ocean might hold information on how global temperatures evolve, at least since 1920 where the first somewhat reliable SST data from the Nino3,4 area begins. For each month a constant fraction of the Nina3,4 index is added to global temperatures from the month before, and this approach seems to re-produce global temperatures rather well. The 1000 $ question is if this relationship will remain tomorrow ?
The relation on fig 1 – if true – has the following consequence:
La Niña: One year of average -1 K in the nino3,4 area changes global temperatures approx – 0,094 K El Niño: One year of average +1 K in the nino3,4 area changes global temperatures approx + 0,105 K
Due to the above finding I carried out just a rough analysis of the climatic patterns in the Pacific Ocean. There are different writings on the subject, but I like hands on myself so I can investigate exactly what I find relevant. I have divided up the Pacific into the three zones, along with the well known Nino3.4 area.
Nir Shaviv, the well known astrophysicist from Israel, points out that climate sensitivity (according to the IPCC and co) has barely changed in 33 years. Therefore their predictions from the FAR (IPCC, First Assessment Report) in 1990 ought to mean something. Yet observations are now tracking outside and below even their lowest bounds of estimates. When will the IPCC admit those models need to change?
–Jo
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On IPCCs exaggerated climate sensitivity and the emperor’s new clothes
A few days ago I had a very pleasant meeting with Andrew Bolt. He was visiting Israel and we met for an hour in my office. During the discussion, I mentioned that the writers of the recent IPCC reports are not very scientific in their conduct and realized that I should write about it here.
Normal science progresses through the collection of observations (or measurements), the conjecture of hypotheses, the making of predictions, and then through the usage of new observations, the modification of the hypotheses accordingly (either ruling them out, or improving them). In the global warming “science”, this is not the case.
What do I mean?
From the first IPCC report until the previous IPCC report, climate predictions for future temperature increase where based on a climate sensitivity of 1.5 to 4.5°C per CO2 doubling. This range, in fact, goes back to the 1979 Charney report published by the National Academy of Sciences. That is, after 33 years of climate research and many billions of dollars of research, the possible range of climate sensitivities is virtually the same! In the last (AR4) IPCC report the range was actually slightly narrowed down to 2 to 4.5°C increase per CO2 doubling (without any good reason if you ask me). In any case, this increase of the lower limit will only aggravate the point I make below, which is as follows.
Because the possible range of sensitivities has been virtually the same, it means that the predictions made in the first IPCC report in 1990 should still be valid. That is, according to the writers of all the IPCC reports, the temperature today should be within the range of predictions made 22 years ago. But they are not!
The business as usual predictions made in 1990, in the first IPCC report, are given in the following figure.
The business-as-usual predictions made in the first IPCC report, in 1990. Since the best range for the climate sensitivity (according to the alarmists) has not changed, the global temperature 22 years later should be within the predicted range. From this graph, we take the predicted slopes around the year 2000.
How well do these predictions agree with reality? In the next figure I plot the actual global and oceanic temperatures (as made by the NCDC). One can argue that either the ocean temperature or the global (ocean+land) temperature is better. The Ocean temperature includes smaller fluctuations than the land (and therefore less than the global temperature as well), however, if there is a change in the average global state, it should take longer for the oceans to react. On the other hand, the land temperature (and therefore the global temperature) is likely to include the urban heat island effect.
The NCDC ocean (blue) and global (brown) monthly temperature anomalies (relative to the 1900-2000 average temperatures) since 1980. The observed temperatures compared to the predictions made in the first IPCC report. Note that the width of the predictions is ±0.1°C, which is roughly the size of the month to month fluctuations in the temperature anomalies.
Years before Climategate, THAT email, from Phil Jones to Warwick Hughes told us everything we needed to know about the scientific standards at the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia. THAT email was the tip of the iceberg, and below is what lay underneath the surface — the things that were said behind the scenes at the time. Geoff Sherrington has pieced together a sequence of climategate emails, his own emails, and parts of Warwick Hughes work to recreate the sequence.
And for the true skeptic-aficionados, here’s a new layer of history to the skeptical chronology. Where did this volunteer audit movement begin?
Who would have guessed that at least one skeptic, Hughes, was asking for the data Phil Jones worked with, as long ago as 1991? (That was way back in the days where people worked with hard copy print outs, and drew graphs by hand!) Does Hughes rank as volunteer Skeptic Number 1?
