BoM: 2009 "second hottest year on record"

5 January, 2010 by

Good news for doom mongers

The warmenistas will love this – oh, well, can’t begrudge them a bit of fun – it’s been a shocking year for the poor blighters. The Bureau has come out and labelled 2009 the second hottest year on record:

“2009 ends Australia’s warmest decade on record, with a decadal mean temperature anomaly of +0.48C (above the 1961-90 average),” the Bureau of Meterology said.

“In Australia, each decade since the 1940s has been warmer than the preceding decade. In contrast, decadal temperature variations during the first few decades of Australia’s climate record do not display any specific trend. This suggests an apparent shift in Australia’s climate from one characterised by natural variability to one increasingly characterised also by a trend to warmer temperatures.”

In a statement, the bureau also noted that the World Meteorological Organisation stated that 2009 is expected to be the globe’s fifth warmest year on record (about 0.44C above the 1961-90 average).

And the moronic Peter “Where’s Penny” Garrett leaps on it as evidence of “global warming”:

Environment Minister Peter Garrett said today the finding that Australia’s annual mean temperature for 2009 was 0.9C above the 1961-90 average exposed Tony Abbott’s false climate change claim that global warming has stopped.

“This false and misleading claim is today shown to be completely at odds with the rigorous scientific findings of the independent experts at the Bureau of Meteorology,” Mr Garrett said.

“This is the latest Abbott climate-change clanger to be exposed by the independent experts and once again shows why Mr Abbott cannot be trusted when it comes to climate change.”

Mr Garrett said the weather records underlined the need for a carbon pollution reduction scheme to reduce global warming. (source)

Where’s Penny again? Where’s Kevin? When those two aren’t around, it’s left to the pea-brained rock-star to deal with climate matters. So what does this actually say? It actually says that the surface temperature in Australia is the second highest since 1850 [Update: actually, since 1910, which makes it even less relevant]. Big freaking deal. The planet was at the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850, so guess what, it’s getting warmer.

What doesn’t it say?

  • It doesn’t prove any link with CO2 emissions, so Garrett’s link to the CPRS is total nonsense
  • It doesn’t say that the satellite record shows far less warming (almost none) since 2001 (see below)
  • It doesn’t say the planet has been warmer previously – it has, many times – nor that the rate of warming is anything unusual.

In fact, Dr Roy Spencer has just posted the December anomaly from UAH:

Dr Spencer comments thus:

While the large amount of year-to-year variability in global temperatures seen in the above plot makes it difficult to provide meaningful statements about long-term temperature trends in the context of global warming, the running 25-month average suggests there has been no net warming in the last 11 years or so. (source)

Which would you trust? Satellite data, or thermometer records that are fudged and “adjusted” and “homogenized” by the likes of CRU?

UPDATE at 3 pm: And of course, every two-bit rag, newsletter and gossip sheet in Australia is now running the story. Stuffed full of alarmists, the editorial offices have had a pretty tough time, what with the climate not co-operating, and Climategate. But now they can breathe a collective sigh of relief as a big, copper-bottomed scare story finally breaks (except it isn’t if you actually stopped for five seconds to think about it).

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2009 Weblog Awards cancelled

5 January, 2010 by

Cancelled

Unfortunately, due to lack of computing resources, the Weblog awards have been cancelled this year.

A big thank you, however, to all of you who nominated this site – we had the highest number of nominations in the Best Australian or New Zealand Blog category.

Hopefully, they will get their act together for next year.

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Rally in Canberra for Peter Spencer

4 January, 2010 by

Supporters

Whilst Kevin Rudd sits and home and takes the credit for a children’s book about his pets written by someone else, Peter Spencer is into his 43rd day of hunger strike protesting against the confiscation of his land (without compensation) for use as a carbon sink, in order for Australia to meet its Kyoto obligations (see here for more stories on this).

More than 300 people have rallied outside Parliament House in Canberra in support of hunger-striking New South Wales farmer Peter Spencer.

Mr Spencer has spent 43 days without food on top of a tower on his property at Shannons Flat near Cooma, in protest against state laws which stop him from clearing vegetation on his land.

He wants the Commonwealth to compensate farmers whose land has been used as ‘carbon sinks’.

