More money than sense

8 January, 2011 by

Think it through…

The wealthy founder of website wotif.com donated $1.6 million to the Greens’ 2010 election campaign:

The generous donation by Brisbane-based businessman Graeme Wood, who has an estimated wealth of $378.5m, formed the bulk of the Greens election campaign spending, according to an article in the Fairfax press.

The Greens were able to invest in a high-rotation television advertising campaign.

Independent market research found the party won more votes in the seats that were targeted by the television advertising campaign.

Mr Wood told Fairfax he made the donation because he was unhappy with Labor and the Coalition policies on climate change and the environment.

“I didn’t think either of those parties were being effective,” he said. “They were being driven by people with vested interests.” (source)

I wonder if Mr Wood realises that if the Greens were ever able to implement their backward, dangerous, Marxist policies fully (g-d help us), there wouldn’t be an economy left in which he could amass such a vast personal fortune. He should be thanking the Coalition. Twit.

UPDATE: Andrew Bolt has more.

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Earth's natural negative feedbacks

7 January, 2011 by

Negative feedback

Feedbacks are what climate alarmism is built on. The warming effect of carbon dioxide alone is already almost at its maximum, and a doubling of the concentration would at most add less than 1 degree C to the global temperature. But the alarmist models use that modest warming to initiate positive feedbacks, increasing and accelerating it to dangerous and catastrophic levels.

Here, however, is a great example of the planet’s natural tendency for negative feedbacks:

Bacteria ate nearly all the potentially climate-warming methane that spewed from BP’s broken wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico last year, scientists reported on Thursday.

Nearly 200,000 tons of methane — more than any other single hydrocarbon emitted in the accident — were released from the wellhead, and nearly all of it went into the deep water of the Gulf, researcher David Valentine of the University of California-Santa Barbara said in a telephone interview.

Bacteria managed to take in the methane before it could rise from the sea bottom and be released into the atmosphere, but the process contributed to a loss of about 1 million tons of dissolved oxygen in areas southwest of the well.

That sounds like a lot of oxygen loss, but it was widely spread out, so that the bacterial munching did not contribute to a life-sapping low-oxygen condition known as hypoxia, said Valentine, whose study was published in the journal Science.

What happens to methane has been a key question for climate scientists, because methane is over 20 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. Like carbon dioxide, methane comes from natural and human-made sources, including the petroleum industry.

…

The BP spill offered an “accidental experiment” that showed particular bacteria with an all-methane diet multiplied quickly as the methane spread with the underwater plume from the broken well. Peak consumption of methane probably came in late July and early August, Valentine said.

Other organisms dealt with other hydrocarbons, including ethane and propane emitted in the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history. The methane-eating bacteria were the last to the hydrocarbon banquet, and based on past observation, the scientists questioned whether they could do the job.

“Given observations about how slowly methane is normally consumed, we didn’t think the (bacteria) population was up to the challenge at all … we thought it would be a lot slower,” Valentine said. (source)

How wrong they were. It’s not surprising if you think about it – in a massively complex ecosystem such as our own planet, when a particular variable begins to increase (methane concentration), there will be some natural process (explosion of methane-consuming bacteria) to act as a negative feedback to restore the system to a quiescent state. Crikey, I’m beginning to sound like a Gaia-freak!

Speaking of Gaia freaks, ACM stalwart Andy Pitman (see here for one of Pitman’s previous classics) comes to a fellow warmist’s aid in today’s Australian, playing down Tim Flannery’s “earth-mother” nonsense on The Science Show (see here), and spouting all the usual alarmist nonsense we would expect from someone on the AGW funding bandwagon:

Flannery made a series of eloquent points in his interview and the transcript is worth reading in full. However, he also said: “I think that within this century the concept of strong Gaia will actually become physically manifest.” This is about as silly, in my view, as Flannery’s statement on the ABC’s Lateline program in November 2009 that global warming had not occurred over the past 10 years, that “there hasn’t been a continuation of that warming trend”. This statement was incorrect and highlights the dangers of a scientist commenting outside their area of expertise. (source)

So the one statement Flannery gets right, Pitman complains about! You get the picture…

And finally, a moral tale of junk science which cost millions of dollars (and possibly lives), which was finally exposed as fraud. Sound familiar?

RESEARCH linking childhood vaccination to autism is not only flawed but a fraud, the British Medical Journal declared yesterday.

The journal thus “closed the door” on the health scare of a decade.

