Shock: Burning coal now causes global cooling

6 July, 2011 by

Aerosol clever

On the one hand, the warmists insist we stop burning coal because the evil CO2 emissions were frying the planet. But now, because the planet isn’t warming as their clunky models think it should, they’re on the lookout for excuses, and this is a good one.

Burning coal, no less, is also cooling the planet allegedly, by greater emission of sulphur into the atmosphere, cancelling out the warming from CO2 we would otherwise have seen:

CHINA’S soaring coal consumption in the last decade held back global warming as sulphur emissions served as a coolant, according to a study that takes head-on a key argument of climate sceptics. [Notice how AFP is more interested in gleefully scoring points over climate sceptics than actually getting to the truth; no surprise there – Ed]

While 2005 and 2010 are tied as the hottest years on record, sceptics have charged that an absence of a steady rise from 1998 to 2008 disproves the view that people are heating up the planet through greenhouse gas emissions.

Robert Kaufmann, a professor at Boston University, said he was motivated to conduct the study after a sceptic confronted him at a public forum, telling him he had seen on Fox News that temperatures had not risen over the decade.

“Nothing that I had read that other people have done gave me a quick answer to explain that seeming contradiction, because I knew that carbon dioxide concentrations have risen,” Kaufmann said.

The US-Finnish study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, named a culprit – coal.

The burning of coal jumped in the past decade, particularly in China, whose economy has grown at breakneck pace. Coal emits sulphur, which stops the Sun’s rays from reaching the Earth.

Warming hysteric Joe Romm goes into full “Yah boo sucks” mode, thinking this will shut up the filthy deniers once and for good (er, wrong, by the way):

“There has been no hiatus in global warming,” Romm wrote on his blog, saying that the years 1998 and 2008 were “the favourite cherry-picked endpoints of the deniers” due to outside factors such as El Nino and La Nina. (source)

Dr David Whitehouse restores a bit of sanity on WUWT:

The researchers tweak an out-of-date climate computer model and cherry-pick the outcome to get their desired result. They do not use the latest data on the sun’s influence on the Earth, rendering their results of academic interest only.

They blame China’s increasing coal consumption that they say is adding particles into the atmosphere that reflect sunlight and therefore cool the planet. The effect of aerosols and their interplay with other agents of combustion is a major uncertainty in climate models. Moreover, despite China’s coal burning, data indicate that in the past decade the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere has not increased. [I have emailed Dr Whitehouse for sources of that data – Ed]

…

Despite what the authors of this paper state after their tinkering with an out of date climate computer model, there is as yet no convincing explanation for the global temperature standstill of the past decade.

Either man-made and natural climatic effects have conspired to completely offset the warming that should have occurred due to greenhouse gasses in the past decade, or our estimation of the ‘climate sensitivity’ to greenhouse gasses is too large.

This is not an extreme or ‘sceptic’ position but represents part of the diversity of scientific opinion presented to the IPCC that is seldom reported. (source where you can also download the paper)

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Quotes of the Day: Will Steffen

6 July, 2011 by

Quote of the Day

In a sycophantic piece in the Sydney Morning Herald Will Steffen, the Gillard government’s climate adviser, claims, without any irony, that science knows all there is to know about the earth’s climate:

”What debate? There is no debate in the scientific community about this.”

And another one for luck:

”We don’t debate gravity, we don’t debate the tides.”

Apparently, he’s also “bemused, frustrated and appalled” that the media dares publish anything that criticised the consensus as well.

Odd that just today, an article claims that the IPCC artificially adjusted the results of a peer-reviewed study on climate sensitivity so that they fitted better with the organisation’s political aims. Is that what you mean when you say there’s no debate?

Odd also that there are a thousand or so peer-reviewed papers that challenge the consensus and new ones are published every week – hang on, they would be published in the wrong journals and written by the wrong scientists, I guess.

With people like Steffen advising the government, what could possibly go wrong?

Read it here (and weep).

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Quote of the Day: Julia Gillard

5 July, 2011 by

Quote of the Day

On her popularity improving after announcing a pointless, economy-wrecking carbon tax, in breach of an explicit pre-election promise not to, and which will do nothing for the climate, Julia opts for unintentionally comical understatement:

“We won’t see an instantaneous jump in support.”

Gee, ya think? More like a continuing terminal slide into oblivion… with a bit of luck.