…

Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce also addressed the crowd, calling for a Royal Commission into vegetation laws.

He said farmers across Australia have been unjustly divested of their land.

“It might have been legally possible but it was totally unjust,” he said.

Read it here.

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Monckton offers "personal briefing" to Kevin Rudd

4 January, 2010 by

Viscount Monckton

Viscount Monckton writes to Kevin Rudd to offer a “personal briefing” on the non-problem of AGW:

Prime Minister,

Climate change: proposed personal briefing

Your speech on 6 November 2009 to the Lowy Institute, in which you publicly expressed some concern at my approach to the climate question, has prompted several leading Australian citizens to invite me come on tour to explain myself in a series of lectures in Australia later this month. I am writing to offer personal briefings on why “global warming” is a non-problem to you and other party leaders during my visit. For convenience, I am copying this letter to them, and to the Press.

I wouldn’t hold your breath. Kevin Rudd and his government have their fingers plugged firmly into their ears on this subject.

Read it all here (h/t WUWT)

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Christopher Booker: Met Office gives us the warmist weather

3 January, 2010 by

Alarmism

Christopher Booker lifts the lid on the alarmism at the UK Met Office:

The reason the Met Office so persistently gets its seasonal forecasts wrong is that it has been hi-jacked from the role for which we pay it nearly £200 million a year, to become one of the world’s major propaganda engines for the belief in man-made global warming. Over the past three years, it has become a laughing stock for forecasts which are invariably wrong in the same direction.

The year 2007, it predicted, would be “the warmest ever” – just before global tempratures plunged by more than the entire net warming of the 20th century, Three years running it predicted warmer than average winters – as large parts of the northern hemisphere endured record cold and snowfalls. Last year’s “barbecue summer” was the third time running that predictions of a summer drier and warmer than average prefaced weeks of rain and cold. Last week the Met Office was again predicting that 2010 will be the “warmest year” on record, while Europe and the US look to be facing further weeks of intense cold.

What is not generally realised is that the UK Met Office has been, since 1990, at the very centre of the campaign to convince the world that it faces catastrophe through global warming. (Its website now proclaims it to be “the Met Office for Weather and Climate Change”.) Its then-director, Dr John Houghton, was the single most influential figure in setting up the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as the chief driver of climate alarmism. Its Hadley Centre for Climate Change, along with the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU), was put in charge of the most prestigious of the four official global temperature records. In line with IPCC theory, its computers were programmed to predict that, as CO2 levels rose, temperatures would inevitably follow. From 1990 to 2007, the Department of the Environment gave the Met Office no less than £146 million for its “climate predictions programme”.

Read it here.

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Idiotic Comment of the Day: Clover Moore

1 January, 2010 by

If in doubt, say nowt

Sydney’s batty “Lord” mayor spoils the New Year celebrations by hijacking them to preach about climate change. It’s just so last year:

“I think it’s an incredibly important message. As I said last night, Aboriginal people believe that each year you awaken the spirit of the land, the sea, the sky and the people,” Ms Moore told reporters.

“I believe that at this time there is no more important message because we are facing catastrophic climate change and we indeed need to awaken our spirit to take action to address global warming.”

The celebrations were carbon neutral, Ms Moore said. (source)

Big freaking deal. Thanks for ruining people’s enjoyment of the New Year. Now go away.

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Quote of the Day: Catherine Deveny

1 January, 2010 by

Over the edge

Quite disturbing:

Like all people apart from politicians my hopes for 2010 are world peace and freedom from hunger, poverty, discrimination and oppression. Oh and the reintroduction of stoning for Channel Nine executives, religious fundamentalists, people who ask you to bring your own meat to their barbeques, parents with ‘gifted children’ and ‘climate change skeptics’.

(Climate Change Skeptics (also known as morons) are people who don’t believe in science purely because they a) can’t bear to admit they couldn’t see it coming or may have contributed to it b) don’t care because they assume by the time the real catastrophe happens they’ll be old, dead or rich enough to buy their way out and or c) refuse to accept the evidence because if they do they will have to admit that it God doesn’t exist. Because if God existed wouldn’t we be special enough for him to spare us?)

