Garbage squared: Global warming to "kill a fifth of all lizards"

14 May, 2010 by

It is an ex-lizard, it has ceased to be

This is the kind of nonsense you get when you pile one computer model on top of another (hopeless) computer model. So our diligent researchers took the outputs from the IPCC’s models (which drastically overstate the climate sensitivity and hence response to CO2) which predict catastrophic warming, and plugged those numbers into an extinction model for lizards. So we have Garbage In, followed by Garbage Out, which becomes the next Garbage In and finally Garbage Out again. In other words, we have “garbage squared”.

Global warming could kill off as many as a fifth of the world’s lizards by 2080, with potentially devastating consequences for ecosystems around the world, according to a new study.

Researchers who conducted a major survey of lizard populations worldwide, which appears today in the journal Science, say lizards appear to be especially sensitive to the effects of climate change and are dying off at an alarming rate.

The loss of the lizard populations could wreak havoc with ecosystems in which they are a crucial part of the food chain, since they are important prey for many birds, snakes, and voracious predators of insects.

The biologists in the study ruled out factors other than global warming as being responsible for the rapid decrease in the lizard population.

“We did a lot of work on the ground to validate the model and show that the extinctions are the result of climate change,” says Dr Barry Sinervo, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

“None of these are due to habitat loss. These sites are not disturbed in any way, and most of them are in national parks or other protected areas,” he says.

The scientists worked up models based on predicted probabilities of local extinction showing the likelihood of species extinction was estimated to be 6% by 2050 and 20% by 2080.

Read it here.

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Become a fan of ACM on FaceBook!

14 May, 2010 by

Now on FaceBook!

Become a fan of ACM on FaceBook! Click the link below and click “Like”:

ACM Fan Page

Now you will receive ACM posts in your news feed every day.

There’s also a new button in the left hand column with a link to the Facebook page.

See you there!

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Chris Uhlmann on Rudd's ETS about-turn

14 May, 2010 by

Refreshing

Chris Uhlmann is a rarity in ABC circles – a journalist who isn’t a global warming ecotard with an axe to grind. So it is refreshing to read his critique of Kevin Rudd’s volte face on climate change:

The nude ball is well known in cricket circles.

It’s a derogatory term applied to deliveries that don’t spin, swing or seam. With the bowler doing nothing to defeat the batsman nude balls usually disappear over the boundary and the fielding captain is forced to change the attack.

The Government’s defence for its new position on climate change is the nude ball of politics. After campaigning for three years on the urgent need for an emissions trading scheme as the central weapon for reducing Australia’s carbon footprint it abruptly shelved the idea because it all got too hard.

The argument for delay is that it couldn’t get agreement in the Senate, and that international progress is too slow.

The Prime Minister summed up the case for delay in his recent exchange with The 7:30 Report’s Kerry O’Brien. [See ACM’s comment on this here – Ed]

“We believe that an emissions trading scheme is the most effective and cheapest way of getting there, [Tony Abbott] has rejected that position despite the Liberal Party having formally embraced it,” Kevin Rudd said.

“I now have to confront the reality of that is what he’s done… the progress on global action has been slower than any of us would like. That is why we’ve announced a decision that we would not seek to reintroduce this legislation until the end of the Kyoto commitment period and on the basis that global action has been adequate.”

Abandoning the idea because of Senate obstructionism ignores the fact that the Prime Minister could seek to have both houses of Parliament dissolved and then put the matter to the people at an election. If he won that election he could then put his Carbon Pollution Reduction bill to the vote at a joint sitting.

It’s not something anyone would do lightly but it is something you would do if you believed that climate change was the great moral and economic challenge of our age.

Read it here.

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Daily Bayonet – GW Hoax Weekly Roundup

14 May, 2010 by

Skewering the clueless

As always, a great read!

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Rudd loses it on 7.30 Report

13 May, 2010 by

Grim faced

As the Herald Sun puts it, channelling the spirit of Mark Latham. Well, what else can the poor chap do? He’s claimed climate change is the greatest moral challenge since the dawn of time, but then drops the ETS like a hot rock when it looks like the public don’t like it. Not content with that, he then pretends that climate change is still at the forefront of Labor policy. What a joke!

THE PM has been accused of petulance and likened to Mark Latham after a fiery outburst during a television interview last night.

Some of his political opponents compared the prime minister’s performance on ABC Television’s 7.30 Report with former failed Labor leader Mark Latham.