UPDATE: I asked Warwick, and he thinks the first unpaid skeptic was Fred Wood in 1988*. — Jo
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Guest post by: Geoffrey H Sherrington, Scientist.
This is the longer story behind one of the more anti-science quotes in the short history of people attempting to be ‘climate scientists’, definition unclear. The pivotal short quote is in the opening email.
“Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.”
…
Here is a series of emails and articles with my interspersed comments in italics. Each email number is the one assigned in Climategate One and Two, presumably by the donor named FOIA. The Climategate emails are indented below, so the source can be picked up easily. There are sections cut from other emails as well. They are not indented. We start with the famous email, the one that some say was the start of the difficulty that scientists in general found when they tried to access data from some climate scientists.
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From Phil Jones to Warwick Hughes.
1299. Between July 2004 and Feb 2005. (Exact date not on my copy of the email.)
I should warn you that some data we have we are not supposed top (sic) pass on to others. We can pass on the gridded data – which we do. Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it. There is IPR to consider. You can get similar data from GHCN at NCDC. Australia isn’t restricted there.
ACRONYMS
WMO = World Meteorological Organisation.
IPR = Intellectual Property Rights.
GHCN = Global Historical Climatology Network.
NCAR = USA National Centre for Atmospheric Research.
WWR = World Weather Records of the World Meteorological Organization.
MCDR = WMO’s Monthly Climatic Data for the World.
Phil had had some prior thoughts about this.
0688. 16 July 2004.
The reason for emailing though is that I’m also being hassled by Warwick Hughes for the CRU station dataset. We put up the gridded fields, but not the station data. Over the last year or so, I’ve told people they can’t have the station data – go to the GHCN site and get it. I knew that avenue has been closed, but it got some of them off my back. I’m not that inclined to release it to Hughes (who Mike knows and maybe Tom). All he wants to do is to show how I’ve made some mistake or used some incorrect data for some stations.
There are a number of issues, though:
Until recently we had very little data about real time changes in ocean pH around the world. Finally autonomous sensors placed in a variety of ecosystems “from tropical to polar, open-ocean to coastal, kelp forest to coral reef” give us the information we needed.
It turns out that far from being a stable pH, spots all over the world are constantly changing. One spot in the ocean varied by an astonishing 1.4 pH units regularly. All our human emissions are projected by models to change the world’s oceans by about 0.3 pH units over the next 90 years, and that’s referred to as “catastrophic”, yet we now know that fish and some calcifying critters adapt naturally to changes far larger than that every year, sometimes in just a month, and in extreme cases, in just a day.
Data was collected by 15 individual SeaFET sensors in seven types of marine habitats. Four sites were fairly stable (1, which includes the open ocean, and also sites 2,3,4) but most of the rest were highly variable (esp site 15 near Italy and 14 near Mexico) . On a monthly scale the pH varies by 0.024 to 1.430 pH units.
Figure 1. Map of pH sensor (SeaFET) deployment locations.
The authors draw two conclusions: (1) most non-open ocean sites vary a lot, and (2) and some spots vary so much they reach the “extreme” pH’s forecast for the doomsday future scenarios on a daily (a daily!) basis.
At Puerto Morelos (in Mexico’s easternmost state, on the Yucatán Peninsula) the pH varied as much as 0.3 units per hour due to groundwater springs. Each day the pH bottomed at about 10am, and peaked shortly after sunset. These extreme sites tell us that some marine life can cope with larger, faster swings than the apocalyptic predictions suggest, though of course, no one is suggesting that the entire global ocean would be happy with similar extreme swings.
Even the more stable and vast open ocean is not a fixed pH all year round. Hofmann writes that “Open-water areas (in the Southern Ocean) experience a strong seasonal shift in seawater pH (~0.3–0.5 units) between austral summer and winter.”
This paper is such a game changer, they talk about rewriting the null hypothesis:
“This natural variability has prompted the suggestion that “an appropriate null hypothesis may be, until evidence is obtained to the contrary, that major biogeochemical processes in the oceans other than calcification will not be fundamentally different under future higher CO2/lower pH conditions””
It’s another mindless record used to remind the public to “keep the faith” and recite the litany:
“Adelaide had it’s hottest start to the year since 1900” Sky news
Picking three particular days outof 365 and comparing them over a century is about as cherry-pickingly meaningless as it gets. But Ian Hill went back through the records to find that not only have there been 79 heatwaves in Adelaide since 1887, but there have been 51 heat-waves that were hotter since 1887.
