UN carbon price crash: now just 1/7th Australian price

19 July, 2012 by

The Australian economy…

Australia’s “world leading” carbon price of AU$23 per tonne is now nearly seven times the price of UN-backed carbon credits, which yesterday fell to a new low:

Prices for UN-backed carbon credits sank to a record low in morning trading on Wednesday after doubts emerged about European Commission plans to prop up the bloc’s ailing emissions trading market.

Benchmark prices for certified emission reduction credits fell as much as 12.9 per cent from the previous day to a record low of €2.86 in early trading – a decline of 31 per cent from the start of July.

Allowances traded in the European Union’s emissions trading system, which the CER credits normally track, fell to a low of €6.80, down 11.5 per cent on the day and their lowest point since mid-June, before recovering to €7.18 later in the day.

Carbon prices have fallen to fresh lows at several points over the past nine months as a glut in the supply of EU credits has been exacerbated by sagging demand due to weak European economic conditions.

Some analysts believe carbon credits need to cost as much as €50 to drive the low-carbon investment that is a central plank of UN policy, so some EU countries, including Denmark and the UK, have been pushing for a plan to bolster the market. Others, such as Poland, which generates about 90 per cent of its electricity from carbon-intensive coal plants, have strongly opposed such moves. (source)

That’s the spirit, Julia – sacrifice the Australian economy on the UN’s environmental altar, right?

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Carbon tax compensation lost in gaming machines

18 July, 2012 by

Tragic

This would be funny if it weren’t so tragic:

Pokies [that’s ocker Aussie slang for gaming machines – Ed] have swallowed a chunk of the federal government’s carbon tax compensation, new figures suggest.

Revealed today by The Australian Financial Review, the figures show handouts to low-income earners under the scheme have led to surges in gaming revenues from pubs and clubs in Queensland and Victoria.

They show that there was a 7 per cent rise in poker machine revenues in Queensland in May when the government’s first clean energy payment was made to eligible people.

And the following month poker machine revenue rose by almost 12 per cent in the state on a year-by-year basis. (source)

Just another unintended consequence of old fashioned socialist interventionism.

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Bureau: warmer times for Australia… again

18 July, 2012 by

Click to enlarge

The Bureau of Meteorology has just released its latest seasonal outlooks, and it is projecting a very high chance of a warmer than normal late Winter and early Spring over much of Australia:

The national outlook averaged over August to October 2012 shows the following:

  • warmer days are more likely over most of Australia, except the northern tropics
  • warmer nights are more likely over most of Australia, except for the far tropical north

This outlook is predominantly a result of warmer than normal waters in the Indian Ocean; emerging warmer than normal Pacific waters have had a lesser impact. (source)

The BoM is predicting 75-80% chance of this over much of the continent.

If you search the Seasonal Outlook archive for “cool” or “cooler” you get 14 results. If you search for “warm” or “warmer” you get over 100. The Bureau is clearly doing its bit to prop up the Cause, but I wonder how many of those projections were actually anywhere near right? Someone with the time should go through them and compare with the actual records (also available on the BoM website).

For example, in September 2011, the Bureau claimed that the October to December months would be, you guessed it, predominantly warmer, with Brisbane and Sydney looking at a 50-55% chance of exceeding the median maximum temperature. What actually happened?

And the same for December to February, where Warwick Hughes noted:

This summer has been cooler than average across vast areas of Australia. Which has been a surprise to the BoM.

The BoM 3 month summer temperature outlooks were issued in November – actual daytime temperature anomalies were cooler over vastly more area of Australia than the BoM predicted. The actual warmth along the Perth to Pilbara coast and Sth Aust & Vic turned out to be miniscule compared to the BoM predictions. Ditto for the Far North which turned out near average. The BoM scores some marks for their Eastern and Central Australian cool predict but all of their hot predictions turned out cooler and smaller.

Let’s see how they fare with this one… check back in October.

