Chief Scientist Penny Sackett resigns

19 February, 2011 by

Politics

Penny Sackett, Australia’s Chief Scientist, is resigning from the post halfway through her 5 year appointment. Personally, I am not sorry to see her go, as she was an outspoken climate alarmist (see here, here, here, etc) and became a shrill advocate for the usual “urgent action to tackle climate change.” Unsurprisingly, therefore, she cites “lack of government progress” on climate change as one of the reasons for her departure.

Just as no-one seems bothered any more that the Governor General and various state Governors wade in on political matters, nobody batted an eyelid at Sackett’s outspoken views on climate change. Unfortunately, it’s the world we live in.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

AUSTRALIA’S chief scientist, Penny Sackett, has resigned half way through her five-year appointment.

The government’s leading scientific adviser said she was standing down for personal and professional reasons, but declined to comment further.

”This is not a decision that I have taken lightly or quickly,” said Professor Sackett, pictured, in a statement released on her website yesterday afternoon.

…

Professor Sackett was … understood to be frustrated about a lack of progress in government efforts to address climate change.

She told the Herald last May she was concerned by the government’s decision to delay its emissions trading legislation.

”Any action that is delayed puts us at higher risk of dangerous climate change,” she said. (source)

If you want to play politics, become a politician.

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Carbon price deal "months away"

18 February, 2011 by

Finally, some half-good news:

The Federal Government has indicated that it will be months before a deal on carbon pricing is reached.

The Government’s multi-party climate change committee, which is chaired by Prime Minister Julia Gillard and includes the Greens and independent MPs, held its fourth meeting in Canberra this morning.

Ms Gillard and Climate Change Minister Greg Combet were widely expected to unveil their preferred model after the meeting.

But the committee says no final decisions have been taken on how to price carbon or what assistance will be offered to industry and taxpayers.

It says the final design of the carbon price will only be decided when all the elements of the policy can be considered together, and that should happen in the coming months. (source)

What the heck does that mean? Who cares, anyway – the longer the better. Personally, I suggest starting in about 2200, when the permafrost has melted, and we’re all breathing 100% methane.

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The debunking of the Antarctic warming scare

18 February, 2011 by

Debunked again?

In the science blogs there is currently a serious bust up between Eric Steig, author of a paper claiming that the Antarctic was warming (and therefore, in his view, putting the final nail in the sceptics’ coffin) and Ryan O’Donnell, who, with Steve McIntyre, has published a challenging rebuttal. The story is taken up in the UK Spectator this week. The main story is subscription only, but the editorial makes very interesting reading:

In January 2009, Nature magazine ran the a cover story (pictured) conveying dramatic news about Antarctica: that most of it had warmed significantly over the last half-century. For years, the data from this frozen continent – with 90 percent of the world’s ice mass – had stubbornly refused to corroborate the global warming narrative. So the study, led by Eric Steig of the University of Washington, was treated as a bit of a scoop. It reverberated around the world. Gavin Schmidt, from the RealClimate blog, declared that Antarctica had silenced the sceptics. Mission, it seemed, was accomplished: Antarctica was no longer an embarrassment to the global warming narrative.

He spoke too soon. The indefatigable Steve McIntyre started to scrutinise his followings along with Nicholas Lewis. They found several flaws: Steig et al had used too few data sequences to speak for an entire continent, and had processed the data in a very questionable way. But when they wanted to correct him, in another journal, they quickly ran into an inconvenient truth about global warming: the high priests do not like refutation. To have their critique (initial submission here, final version here) of Steig’s work published, they needed to assuage the many demands of an anonymous ‘Reviewer A’ – whom they later found out to be Steig himself.

Lewis and Matt Ridley have joined forces to tell the story in the cover issue of this week’s Spectator. It’s another powerful, and depressing tale of the woeful state of climate science. Real science welcomes refutation: with global warming, it is treated as a religion. As they say in their cover story:

“Nature’s original peer-review process had let through an obviously flawed paper, and no professional climate scientist then disputed  it – perhaps because of fear that doing so might harm their careers. As the title of Richard Bean’s new play – The Heretic – at the Royal Court hints, young scientists going into climate studies these days are a bit like young theologians in Elizabethan England. They quickly learn that funding and promotion dries up if you express heterodox views, or doubt the scripture. The scripture, in this case, being the assembled reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

They went through 88 pages of correspondence in their battle to have their critique published.