Ian Hill crunched the numbers and wrote:
Using the definition of a heatwave being “three or more consecutive days at or above 38C”, for no other reason than the fact that this fits in nicely with Adelaide’s recent maxima of 38.0, 41.6 and 40.6 on Dec 31, Jan 1 and Jan 2 respectively, I found that there have been 79 such heatwaves recorded in Adelaide since Jan 21, 1887, the date of the first such information available from the BOM. The recent heatwave is ranked 52nd, where the average maximum of days involved is used to rank heatwaves of the same duration.
If the file is sorted in chronological order a familiar trend emerges where there are many years on end with no heatwaves, then clusters of them. Between 1973 and 1989 there was only one, a week-long heatwave in January 1982. The longest heatwave was in March 2008 where there were 12 consecutive days above 38 degrees C. In fact the day before was 37.9 and the previous two days to that were above 35, so it was reported as a 15-day heatwave. This would be the true “record” for many sites in SE Australia and for Adelaide it was called “a once in 3000 years occurrence”.
Probably the most severe heatwaves were in January 1908 where the Adelaide citizens endured a week of temperatures averaging 43.2. Earlier in the month they had six days averaging 41.8.
UPDATE 2014: Claims made that “Michael Mann Faces Bankruptcy as his Courtroom Climate Capers Collapse” on Feb 22, are incorrect. See here for more information. This post below is two years old, and many things have changed. — Jo
It’s slipped past most skeptics with all the action lately, but John O’Sullivan is putting in above and beyond what any single skeptical soul ought to.
He’s already been a key figure helping Tim Ball in the legal fight with the UVA establishment, which has spent over a million dollars helping Michael Mann to hide emails. The case was launched by Michael Mann, but could turn out to do a huge favor to skeptics — the discovery process is a powerful tool, and we all know who has been hiding their methods, their data, and their work-related correspondence.
Tim Ball and John O’Sullivan are helping all the free citizens of the West. The burden should not be theirs alone. There are many claims for help at the moment, but that is a sign that the grand scam is coming to a head.
— Jo
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Official: I Just Bet My House on the Outcome of Science Trial of the Century
No truer headline will you read. Last month this author literally wagered his home, life savings, and all his possessions on the outcome of a crucial global warming lawsuit currently ongoing in Canada.
So what is it that drove me to such apparent recklessness endangering not only my own well-being but that of my family? Well, to me this pivotal lawsuit encapsulates the archetypal ‘good versus evil’ battle no conscientious parent can ignore.
Dr. Ball famously declared that his adversary belongs “in the state pen, not Penn State.” For that Ball was summarily hit with a libel suit and Ball’s legal fees could exceed $300,000. But defiantly, the septuagenarian says, “if you think education is expensive – try ignorance.”
So persuasive is the evidence to me that last night I signed a contract in favor of Dr. Ball to forsake my worldly goods in the event the B.C. court ruled in favor of his adversary, Dr. Michael Mann .
I met two Australian libertarians a few weeks ago who didn’t know who Ron Paul was, but then, why would they? The media sure doesn’t want anyone to talk about Paul.
In the Iowa Polls Romney is the “front-runner”, the “man-to-beat”, and leads at (wow) 24%, while Paul is completely out of contention, hardly worth a mention, at… ah… 22%. If Romney wins, it will set him up for the run at the White house, if Ron Paul wins, it “it may jeopardize the future importance of Iowa in the presidential election cycle“. Follow the logic: if Paul is elected in Iowa, then “Paul is just unelectable.” They actually say that. (Some polls put the two men level.)
If there was a serious frontrunner in the US republican race who was smart, decent, a doctor with no scandals, a long record of keeping promises in congress, a magnetic ability to raise money, massive grassroots fan base, and excellent polling, well of course the media will ignore him. Censorship by omission is weapon number one (and we know all about that as climate skeptics). If they have to mention him (and it’s coming to that), look for the opinion that writes him off: “No one seriously thinks Paul can win”. (It doesn’t even need to be an attributed quote). It’s weapon number two. Starting now is weapon three: stringing dirt out of newsletters that are 20 years old. They’ll call him extreme, fringe, a radical, but what he wants most is to stick with the US constitution and the words of the founding fathers. He wants freedom for the people, peace, and the government to get out of the way. Get ready for the smear campaign from the people who want the opposite.
The parallels with how the Establishment (the governments and mainstream media) treat climate skepticism are obvious. They ignored skeptics until 2008, omitting any mention of us or our arguments. Then we started doing well in public polling, and they switched to ridicule. (Remember the famous quote mistakenly thought to be Ghandi?* First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight, then you win.) Declaring that “all scientists say x” is so like “no one seriously thinks Paul can win”.
