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Sunday
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If only we’d built those offshore wind turbines, eaten more cricket-burgers, we could have stopped the floods, right?
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Friday
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If UK had never tried renewables, each person would be £3,000 richer
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Thursday
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New AI data centers will use the same electricity as 2 million homes
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Wednesday
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No one knows what caused the Blackout but Spain is using more gas and nukes and less solar…
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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Half of Australia doesn’t want to pay a single cent on Net Zero targets
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Saturday
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Secret comms devices, radios, hidden in solar inverters from China. Would you like a Blackout with that?
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Friday
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LSE junk study says if men didn’t eat so much red meat we’d have nicer weather
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Thursday
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Now they tell us? Labor says new aggressive Net Zero policy they hid from voters “is popular”
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Wednesday
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British politics in turmoil after Reform’s wins — Greens Deputy even attacks Net Zero from the left
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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Children of 2020 face unprecedented exposure to Extreme Climate Nonsense…
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Saturday
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60% are skeptics: Only 13% of UK voters say Net Zero is more important than cost of living
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Friday
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Climate change is causing South Africa to rise and sink at the same time
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Thursday
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Why is the renewables industry allowed to sponsor political advertising in schools and call it “education”?
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Wednesday
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In trying to be a small target, the Liberals accidentally disappeared
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Tuesday
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Monday
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The best thing about the Australian election was that Nigel Farage’s party won 30% in the UK
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Sunday
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Saturday — Election Day Australia
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Vote for freedom…
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Friday
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Bombshell: Sir Tony Blair says climate policies are unworkable, irrational, and everyone is afraid of being called a denier
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Thursday
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Blackout in Spain to cost 2-4 billion Euro, likely due to solar plants — blind and biased ABC says “cause is a mystery”
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Wednesday
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Days after Spain reaches 100% renewable, mass blackouts hit, due to mysterious “rare atmospheric phenomenon”
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Tuesday
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Help needed: Site under DDoS attack from hundreds of thousands of unique IPs this week — especially China and the USA
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Monday: Election Day Canada
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When the Labor Party talk about “The Science” the Opposition can easily outflank and outgun them with bigger, better science
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Saturday
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UK Gov spends £50 m to dim sun to create slightly less beach weather
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Friday
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Welcome to another day in the lost democracy. The place where an elected government thinks that cheating is the answer. What was Julia Gillard thinking? This turnaround is happening so fast. She announced the Carbon Tax only last Thursday, and already former members of her own party are discussing what genre of “lie” it qualifies as, or speculating over who will take over as PM, the polls are falling, and thousands of people are getting organized behind the scenes. Even one of the star team at the launch of the Tax has had to admit he’s not completely behind it. Worse the opposition now has a clear cause to fight for (Repeal the tax!). Rallies are being planned in most capital cities, phones are running hot, new groups have sprung into action, posters and T-Shirts are being printed. O Joy and what not, “Galvanised” is the word. People I’ve never spoken to are emailing me about their plans.
Meanwhile the Greens are falling all over themselves to help the skeptics. Please, someone – organize more mass media interviews with Bob Brown and Christine Milne where they tell people alternately that the Greens are behind the Big New Awful Tax, and how making everyone pay more for petrol is a good thing.
Poor Gillard had tried to take power from the Greens by shifting “left”, but instead has fed the monster. She’s pumped them oxygen, and with a industrial compressor. They’re twice life size and floating. The last thing Gillard needed was to look like she was being controlled by the greens, and the last thing any of the do-gooder patchwork government needed was to remind all the voters that the rulers were quite enjoying the thought of the economic penance the public would have to pay.
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5.5 out of 10 based on 2 ratings
Thank you Julia Gillard. Nothing could have put the fire back into the carbon debate like promising not to tax us during an election, then barely scraping in by the thinnest of “wins”* (with hang-nail support of two men in some of the most conservative seats in the country) and then doing what you said you wouldn’t.
This is much more than just a lie.
Imagine if Gillard had announced the Carbon Tax as part of her election platform. How many voters would have changed their vote? It wouldn’t take many. The two party preferred vote in Australia was split by only 0.12%.