“He’s starting to lose it,” opposition frontbencher Andrew Robb said.

The night before, a visibly angry Mr Rudd dismissed a suggestion he had shown political cowardice on climate change by deferring his carbon pollution reduction scheme until at least 2013.

“(Climate Change Minister) Penny Wong and I sat up for three days and three nights [so what? – Ed] with 20 leaders from around the world to try and frame a global agreement,” he said.

…

Mr Rudd’s deputy Julia Gillard defended her boss saying he was passionate about climate change action.

“You’re seeing the prime minister articulate the policy but also the passion and enthusiasm to deal with this question of climate change in that interview.”

Opposition frontbencher Christopher Pyne dismissed that description of the interview, saying Mr Rudd was “just petulant”.

His colleague Greg Hunt went further: “He is making wildly erratic decisions and morphing into Mark Latham, but without the conviction.

“It appears that under the slightest pressure the prime minister is looking increasingly out of control.“

Read it (and watch an extract) here.

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US to legislate carbon cuts

13 May, 2010 by

Still desperately trying to wreck their economy for no environmental benefit, the Yanks are launching another cap-n-trade bill:

US senators on Wednesday unveiled a long-awaited plan on climate change, proposing to cut emissions 17 per cent by 2020 off 2005 levels through regulation of power, industry and transportation.

“We can finally tell the world that America is ready to take back our role as the world’s clean energy leader,” said Senator John Kerry, a Democrat from Massachusetts and close ally of President Barack Obama.

After months of fine-tuning, Kerry and independent Senator Joe Lieberman proposed a bill that would put the onus on heavy industry and power plants to cut carbon emissions, which scientists blame for global warming.

Read it here. And to understand just how pointless it all is:

The global temperature “savings” of the Kerry-Lieberman bill is astoundingly small—0.043°C (0.077°F) by 2050 and 0.111°C (0.200°F) by 2100. In other words, by century’s end, reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 83% will only result in global temperatures being one-fifth of one degree Fahrenheit less than they would otherwise be. That is a scientifically meaningless reduction. (source)

In other words, barely measurable with a thermometer.

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UN: The fount of all hysteria

11 May, 2010 by

Hysteria Co., Inc

If it’s not climate it will be something else. The UN is watching its plan for world government through climate alarmism disappear in smoke, as the public realise that there are more important things to worry about, like erupting volcanoes and Greek financial crises and Islamic terrorism. So it’s now looking elsewhere for some other “cause” via which to regulate, tax and control the globe. This time it’s the extinction of species. As you read this report, just notice how often they have simply taken the climate alarmists’ dictionary, and applied it to extinctions:

  • “Business as usual no longer an option”
  • World needs a “new vision”
  • “Sustainable future”
  • “Tipping points”
  • “Irreversible” damage to the planet unless we “act now”

As the Sydney Morning Herald breathlessly reports:

KEY natural processes that sustain human life, such as crop production and clean water, face a high risk of ”rapid degradation and collapse” because of the record rate of extinction of animal and plant species.

That is the key finding of a major United Nations report, the third edition of the Global Biodiversity Outlook.

The executive-secretary of the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity, Ahmed Djoghlaf, said: ”The news is not good. We continue to lose biodiversity at a rate never before seen in history – extinction rates may be up to 1000 times higher than the historical background rate.

”Business as usual is no longer an option if we are to avoid irreversible damage to the life-support systems of our planet.”

The Secretary-General of the UN, Ban Ki-moon, said the world needed a ”new vision for biological diversity for a healthy planet and a sustainable future for humankind”.

The outlook finds extinction rates of plant and animal species will continue and potentially accelerate far above the natural rate across this century. Threatened species are on average moving closer to extinction due to the impact of humans and climate change. Coral and amphibians are under the most stress.

The report states that if the rate of species extinction hits crucial ”tipping points,” not yet identified, there is a high risk that natural systems that help crops grow and keep water clean could be damaged irreversibly. (source)

Just replace the word “extinction” with “climate change” and we’ve heard it all before. So the next logical steps will be:

  • develop computer models that predict that species extinctions will rapidly get out of hand (just ask Michael Mann for his cast offs)
  • tweak those models to demonstrate that extinctions are directly related to something easily regulated, such as land use
  • ensure that the models play down all other factors, especially those that are natural in origin
  • organise regular conferences to decide that the world needs to “urgently tackle extinctions”
  • describe extinctions as “the greatest moral challenge of our time”
  • require countries to sign a treaty promising not to expand land use, unless they pay a new “land tax”
  • companies can trade permits to build on undeveloped land in a Land Trading Scheme
  • in no time at all, fraudsters will account for 90% of all trading on the Land Permit exchanges

and we’re back to square one.