Notice that, like us, Paul gets his message out via the Internet because the mainstream media is denied to his ideas. There is an historical precedent for this phenomenon: the church once had a monopoly on distributing high quality information, via the pulpit. Then the printing press came along, bypassing the Church, and we got the reformation and the enlightenment (and also a profound shake up in the power structure, leading to a series of wars including the 30 Year War, but that’s a story for another time). The powers that be currently own our political class and our mainstream media, but the Internet is increasingly bypassing their controls on what people can know and think. (Something like this paragraph, for instance, will probably never appear anywhere in the mainstream media.) Paul threatens both the military power (he wants the US to stop being the world policeman, to bring its forces home) and the money power (he wants to stop money manufacture out of thin air and abolish the Fed), and for good measure he even threatens the power of large criminal organizations (he wants to legalize drugs).
I have no business telling US voters how to vote. But I’m a member of Western Civilization too. The rest of the West needs a strong US to help us defend our freedoms. We need free speech. We need politicians with principle and people who can clean up the corruption.
There are points I don’t agree with him on, but I so admire the man who sticks to his word, who speaks his mind, who can’t be bought.
The media are staffed by people known to vote left. They want Mitt Romney or even Newt Gingrich (just like they want Malcolm Turnbull in Australia). That’s exactly why the Republicans should pick… someone, anyone else. Whoever the media want in this race, they don’t have the interests of (non-establishment) Republicans at heart.
If National Geographic had more stories like this one, I’d be inclined to subscribe. This is fascinating stuff.
Seven thousand years before Stonehenge was Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey, where you’ll find ring upon ring of T-shaped stone towers arranged in a circle. Around 11,600 B.C. hundreds of people gathered on this mound, year after year, possibly for centuries.
There are plenty of mysteries on this hill. Some of the rocks weigh 16 tons, but archaeologists can find no homes, no hearths, no water source, and no sign of a town or village to support the hundreds of workers who built the rings of towers. The people apparently, unthinkably really, were nomadic, as far as we know, they had no wheels, and no beasts of burden. True hunter gatherers, whose first heavy building project was not a home to fend off the elements, but a religious sacred site.
Perhaps we should not be so surprised, after all, we know the pyramids, the largest and oldest surviving buildings didn’t house people or grain either — the only humans they keep warm were dead ones. In a sense, the theme repeats. It takes extraordinary expertise and effort to move tons of rock, especially if you don’t have a trolley, let alone a crane, yet seemingly the first priority for our ancestors was not food or shelter, but just some respite from daily overbearing fears. Could it be some other reason than fear like the “spectacle” or festival (mentioned in the article) or the ever reliable search for status? Maybe, but it’s hard to believe these circles could be about power trips or parties if the there is no permanent settlement to reward the hierarchy.
Göbekli Tepe was built much earlier [than Stonehenge] and is made not from roughly hewn blocks but from cleanly carved limestone pillars splashed with bas-reliefs of animals—a cavalcade of gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, and ferocious wild boars. The assemblage was built some 11,600 years ago, seven millennia before the Great Pyramid of Giza. It contains the oldest known temple. Indeed, Göbekli Tepe is the oldest known example of monumental architecture—the first structure human beings put together that was bigger and more complicated than a hut. When these pillars were erected, so far as we know, nothing of comparable scale existed in the world.
“Within minutes of getting there,” Schmidt says, he realized that he was looking at a place where scores or even hundreds of people had worked in millennia past. The limestone slabs were not Byzantine graves but something much older.
Inches below the surface the team struck an elaborately fashioned stone. Then another, and another—a ring of standing pillars. As the months and years went by, Schmidt’s team, a shifting crew of German and Turkish graduate students and 50 or more local villagers, found a second circle of stones, then a third, and then more. Geomagnetic surveys in 2003 revealed at least 20 rings piled together, higgledy-piggledy, under the earth.
Puzzle piled upon puzzle as the excavation continued. For reasons yet unknown, the rings at Göbekli Tepe seem to have regularly lost their power, or at least their charm. Every few decades people buried the pillars and put up new stones—a second, smaller ring, inside the first. Sometimes, later, they installed a third. Then the whole assemblage would be filled in with debris, and an entirely new circle created nearby. The site may have been built, filled in, and built again for centuries.
