This time from AAP, as reported in The Australian.

ANTARCTICA is melting – and that spells big trouble for Australia. Scientists used to think Antarctica was bucking the trend on global warming by getting cooler. Now it seems they got it wrong.

US researchers have pored over data from satellites and weather stations in the biggest ever study of the frozen continent’s climate – and found it’s warming after all. Scientists now estimate the melting of Antarctica’s massive ice sheets will cause the world’s sea levels to rise by one to two metres by the end of the century.

They then wheel out Prof Barry Brook (a favourite of these pages…):

“That’s bad news if you live near the Australian coast,” Prof Brook said. [Gee, really? – Ed]

“In some areas where you’ve currently got housing, you’d probably have to abandon those areas.”

He said the sea would penetrate up to 1km inland in flat areas like South Australia’s lower lakes. Large areas which don’t see flooding now would get flooded by king tides. House prices for coastal areas would probably drop, Prof Brook said.

But, as usual, there is more to the story than meets the eye. It appears that the researchers used a “statistical technique” using both surface station data and satellite data to make a “new estimate” of temperature trends. How convenient (the quote “Lies, damned lies and statistics” springs to mind…).

The scientists found temperature measurements from weather stations corresponded closely with satellite data for overlapping time periods. That allowed them to use the satellite data as a guide to deduce temperatures in areas of the continent without weather stations. (source)

“Deducing” temperatures? Sounds like flakey modelling to me. And let’s just look at some of the authors of the study:

• Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann
• Scott “Hockey Stick” Rutherford
• Drew Shindell from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (ie. James Hansen)

And as a final irony, it claims that the successful reduction of the ozone hole over the Antarctic (another Greenie cause célèbre) will cause further warming. You just can’t win, can you?

As Climate Research News so brilliantly puts it:

But wait! There is more fun to be had here – Real Climate, which includes Michael Mann, have previously said, “A cold Antarctica and Southern Ocean do not contradict our models of global warming.” You just can’t lose when playing the ‘consistent with climate models’ game can you!? Presumably, the findings of this new paper don’t contradict climate models either.

Read it here.

UPDATES:

• Watts Up With That cites volcanic activity as the most likely cause of any warming; and
• Marc Morano deconstructs the whole thing very nicely over at the Inhofe EPW Press Blog
• Climate Audit is on the case as well here
• The Age goes into full “told-you-so” mode as it labels the report “Clear Evidence Emerges of Antarctic Warming” – not so fast…

As the economy slows dramatically, and thousands of jobs are lost across all industry sectors, it is lamentable to see that Rudd has his blinkered eyes fixed firmly on forcing through his crazy emissions trading scheme at all costs.

Mr Rudd says the Government will not ignore the problems caused by climate change while it deals with the global financial crisis.

“These are both real challenges responsible Governments can’t afford to walk away from either, you have actually got to rise to the challenge, with both I believe we have got the balance right,” he said.

There’s only one real challenge, I’m afraid, and you’re making it worse. Pure climate madness.

Read it here.

Well there’s a surprise.

Governor-General Quentin Bryce had every right to enter the climate change debate, despite her role typically calling for a more apolitical approach, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong says (source).

OK then. Here’s a little poser for you… what do you think Penny Wong would have said if the GG had come out as an AGW sceptic? Can you imagine Penny saying that the GG has every right to participate in the debate? It would be outrage on all sides, “shouldn’t meddle in politics”, not her place, inappropriate for representative of the Queen to get involved, harumph harumph…

As usual, double standards rule in the climate change debate.

OK, now I am sure that Quentin Bryce has lost the plot completely. Someone needs to sit her down, with a cup of milky tea, and explain just exactly what the role of Governor General is, because she clearly hasn’t a clue. It is certainly not to act as a shill for the climate change lobby and the Rudd government. Here are the words of former Governor General Michael Jeffery, which Bryce could do well to remember:

“One always tries to throw in ideas or suggestions without treading on any political toes because as a Governor-General you simply can’t do that,” he says. “It’s not your role to become controversial, to be agin the government or agin the opposition for that matter.” His job, he says, is “to help the machinery of government”, in the broadest sense. (Source)

Not Quentin Bryce, however, who blunders in, feet first, to one of the most political issues of our time, that of “climate change”, and reveals herself to be an out and out alarmist at a renewable energy conference:

“We all have the responsibility – to each other and to our children for generations to come – to prevent the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change,” Ms Bryce said.