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'Man-made' global warming

17 July, 2012 by

UPDATE: Make that FOUR interesting articles today: Watts Up reports that a new paper attributes half the global warming signal in the last century to “data homogenisation” – that’s plain old fudging to you and me. And in 2/3 of the stations, the process resulted in a temperature increase. What a surprise! Not. Read it all.

I am as prepared as anyone to accept that we are causing some warming of the climate. However, the precise amount and whether it’s a problem is the key issue.

The surface temperature data sets all show a fairly marked recent warming (far more than the satellite record), but how much of that warming is due to changes in the climate, and how much is due to, say, urbanisation, or data “homogenisation”? Homogenisation is a polite way of saying “fudging”, by the way. Excuses to “adjust” raw data for a variety of reasons, some legit, some less so – changing instrumentation, location etc etc.

Despite the fact that you would expect surface temperatures to have generally increased with population and urbanisation, and therefore any adjustments should cool the more recent records to compensate, the bizarre thing is that the data sets appear to be “cooling the past”, to make the present appear warmer… huh?

Three interesting articles today from various blogs concern the surface temperature record. Firstly we have Steven Goddard on the US Historical Climate Network (USHCN):

The animation below shows how USHCN turns a measured strong cooling trend since 1930, into a strong computer generated warming trend.

USHCN2 uses a three step process to cool the past and warm the present. Going from the actual measured daily data to “raw monthly” reduces the decline. The TOBS adjustment flips the trend from cooling to warming, and then a final mysterious adjustment creates a strong warming trend.

Whatever the final mysterious adjustment is, it has to include UHI – which would do the exact opposite of what we are seeing.

(click to see animation)

Watch those older temperatures plummet inside Tom Karl and James Hansen’s computer games, which are used to influence critical US government policy decisions.

They cool the 1930s by 1.3 degrees, and then claim that the past decade has been the warmest by a few tenths of a degree. Enron accountants would be proud of such fine data presentation. (source)

See? Man-made global warming! Then we have Jo Nova on the Bureau of Meteorology, which hasn’t yet worked out a rather fundamental rule of temperature recording:

In total, the ACORN-SAT database released in March displays about 1,000 (one thousand) violations of [the] simple rule that for any day

The Maximum Temperature must be greater than the Minimum Temperature.

This is a blindingly obvious type of error which should not have escaped quality control. It throws serious doubt on the whole ACORN-SAT project. In my opinion, these violations indicate that the entire ACORN-SAT database is suspect, and should be withdrawn for further testing. (source)

Hmm. And finally, over the ditch in New Zealand, the National Institute for Atmospheric and Water Research (NIWA) is in court today faced with a challenge that its temperature record is also not so ‘hot’ (heh):

A climate change group has taken the National Institute for Atmospheric and Water Research (NIWA) to court over what they say are inaccurate temperature recordings.

The New Zealand Climate Education Trust – a branch of the NZ Climate Science Coalition – are challenging NIWA figures which show a rise in temperatures in New Zealand of 1degC over the past 100 years.

This figure is significantly higher than global warming figures around the world and the trust is questioning how NIWA calculated the figures and whether they are accurate.

It believes there has either been no warming or a trivial warming of around 0.2degC.

The group’s lawyer Terry Sissons told the High Court at Auckland today that  NIWA could have obtained inaccurate New Zealand average temperatures due to ‘sudden site relocations’ and by regularly changing temperature gauging instruments.

“We’re not saying that climatic changes are not happening but let’s at least ensure the evidence gathered for the benefit of New Zealanders is accurate and is done properly,” Sissons said. (source)

So in other words I think we have a ‘consensus’, ladies and gentlemen: surface temperature records are a crock the world over.

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Let's make sure Gillard has to answer these questions

16 July, 2012 by

Hang out with the PM? No thanks…

The OurSay website is inviting us to “hang out with the Prime Minister” – nothing I could think of could possibly be worse, but anyway – and you have the chance to vote for the three questions she will be asked [Update: link fixed to show most popular questions first]. You may recall that ACM’s question on OurSay’s The Climate Agenda reached third place and therefore received a full page article in Fairfax – that must have hurt.