Read it here.

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Bad science makes for bad policy

5 July, 2011 by

Price on carbon dioxide

The details of Labor’s carbon [dioxide] tax will be revealed on Sunday. I don’t intend to write in any detail on the matter, since, and forgive the scatological reference, it would be like examining the detail of a pile of horseshit – no matter how closely you examine and analyse it, it’s still horseshit. So don’t wait up for a post on how billions of dollars will be redistributed via some hideously complex bureaucracy – it won’t be there.

Just yesterday, Julia Gillard quoted wildly inaccurate and exaggerated climate predictions in a desperate attempt to scare the public into supporting her carbon dioxide tax. Nonsensical claims of temperatures rising by up to 5 degrees by 2070, 1 metre sea level rises, climatic shifts of 2000km, giving Sydney the climate of Cairns. And then she has the gall to accuse the Opposition of running a scare campaign! If the Australian people don’t see through such shallow tactics, they deserve the fate that will befall them.

All of this stems from the conclusions of the IPCC’s climate reports, the key one being:

Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations. (source)

The IPCC was established for the sole purpose of building a body of evidence to support a conclusion that had already been reached, namely that man-made emissions were causing dangerous global warming. And guess what? They found it. They found it by excluding papers that contradicted that conclusion, playing down natural influences on the climate, exaggerating the effect of CO2, drawing from a huge range of grey literature from environmental advocacy groups and then claiming a consensus of 2500 scientists which is actually nearer to 50.

Based on those biased and skewed reports, successive governments in Australia (both Coalition and Labor) were determined to “tackle climate change”. It was the politically astute thing to do.

However late in 2009, that bipartisan approach broke apart, when Tony Abbott was elected leader of the Opposition, and Kevin Rudd’s ETS was voted down. Rudd was subsequently dumped by Labor, and Julia Gillard was installed, promising:

“There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.” (video)

We can play semantic games concerning whether she or Bob Brown leads the government, but the Australian people went to the polls in August 2010 on that basis, and Labor won a very narrow victory. In February 2011, however, in a brazen about-turn, forced up on her by her tawdry power-sharing deal with the Greens, she announced that a carbon [dioxide] tax would commence in mid-2012.

There then followed the establishment of the Climate Commission and the Climate Committee, neither of which included any members who weren’t 100% behind the IPCC line (indeed you weren’t even allowed to participate if you were at all sceptical), to make the case for “pricing carbon”. There was also going to be a “people’s assembly” which was killed off quickly and painlessly when Labor saw the reaction to it.

Unsurprisingly, those bodies have concluded that we need to price carbon and we will see the results of this sham on Sunday. Knock me down with a feather.

Call me old fashioned, but scientific enquiry is about challenging the consensus to see if it stands up. But where is the challenge? There was barely any in the IPCC – a coterie of warmists all cosily peer-reviewing each other’s papers, making sure that anything remotely critical was never published (and conspiring against journals that did dare publish such papers – Climategate), and there was none in the Climate Commission and the Climate Committee.

It’s a simple point. If the science is so strong and overwhelming, why this cowardly fear of exposing it to scrutiny? Surely the sceptics would be put in their place once and for all, and the public would see, transparently and obviously, that their arguments carried little weight.

But they are afraid. Afraid of hearing anything that might raise doubts in their own blinkered view that man is dangerously changing the climate. Afraid of even engaging with those who challenge the consensus, going to great lengths to shut down debate, smear sceptics and abandon rights of free speech (Brisbane Broncos club, are you listening?).

And what will a price on carbon dioxide do to the climate? Nothing. I’ll just write that again (slightly larger so nobody misses it):

NOTHING.

 

In fact it will do:

  • nothing whatsoever for climate
  • nothing whatsoever for global temperatures
  • nothing whatsoever for local temperatures
  • nothing whatsoever for the Arctic
  • nothing whatsoever for polar bears (which are doing fine, thanks)
  • nothing whatsoever for the drought or floods or cyclones
  • nothing whatsoever for the Great Barrier Reef (which is also doing fine, thanks)
  • nothing whatsoever for Kakadu
  • nothing whatsoever for Tuvalu and all the other sinking islands
  • nothing whatsoever for the ringtail possum and other cuddly creatures
  • nothing whatsoever for bushfires and heatwaves
  • in fact, nothing whatsoever for anything even remotely related to the climate

The measly 5% reduction of our already tiny 1.5% contribution to global emissions planned for 2020 will be swallowed up in a matter of weeks or months by China’s ever increasing number of coal-fired power stations. Yes, I know they are making the right noises about renewables, but coal is the cheapest form of energy, and unlike us, they aren’t dumb enough to force expensive, inefficient and unreliable renewables on their long-suffering population.