Would the Labor Party have won?
Back in August 2010 Julia Gillard obviously thought the Australian people would not have wanted a carbon tax, or she would have run her campaign on it. Instead she thought we’d want an ineffectual climate committee and the certainty of knowing a carbon tax would not be imposed before another election.
Seven ALP seats were won with less than a 2% margin.
In Corangamite, a mere 769 voters who didn’t want a carbon tax could have changed the leadership of the nation.
This is not just a “lie”, it’s deception writ large. The Australian public were never given the chance to vote on this issue. There was never a discussion about the benefits. It was not a debate topic. The commentators and opinion writers did not thrash out the costs and risks. This is not how democracies are supposed to work.
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7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings
The good news is that skeptics are the majority, the bad news is that we’ll all have to pay the tax anyway. The IPA commissioned a Galaxy Poll in Australia and only one third of Australians believe that man-made global warming is real. Despite the advertising, the propaganda, the Nobel Prizes, the support of major institutions, the ABC censorship of skeptical science news, and the educational indoctrination at schools, most people are unconvinced.
Despite the falling polls, today the Gillard Government committed itself to getting a “carbon price” — the nice way of saying “tax”. (Note the poll attached to that story: Do you support a carbon tax? 84% say NO.)
It’s a question of youth
From the full results it’s clear that belief is mostly a “young” naive thing, and that by the age of 30 people are waking up to the truth. Half of the 18-24 year olds think that man is to blame, but only a quarter of the over 50’s do. The old cats who’ve been there and done that are wiser to exaggerated scare campaigns. Half of the 25 -34 year old group answered that they are not sure.
It’s also a socio-economic thing. Blue collar workers were more likely to say the cycle was natural than white collar workers (33% versus 22%) and white collar workers were more likely to blame man (37% versus 28%). The fans of The Big Scare would say that because the more highly educated know more about the science, but we skeptics know that this is not about science any more. If it were about the science the believers wouldn’t run scared from public debates, the media wouldn’t be too intimidated to interview people with other opinions, and people who asked polite questions wouldn’t be called rude names. When skeptics asked for empirical evidence for positive feedbacks the alarmists would be able to provide some (and from several sources and over long time spans).
Skeptics won the science years ago (back when the hot spot went missing, and the ice cores showed a long lag). Belief in man-made global warming is about the fashion, the meme, the religion. Since this is a fashion meme which is used as a substitute for an IQ test and a measure of someones “compassion”, this is a test that university educated people most want to pass.
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7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings
The ABC is so afraid that the public might read comments from global warming skeptics that they frequently censor or delay reasonable comments, while allowing defamatory, unprofessional, and unsubstantiated ones through. (Guess which way the editors of The Drum vote?)
Marc Hendrickx describes how hard it is to get rid of a single baseless defamatory comment on the ABC taxpayer-funded-site:
The following anonymous comment was posted to [Sara] Phillips’s blog shortly afterwards:
Annie : 03 Dec 2010 7:07:53pm
The denialist clowns return again . . . climateaudit.org . . . run by Stephen McIntyre a known climate denialist and extremist right-wing provocateur . . . you are a joke as are your answers . . . laughing hysterically.
Marc Hendrix suggested it be removed as defamatory. The ABC editors protested, and here’s the weird thing, it would have taken them less time to just say “yes” — after all, it’s only a comment. But in the sum total editorial-calculation-of-the-day there was apparently some net benefit in fighting to keep an unsubstantiated insult visible among hundreds of other comments? (Go figure.) According to the ABC editors: “He [MacIntyre] could reasonably be described as ‘right wing’ as a speaking member of the George C Marshall Institute, which is known for its right-leaning politically conservative views. ‘Provocateur’ is a name given to describe those whose thinking goes against that of the status quo, another label that could reasonably be given to Mr McIntyre. As such, the comments from Annie are not unfounded and therefore not defamatory.””
Hendrickx then passed on the ABC editorial point of view to Steven McIntyre, and he replied:
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7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings
Maintained by bullying and bluster, the facade grows more brittle by the day, as heretics start to come out of the woodwork — being pragmatic, concerned, but unapologetic.