“So has Antarctica been warming? Mostly not – at least not measurably. Retreat of the floating Antarctic ice shelves is a favourite story for the media. But, except in a very few peripheral parts, Antarctica is far too cold to lose ice by surface melting.”

As Lewis & Ridley say in their closing paragraphs:

“Papers that come to lukewarm or sceptical conclusions are published, if at all, only after the insertion of catechistic sentences to assert their adherence to orthodoxy. Last year, a paper in Nature Geosciences concluded heretically that `it is at present impossible to accurately determine climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide’ (high sensitivity  underpins the entire IPCC argument), yet presaged this with the (absurd) remark: `Earth’s climate can only be stabilized by bringing carbon dioxide emissions under control in the twenty-first century.’Likewise, a paper In Science last month linking periods of migration in European history with cooler weather stated: `Such historical data may provide a basis for counteracting the recent political and fiscal reluctance to mitigate projected climate change.’ Sceptical climatologist Pat Michaels pointed out that the sentence would make more sense with `counteracting’ removed.

Science as a philosophy is a powerful, but fragile thing. In the case of climate, it is now in conflict with science as an institution.” (source)

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Daily Bayonet GW Hoax Weekly Roundup

18 February, 2011 by

Skewering the clueless

As always, a great read!

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Global warming to melt permafrost

17 February, 2011 by

I literally cannot keep up with the alarmism today. The warm-mongers must sense they’re on a roll and are churning stuff out for all they’re worth. Now it’s the permafrost:

Global warming could cause up to 60 percent of the world’s permafrost to thaw by 2200 and release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere that would further speed up climate change, a study warned.

Using projections based on UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenarios, scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Colorado estimated that if global warming continues even at a moderate pace, a third of the earth’s permafrost will be gone by 2200.

If the planet warms at a faster pace, the world could see 59 percent of the permanently frozen underground layer of earth thaw out; as that happens, organic matter that has been trapped in the permafrost for tens of millennia will begin to decay, releasing carbon into the atmosphere.

The NSIDC scientists then used a model to predict how much carbon the thawing permafrost would release and came up with the staggering figure of 190 gigatons by 2200.

“That’s the equivalent of half the amount of carbon that has been released into the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial age. That’s a lot of carbon,” NSIDC scientist Kevin Schaefer, the lead author of the study, told AFP. [I assume he’s just being sloppy and really means carbon dioxide – Ed]

A gigaton is one billion tons, so 190 gigatons is the equivalent of around a billion tons of carbon entering the atmosphere each year between now and 2200.

Schaefer said carbon that would be released from melting permafrost has to be accounted for in global warming strategies.

“If we don’t account for the release of carbon from permafrost, we’ll overshoot the C02 concentration we are aiming for and will end up with a warmer climate than we want,” he said.

But all was not doom and gloom, he said. [Gee, really? – Ed]

“If we start cutting emissions now [ah, there’s the rub – Ed], we will slow down the thaw rate and push the start of this carbon release off into the future,” he said. (source)

Of course, as it states at the start, this is based on the hugely exaggerated IPCC projections of 6 degrees by 2100 or something. But even if we ignore that, why didn’t all this happen thousands of years ago when temperatures were higher in the Holocene Optimum? Or the MWP? [The MWP didn’t exist, remember? Ask Michael Mann – Ed.] Why didn’t the climate spiral out of control then? Is there something different between temperature rises caused naturally and those allegedly caused by man-made CO2 which makes them melt permafrost faster? So many questions and so few answers.

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Man-made CO2 is "the only thing we can think of"

17 February, 2011 by

6th grade science FAIL

That’s a wonderfully scientific statement for you, isn’t it? We can’t think of anything else so it must be what we say it is, which just happens to be man-made CO2. A twelve-year-old physics student would be told off for writing something so unscientific in a laboratory experiment write-up, but climate scientists can get away with it.

As The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

A new study says greenhouse gas emissions have caused an increase in the intensity of floods.

Two Canadian scientists say that between 1951 and 1999 the intensity of extreme rains and floods increased by seven per cent in all of the northern hemisphere.

Published in the journal Nature, the research has found that the increase is twice what was predicted by climate modelling.

Dr Xuebin Zhang, a research scientist based at Environment Canada, said it was clear human activity had caused more intense weather.

“Our research provides the first scientific evidence that human-induced greenhouse gas increases have contributed to the observed intensification of heavy precipitation events,” Dr Zhang said in a statement.