China’s emissions will continue to rise in real terms, even though they may decrease as a percentage of GDP. But as their GDP is rising so fast, the point is irrelevant. And if our politicians seriously think that our action will shame China and India into torpedoing their plans for economic growth, then our leaders are even more deluded than we thought.

On the other hand, a unilateral price on carbon dioxide in Australia will do the following:

  • everything to damage Australia’s economy
  • everything to damage Australia’s competitiveness
  • everything to increase the cost of living for ordinary Australians
  • everything to make the poorest in society worse off
  • everything to damage emissions intensive industries
  • everything to ensure that our industries move offshore
  • everything to create more unemployment
  • everything to raise electricity, gas and food prices

Pointless political gestures are rarely as empty and damaging as this one. We can only hope that the Australian public have long enough memories to remember the deceit of this government, and vote them out in 2013.

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Julia quotes "the science"

4 July, 2011 by

Hypocrite

And gets it spectacularly wrong. Hypocrisy Alert as Julia Gillard launches a scare campaign, and then accuses the Opposition of, er, a scare campaign:

JULIA Gillard has invoked a doomsday-like scenario of metre-high sea level rises and a 2000km southward shift of Australia’s climactic [the dumb journo means “climatic” – Ed] zones as she battles an opposition scare campaign over her proposed carbon tax.

Setting the scene for a week of intense debate on the government’s carbon tax – which is yet to be fully detailed – the Prime Minister today returned to scientific arguments for putting a price on carbon.

The move came as Opposition Leader Tony Abbott renewed his now hopeless call for a plebiscite on Labor’s carbon tax, but changed tack by saying he would accept a popular vote if it backed the measure.

Ms Gillard warned of threats to infrastructure, failures of urban drainage and sewerage systems, blackouts, transport disruption and private property damage as temperature rose by between 2.2 and 5 degrees by 2070.

“Now this is a huge change,”  said Ms Gillard, as she again accused Mr Abbott of mounting a scare campaign over prices under a carbon tax.

Where on earth does Gillard get 5 degrees by 2070? That’s total fiction. In fact it supposes a rate of warming of over 2 degrees per century MORE than the absolute WORST estimate of the IPCC (which is 6.4 degrees between 2000 and 2100):

IPCC AR4 WG1 Summary for Policymakers

And a 2000km shift in climatic zones? This is pure, unadulterated nonsense. A metre rise in sea levels? Again, the worst IPCC estimate is 59cm, and with sea levels currently rising by about 3mm per year, it’s probably more like 25cm. More exaggeration and spin.

Keep it up, Julia, your credibility is sinking faster than a Pacific island. Desperation has taken over, and invoking alarmist, hysterical claims like these is like tying a hundredweight of lead shot to your ankle.

This debate (if it could ever be called that) has descended into total and utter farce. At least Abbott’s scare campaign on the carbon dioxide tax is based on some kind of possible future reality, but this is just lies, pure and simple.

Read it here.

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Petrol exemption in doubt – already

4 July, 2011 by

Sorry, don't believe you

No-one listens to Julia Gillard anymore. Whatever she says, her words are meaningless.

“There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.”

And soon we will have a carbon [dioxide] tax. Just a few days ago she announced that petrol would be permanently exempted from the tax. Did we believe her? No, because we cannot trust a word she says. And as expected, doubts are being raised about that claim:

Greens Deputy Christine Milne and independent MP Tony Windsor say it is impossible for the Government to promise a carbon price will never be imposed on fuel.

The two MPs, both members of the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee which agreed to exclude fuel for motorists from the tax, both say governments and circumstances change in politics.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard said yesterday that fuel for private motorists, tradespeople and small business would not attract the tax and the exclusion would be permanent.

Senator Milne said the 17 per cent of Australia’s greenhouse emissions that come from transport must be “dealt with”.