“We must act swiftly, act smartly, and act together.”
…
Ms Bryce said climate change was partly to blame for Australia’s crippling drought. [No it isn’t, there were far worse droughts before “climate change” was fashionable – Ed]

She talked up her country’s efforts to tackle climate change.

“Australia will play its full part in the global effort to make sure we seize that opportunity.”

All wrong in so many ways, but as GG, her words get reported and people take notice. Her role, like that of the Queen is primarily ceremonial and for her to get so involved in a deeply political issue is inappropriate in the extreme.

Read it here.

(h/t WipeOut)

As reported in The Australian:

“With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the spectre of a warming planet,” [Obama] said today in his inaugural address, vowing to pioneer a green revolution in renewable energy.

“We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost,” Mr Obama said.

“We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.”

Sorry in advance for not buying into the whole Obama thing, but WTF? This is all just hot air. “Roll back the spectre of a warming planet”? Playing God already? Has your science adviser not told you that the planet has been warming and cooling for 4.5 billion years? Wait, it’s John Holdren, he wouldn’t have.

And “restore science to its rightful place”? What, you mean, uncorrupted by politics and self-interest, as it currently is thanks to AGW alarmists like Gore and Hansen? That would be a good thing.

And as for solar and wind power, dream on, and watch your economy die.

Empty words from an empty suit.

Read it here.

Here at ACM, one tends to get bogged down wading through heaps of RSS feeds, overwhelmed with yet more dire alarmist stories in our media, grovelling around in the minutiae, and sometimes it’s helpful just to remind oneself of the big picture: the fundamental flaws in the AGW alarmists’ arguments.

Jeff Id, over at The Air Vent, has a great article based on a post in a thread at Watts Up With That, which brilliantly summarises the gaping holes in the alarmists’ case. Here’s a quick extract:

Based on this flakey data, folks build castles in the sky. They do this with computer models. (I’m a ‘computer guy’ by trade and managed a Cray supercomputer site that did modeling for plastic flow so this one galls me.) The models are ‘not very good’ to put it charitably. The don’t match reality. Their predictions are regularly shown to be bogus. When you do get a little look at how they work, it is not convincing. They leave out major, perhaps even dominant, features of climate. (Cloud formation of all sorts, cosmic rays that lead to cloud formation, variation in the sun, many most or all of the various ocean oscillations and heat transfer anomalies ENSO, AMO, etc.) Oh, and we have a specific admission by at least one of the modelers that they deliberately made the model run fast for more dramatic effect. That 50 year doom? Even their model would say it’s 150 years away if not run on ‘juice’. We have public quotes from ’scientists’ in the field saying they need to punch up the results to create stronger public responses…

Great stuff. Read it all here.

I hope Barack Obama has been practising his “walking on water” trick very hard, as it will be expected of him pretty soon when he finally takes office. That’s after he’s cured cancer, fixed up the world’s economy, achieved world peace … and all by March 1st!

What is more, the disappointment will be all the more intense when the US public realises, after maybe a year, maybe less, that he’s not divine, just another human being – a socialist/Marxist human being in fact, who will wreck the US economy, erode freedom of speech in an attempt to appease Islam, and plunge headlong into carbon trading schemes based on smoke and mirrors.

I’m sure I’m not alone in finding the adulation, hero-worship, and the almost religious devotion to the Obamessiah to be way over the top, and I have serious reservations about Obama’s prospects as President. There have been a hell of a lot of empty promises from a man who appears to be the archetypal style-over-substance victim.

And a lot of utter nonsense spouted, especially in relation to “climate change”. By appointing John Holdren (see here), a well known alarmist, as his science adviser, we can see where US policy in that area will be heading during the next four years.

The Age however cannot contain itself and gushes even more praise over “the one” under the headline “World can’t wait for Obama’s new era”, and gleefully trashes George W Bush’s record, describing him as one of the worst US presidents. I’m not even going to quote anything from it – it is nauseating, sycophantic tripe – in other words, typical Age fare.

Read it here (if you dare…)

Under the doom-laden headline “Antarctic ice shelf set to collapse” the ABC breathlessly attributes the possible loss of the Wilkins Ice Shelf to “climate change caused by heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuels.” It reports that 25,000 sq km of ice has been lost “in total” – since when, we are not told.

Wow, 25,000 sq km sounds like a hell of a lot of ice…! But, as always, the reality is different. The total Antarctic sea ice area varies from about 2.5 million sq km to nearly 15 million sq km, meaning the total loss claimed is only 1% of the minimum and about 0.15% of the maximum sea ice extent. Furthermore, in April 2008, the sea ice anomaly compared to the 1979-2000 average was up nearly 2 million sq km! Even now, it is up on the average. So even though ice is being lost here, it is being made up even more over there…

Read it here.