Gosh, that sounds pretty conclusive. So let’s read further for the empirical evidence to make such a bold and sweeping conclusion:

Dr Francis Zwiers from the University of Victoria said the evidence led the researchers to a phenomenon that influenced precipitation on a global scale.

“The only thing we can think of is the changing composition of the atmosphere. Warmer air contains more moisture and leads to more extreme precipitation,” Dr Zwiers said. (source)

Right, there isn’t any evidence. then. Just a temporal relationship and a hunch? And the “only thing they can think of” is the changing atmospheric composition? Which just happens to have been all due to man? What if the warmer air were caused by natural, internal climate variation which may cause increased precipitation? Did they think of that, perhaps? No, I doubt it as well.

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Flannery: Climate commission "isn't selling anything"

17 February, 2011 by

Hopelessly compromised

Please stop it, I think my sides have split. Joke of the Week alert, as Tim Flannery, the Grand High Commissioner of Climate (or something), huffs and puffs and blusters and flusters in defence of his hopelessly compromised band of warmists in The Daily Telegraph today:

THE opinion piece by Tim Blair “Just pay up and ignore the irony” in Monday’s Daily Telegraph is not only insulting to members of the Australian Climate Commission, but contains serious errors.

Contrary to what was written, it is not the Climate Commission’s business to “sell” anything to the public. Our role is to engage people on climate science and the state of international climate change action, and to explain carbon pricing as Australia deals with this problem.

Your readers deserve also to know that the Climate Commission is independent of government. Having publicly criticised prime ministers from both sides of politics, I value my independence greatly, and would not have taken up the Chief Commissioner position were this not crystal clear. (source)

Independent of government, and also independent of any dissenting views. It’s a one-sided talking shop, where everyone has made his mind up and they all stew in their own warmist juices. Where’s Bob Carter or Ian Plimer? Where in fact is anyone with an opinion that doesn’t neatly fit into the IPCC’s consensus? Nowhere to be seen, of course.

But the fact that, according to Flannery, the Commission isn’t a tool for communication will certainly be news to Greg Combet, however, as the Commission’s launch document states:

“The Climate Commission has been established by the Gillard Government to provide an authoritative, independent source of information for all Australians,” he said. “It will provide expert advice on climate change science and impacts, and international action. It will help build the consensus required to move to a clean energy future.”

The Climate Commission would have a public outreach role, he said, to help build greater understanding and consensus about reducing Australia’s carbon pollution.

“The Commissioners are eminent Australians who are leaders in their fields and I’m pleased one of Australia’s leading science communicators, Professor Tim Flannery, a former Australian of the Year, has accepted the role of Chief Commissioner,” Mr Combet said.

“The Climate Commission will fulfil a key information and education role, enabling the Australian community to have a more informed conversation about climate change. I am delighted to lead this new Commission,” said Professor Tim Flannery. (source – PDF)

I suppose when the spin and misrepresentations are so blatant, you know they’re in a hole.

(PDF link thanks to Andrew Bolt)

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Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO referred to National Audit Office

16 February, 2011 by

National Audit Office

I’m not sure how far this will get [probably not very far, given how every public body you care to mention seems to be infested with climate alarmists – Ed], but we can at least thank them for their efforts and wish them the best of luck – they’ll need it. From Jo Nova’s site:

A team of skeptical scientists, citizens, and an Australian Senator have lodged a formal request with the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) to have the BOM and CSIRO audited.

The BOM claim their adjustments are “neutral” yet Ken Stewart showed that the trend in the raw figures for our whole continent has been adjusted up by 40%. The stakes are high. Australians could have to pay something in the order of $870 million dollars thanks to the Kyoto protocol, and the first four years of the Emissions Trading Scheme was expected to cost Australian industry (and hence Australian shareholders and consumers) nearly $50 billion dollars.

Given the stakes, the Australian people deserve to know they are getting transparent, high quality data from the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM). The small cost of the audit is nothing in comparison with the money at stake for all Australians. We need the full explanations of why individual stations have been adjusted repeatedly and non-randomly, and why adjustments were made decadesafter the measurements were taken. We need an audit of surface stations. (Are Australian stations as badly manipulated and poorly sited as the US stations? Who knows?)