It branded the bombshell study by Andrew Wakefield – published by its prestigious rival The Lancet in 1998 and retracted last year – as an “elaborate fraud”.

Mr Wakefield had been secretly working for a class-action law firm that planned to sue the manufacturers of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, at the time he published his paper linking the jab to childhood autism, the BMJ claimed in an article published yesterday.

The resulting public health scare caused by the original article triggered a boycott of the vaccine in Britain, where immunisation rates crashed to 80 per cent.

The BMJ article, by investigative journalist Brian Deer, claims that Mr Wakefield was paid a total of $677,000.

“The paper was in fact an elaborate fraud,” the BMJ says in a separate editorial. “Meanwhile, the damage to public health continues.” (source)

And this is just small fry compared to the fraud being perpetrated by the GW alarmists on the global economy and standards of living.

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Daily Bayonet GW Hoax Weekly Roundup

7 January, 2011 by

Skewering the clueless

As always a great read!

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Tomorrow's Headlines Today: Decline in Vegemite sales would be "consistent with global warming"

6 January, 2011 by

Excellent proxy

[Satire Alert] Don’t forget, you read it here first… 😉

Decline in Vegemite sales would be “consistent with global warming”

A recent federally funded study has demonstrated that a decline in the consumption of favourite Aussie spread Vegemite, if such a decline ever occurred, would be consistent with global warming.

Climate Scientist Dr Al Armist said, “It’s been well known for many years that consumption of toast is a very good indicator of global temperature. People just don’t eat toast when it’s hot – simple as that. Here in Australia, toast is invariably accompanied by copious amounts of Vegemite, so if sales of Vegemite were ever to decline, it would indicate clearly that Australian temperatures were rising.”

When asked whether such a decline could be a result of other factors, such as people “simply going off it”, Dr Armist replied that their research showed that global warming was the only explanation. “We looked at all the other possible causes, but we discounted all of them for reasons that would be too complex to explain to the general public, or a journalist.”

The study’s results could be applied in other countries, Dr Armist said. “This isn’t just a local phenomenon, but would be repeated globally. You could look at Marmite, Bovril and other salty, yeasty spreads elsewhere in the world. They would all act as excellent proxies for global temperature, and would certainly be more reliable than GISS.”

The study, which cost the Australian taxpayer a staggering amount of money, also showed that if Vegemite sales were to increase, that too would be entirely consistent with global warming. Dr Armist concluded, “We haven’t quite worked out why yet. But it’s only a matter of time.”

© any gullible newspaper or website you care to mention.

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Electric cars "may accelerate global warming"

6 January, 2011 by

Because I REALLY want to drive something that looks like THAT...

Oops – the law of unintended consequences at work – again. What they mean, of course, is that electric cars may cause more emissions of harmless carbon dioxide, which may (or may not) have a significant and/or dangerous effect on the climate. Either way, it’s hilarious, because governments are pushing electric cars as yet another panacea for saving the planet, but just like wind farms, it turns out to be an illusion:

Electric cars are not a silver bullet solution for global warming, but could they actually be part of the problem?  In some developing countries, the answer is likely “yes,” according to the results of a modeling exercise conducted by Oxford University’s Reed Doucette and Malcolm McCullocha.

The results, which appeared in a paper published in Energy Policy last Fall, found that for countries with dirty power supplies – like India and China – widespread adoption of electric vehicles could lead to more – not less – CO2 emissions compared to widespread adoption of gasoline based vehicles, unless dramatically less CO2 intensive.

“Given the state of their power generation mixes in 2010, the case for widespread adoption of [electric vehicles] in both China and India solely on the basis of potential CO2 emissions reductions is not too compelling, especially when the generally higher capital cost of [electric vehicles] relative to [gasoline]-based vehicles is considered,” Doucette and Malcolm McCulloch concluded. (source)

It’s isn’t compelling anywhere else, either…

(h/t Climate Change Dispatch)

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UK Climate Madness

5 January, 2011 by

Green in oh so many ways

A couple of stories from my home country to raise a smile, and perchance, a chuckle into the bargain:

  • Eco-totalitarian George Monbiot wants to force people with big houses to take in lodgers, to save the planet, I guess. Would it apply to his own massive pile? Ed West in the UK Telegraph rips Moonbat a new one. Ed calls it fascism, but I think it’s closer to Marxism. What do you think?
  • The Met Office is in damage control mode, as it tries to spin its way out of failing to forecast the UK’s coldest winter in 300 years. Apparently, they did tell the government, but didn’t make a public announcement as the nasty general public were mean and horrid to them the last time they screwed up with the “barbecue summer” prediction. Sound credible? No, doesn’t to me either.
  • Louise Gray, eco-loony environment reporter for the Telegraph discovers that wind turbines are useless when the wind doesn’t blow. Maybe the government will also realise this in time, before the UK’s lights go out for good.
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"Suspicion" of link to global warming is enough