“In politics you never say never, ever, ever – look what happened to John Howard with never a GST,” Senator Milne told reporters at Parliament House. [When will they stop digging a hole with the GST analogy? Howard took that decision to an election – Ed]

“We are going to have to get people to move off oil, electrify the transport fleet, invest in public transport – all of those things are not going to happen without policy frameworks and price drivers.”

The exemption is seen as a win for independents Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, who argued country people do not have alternative transport available so would be stuck paying the tax – estimated to be six cents a litre on a $25 a tonne carbon price.

But Mr Windsor told AM nothing is certain in politics and that includes the future of the tax.

“A future government might want nuclear energy as well so you can’t rule out anything. Anything can happen in politics,” he said.

But Climate Change Minister Greg Combet insisted the exclusion is permanent.

“We’ve excluded petrol from the carbon price arrangements and the Prime Minister has made it clear that it’s excluded for the future as well,” Mr Combet told AM. (source)

Sorry, Greg, Julia and the rest of you. WE DON’T BELIEVE ANYTHING YOU SAY ANYMORE.

Trust lost is not easily regained. And the Greens will make sure motorists suffer. They are just one of a long list of groups of ordinary Australians that the Greens hate. Actually, let’s not beat around the bush, they hate all of humanity.

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The pointlessness of wind power

3 July, 2011 by

Monument to green stupidity

Once again, the futility of wind energy has been brought into sharp focus in an article by Christopher Booker in the UK Telegraph. The lights will be going out in Britain if the present government, and in particular Chris Huhne, continues with its suicidal plan to wreck the country’s energy generation capacity:

Centrica and other energy companies last week told [the Department of Energy and Climate Change] that, if Britain is to spend £100 billion on building thousands of wind turbines, it will require the building of 17 new gas-fired power stations simply to provide back-up for all those times when the wind drops and the windmills produce even less power than usual.

We will thus be landed in the ludicrous position of having to spend an additional £10 billion on those 17 dedicated power stations, which will be kept running on “spinning reserve”, 24 hours a day, just to make up for the fundamental problem of wind turbines. This is that their power continually fluctuates anywhere between full capacity to zero (where it often stood last winter, when national electricity demand was at a peak). So unless back-up power is instantly available to match any shortfall, the lights will go out.

Two things make this even more absurd. One, as the energy companies pointed out to DECC, is that it will be amazingly costly and wildly uneconomical, since the dedicated power plants will often have to run at a low rate of efficiency, burning gas but not producing electricity. This will add billions more to our fuel bills for no practical purpose. The other absurdity, as recent detailed studies have confirmed, is that gas-fired power stations running on “spinning reserve” chuck out much more CO2 than when they are running at full efficiency – thus negating any savings in CO2 emissions supposedly achieved by the windmills themselves.

How supposedly intelligent people can be taken in by this nonsense is beyond belief, unless of course, rational thinking has flown out of the window, and all that remains is devotion to a green religion.

Read it here.

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Fairfax publishes another article by Bob Carter

3 July, 2011 by

Climate sense

Two in a week is pretty good going (see here for the first). As before, they will no doubt have lined up a bunch of hysterical alarmists to smear and rubbish Bob Carter, but at least they are letting their readers see the other side of the debate for once.

In this piece, Carter addresses points made recently by Chief Scientist Ian Chubb:

Sound science is based upon observation, experiment and the testing of hypotheses in the context of the principle of simplicity (often termed Occam’s Razor).

The unvalidated computer models that now dominate the public face of climate ”science” are a jungle of complexities, and represent speculative thought experiments not empirically tested science.

In support of these methods, the former director of the British Meteorological Office, Professor John Mitchell, has said that ”people underestimate the power of models. Observational evidence is not very useful … Our approach is not entirely empirical”.

The last part of this statement is only too true, and leads to the discomfit expressed by those such as the British engineering professor John Brignell: ”The ease with which a glib algorithm can be implemented with a few lines of computer code, and the difficulty of understanding its implications, can pave the path to cloud-cuckoo land.”

Read it all here.

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University forced to hand over temperature data

2 July, 2011 by

Avoided releasing data

The university at the centre of the Climategate scandal has been force to hand over its raw temperature data by the Information Commissioner in the UK. The University of East Anglia has repeatedly refused access to the data using various methods to thwart FOI requests. Why would they do that?

Here we have a body which is responsible for one of the main temperature data sets on which the global warming scare is built (CRUTEM3), and yet they refuse to hand over the data so third parties can check it. There’s transparency for you.