Writing in The Australian, Professor Bob Carter discusses the current cooling trend and wonders why the alarmists are “denying” that fact (he’s clearly picked up on my recent post about alarmists being the new deniers…!)…

Thus using several fundamentally different mathematical techniques and many different data sets, seven scientists all forecast that climatic cooling will occur during the first decades of the 21st century. Temperature records confirm that cooling is under way, the length and intensity of which remains unknown.

Yet in spite of this, governments across the world – egged on by irrational, deep Green lobbying – have for years been using their financial muscle and other powers of persuasion to introduce carbon dioxide taxation systems. For example, the federal Labor government recently spent $13.9million on climate change advertising on prime time television and in national newspapers and magazines.
…
Introduction of a carbon dioxide tax to prevent (imaginary) warming, euphemistically disguised as an emissions trading scheme, is a politician’s, ticket clipper’s and mafia chief’s dream. All will welcome a new source of income based on an invisible, colourless, odourless, tasteless and often unmeasurable gas. No commodity changes hands during its trading, and should carbon dioxide emissions actually decrease because of the existence of a carbon dioxide market (which is highly unlikely), the odds are that it will have no measurable effect on climate anyway. Nonetheless, the glistening pot of gold which beckons to be mined from the innocent public is proving nigh irresistible, and it is going to need a strong taxpayer revolt to stop it in Australia.

Read it here.

We’ll start with a definition today, as this is key to what follows:

Argument from Authority is an informal logical fallacy, formally known as argumentum ad verecundium, where an participant argues that a belief is correct because the person making the argument is an authority. (SkepticWiki)

The Canberra Times has taken over first place in the league table of AGW scaremongers from its stable mates The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald thanks to the work of Rosslyn Beeby and various opinion writers. In an article today, all the old tired clichés are pulled out of the bag one by one, including the “D” word, comparisons with tobacco lobby, funding of sceptics by “Big Oil”, and of course, rubbishing of the Petition Project:

As far as can be judged, some of the 31,000 were not graduates, very few were qualified in scientific disciplines, and almost none had any knowledge of climate change. The petition was organised by a Dr Frederick Seitz, a former president of the US Academy of Science in the 1960s, who worked as a consultant to the tobacco lobby in the 1970s, and who, apparently, has published little research of his own on any subject in 40 years, none of it on the science of climate change. The common strategy in climate change denial is not to offer serious scientific, economic or policy arguments against effective action, but to utilise prejudice, fear and inertia to undermine the case for action.

This is the classic, and fallacious, argument to authority. These 31,000 have “no” qualifications, therefore their opinion is not worth listening to. And it avoids the far more difficult task of addressing their actual arguments (which the writer doesn’t even try). Conversely, however, the fact that 31,000 signatures are on a petition likewise has little “authority” by itself. However, it demonstrates effectively that there is no consensus.

But as the writer appeals to authority, I am entitled to do the same. If he had bothered to take ten seconds do any research on the Petition Project he would have found the following information about the signatories:

• 9,021 PhD; 6,961 MS; 2,240 MD and DVM; and 12,850 BS or equivalent academic degrees;
• Atmospheric, environmental, and Earth sciences includes 3,697 scientists trained in specialties directly related to the physical environment of the Earth and the past and current phenomena that affect that environment;
• Physics and aerospace sciences include 5,691 scientists trained in the fundamental physical and molecular properties of gases, liquids, and solids, which are essential to understanding the physical properties of the atmosphere and Earth; and
• Engineering and general science includes 9,992 scientists trained primarily in the many engineering specialties

Whilst there are many scientists here that are not climate scientists, they are trained in a science discipline to a level that they can see, like me, that the wool is being pulled over their eyes, simply by looking at the evidence available. Proper scientists would never, ever, say, in respect of such a frighteningly complex and (relatively) poorly understood system such as the earth’s climate, that the debate was over or that the science was settled.

Again, as the writer has relied on authority, I am entitled to do the same (again). There were not 2500 scientists involved in the review of the IPCC’s 2007 report. As John McLean points out in his detailed expose of the IPCC review process (link – PDF):

more than 40 of the 53 authors of the crucial chapter of the IPCC 4AR had either worked together, co-authored papers together and in all probability acted as peer reviewers for each others’ work. Instead of being the product of a set of authors with a wide range of views, as the IPCC mandates, the key chapter comes from a narrow coterie of scientists.

The alarmists are the new deniers.

Read it here.