What makes a leader of a field, a leader? They have a brain, and not always, but sometimes, they can reason. So it’s not surprising that some leaders see through the fog. Here’s another example of how the truth gets out. It’s a specialist field, and newspaper stories are all doom and gloom (eg. Climate change threat to Australia’s top wines! ) but one of its most esteemed leaders is saying emphatically: not so.
“The effects of climate change have been dramatically over-estimated. Future global climate change caused by human activity will be much less than feared and be largely benign for viticulture”. “The 21st Century will be wine’s golden age”.
In viticulture, tiny changes in levels of part-per-trillion molecules produce prizewinners (or not). See Croser’s review to appreciate just how much. They don’t just talk in degrees but the number of days involved.
“…the quantum and quality of the tertiary aroma and flavour compounds synthesised is profoundly influenced by atmospheric temperature. John Gladstones identifies the optimal mean temperature of the last 30 days of ripening for the synthesis of flavour and pigment in red varieties as 18-22ºC and for the best attributes of delicate white and sparkling wines the mean can be as low as 12-15ºC”
Here is one of their own greats staking his reputation on the skeptical side. About a third of the book is about climate change, and John Gladstones writes prize winning books of almost biblical fame in the vineyard industry. According to one winery blogger, Gladstones’ 1992 book — the highly acclaimed Viticulture and Environment –became THE essential resource book, above almost all others. Gladstones is a leading agricultural scientist, winning prizes for his work on breeding, agronomy, and botany. The famous Margaret River wine growing region (here in WA) was set up because Gladstones recommended it.
His new book Wine, Terroir and Climate Change (Wakefield Press) is garnering excellent reviews, and here’s the thing: his message on climate change is well researched, clear, and unapologetic — man-made effects have been exaggerated, and the effects of extra CO2 are largely beneficial. He’s 79, and not going to waste time pandering to silly fashions.
Australian people know they are being “sold” a message in the media. According to the Australian Election Study from 2010, just 17% are “confident” in The Press. [Story: The Australian]
Australians were underwhelmed with the politics on offer in 2010, Rudd hit deep lows, Gillard had knifed Rudd, yet, even in that unflattering environment over twice as many people (43%) said they were confident in “the federal government ” as said the same about the media. I wonder what these results would be now?
Trust in the media is a theme I will keep returning to in 2012 – when it comes to underperforming politicians, insane laws, over-reaching judiciary, corrupt bureaucrats, and failing currencies, the problem is The Media. None of the lackluster or self-serving talent on display would be able to continue for long if the media exposed them and relentlessly demanded logic, reason, evidence and manners.
It’s what is not said that matters.
Source: The Australian
Australians trust the armed forces, universities, and the police.
The gloss of universities is striking — they are riding on the rigor and achievements of past generations.
The last survey I saw (about May 2011) showed that 50% of Australians still think we need to do something about “the climate”, so none of those people have even the faintest idea of how some parts of our universities are not that different to the Press Corp — just wait til the sordid details of Climategate, lost data, and hidden files surface and the people find out how impartial and trustworthy those universities have been.
Even though voters don’t trust the media, in Australia, the MSM is still very influential. When election time comes, only 10% of the voters followed it through the internet. It’s rising fast, but fully 56% of people followed the election through their television or newspaper. We have five real channels (with many spinoff channel variants of late) and two of the five are government funded in part or in full. There is no Fox News in Australia.
...
Assuming that the internet remains largely free, that MSM influence can only fall, but why assume that free speech will stay free? The government censors are becoming ever more blatant – yesterday ruling that the media are not allowed to photograph asylum seekers arriving in boats.
Some time ago, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, dissident Czech novelist Zdener Urbanek observed: “In dictatorships we are more fortunate that you in the West in one respect. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and nothing of what we watch on television, because we know it’s propaganda and lies. Unlike you in the West, we’ve learned to look behind the propaganda and to read between the lines, and unlike you, we know that the real truth is always subversive”.
Paul Biegler has some words of wisdom in The Age, but unfortunately he mixed up a few vital terms up in his pop-psychosocial-analysis.
Once again, the projection of the alarmist’s own inner headspace is rampant. Those without the ability to reason keep “finding” that inability in those who can. (It makes sense, a brain needs to use logic to recognize logic)*. Not surprisingly, surveys also show that skeptics are more literate and numerate than believers.
Those who adopt fashionable ideas to impress their friends assume their opponents behave in the same unscientific way. I have to sympathise with them. How else can they explain the mismatch between their chosen prophets and their busted prophecies?