We’re really through the looking glass now. And the good old ABC gleefully publishes this kind of stuff.

Read the rest here – it’s even more bizarre.

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ETS: Electricity prices to double within two years

1 January, 2010 by

Minchin: stunned

… and treble by 2024. All thanks to the ETS. Fortunate, then, that it will never make it into law:

New modelling by the Government’s energy market operator reveals the wholesale price of electricity will rise from $30 per megawatt hour in 2010 to about $100 by 2024.

In a national transmission report released before Christmas, the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) predicts the price will double to $60 per megawatt hour by 2012.

The wholesale price makes up less than half of the final bill that reaches each customer, who also pays distribution costs.

The AEMO modelling is based on Treasury’s carbon price estimates under the proposed emissions trading scheme, which from next year will force big polluters to pay for their emissions. [Er, well it would if it was actually law yet – Ed]

Opposition energy spokesman Nick Minchin yesterday accused the Rudd Government of trying to hide the real costs of tackling climate change.

“I think Australians will be stunned to learn that their power bills could more than triple as a result of Mr Rudd’s climate change policies,” Senator Minchin said.

Read it here.

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Tom Switzer: Don't expect too much down Mexico way

1 January, 2010 by

"Climate agreement? We don't need no stinking climate agreement!"

Always right on the money, Tom Switzer says that the chances of any agreement on climate in Mexico are microscopic:

All the evidence indicates that President Barack Obama won’t be able to lead the world to a post-Kyoto deal. This is because the politics of the environment have shifted dramatically in recent months. There are many reasons for the changing climate in Washington. Here are four of them:

First, both Congress and the White House remain pre-occupied with other policy priorities from overhauling the healthcare and immigration systems and increasing 30,000 troops to Afghanistan to implementing new Wall Street regulations and tackling double-digit unemployment and skyrocketing debt and deficit.

Second, polls and surveys Pew, Gallup, Zogby, Rasmussen show Americans are quickly losing faith in the science of man-made climate change. A Harris Poll found that those who believe that carbon dioxide leads to global warming have dropped from 71 per cent two years ago to only 51 per cent today. And this poll was conducted before Climategate erupted.

…

Third, world leaders are recognising that reaching a global consensus on climate change is even more difficult than reaching a global consensus on multilateral trade. China and India insist they won’t be part of what they see as an economic suicide pact. In Canada, a Kyoto signatory that has increased its emissions much faster than the US, the ETS bill is stalled in legislative limbo. In Australia, the conservative opposition parties just defeated Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

…

Fourth, this year is an American election year. A huge new energy tax that threatens to cut wages and jobs unnerves politicians facing a mid-term vote. And not just Senate Republicans either. “Blue Dog” Democrats from the South as well as “Brown Dog” Democrats from the Midwest and Great Plains, whose states are dependent on coal and manufacturing, are uneasy about the administration’s energy policies.

Read it here.

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Rudd's New Year delusion on climate

1 January, 2010 by

More spin than a launderette

Spinning is what Labor does best, and Kevin Rudd is a master of the art. Copenhagen was a disaster – only rescued from achieving absolutely nothing by the presence of the Obamessiah himself, who cobbled together a flimsy, eleventh-hour non-agreement in order to have something to announce to the waiting media. But not according to our Kevin, speaking in a typically patronising New Year address, who actually divined some kind of outcome:

We saw more than 90 per cent of world leaders supporting the Copenhagen Accord on climate change.

It was by no means a perfect agreement, as Australia wanted much more, but it was an agreement nonetheless, where the alternative was complete collapse and total inaction.

Globally, we’ve agreed for the first time that temperature increases must be kept within two degrees Celsius [Just like that – world leaders agree, and the earth’s climate meekly follows – Ed] and that rich and poor countries alike will bring down their carbon emissions to limit increases in global temperatures.

As one of the hottest and driest continents, Australia is experiencing the impact of climate change first, and hardest [No it isn’t. See here – Ed]. We therefore have a deep national interest in global and national action on climate change.

If we do not act at home and abroad, we betray both our children’s future [“and our grandchildren’s future” – Ed], and their ability to enjoy our natural wonders, including the Barrier Reef.

Pious nonsense.

Read it here.

Read it here.

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