From the Daily Mail in the UK — Johnny Ball says Beware of the Global Warming Fascists. More evidence that this is a propaganda campaign, not a question of science (as if we needed that). Kudos to the Daily Mail for printing thousands of copies of this story. A hat-tip to Johnny Ball for being brave enough to face down the bullies.
In the past decade or so I’ve been mocked, vilified, besmirched — I’ve even been booed off a theatre stage — simply for expressing the view that the case for global warming and climate change, and in particular the emphasis on the damage caused by carbon dioxide, the so-called greenhouse gas that is going to do for us all, has been massively over-stated.
And something very similar has happened to Dr David Bellamy, who has never been shy about expressing his belief that climate change is an entirely natural phenomenon. His media career, particularly in television, has suffered as a result.
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8.3 out of 10 based on 7 ratings
Part of the US Government has been caught trying to buy software that would allow it to generate 500 fake personas generally known as sockpuppets. They plan to use Facebook, Twitter, and blog comments. This particular leaked email refers to a submission from the Air Force, and apparently for use in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the details reveal that “persona management software” is a spookily mature market sector. Who knows how widespread this is already?
Astroturfing by community organizations is one thing. But Establishment anti-news, non-points, and funded fake opinions are quite something else. When the Establishment sponsors the activists and the activists post fake messages, taxpayer funds are used against the taxpayer. Is it happening? How would we know?
The story is starting to spreading through blogs.
According to an embedded MS Word document found in one of the HB Gary emails, it involves creating an army of sockpuppets, with sophisticated “persona management” software that allows a small team of only a few people to appear to be many, while keeping the personas from accidentally cross-contaminating each other. Then, to top it off, the team can actually automate some functions so one persona can appear to be an entire Brooks Brothers riot online.
The source of the quote above, and for publicizing the revelation is Happy Rockefeller on The Daily Kos.
UPDATED: The HB Gary Email That Should Concern Us All
Washington’s Blog “The Empire Fights the Net” has a useful description of the power involved.
Unfortunately, the Air Force’s contract description doesn’t help dispel their suspicions either. As the text explains, the software would require licenses for 50 users with 10 personas each, for a total of 500. These personas would have to be “replete with background history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographically consistent.” It continues, noting the need for secure virtual private networks that randomize the operator’s Internet protocol (IP) address, making it impossible to detect that it’s a single person orchestrating all these posts. Another entry calls for static IP address management for each persona, making it appear as though each fake person was consistently accessing from the same computer each time.
They apparently want top-dog programmers:
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7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings
 Flood Marker in Rome 1598, when CO2 levels were extreme-(extremely low). Photo by Anthony M. After twenty years of drought predictions that turned out to be not worth a rhinestone rune-stone, the acolytes of the scare campaign were keen to find some evidence that they were still “right”. Two new papers came along showing that, golly, warming really “formally” “officially” caused floods after all, and they were just what the PR-doctor ordered. So the BBC, ABC, and the usual suspects rushed out to talk about how it was now “proven” that any flood was now officially man-made with a “robust” study and the “first scientific evidence” of a link. Richard Black even got excited that the study was based on “real world data”, which makes you wonder which studies used the fake sort?
If it’s all so definitively proven and obvious now that it’s a shame they didn’t think to join these dots, say, two years ago, so they could warn the world beforehand. It must be frustrating for them that they always seem to get the forecasts right two years too late. It’s another post hoc “prediction”.
And what are these two (TWO! shouted the believers) papers based on (AND don’t forget they’re from Nature)? The new-found certainty comes from about 50 years of records, interpreted by climate models, with those results then fed into precipitation models (just to magnify the error-margins even further). The handy thing about models is that if you try hard enough you can get nearly any result you want.