Think I’m kidding? Just you wait!

UPDATE: And of course the Greens can’t wait to jump on any passing bandwagon. Cue Bob Brown:

Humanity is sealing its own fate by rapidly destroying the planet’s ecological diversity, the Australian Greens have warned.

“It’s not going to change while we have governments who don’t care and governments who are making things worse,” [Brown] told reporters in Canberra on Tuesday.

“It is a prescription for our own fate if we don’t stop to consider the value, of least to ourselves, of wildlife and biodiversity.” (source)

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SMH: Temperatures to rise "12 degrees by 2300"

11 May, 2010 by

Throw some more snags on the barbie, mate

Another day, another desperate plea from the warmist camp. Why would anyone voluntarily subject themselves to the alarmism of the Sydney Morning Herald? Every day, its readers are barraged with acres of doom and gloom from some hysterical climate research, its authors desperate to get a headline and keep the funding going – and the Moonbat duly obliges. The headline screams “Too hot to live: grim long-term prediction“:

HALF the Earth could become too hot for human habitation in less than 300 years, Australian scientists warn.

New research by the University of NSW has forecast the effect of climate change over the next three centuries, a longer time scale than that considered in many similar studies.

The research suggests that without action to cut greenhouse gas emissions [of course – Ed], average temperatures could rise as much as 10 to 12 per cent by 2300. [Let’s skate over the idiocy of measuring temperature rises in percentages, which only an ignorant non-scientific writer would ever do – Ed]

”Much of the climate change debate has been about whether the world will succeed in keeping global warming to the relatively safe level of only 2 degrees Celsius by 2100,” said Professor Tony McMichael, from the Australian National University, in an accompanying paper published in the journal.

”But climate change will not stop in 2100 [Duh – Ed] and, under realistic scenarios out to 2300, we may be faced with temperature increases of 12 degrees or even more.”

Professor McMichael said that if this were to happen, then current worries about sea level rises, occasional heatwaves and bushfires, biodiversity loss and agricultural difficulties would ”pale into insignificance” compared to the global impacts.

Not content with this, the article goes yet further:

There was also a real possibility that much of the existing climate modelling had underestimated the rate of global temperature rise, they said.

Dr [Keith] Dear [also of ANU] said scientific authorities on the issue, such as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), had struck a cautious tone in forecasting future temperature rise and its impact.

Please stop, my sides are about to split… Ridicule is the only response that this kind of rubbish deserves. Every single word of this is based on flaky and inadequate computer models, which are hopelessly incomplete, and which are skewed to exaggerate the effect of CO2 and suppress the effects of everything else. They must think we were born yesterday…

Read it here.

P.S. As the warmists are all over sceptics’ qualifications like a rash, I think it only fair just to point out that both authors are not climate scientists, but specialise in epidemiology and population health. Just sayin’. (see here)

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Desperation as alarmists sense the battle is lost

10 May, 2010 by

The fate of a sceptic in Kruddistan

The more desperate the quotes, the more tragic the arguments, the more it reveals that the alarmists realise that not only is the planet not complying with their incomplete and worthless climate models, but also that the penny [Wong? – Ed] has dropped in the public mind. The public realises now that the IPCC is a politicised advocacy group, spinning the science to fit an agenda conceived back in the 1980s to regulate CO2. Witness the outpouring of vitriol on Tony Abbott for daring to suggest that school pupils be sceptical (see here for original story). Heaven forbid. In Kruddistan we don’t want any of that, they should just uncritically believe whatever Chairman Rudd and the Wongbot say.

So it is with a wry smile that I read this piece in the Sydney Morning Herald.  It shows utter desperation in the face of a lost cause, even down to the headline, “Climate scientists cross with Abbott for taking Christ’s name in vain“, which once again tries (and fails) to portray Abbott as some religious nutcase:

TONY ABBOTT is under pressure to justify telling students it was considerably warmer when Jesus was alive after leading scientists said his claim was wrong.

He urged year 5 and 6 pupils at an Adelaide school to be sceptical about the human contribution to climate change, saying it was an open question.

In a question-and-answer session on Friday, the Opposition Leader said it was warmer “at the time of Julius Caesar and Jesus of Nazareth” than now.