As The Guardian reports:

Critics of the UEA’s scientists say an independent analysis of the temperature data may reveal that Phil Jones and his colleagues have misinterpreted the evidence of global warming. They may have failed to allow for local temperature influences, such as the growth of cities close to many of the thermometers.

Jonathan Jones, who is not a climate scientist, said he thought “the most significant features of this decision are the precedents that have been set”. The commissioner is likely to rule more generally in favour of public access to scientific data.

Under the 2000 Freedom of Information Act, public bodies such as universities have to share their data unless there are good reasons not to. But when Jonathan Jones and others asked for the data in the summer of 2009, the UEA said legal exemptions applied. It said variously that the temperature data were the property of foreign meteorological offices; were intellectual property that might be valuable if sold to other researchers; and were in any case often publicly available.

But in a damning verdict, [Information Commissioner Christopher] Graham said suggestions that international relations could be upset by disclosure were “highly speculative”, and “it is not clear how UEA might have planned to commercially exploit the information requested.”

Jonathan Jones said this week that he took up the cause of data freedom after Steve McIntyre, a Canadian mathematician, had requests for the data turned down. He thought this was an unreasonable response when Phil Jones had already shared the data with academic collaborators, including Prof Peter Webster of the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US. He asked to be given the data already sent to Webster, and was also turned down. So he appealed to the information commissioner.

“I am extremely concerned about the apparent pattern of secrecy and evasion,” he said. “My sole aim [in pursuing the case] is to help restore climate science to something more closely resembling scientific norms.”

The UEA said: “We have nothing to fear from scrutiny; we are committed to openness and transparency in our research… and we fully intend to make all data publicly available as soon as possible.” (source)

Yeah, right. They wouldn’t have done anything of the sort if this kind of application hadn’t been made and prosecuted vigorously. Well done Jonathan.

The Commissioner’s ruling is here (PDF).

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A challenge to the Chief Scientist

1 July, 2011 by

Peter Ridd

Professor Peter Ridd makes the excellent point that if no funding is made available to sceptics wishing to challenge the consensus on dangerous AGW, then it is like a court case without a defence. The defence is there to test, on an adversarial basis, the case put forward by the prosecution by means of questioning the evidence, cross-examination and forensic inquiry.

However, the alarmists don’t want that. They want to shut down debate crying that the science is settled (or “Guilty! Hang him!” to continue the analogy), and for everyone simply to trust what they are saying. What court in the land would accept the word of the prosecution on trust? Similarly, the claims of the alarmists must be subjected to equally rigorous scrutiny, similarly funded out of public money, in order to put them properly to the test.

It is a very powerful argument indeed, and Professor Ridd has put it directly to Ian Chubb:

Dear Prof Chubb,

I wish to support A/Prof Franks comments in his email to you on 30th June.

In addition I would like to add that it is evident that the scientific systems needs considerable modification if we can have faith in some of the conclusions about the big environmental issues of our time such as Greenhouse, the supposed demise of the Great Barrier Reef and such like. I have no faith that both sides of the arguments on these issues are being funded. This comes partly out of personal experience. It is not enough to rely upon peer review and hope for impartiality of scientists. We need to spend money to try to prove that the case against CO2 is flawed. That may seem strange but, if this debate was a court case against the criminal CO2, the conviction by the court (mostly the IPCC etc) would be thrown out on appeal because no resources have been expended mounting a defence of CO2. Can you imagine a court case without a counsel for the defence – a person whose sole aim is to destroy the prosecution case. We need an organisation to do this for CO2. If after spending considerable resources on such a defence it still looks like CO2 is guilty, then I at least would be satisfied about the conventional wisdom on this issue. Presently I have as much faith in science as I did in the Police system in Queensland in the 1980’s before sweeping reforms cleaned it up.

You may feel that the present systems in science make it reliable, but the fact that scientist like me, with a better than average record, in addition to a growing number of the educated and uneducated public have lost faith in science and scientists means that something has to be done to regain confidence. And bashing people like Stewart Franks will do nothing to that end even though he can be pretty brutal at times.

If you have time, I have written more on what I think needs to be done about the systems of science at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=11455

I would be very grateful if you could at least contemplate this issue further.

Peter

Prof. Peter Ridd
HOD Physics
James Cook University
Townsville

Thanks to Bolta.

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