The Pall et al, 2011, abstract sums it up:
Here we present a multi-step, physically based ‘probabilistic event attribution’ framework showing that it is very likely that global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions substantially increased the risk of flood occurrence in England and Wales in autumn 2000. Using publicly volunteered distributed computing11, 12, we generate several thousand seasonal-forecast-resolution climate model simulations of autumn 2000 weather, both under realistic conditions, and under conditions as they might have been had these greenhouse gas emissions and the resulting large-scale warming never occurred. Results are fed into a precipitation-runoff model that is used to simulate severe daily river runoff events in England and Wales (proxy indicators of flood events). The precise magnitude of the anthropogenic contribution remains uncertain, but in nine out of ten cases our model results indicate that twentieth-century anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions increased the risk of floods occurring in England and Wales in autumn 2000 by more than 20%, and in two out of three cases by more than 90%.
Nature
Note that what we are not seeing here is an empirical study that found a correlation between past high CO2 era’s and more floods. That is difficult to get (and it’s absence doesn’t prove anything) but skeptics can point to those kinds of studies, for example, to show how cold periods kill more people.
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8.3 out of 10 based on 7 ratings
Breaking News, straight from Climate Depot.
Another victory for science! The House votes 244-179 to kill U.S. funding of UN IPCC!
‘[The US government] no longer wishes to have the IPCC prepare its comprehensive international climate science assessments’
Defund IPCC ‘amendment was sponsored by Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-Missouri), who read aloud on the floor from the 2009 U.S. Senate Report of more than 700 dissenting scientists!
(Written by Climate Depot’s Morano) — Luetkemeyer: Americans ‘should not have to continue to foot the bill for an (IPPC) organization to keep producing corrupt findings’
Note: U.S. Senate’s 700 Scientist report has been updated to more than a 1000 by Climate Depot. See: * SPECIAL REPORT: More Than 1000 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims.
This still has to get past the Senate.
The US contribution directly to the IPCC is only $2.3 million, and the loss of that would just shorten the two week annual junket by a few hours. But the turnaround in attitude is telling. This wouldn’t have happened two years ago. The Republicans are letting the nation know they are serious.
A majority of the research of the IPCC comes from US institutes and organizations. When this new attitude spreads to the direction of research grants, “PR” units, and to other nations, it could really start to bite. Imagine if the US congress started to fund independent audits, or solar-driven-climate research, or more satellite data collection?
5.5 out of 10 based on 2 ratings
 Photo: Courier Mail This week the Australian government tells us that we ought to pay more tax to prevent the increase in natural disasters that are dead-set bound-to-occur, yet the government itself is budgeting less for these events. Figure that. They’ve cut their expenditure projections for future natural disasters and apparently expect them to be less expensive than what the previous conservative government spent (way back in 2006), and far far less than recent bills.
LABOR has cut budget estimates to meet the cost of future natural disasters while simultaneously arguing that climate change is increasing the frequency of floods and cyclones.
Budget documents show Labor has allocated $80 million a year for the next three years — $23m less than in the last Howard budget and far less than the $524m spent last year.
The Australian
So it appears that the Australian Labor Party can warn us that natural disasters are on the rise (due to man-made emissions) but they estimate the costs of dealing with those disasters are going to be quite a lot less at least for a while. So either (a) they don’t really think disasters are coming, but they are happy to deceive the people about the risk, or (b) they do think disasters are getting worse, but they are happy to deceive people about the budget. Or there’s (c) no one is competent or organized enough to notice how these two things are wildly at odds with each other.
Once again, watch Penny Wong absolve herself of any responsibility. Apparently, the Minister of Finance doesn’t have a role in this. The bureaucrats decide:
Senator Wong said natural disasters varied in frequency, intensity, impact and cost and that budget estimates were based on a “longer-run trend” determined by agencies, not politicians.
Why do we elect her, if it’s not her job to determine how much money we ought to spend? Can we elect the bureaucrats instead?
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6.7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings
 A team of skeptical scientists, citizens, and an Australian Senator have lodged a formal request with the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) to have the BOM and CSIRO audited.
The BOM claim their adjustments are “neutral” yet Ken Stewart showed that the trend in the raw figures for our whole continent has been adjusted up by 40%. The stakes are high. Australians could have to pay something in the order of $870 million dollars thanks to the Kyoto protocol, and the first four years of the Emissions Trading Scheme was expected to cost Australian industry (and hence Australian shareholders and consumers) nearly $50 billion dollars.