The corrected version of this article in The Age. I’ve taken some savage edits of the article (colored like this) and corrected the terms.
“Climate scepticsalarmists might just be captive to basic emotions”
Instant gratification is a powerful, but flawed, human motivator.
Searching for that perfect Christmas gift for your climate alarmist friend? You could do worse than slinging them a book like Emotional Intelligence, Plimer’s, Carter’s or Bookers. Why? Research is mounting that your friend is the victim of a brain glitch. More particularly, he has been derailed by an emotional response and has capitulated to the pleasure of the here and now. He wants to fit in with his peers, to be fashionable, and to look “smart”. How better than to parade his moral superiority by adopting the notion that man-made global warming is real, and he is a saint because he recycles The Age to save the planet? How better to look smart than to pour scorn on “skeptics”?
The bad news is, all fashions change, and cheap tricks will come back to bite him. Because he did no research before he derided “deniers” he didn’t realize what an idiot he would look like when the deniers turned out to be professors, nobel prize winners, engineers, number crunchers, and other savvy people who’ve been on the Earth for decades. It’s time to warn him there will be no fashionista points soon in looking like the dupe who swallowed bizarre lines about coal miners causing cyclones. I mean, really?
Climate scepticism alarmism is a strong candidate example of temporal discounting — people taking the easy road to get instant gratification now, and avoiding the cost. Hundreds of scientific papers and notable scientists point to reams of evidence that natural cycles are more likely to be warming the planet. Yet, doing the research and speaking of your skepticism will cost you real pleasure now. For starters, research takes time, it’s hard work to actually form your own opinion rather than just be a parrot. Then if you admit your skepticism publicly, people will look at you in disdain. Indeed you’ll lose friends. There’s no reward in being exiled.
I don’t have a horse in the Peak Oil race, but Energy Security is too important to let the government “disappear” inconvenient reports. As David Archibald points out, at one time the Australian Government went to great lengths to make sure we would be more self sufficient. Lately there are times when Australia doesn’t even have three months supply.– Jo
World Annual Discovery (red) and Production of Oil (Blue) See below for details.
The White Paper contains a number of strange statements and inanities:
Page 67: “For a major global energy exporter like Australia, pursuing a goal of national energy self‐sufficiency is counterintuitive.”
Page 69: “Energy security does not equate to energy independence or self‐sufficiency in any particular energy source.”
Page 123: “As a result of increased daily net imports in recent years, the level of oil stocks in Australia has regularly fallen below the 90‐day requirement since mid‐2010. The National Energy Security Assessment found that this does not indicate an emerging domestic energy security problem. However, Australia’s stockholding obligation is an important compliance issue under an international treaty that is intended to be a credible response mechanism to a major global oil supply disruption. The Australian Government is currently considering possible options to respond to this issue.”
It is interesting that the Federal Government wants Australia to be an example to the World with the carbon tax, but is also aware that it is breaking a treaty obligation with respect to oil stock levels.
What is most interesting about the Energy White Paper is what it does not mention. That is Report 117 produced by the Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics which in turn is part of the Department of Infrastructure and Transport. Anthony Albanese is the Minister.
Report 117 is entitled “Transport energy futures: long-term oil supply trends and projections”. This report was not only not mentioned in the White Paper, it has been disappeared from the Departmental website. No reference to it exists. As ASPO notes on its website – “This report is no longer available from BITRE, but no reason has been given for its withdrawal.The report is available on a French website [PDF].
So an Australian Government report is not available on an Australian Government website but is available on a French website.
Why would that be?
It would be because Report 117 contradicts the findings of the Energy White Paper which says,”Demand for petroleum fuels will continue to be strong, although this will be increasingly met by a growing level of imported product through well‐established and proven supply chains.”
Report 117 is the best analysis of peak oil that I have seen
…the World’s oil supply is going to fall off a cliff.
It is a very detailed, thorough, and methodically correct report forecasting oil supply to the end of the century. What it says is that the World’s oil supply is going to fall off a cliff. The words the report actually uses are, ”A predicted shallow decline in the short run should give way to a steeper decline after 2016.”
Figure 13.9 from the report sums up the situation:
A small group of selected rulers just raised a hand, changed the rules, and sent billions of dollars from some people to some others.