5 January, 2011 by

All that's required

The SBS headline this morning screamed “‘Drastic shifts’ in Atlantic sea currents”, a quote lifted directly from a press release from EAWAG Aquatic Research in Switzerland. So why is SBS news interested in an arcane paper about ocean currents? Because the press release contains the magic words “global warming”, which sets off all the alarm bells at SBS (and every other news network on the planet – there are over 600 hits on Google for “drastic shift in ocean current” in the last week). Here’s part of the press release from EAWAG:

Examination of deep sea corals reveals that there have been drastic changes to oceanic currents in the western North Atlantic since the 1970s. The influence of the cold water Labrador Current, which is in periodic interchange with the warm Gulf Stream, has been decreasing continually since the 1970s. Occurring at the same time as Global Warming this phenomenon is unique in the past 2000 years. These results are reported by researchers from the University of Basel and Eawag in the current edition of the scientific journal «PNAS».

One of the oldest known weather systems in the world is the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), the periodic variation of atmospheric pressure difference between the Azores and Iceland. It dictates not only whether the winters in Europe will be cold and dry or wet and warm, but also influences the oceanic currents in the North Atlantic. On the continental shelf off Nova Scotia, the NAO seems to control the interaction between different water masses. During positive phases, the oceanography of the north-west American continental shelf is dictated by a relatively warm water mass at 10 degrees Celsius which is salty and nutrient-rich, originating from the Gulf Stream. If the NAO is in a negative phase, the Labrador Current is dominant, a relatively cold water mass at 6 degrees Celsius, which is relatively nutrient-poor scarce and originates from sub-polar regions.

Using new geochemical methods, an international team of researchers including the biogeochemists Prof. Moritz Lehmann (University of Basel) and Dr. Carsten Schubert (Eawag – Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology) were able to prove that a drastic change to a «warm water mode» occurred in the western North Atlantic in the early 1970s. This change, the timing of which coincides with and may be directly related to Global Warming, is unique in the last 2000 years.

Now I am no expert in ocean currents, and for all I know, their research may have been carefully undertaken and of a high standard. But look at the flimsy and tenuous links to “global warming” thrown in:

  • “Occurring at the same time as Global Warming this phenomenon is unique in the past 2000 years” – in other words, the researchers have made a temporal association with GW, but haven’t any evidence to show causation
  • “the timing of which coincides with and may be directly related to Global Warming” – again, a coincidence, and surely might it also not be directly related to GW? Apparently that option wasn’t considered.

And they can’t seem to get the story straight. On the one hand, the Labrador current has been decreasing continually since the 1970s, but later, they claim there has been a drastic change in the warm water mode in the early 1970s. And the last paragraph sweeps away any remnants of scientific impartiality:

The researchers suspect there is a direct connection between the changes in the oceanic currents in the North Atlantic and Global Warming primarily caused by human activities.

Let me get this straigh:

  • “suspect” – so a hunch is enough now, is it? Apparently so when we’re talking about global warming…
  • “direct connection” – where’s the evidence?
  • “primarily caused by human activities” – this is a peach, and completely exposes the agenda, since even if the changes in the ocean currents were linked to changes in climate, why single out changes allegedly caused by human activities? Why wouldn’t the ocean currents respond to natural climate changes? The currents can’t exactly tell what is causing those changes, can they?

This is another perfect example of decent science being compromised by researchers desperate to play the global warming joker – for publicity I expect. And it worked. But if all these changes happened in the 1970s, surely it would have been caused by global cooling… wasn’t that the scare du jour back then?

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US: GHG regulation by the back door

4 January, 2011 by

Sign at EPA offices

Somebody once said climate change was too important to be left to democratic processes [Anybody remember who? It was probably said by hundreds of different people, all of them wishing to rule the world through climate change regulation – Ed] and that’s exactly what has now happened in the US. Despite there being no congressional approval for legislation regulating greenhouse gases, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last year, in a moment of politically-motivated insanity, classified the harmless trace gas carbon dioxide a “dangerous pollutant“. Now the EPA has begun to regulate emissions:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is beginning to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from energy plants and factories despite vows from Republicans in Congress to stop or slow the regulators.