 Given the stakes, the Australian people deserve to know they are getting transparent, high quality data from the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM). The small cost of the audit is nothing in comparison with the money at stake for all Australians. We need the full explanations of why individual stations have been adjusted repeatedly and non-randomly, and why adjustments were made decades after the measurements were taken. We need an audit of surface stations. (Are Australian stations as badly manipulated and poorly sited as the US stations? Who knows?)
The NZ equivalent to the Australian BOM is under an official review
The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition found adjustments that were even more inexplicable (0.006 degrees was adjusted up to 0.9 degrees). They decided to push legally and the response was a litany of excuses — until finally The National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) was forced to disavow it’s own National Temperature Records, and belatedly pretend that it had never been intended for public consumption. But here’s the thing that bites: NZ signed the Kyoto protocol, arguably based very much on the NZ temperature record, and their nation owes somewhere from half a billion to several billion dollars worth of carbon credits (depending on the price of carbon in 2012). Hence there is quite a direct link from the damage caused by using one unsubstantiated data set based on a single student’s report that no one can find or replicate that will cost the nation a stack of money. NIWA is now potentially open to class actions. (Ironically, the Australian BOM has the job of “ratifying” the reviewed NZ temperature record.)
Thanks to work by Ken Stewart, Chris Gillham, Andrew Barnham, Tony Cox, James Doogue, David Stockwell, as well as Cory Bernardi, Federal Senator for South Australia.
Copied below is the cover note of our request.
 Click on the image to download the full PDF (3.3 Mb)
Presenting a Formal Request to Audit BOM and CSIRO Climate Data and Advice
The following is a request and justification for the independent audit of the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) climate record data, particularly the data and algorithms that contribute to the formal assessments of Australian climate change provided by BOM and CSIRO to the Australian government.
BOM Data is vitally important to the nation
The CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) are publicly funded institutions. The Government relies on advice from these organisations. Decisions based on BOM data and CSIRO may increase taxes and will direct the allocation of billions of dollars in the Government and private sectors.
There are currently no independent audits of climate data
Despite their importance, there are no truly independent audits of the quality and accuracy of some of that data and information provided to the Government and to the public from these organisations. Audits are a safeguard to ensure there is no possibility of politically or ideologically motivated manipulation of records and advice.
Unexplained adjustments and errors have been discovered
Preliminary surveys of the BOM temperature record by independent analysts including engineers and scientists have found large, unexplained, non-random changes to original temperature data and in some cases clear errors. Officials inside the BOM have not to date provided adequate justification or a detailed record of the discrepancies identified.
Artificial adjustments exaggerate the warming
A BOM spokesman has claimed that the adjustments make little difference to the overall trend reported for Australia and are simply made to improve data quality. Yet independent checks suggest that the adjustments may account for as much as a third of the reported warming trend in Australia.
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8.7 out of 10 based on 7 ratings
Below is the O so apt resignation of Steven J. Welcenbach from the American Chemical Society (ACS). In it he describes how the largest scientific society in the world has become a non-scientific activist group bowing to political pressure and ignoring its members objections. Such is his ire and dismay, he is not only pulling his membership but vows to do all he can to make sure ACS does not receive public money. He suggests that many former members will form a new society that rigorously follows the scientific method (hear hear).
It’s time to start talking about that new society. What would we call this international coalition of scientists who demand the highest standards of reasoning, who expect that the society would be there to serve its members, not just serve the aspirations of the committee members, or grant-seeking-associates? What would be written into its constitution? Any large entity is a target for people seeking power or seeking to use science for their own purposes. How do we stop that decay?
Where is this science association that would never dream of uttering an ad hom, or argument from authority, and would never declare that the “debate is over” and grovel before the false prophets of science? Where is the association that would outspokenly condemn any scientist who hides data, makes logical errors, and resorts to name-calling to silence the critics?
Art Robinson wrote about the how the control of the quest for knowledge itself has been usurped from individuals and private industry and taken over by the government. I discussed his excellent article in The Truth Shall Set You Free.