Let’s see if we can make our hopeless PM squirm, shall we?

The top two questions as it stands are as follows:

“By how much, measured in thousandths of degrees Celsius, will the Earth’s temperature be reduced through the carbon tax?”

(0.0035C apparently), and:

“You said that you wouldn’t impose a price on CO2 until you had a deep and lasting consensus from the Australian people – When did you receive that consensus? and where is that consensus at now?”

It’s nowhere to be seen. And the public are abandoning you in droves…

Register at Our Say and you have 8 votes. Use them as you see fit – you have just over three days left.

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Freedom of Information: request for donations

15 July, 2012 by

Karoly the activist*

UPDATE: Very many thanks to all of you who have made donations so far (you know who you are) – we now have enough to cover the present FOI expenses. However, if you haven’t donated yet, please consider doing so anyway to help cover some of the ongoing costs of hosting this site (which exceed US$150 per month). We’re still waiting for that Big Oil cheque to arrive. Must have got lost in the post… Perhaps I should try and get some Big Green funding instead – that seems a great deal more bountiful.

I don’t normally request donations, but in this case I am making an exception, so I hope you will forgive me in advance. Firstly a bit of background.

Since my ANU Freedom of Information request was covered by The Australian (see here for full details), I have submitted a further request to The University of Melbourne (or the “Parkville Asylum” as it is known). The request is again relating to death threat emails, this time in respect of Prof David Karoly and one of his colleagues.

Prof Karoly is a Review Editor for the IPCC’s Assessment Report 5 (see here – large PDF) and also on the science advisory panel for the WWF’s Climate Witness project. Apparently, being closely involved with an environmental activist organisation like the WWF does not present Karoly with any conflict of interest, whereas clearly any “denier” who earns one cent from a sceptic think tank is hopelessly compromised. Double standards are a wonderful thing.

[UPDATE: Karoly is also happy to be associated with other shrill environmental advocacy groups, like the naive Australian Youth Climate Coalition, presenting a video on “the science” here. Now we all know that if a geologist has even the most tenuous association with a fossil fuel company, he is immediately ostracised and never trusted or listened to again. So applying those same standards to Karoly himself, presumably we should never trust him or listen to another word he says either, right? No, wait…]

He is well known to readers of this blog as being one of the Gillard government’s climate advisors and a climate alarmist (see here for a recent example). Karoly was one of the climate scientists interviewed in the original Canberra Times article relating to death threats, and a month later gave a lengthy interview to The Age in which he recycles the tired old arguments yet again:

More broadly, however, [Karoly] notes an organised distribution of emails against mainstream climate change scientists.

He points to “so-called think tanks” established by climate change sceptics, whose claims are cited widely by conservative industry lobby groups in a bid to convince legislators that climate change science is full of unknowns.

He highlights the recent establishment of a website by a group called the Galileo Movement. “This site has [ Sydney broadcaster] Alan Jones as the patron and a list of the usual climate change sceptics as their scientific advisers.”

The journalist didn’t ask him about the WWF, sadly, and Karoly clearly has no awareness of the issues that climate science faces with regard to its credibility, given Climategate and the duff predictions of people like Tim Flannery (the Climate Commissioner).

Unfortunately, it seems climate scientists love to play the role of victim. The death threats story was perfect, as it allowed them to portray themselves as innocent bystanders targeted by evil “deniers” in the pay of big oil. And they can’t stop doing it.

You may recall the Gergis et al paper, which was withdrawn after blogger Steve McIntyre found flaws in its calculations? Karoly politely wrote to McIntyre about the issue, but once the dust had settled, was back in his old ad hom ways, accusing McIntyre in a book review of  “promulgating misinformation” (the original review by Karoly has been removed, but the Google cache still shows it, and I have preserved it in PDF here).