The NZ equivalent to the Australian BOM is under an official review

The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition found adjustments that were even more inexplicable (0.006 degrees was adjusted up to 0.9 degrees). They decided to push legally and the response was a litany of excuses — until finally The National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) was forced to disavow it’s own National Temperature Records, and belatedly pretend that it had never been intended for public consumption. But here’s the thing that bites: NZ signed the Kyoto protocol, arguably based very much on the NZ temperature record, and their nation owes somewhere from half a billion to several billion dollars worth of carbon credits (depending on the price of carbon in 2012). Hence there is quite a direct link from the damage caused by using one unsubstantiated data set based on a single student’s report that no one can find or replicate that will cost the nation a stack of money. NIWA is now potentially open to class actions. (Ironically, the Australian BOM has the job of “ratifying” the reviewed NZ temperature record.)

Thanks to work by Ken Stewart, Chris Gillham, Andrew Barnham, Tony Cox, James Doogue, David Stockwell, as well as Cory Bernardi, Federal Senator for South Australia.

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The weather isn't getting weirder

16 February, 2011 by

Big weather for sure, but weather just the same

Try telling that to Bob Brown, or Tim Flannery or any of the countless other alarmists who have no concept of geological time, or even recent weather history. All you need to do is search the news archive to find countless stories of terrible disasters well before man’s emissions of carbon dioxide could possibly have had any effect.

But instead, whenever we suffer extreme weather, the Chicken Littles rush to blame “man-made global warming” because they cannot think of anything else, and they have a political agenda to advance by whatever means possible. We saw it with the Queensland floods, and Cyclone Yasi, the Big Dry and the Victorian bushfires, and we will no doubt continue to see it for every extreme weather event in the foreseeable future.

But unfortunately, a recent study shows no evidence of increasing severe or extreme weather, as the Wall Street Journal reports:

Last week a severe storm froze Dallas under a sheet of ice, just in time to disrupt the plans of the tens of thousands of (American) football fans descending on the city for the Super Bowl. On the other side of the globe, Cyclone Yasi slammed northeastern Australia, destroying homes and crops and displacing hundreds of thousands of people.

Some climate alarmists would have us believe that these storms are yet another baleful consequence of man-made CO2 emissions. In addition to the latest weather events, they also point to recent cyclones in Burma, last winter’s fatal chills in Nepal and Bangladesh, December’s blizzards in Britain, and every other drought, typhoon and unseasonable heat wave around the world.

But is it true? To answer that question, you need to understand whether recent weather trends are extreme by historical standards. The Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project is the latest attempt to find out, using super-computers to generate a dataset of global atmospheric circulation from 1871 to the present.

As it happens, the project’s initial findings, published last month, show no evidence of an intensifying weather trend. “In the climate models, the extremes get more extreme as we move into a doubled CO2 world in 100 years,” atmospheric scientist Gilbert Compo, one of the researchers on the project, tells me from his office at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “So we were surprised that none of the three major indices of climate variability that we used show a trend of increased circulation going back to 1871.”

In other words, researchers have yet to find evidence of more-extreme weather patterns over the period, contrary to what the models predict. “There’s no data-driven answer yet to the question of how human activity has affected extreme weather,” adds Roger Pielke Jr., another University of Colorado climate researcher. (source)

And the conclusion makes even more sense: “prosperity and preparedness help”. In other words, we must have strong economies in order to adapt to the inevitable climate changes that will affect humanity in the future, not economies that are fatally crippled by pointless emissions reduction taxes.

(h/t Peter C)

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A thousandth of a degree for $2,000 per family

16 February, 2011 by

Climate sense

That’s the cost/benefit analysis of a price on carbon in Australia, as Bob Carter points out in a letter to The Australian this morning:

OUR new Climate Commissioner, Tim Flannery, says that his role is to provide accurate information to the public about climate change. (Letters, 15/2).

Perhaps he might start by answering the two most critical questions that taxpayers have in mind.

The first is how many degrees of warming will be averted by a cut in Australian CO2 emissions of, say, 20 per cent by 2020. Second, what extra costs, including all flow-through costs, will be imposed on an average family by the taxation strategy that is aimed at producing such a cut. Available estimates indicate that the answers to these questions are: (i) less than one one-thousandth of a degree Celsius by 2020; and (ii) more than $2000 per family of four per year.

Australian battlers, on whom the extra costs will impinge the most, are unlikely to view this as a good public policy option, and if Flannery has more policy-favourable figures in mind, then now might be a good time to share them with us.

Bob Carter, Townsville, Qld

Seems like great value, doesn’t it?

Source.

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