How soon can we start?
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10 out of 10 based on 2 ratings
In the US there are significant moves at the highest levels to limit the carbon related power-grab. (Thanks to SPPI for the heads-up.)
Perhaps this is the point where the 2010 election results start to spoil the grandiose plans that once looked inevitable? Maybe democracy can save the day?
House republicans are trying to stop funding for the EPA “climate control” at the same time as they try to limit the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases.
House GOP spending bill prohibits funding for EPA climate regs
Source: The Hill
By Andrew Restuccia – 02/11/11 07:33 PM ET
A government spending bill unveiled Friday night by House Republicans would prohibit funding for Environmental Protection Agency climate regulations through September of this year.
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7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings
 Photo: ABC Gillard condemns us to the carbon tax plan (commencing 1 July 2012), and the future emissions trading plans (2015), setting Australia up to be the last dumb-patsy-standing as the rest of the world heads the other way and bails out of the carbon facade.
Australia must immediately pour billions into government coffers, and the man who can justify it all is Ross Garnaut.
For all the expense, the effort, and the pain, what reason did Garnaut put forward?
a/ It will reduce world temperatures. (No.)
b/ 20th century temperatures were perfect. (Says who?)
c/ Australia won’t be so “popular”. Correct answer!
That’s right, the prof of economics has studied it all, crunched the numbers, been paid a stack, and it boils down to “tut-tut-tut, nobody will like you if you don’t do what I say”. (Well, actually it is just foreign “intellectuals”that won’t like you — shucks!)
Garnaut the schoolyard prefect is telling us off. From The Australian:
“ Australia risks a backlash from the international community if it fails to make “proportionate” efforts to cut its carbon emissions.”
But wait, it gets worse, we might confuse them too. God forbid:
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7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings
The Government says it wants a “climate expert” to sell the message to the public, and who do they pick? A small mammal expert whose predictions on the climate are so wrong any normal person would slink off in shame. But not Flannery, the Teflon prophet, reality doesn’t stick to him. How can it be that the outrageously wrong get away with it with reputations intact (and get rewarded too)? Blame the mainstream media. Blame also a government that thinks it’s a good use of public money to promote known failures.
Flannery will be paid $180,000 a year to be part-time chairman of the Gillard Government’s Climate Commission, to convince us to agree to her plans to “put a price on carbon”. In other words, he’s not an expert in climate science but in science-PR. Bolt describes how Flannery changes his PR tune to suit his employers. The man has no scruples.
He claims the “committee is independent”. But we all know that they will come to no other conclusion that to support a tax, call carbon “pollution”, and rave about all the evidence (that they can’t name specifically). That $5.6 million dollar committee is just a thinly disguised $5.6 million dollar advertising campaign.
Despite the reality of floods when he predicted droughts, of 3mm sea level rises when he predicted a meter a year, Flannery is not going to admit he was wrong, or that he helped waste taxpayer funds. Nor that his promotion of a culture of endless drought may have influenced the managers of a certain dam to store water even as deadly flood water collected around them. People blame skeptics already for hypothetical deaths that may come, but bad science is already killing people.
What’s the point of this committee?
It’s sure isn’t science: the “new climate change commission which has been set up to build community support for a carbon price”. The committee is nakedly about promotion of a government agenda. They didn’t even bother to hide it.
“We don’t take advice from the Minister. Our role, really, is just to get a little bit more clarity and understanding in the public around these big issues.
“We’re going to have make a decision around this and everyone will be better served by getting a better understanding around the science.”
A “decision”? Not about “to tax or not to tax” but about “to do a town hall speech” or to do another “televised prime time advert” in the form of a press conference.
When the outcome of a committee is a preconceived conclusion, the point of it is clearly propaganda.
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7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings
The mystery: We know when we drive through a city that temperatures warm from the fringe to the middle. We know UHI is real, but how much does it affect the official records? Is a 2010 city 0.3 K hotter than a 1960 city? How would we know?
Frank Lansner has come up with a way that might approximate the UHI effect — very roughly. It’s well known that UHI gets bigger as cities grow, but the devil is in the detail. Frank argues that it’s not just the size of the city that matters, but it’s growth rate.