When asked by McIntyre to provide examples of such activities, instead of responding, Karoly retreats to the cosseted environment of Un-Skeptical Pseudo-Science to resume his victimhood, protesting in the comments:

 In Australia, I have just received a threat of legal action from Steve McIntyre in Canada and am currently dealing with 6 different FOI requests.

There was no threat of legal action, just a “please explain” – but it’s so much better for The Cause if you don the mantle of victimhood and claim you’re under threat of legal action. Read Steve’s post over at Climate Audit here.

Also, one of those FOI requests was mine – I was going to let it drop, but seeing the  manner in which Karoly has reacted to McIntyre, I’m going ahead with it. So I am therefore asking if you would be so kind as to make a donation.

It is likely to be several hundred dollars, so if you are able to contribute anything (every single dollar helps) I would be personally very grateful. Please mark your donation “FoI” so that it can be allocated specifically to this project rather than towards general operating costs.

Click the Donate button in the Big Oil Tip Jar in the left sidebar to send funds via PayPal.

Thank you all in advance.

*Karoly’s t-shirt reads “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” – the slogan of the radical Left “Weather Underground” movement – see here. Again, it’s perfectly fine for Karoly to be an activist! 

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Brendan O'Neill on 'extreme weather' hysteria

14 July, 2012 by

Brendan O’Neill

You can bet the farm that if there’s some noteworthy weather event (with the emphasis on the term “weather”) somewhere on the planet, there will be a Green nut-job on hand to say it was all caused by man-made global warming.

Usually it’s couched in weasel words, of course, the most common formula being the “consistent with” ploy.

The floods in Queensland were “consistent with” global warming projections. The drought in south-east Australia was “consistent with” global warming projections. The rains that filled the dams and ended the drought in south-east Australia were “consistent with” global warming projections. The Victorian bush fires (that were actually worsened by a variety of non-climate related factors) were “consistent with” global warming projections. The record low temperatures in Canberra last week were “consistent with” global warming projections. My cat getting fleas is “consistent with” global warming projections. My losing a $2 coin down the back of the sofa last Tuesday is “consistent with” global warming projections. [Insert anything you like] is “consistent with” global warming projections.

As has been said countless times on this blog, it is, of course, the classic example of an unfalsifiable hypothesis: ask a greenie to describe the kind of weather events that would not be consistent with global warming, and you’ll get a stony silence. Because anything and everything is “consistent with” some global warming model somewhere. And I’m almost glad the warm-mongers continue to make these nonsensical claims, because every time they do, it moves them further away from proper science and into the realms of astrology.

Brendan O’Neill has a whale of a time exposing the neo-Medieval view of the planet punishing humanity for its sins:

Greens now constantly promote the wild idea that mankind’s irresponsible behaviour is causing “extreme weather”, and that only by being more meek, by radically overhauling our lifestyles, can we hope to tame this weather of mass destruction.

But haven’t we heard this kind of thing before? Yes. From the biblical era to the Middle Ages, the idea that the immorality of man was responsible for enraging nature or God and causing storms and floods was widespread.

So the modern green claim that floods in Britain are a consequence of our wicked over-reliance on fossil fuels, that is of our daring to live industrialised lives, is just a pseudo-scientific updating of the Noah story.

Genesis tells us it was when God saw “the wickedness of man was great” that he decided to “bring a flood of waters upon the earth”.

Today, greens give us a science-tinged version of that morality tale. Mark Lynas, one of Britain’s leading eco-thinkers, says that with all our fossil fuel-using and climate disruption “we have woken Poseidon (God of the Sea) from a thousand-year slumber, and this time his wrath will know no bounds”.

A columnist for The Guardian says recent floods are a kind of punishment for our polluting behaviour. “The turbulent weather we’ve seen is a warning of what lies ahead for us,” she said, unless we can be “cajoled, led, provoked and taxed into changing (our) ways”.

Here, Gaia replaces God as the sender of floods to reprimand man and “change our attitudes”.