This type of arbitrary control over the carbon market shows why it is a misnomer to call it a “free” market, and why a “market” is the wrong tool to try to use to reduce emissions. CO2 is a universal molecule, found in every walk of life and many inanimate processes. We can’t include them all, and someone somewhere gets to decide which ones count and which ones don’t, and how many of them we are allowed to emit in the first place.
Supply and demand of CO2 emissions are not set by a free market (you know, voluntary and willing participants exchanging things for mutual benefit). The bureaucrats just mandated an illusion of market forces, within a range set by said ‘crats. The price of carbon credits had gotten too painfully low for the rulers and their patrons and fans, so something had to be “done”. They made the carbon caps more stringent. If the price was too high, they would have loosened them (and they admit as much below). This has nothing to do with the environment or science, and everything to do with a plutocracy charging “what it can get away with”.
Now, are they doing this more for your benefit, or theirs? Cui bono?
Any efficiency gains we get from the “free market” are destroyed by the losses due to corruption.
Carbon allowances rose as much as 32 percent on speculation that an amendment to an energy efficiency law voted today raised the likelihood of the EU curbing oversupply and supporting prices in its emissions trading system. Concern that the new energy- savings regulations will further cut demand for pollution rights at a time of economic slowdown helped knock carbon prices to a four-year low last week.
It’s well written, packed with references, and has an unapologetic, irreverent tone.
If you are a skeptical teacher, this is an essential book; if you are an alarmist teacher, it’s doubly so. This is the ammunition that smart teenagers will use to point score against you. (Be prepared, eh?)
My only grievance with this book is that Plimer got this excellent title before me 😉
Following on from blackbody discussions, here is Christopher Monckton’s simple account of how we know the IPCC is exaggerating climate sensitivity. This comes from page 12 of Moncktons: Regulation without reason (on the Canadian coal regulations.)
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Guest Post: Christopher Monckton
Are the IPCC’s global-warming projections proving accurate?
IPCC (2007, scenario A2) expects 3.4 C° manmade global warming to 2100. The calculations so far in this paper have assumed that the IPCC is right. Environment Canada does not ask any questions about the IPCC’s global-warming projections. Officials should have made some allowance for IPCC overshoot.
Since 1750, whence IPCC dates our influence on climate, a recent study (Blasing, 2011) shows 3 W m–2 of forcing from our greenhouse-gas emissions, less –1 W m–2 from non-GHG influences (IPCC, 2007). Global temperature had risen by 0.5 C° from 1750-1983 (Hansen, 1984), with a further 0.3 C° since (HadCRUt3, 2011). Of this 0.8 C° warming, 50 to 100% may be manmade. Thus, the 261-year transient climate sensitivity parameter is (0.4 to 0.8)/(3 – 1) = 0.2 to 0.4 C° W–1 m2. Multiplying by the forcing at CO2 doubling, i.e. 5.35 ln 2 (Myhre et al., 2001, cited by IPCC, 2001, 2007), gives transient sensitivity of 0.75 to 1.5 C° by 2100, when CO2 concentration will have doubled. Dividing this value by 0.7, the fraction of all forcings attributable to CO2, allows for non-CO2 forcings. Expected warming would thus be 1.1 to 2.1 C° to 2100, 32 to 62% of IPCC’s central estimate.
Since 1850, the year when the first global-temperature record was kept, the most rapid rate of warming sustained for more than a decade was 0.17 C°/decade (HadCRUt3, 2011). Assume that, after no warming in the 2000s, this maximum supra-decadal warming rate were to become the average rate for the next nine decades. Warming would be 1.5 C° by 2100, 44% of IPCC’s central estimate.
Since 1950, when Man first began emitting enough CO2 to influence the climate, 0.72 C° of warming has occurred (HadCRUt3, 2011). This rate, extrapolated from the past 61 years to the next 90, gives 1.1 C° of warming by 2100. Assuming 20 to 40% acceleration in the warming rate to allow for rising CO2 concentrations net of the logarithmic diminution in the CO2 forcing gives 1.3 to 1.5 C° warming to 2100.
I wrote to Christopher Monckton a while back to ask him about a post Blackbody – the key error in climate science, and bless his soul, he whipped off a letter with his detailed answer and wrote it all back to me, saying that other people were asking him about that too. It’s a shame to keep it hidden and high time I brought it out. Usually this topic generates quite a discussion. Though, warning (!) it contains equations, and primarily discusses the physics of blackbody radiation from Earth. It is essentially a debate about the core physics among a few skeptics. The most curious thing being that this time — this blog is on the mainstream end of opinions. (Yes, I think there is a greenhouse effect as I explained here and here).