The USA is full of large cities, but there is not much difference between the trend in satellites and ground stations there. Frank’s approach could explain this — most of the growth in human population has come in regions like Africa, not the USA.
He figured that if we compare satellite records to ground stations and see if there is a divergence, we might be able to see an indicator of UHI. The info coming out of satellites ought not be affected as populations expand, but the ground stations are often near population centres and they gradually get surrounded with more square-kilometers of concrete and a bigger buffer of UHI. Hence Frank sectioned up the world, and looked at the trends from both sets of measurements.
None of this is simple as Frank points out. Populations don’t just grow evenly across regions, nor does each 10% increase in population translate into the same increase in industrial output (and presumably heat). Indeed Frank finds the trend changes in different regions of the world. What ever the reason, then the significant result of Frank’s analysis is that the ground based temperature stations contain, on average, nearly half a full degree (0.46 K) of extra heat trend 1979-2010 when compared to the satellite based data, and it occurs in exactly in the areas of the world with highest population growth rates: The developing countries.
A 0.46K difference (for Africa, Latin America, and Asia minus Russia) is pretty darn significant especially as it’s only over 30 years. Is that UHI?
Why do ground based temperatures rise so much faster than satellite data in areas of the largest population growth? UHI? Coincidence? Or some natural effect? (And why isn’t a PhD student, or paid researcher doing these analyses?)
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5.5 out of 10 based on 2 ratings
When “experts” say that cyclones and extreme storms will be more common in a warmer world, and are “linked”, “connected”, “expected”, or “definitely” due to man-made CO2 emissions, journalists could try asking some real questions.
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1. If storms are getting worse thanks to man-made CO2 emissions, why has there been no increase globally as man-made CO2 emissions rose over the last 40 years?
 Last 4-decades of Global Tropical Storm and Hurricane frequency -- 12-month running sums. The top time series is the number of TCs that reach at least tropical storm strength (maximum lifetime wind speed exceeds 34-knots). The bottom time series is the number of hurricane strength (64-knots+) TCs.. Source: Global Tropical Cyclone Activity Dr. Ryan N. Maue
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2. So if you admit the global trend doesn’t change, but suggest that the local or regional trends will change, which parts of the world will get fewer cyclones?
If global averages are still “average”, things have to get better somewhere else right?
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3. So if climate simulations project that Queensland will experience more cyclones, and be one of the areas that get worse, but the Crompton and McAneney (2008) paper shows that in that region the number of cyclones has been falling.
(Follow up: So the global trend is the same, and the regional trend in Queensland is falling, yet we should expect that “it will get worse”?)
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10 out of 10 based on 4 ratings
Who would have thought that if you knew the air pressure in Darwin and Tahiti in June, you could figure out that the start of 2011 might be a Stalingrad Winter up North and a cooler wetter summer down south (Not that people in Sydney feel all that cool right now). But the air pressure ratios are reported as the SOI (Southern Oscillation Index) and it’s the handiest thing if you like predicting global temperatures 7 months ahead. Look at that correlation.
Since June last year Bryan Leyland has been using the simple connection described by Carter, De Freitas, and McLean in 2009 to predict up and coming temperatures.
So far, for what it’s worth, he’s right on track.
 ... Such is the power of the stored pool of cold that is the bottom three-quarters of the Pacific Ocean. And when you look at how vast the Southern Pacific ocean is, is it any wonder it has such an influence? All that heat capacity…
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7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings
There is still billions invested in research, billions circling in carbon markets, and billions tossed as government subsidies. But there are a few less billion available now than there was before Christmas. Reality bites and Green Energy is left to face the music.
Austerity pulling plug on Europe’s green subsidies
by ERIC REGULY , Globe and Mail
The Spanish and Germans are doing it. So are the French. The British might have to do it. Austerity-whacked Europe is rolling back subsidies for renewable energy as economic sanity makes a tentative comeback. Green energy is becoming unaffordable and may cost as many jobs as it creates. But the real victims are the investors who bought into the dream of endless, clean energy financed by the taxpayer. They forgot that governments often change their minds.