Quick, stone another sceptic…

Read it here.

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Queensland: stop climate brainwashing in schools

14 July, 2012 by

Climate sense

A few days ago, The Australian reported on the fact that, in the Queensland curriculum, science is regarded as a “social and cultural activity”, an approach totally at odds with the concept of the scientific method:

“Science is a social and cultural activity through which explanations of natural phenomena are generated,” it says.

“Explanations of natural phenomena may be viewed as mental constructions based on personal experiences and result from a range of activities including observation, experimentation, imagination and discussion.

“Accepted scientific concepts, theories and models may be viewed as shared understandings that the scientific community perceive as viable in light of current available evidence.”

In other words, we are talking about here is “post-normal science” where objective truths are no longer paramount, and where various societal “interpretations” can be overlaid on bare scientific facts. As I quoted in a blog post back in 2010:

The guiding principle of normal science – the goal of achievement of factual knowledge – must be modified to fit the post-normal principle…For this purpose, post-normal scientists should be capable of establishing extended peer communities and allow for ‘extended facts’ from non-scientific experts…In post-normal science, the maintenance and enhancement of quality, rather than the establishment of factual knowledge, is the key task of scientists… Involved social actors must agree on the definition of perceptions, narratives, interpretation of models, data and indicators…scientists have to contribute to society by learning as quickly as possible about different perceptions…instead of seeking deep ultimate knowledge. (source: Eva Kunseler, Towards a new paradigm of Science in scientific policy advising)

It’s utter garbage of course. But nowhere has this new flexibility of post-normal science been exploited more effectively than in the teaching of climate change in schools. Political correctness and “social and cultural interpretations” have trumped scientific objectivity, so that students are fed a stream of eco-propaganda cut-and-pasted from environmental activist groups press releases, which masquerades as impartial science.

The typical line would go like this:

Man-made emissions of CO2 are causing global temperatures to rise and we should cut our emissions urgently to avoid the risk of dangerous climate change. A tiny minority of scientists (or “deniers” as we should call them), funded by large oil companies who want to maintain the status quo, are paid to state that climate change is not happening/is a hoax/is a Marxist plot/etc etc…

Dissent is suppressed at all costs and only the “authorised” line is plugged. If you think this is exaggerated, have a look at the extract from a geography text book at the end of this post (see original here).

But it seems that a number of Queensland Liberal National Party (LNP) members are in favour of an overhaul of Queensland’s education system, specifically the teaching of climate:

LNP members have overwhelmingly voted to ensure the removal of “environmental propaganda” about climate change from schools.

The motion, proposed by the LNP’s Noosa State Electorate Council, calls on Education Minister John-Paul Langbroek to require Queensland schools to “remove environmental propaganda material, in particular post-normal science about ‘climate change’, from the curriculum and as adjunct material at exam time”.

The mover of the motion, LNP member Richard Pearson, railed against “those false prophets who would poison the minds of our children in our schools”.

“Few people understand that the so called science of climate change is really what can be defined as ‘post-normal’ science,” he said, arguing it went beyond traditional understanding of science based on experimentation and falsifiable theories.

Another member spoke against the motion, saying he was concerned when people tried to dismiss differing opinions and he believed children to have access to all information.

The motion was nonetheless passed with overwhelming support from the LNP members at the gathering.

At last year’s conference, LNP president Bruce McIver questioned the role of humans in driving climate change, arguing the climate was always changing and children were being “brainwashed” in the way climate science was taught. (source) [Update: The Australian has more here]

I guess we wait for the brainless alarmists to start saying that this is akin to teaching creationism alongside evolution or that gravity isn’t settled science or some other idiotic comparison. No, it isn’t. Whereas there are centuries of hard empirical evidence for both evolution and gravity, there are about 20 years of flaky computer modelled projections on which the entire climate scare is based, not to mention the massaging of temperature data to prop up The Cause.