Huffman asserts there is no measureable greenhouse effect on Venus and Earth and that the temperatures of both planets is determined by their distance to the sun. (Michael Hammer responded to that with an explanation of why we know There is a Greenhouse Effect on Venus). My unsophisticated thought was that if distance explained it all, then ergo, albedo would have no effect at all — as in zero — and it seems hard to believe that a black planet and a white planet the same distance from the sun would be at identical temperatures. (It doesn’t gel with my experience of a white car vs black car parked in the baking sun.) – Jo
…Huffman makes a point about albedo himself:
You cannot “correct for albedo” to use the Stefan-Boltzmann equation at the Earth’s surface, because a blackbody by definition has no albedo to “correct” for. This of course was confirmed in my previous Venus/Earth analysis, which showed there is simply no room for an albedo effect upon the long-term mean temperatures in the atmospheres of Venus and Earth
Guest Post: Christopher Monckton replies explaining the four errors of this reasoning
The posting begins by making the common error of assuming that a blackbody cannot have an albedo. Of course it can. The Stefan-Boltzmann equation accounts for albedo in the simplest possible way: by simply taking it that the fraction of incident radiation that is reflected away by the albedo of the Earth plays no part in the radiative transfer at the characteristic-emission surface. Here is how it’s done.
The characteristic-emission surface of the Earth is not the surface we stand on. It is about 5 km up in the troposphere, varying quite a bit with latitude. At that surface, by definition, incoming and outgoing radiative fluxes balance, and there are no non-radiative fluxes as there are at the Earth’s surface.
Fenbeagle does the full Star Wars parody for Christmas, check it out! This is just a part. But before you go, if you haven’t already read the letter from Tallblokes attorney, see below. All jokes aside, we don’t want the establishment to think they can get away with invasions of privacy like this. UVA spent $1million helping Mann to hide the emails that the public paid him to write. Tallbloke (Roger) was just writing from home when 6 police turned up to take his computer and copy the entire contents.
Fenbeagle
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Tallbloke will pursue legal action and could use some help
Frustrated cult members know they can’t explain their faith to the rational. [See Grist]
They bombarded us with glossy brochures, with full feature documentaries, and awarded people on their team with Nobels for nothing. They spend billions of dollars of our government funds and investment monies, and, once upon a time, the full support of the EU, UK, US, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand governments, all the major financial houses of the world, and of course the supertanker of governments – the UN. They had 70% of the Western population convinced and a $144 billion dollar global trading scheme with all the patrons that engenders.
So now that it’s all going to rot and ruin, they have no ammo left. Their arsenal is reduced to namecalling and jokes that reveal the Christmas wish-list of the inner totalitarian.
Those with billions of dollars attack the mostly unpaid volunteers who are beating them. It’s emblematic that in this meeting of the “ruling class” where the joke is funny, the only people not represented in the audience of politicians and businessmen are the taxpaying citizens:
Our biggest problem is to deal with the skepticism and denial of the cult-like lemmings who would take us over the cliff,” said Brown, a Democrat, eliciting cheers and laughter from an audience of roughly 200 policymakers, businessleaders, and activists. “The skeptics and deniers have billions of dollars at their disposal ... But I can tell you we’re going to fight them every step of the way until we get this state on a sustainable path forward.”
More laughter came when Pachauri joked that Branson could give climate deniers tickets on the aviation mogul’s planned flights into outer space. “Perhaps it could be a one-way ticket,” Pachauri said, smiling, “though I’m not sure space deserves them.” [Source: Grist]
The alarmist cult needs to keep that myth alive about the money. Could it be that the only way they can “reason” about the planetary atmosphere is to “follow the money”, even if that money doesn’t exist? (Is monetary influence the only way they can think?) Or is it simply that they deny the facts about climate that are defeating them as they leak out to the public over the Internet, so they pretend they were beaten instead by big money and PR?
Anything to avoid the dreaded “we were wrong”, that all us little people — whom they’ve been calling idiots in every possible way for years — might be right. After all, wasn’t this issue supposed to prove their intellectual superiority once and for all and therefore give them (in their minds) a mandate to govern over us?
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The NCDC ocean (blue) and global (brown) monthly temperature anomalies (relative to the 1900-2000 average temperatures) since 1980. The observed temperatures compared to the predictions made in the first IPCC report. Note that the width of the predictions is ±0.1°C, which is roughly the size of the month to month fluctuations in the temperature anomalies.
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