When the Spanish economy went into the toilet in 2008 and 2009, austerity measures were put into place. At first, it appeared the solar industry would be spared the worst of the cutbacks. That changed a bit, but only a bit, in November, when a royal decree reduced tariffs by up to 45 per cent on new PV plants; existing plants would remain untouched. Then – whammo! – a new royal decree landed with a thud just before Christmas. While it didn’t change the tariff, it retroactively limited the number of production hours that PV plants could qualify for the subsidies.
Spain’s solar industry lobby group, the Asociacion Empresarial Fotovoltaica, estimated that the second decree would effectively reduce tariffs received by PV plants by 30 per cent, forcing many of the PV companies to default on their debt. Infrastructure Investor magazine called the second decree “the Christmas Eve massacre.”
Shucks. Lets not forget that this is the same attractive tariff that encouraged producers to generate solar powered electricity around the clock — even at night time. Those tricky solar cells were not so much photo-voltaic as diesel-voltaic. The “market” valued solar power so highly that it paid to use diesel generators to produce “solar power”.
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 Photo: Guardian Fred Pearce from New Scientist thinks that there was a real meeting between climate skeptics and “scientists” last week in Lisbon, but therein lies the problem right from the start. The climate skeptics are the scientists, and in the end, hardly anyone else turned up. The unskeptical “scientists” who lose data, hide results, and break laws of reason, not surprisingly, ran a mile from a face to face meeting with the likes of Steve McIntyre, Ross McKitrick, Steve Mosher, Georgia Tech’s Judy Curry and Peter Webster. Gavin Schmidt is not stupid, he knows he can’t win, and that there is no middle ground. He has little to gain from attending a meeting like the one held in Lisbon Portugal last week.
The meeting was the brainchild of University of Oxford science philosopher Jerry Ravetz, an 81-year-old Greenpeace member who fears Al Gore may have done as much damage to environmentalism as Joseph Stalin did to socialism. Post-Climategate, he found climate science characterised by “a poisoned atmosphere” in which “each side accuses the other of being corrupt”. Mainstream researchers were labelled “ideologues on the gravy train”, while sceptics were denigrated as “prostitutes and cranks”.
As I keep saying, Climategate is a virus that will not go away. It shocked environmental journalists, earned them dark looks from editors and everyone else in the office, and now we see that a greenpeace member obviously didn’t find all the whitewash committee declarations convincing. But note how far we have come, what a turnaround for Pearce — here’s a former petty-name-caller, now calling skeptics, “skeptics” instead of the usual insult and suggesting they were denigrated. Not long back, he was one of the ones leading the denigrating. Did he think no one would notice?
Here’s Pearce — mid 2008:
In any case, we can expect the deniers to make the most of this opportunity to pour cold water on the whole climate change narrative.
And back then we can see “Pearce-the-journo” knew more about the climate than say, Richard Lindzen, Professor of Meteorology at MIT. It was all so simple eh?
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Yasi — the super cyclone that isn’t so unusual
 Random shot of some coral bits on a beach. For all the other Christine Milne’s out there, who think coal mining causes cyclones, the empirical evidence inconveniently declares that super-cyclones have been hitting Queensland regularly for the last 5000 years.
As usual, it’s the name-callers who cling to 100 year time-frames and deny the long term evidence, while we “cherry-picking denialists” gravitate towards long term studies based on real observations. (The evidence lies in an obscure industry newsletter called Nature.) The way researcher, Jon Nott, describes it, things have been unusually quiet in our high CO2 world for the last few decades, but cyclones used to be a lot worse, and “worse” is coming back.
Thanks to The Australian for putting together a very timely piece about the historical pattern of cyclone activity.
[Johnathon] Nott is an expert on the incidence of super cyclones. By analysing ridges of broken coral pushed ashore by storm surges, he has catalogued the incidence of super-cyclones over the past 5000 years.
In a paper published in the scientific journal, Nature in 2001 his research shows the frequency of super-cyclones is an order of magnitude higher than previously thought.
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The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
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