Furthermore, whereas there are no political gains to be made from evolution and gravity, climate change has been swamped by political motivations of global organisations like the UN and the IPCC (which, having been infiltrated by environmental activist groups, have already made up their minds that CO2 is to blame and are just desperately searching for evidence to back it up) and national governments, implementing pointless gestures like the carbon tax to appear politically correct (and in Australia’s case, stay in power).

For anyone to claim the “science is settled” and that only the approved version be taught in schools is delusional. At least Queensland LNP is taking a stand against this brainwashing.

Extract from NSW Year 8 Geography text book:

Propaganda (click to enlarge)

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Roman and Medieval periods warmer than today

12 July, 2012 by

Cooling trend?

Another story you won’t see anywhere on the ABC, firmly stuck in its groupthink mode and working itself up into a lather plugging a litany of dire and alarmist statements from a symposium on coral reefs, which has predicted, amongst other things, rises in sea levels of 1.7m by the next century (far exceeding even the “gold standard” IPCC projection).

I wonder if a “coral reef symposium” would get any media interest at all if it didn’t follow the well worn-path of alarmism and links to man-made climate change? Probably not.

And why, I wonder, did the ABC choose not to report on a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Climate Change that showed the Roman and Medieval periods were actually warmer than the present, without any help from man-made CO2? Because it doesn’t fit the rusted-on groupthink, maybe?

A new study measuring temperatures over the past two millennia has concluded that in fact the temperatures seen in the last decade are far from being the hottest in history.

A large team of scientists making a comprehensive study of data from tree rings say that in fact global temperatures have been on a falling trend for the past 2,000 years and they have often been noticeably higher than they are today – despite the absence of any significant amounts of human-released carbon dioxide in the atmosphere back then.

“We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low,” says Professor-Doktor Jan Esper of the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, one of the scientists leading the study. “Such findings are also significant with regard to climate policy.” (source)

They certainly are. But don’t expect such policies to change anytime soon.

Warmist journal New Scientist does its best to prop up the consensus and wheels out Michael “Stick” Mann to rubbish the results:

The finding does not change our understanding of the warming power of carbon dioxide. In fact, it shows that human CO2 emissions have interrupted a long cooling period that would ultimately have delivered the next ice age. [So we’ve stopped an ice age? I would have thought that was probably quite good news…]

Esper says temperature reconstructions will have to be redone because past studies probably underestimated temperatures during the medieval warm period and other warm periods going back to Roman times. The further back in time, the greater the underestimate would be.

But others have doubts. [Michael] Mann argues that Esper’s tree-ring measurements come from high latitudes and reflect only summer temperatures. “The implications of this study are vastly overstated by the authors,” he says. (source)

Because when you’re an activist first and a scientist second, like Mann and the rest of the Hockey Team, your mind is firmly closed to even the possibility of contradictory evidence.

Link to paper here.

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Donna Laframboise in Sydney

11 July, 2012 by

ACM author with Donna Laframboise

Last night I attended the Sydney talk of Canadian author and blogger Donna Laframboise, whose book, “The Delinquent Teenager who was mistaken for the world’s top Climate Expert” has recently been published here in Australia.

A large crowd had gathered at the Sheraton on the Park to hear Donna speak about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In her talk, she explained how despite protestations that the IPCC was a collection of the world’s best climate scientists, much of the IPCC’s reports were written by students and environmental activists, and that many appointments to the panel were politically motivated.

She also showed that the IPCC’s claim only to rely on peer-reviewed science was false, with over 30% of the references cited in the recent AR4 coming from newspaper clippings, WWF and Greenpeace reports, press releases and other grey literature. I wonder how much of that grey literature supported “the consensus”? I’m guessing roughly 100%.

I have corresponded with Donna in the past and it was great to meet her finally! Donna, I hope you enjoy the rest of your stay in “Fantasy Island”.*

John Roskam of the IPA

 

Donna Laframboise

 

Signing books

* Roger Pielke Jr.’s Blog: Welcome to Fantasy Island!

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