Leading scientists said there was no evidence to suggest it was hotter 2000 years ago.

The president of the Australian Academy of Science, Professor Kurt Lambeck, said true scepticism was fine, but required looking at published data with an open mind. “To make these glib statements to school students, I think, is wrong. It’s not encouraging them to be sceptical, it’s encouraging them to accept unsubstantiated information.” Tas van Ommen, who as principal research scientist with the Australian Antarctic Division collects climate data from ice cores, said any definitive statement about temperatures 2000 years ago was “completely unfounded”.

He cited the 2007 report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which found the available data from climate records was too sparse to make clear statements beyond about 1000 years ago. Dr van Ommen said the confidence that global warming was linked to greenhouse gas emissions was based on multiple lines of evidence.

Yawn. We’ve heard it all before. As soon as you quote the IPCC, it’s time to switch off. And then they wheel out Fairfax’s alarmist in chief:

David Karoly, a Melbourne University federation fellow and climate panel lead author, said Mr Abbott’s statement appeared to be based on Heaven + Earth, a 2009 book by the geologist and climate change contrarian Ian Plimer. It has been embraced by sceptics, but criticised by scientists working in the fields it covers. [Ah yes, of course, Plimer isn’t “working in the fields it covers”, right? – Ed]

Professor Karoly said: “It seems strange to me that the leader of a political party would be seeking to disagree with Australia’s chief scientist, the Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO, the overwhelming majority of climate scientists and Australia’s support of the work of the IPCC. He obviously knows better.” (source)

Probably right. The public have an innate common sense which Sackett (raving alarmist), the Bureau, CSIRO (all on the climate gravy train) and the IPCC (ditto) all lack. They can smell a rat – and it’s a dead, rotting, carcass of a rat with a stench that could strip paint. One letter writer in The Australian gets it right:

CLIMATE Change Minister Penny Wong says she was disappointed in Opposition Leader Tony Abbott for encouraging climate change scepticism in the classroom, which she claimed was “irresponsible”, (“Climate change natural”, 8-9/5).

Since when was scepticism in science a bad thing? Mr Abbott was quite right to point out it is an open question as to why the climate changes, and what role man plays in that change.

Surely we want our children to grow up with open and questioning minds and not to accept unthinkingly any proposition put to them in the classroom.

The irony in all this is that Mr Abbott is presented as something of a hardliner, as being inflexible. But it now appears the boot is on the other foot. It is Senator Wong who is the dour, inflexible one as she constantly refuses to accept there is a valid scientific position on climate change apart from her own doomsday alarmist scenario.

It is irresponsible not to present the full range of scientific views on climate change to young, inquiring minds — indeed the general public, and individuals should be allowed to make up their own minds, without fear of being labelled or ostracised.

Alan Barron, Grovedale, Vic (source)

Keep it coming, SMH. Just more evidence that climate hysteria, like Rudd, is on the skids.

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UK: Cameron agrees to "low-carbon economy" for Lib Dem deal

9 May, 2010 by

Cameron and Clegg

Cameron and Clegg

The UK Conservatives are still stuck in the past on climate change, and desperate as they are to form a government, they are abandoning yet more of their principles by giving in to a Liberal Democrat demand for a “low-carbon economy” as part of any deal with the Conservatives. James Delingpole sums it up under the headline “Cameron’s first stupid mistake”:

I hate to tell you this but committing Britain to a low-carbon economy is not like committing yourself to keeping all phone boxes painted red or promising Britain will never join a currency it was never going to join in a million years anyway.

A low carbon economy is virtually the same thing as NO economy.

It means:

1. Committing your country – at the enormous expense of at least £18 billion a year – to combatting an entirely imaginary problem called CO2, which is plant food, and which makes no serious contribution to [Anthropogenic] Global Warming.

2. Losing 2.2 real jobs for every “Green job” you subsidise with taxpayers’ money.

3. Crippling industry with higher fuel costs and greater tax and regulation at the very moment in the economic cycle when what it needs is cheap, reliable energy, a slashing of red tape and lower taxation.

4. Squandering still more money on “alternative energy” sources, all of which are enormously expensive, none of which work.

If Cameron tries to push this sort of legislation through, our only hope is that he will be torn apart by the Furies within his party, many of whom are as AGW-sceptical as they are Euro-sceptical.

We can count ourselves lucky that at least here in Australia we have one party that is as sceptical as it’s possible to be in the current politically correct climate change environment.

Read it here.

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