President Barack Obama, who has pledged the United States will cut the emissions 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, wants Congress to pass limits on the gases blamed for warming the planet. There’s virtually no chance that will happen before Obama’s first term ends in 2012, so he has pushed the EPA to move.

The EPA paved the way for the rules in late 2009 when it declared greenhouse gas emissions a threat to human health.

But Republicans, who are taking control of the House of Representatives and who gained seats in the Senate, want to stop or delay the EPA from acting. They say the regulations will hurt job recovery in states heavily dependent on coal, oil and natural gas. (source)

And it’s blatantly undemocratic. But with luck, a Republican House will squeeze the EPA’s funding until they come to their senses… maybe.

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Climate sense from Bob Carter

4 January, 2011 by

Climate sense

Professor Carter is a breath of fresh air in the stale fog of climate alarmism. Writing in Quadrant, he skewers Greg Combet’s crusade (for that is what it is) for a price on carbon, when the rest of the world is putting on the brakes:

Following the failure of the UN’s Cancun talkfest, Climate Minister Greg Combet, displaying what Paul Keating would doubtless term remarkable intransigence, commented that it was still “very important from the government’s point of view that a market mechanism is adopted” to put a price on carbon dioxide.

Scrabbling to regain similar lost ground, EU Commissioner for Climate Action (a real, and not satirical, title) Connie Hedegaard has now started to spin up the outcome of the Cancun conference as being a great success (“Cancun deal puts climate action back on track”, The Australian, Dec. 27).

According to Ms. Hedegaard, the major Cancun achievements were an agreement to limit future global temperature increase to 2 deg. C (a policy ambition that represents an astonishing mixture of scientific ignorance and political hubris), and the agreement of a package of climate-related financial aid to third world countries that is forecast as attaining $100 billion annually by 2020; to believe that this money will be well spent, or even provided at all, represents the triumph of UN hope over likely reality.

Ms. Hedegaard was the former Minister for the Environment who approved the conditions under which Danish financial traders were able to rip-off the European carbon dioxide trading market of an amount estimated by the auditor general to be 38 billion kroner. In 2007, she allowed a Danish carbon dioxide registry to be set up with lax rules, amongst other things removing the requirement for trader identification. One result of this was that more than 1100 of 1256 traders registered in Denmark (almost 90%) were set up with fraudulent intent, and have subsequently been delisted as their crimes became apparent. [ACM posted on Hedegaard’s Australian article, and the Danish ETS scam here – Ed]

Ms. Hedegaard, therefore, is scarcely the type of public official whose advice Australia should be seeking, and that she and Mr. Combet are hand-in-glove in their attitudes regarding the still entirely hypothetical “dangerous global warming” is a matter for concern.

Mr Combet’s continued, and unrealistic, support for the introduction of a carbon dioxide tax or trading system was announced on Dec. 21st, together with the results of the third meeting of the Prime Minister’s Multi-Party Committee on Climate Change (MCCC).

Read it all.

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Natural disasters 2010: Munich Re blames climate change

4 January, 2011 by

Moonbats

It’s that time of year again, and as the end of year bell rings, Pavlov’s dog begins to slaver, and the ecotards at Munich Re start yelping at the moon. Munich Re are long-term climate alarmists (see here) blaming everything and anything on climate change – remember they are an insurance company, so therefore spreading fear and alarm in the community is good for business. And the Sydney Morning Herald falls for it every year:

The Haiti earthquake and floods in Pakistan and China helped make 2010 an exceptional year for natural disasters, killing 295,000 and costing $130 billion, the world’s top reinsurer said Monday.

“The high number of weather-related natural catastrophes and record temperatures both globally and in different regions of the world provide further indications of advancing climate change,” said Munich Re in a report.

And which natural disaster contributed most of those deaths?

The earthquake in Haiti in January was by far the worst disaster in terms of human cost, killing 222,570 people, Munich Re said. (source)

So unless Munich Re somehow blames earthquakes on climate change, you can forget over 75% of the total straight away. Whilst there were significant deaths from a heatwave and forest fires in Russia, there is no link to “climate change” – it’s just weather – but there is a clear link to drainage of peat bogs in the 1960s which made them susceptible to serious fire, and to the abolition of the national fire service in 2007 which crippled Russia’s ability to deal with the outbreaks. But as always, never let the facts get in the way of a good story (or a good marketing tactic).

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