Just don't tell me the debate's over…
MTR 1377
Tune in to Luke Grant’s show on Melbourne Talk Radio (MTR 1377) to hear a chat with Simon about the floods and Victorian Governor David de Kretser’s comments on climate change. If you’re in Melbourne, do tune in from 8pm (not sure when it’s going out yet), or you can listen online at:
Clueless
I mean what else can it be? Does the governor understand the concept of geological time? Does he understand that records only go back 150 years? Does he appreciate that events like this have gone on, unobserved, for thousands of years? Does he understand that the role of governor is above political point scoring? Clearly the answer is no to all of these questions, especially the last, where following Quentin Bryce’s lead, he thinks he can say what he likes. But David de Kretser has form for this. A climate activist, he advocated a carbon tax back in 2009 to “fight global warming” (see here). So it’s little surprise that he, like the odious Bob Brown, rushes to blame climate change for the Victorian floods:
“I’m sorry, I’m one of these believers in climate change I’m afraid and if its [sic] doesn’t get that message out I don’t think its going to go away,’‘ Prof de Kretser told 3AW yesterday. [In other words, “I’m using these events to cynically push my own political agenda” – Ed]
“There’s too many of these events [Too many for you? Going to start controlling nature now, are you? – Ed], not only in Australia but throughout the whole world that are happening now, which everyone says this week (is a) one in 100, one in 200 years (event) but they are happening pretty much more frequently now.”
The Governor, seeming to sense his statement would be controversial, made the comments in relation to both the recent floods and the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires.
Government House staff said he was not be available yesterday for any further comment on his position. (source)
That’s the spirit, make controversial statements with no basis whatsover and then hole up in the residence and refuse to face the criticism. But at least Ted Baillieu has called him out:
Premier Ted Baillieu later disagreed with the Governor’s linking of the floods to climate change. ”I don’t think we are in any position to make a comment on that, frankly,” he told The Age.
He said he had been told yesterday that Melbourne Water was now saying Victorians should expect 30 per cent more rainfall in the next 10 years.
”You’ve only got to go back 12 months ago and they were saying Victorians should expect 30 per cent less,” Mr Baillieu said. (source)
More rain, less rain, more drought, less drought, more hurricanes, fewer hurricanes, stronger hurricanes, weaker hurricanes, more heat, more cold – whatever – it’s all climate change.
Spillway at Wivenhoe
An article in The Australian today highlights the role of the Wivenhoe Dam in the flooding that affected Brisbane:
The official records from SEQWater show that, at 6am on Friday, January 7, Wivenhoe Dam, Brisbane’s insurance policy to protect the city and surrounding suburbs from a massive rainfall and flood event, was at about 106 per cent capacity. This means that Wivenhoe had filled to 100 per cent of its capacity for water supply with a total 1.15 million megalitres, and it was 6 per cent into its additional 1.45ML of storage for flood mitigation.
On Saturday, January 8, it is understood to have let about 100,000ML go; on Sunday, when Mr Goodwin’s family was there, a further 116,000ML were released.
By 9am on Monday, the levels in the dam had soared to just over 148 per cent, and it was reported that managers at the dam had “scrambled”.
That afternoon, the extreme rainfall over Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley unleashed a maelstrom that the Bureau of Meteorology had not predicted. While the run-off from this event did not fall into Wivenhoe’s catchment of about 7000 sq km, the dam’s operators were caught by surprise and released 172,000ML as the capacity went past 150 per cent.
Through Tuesday, as Wivenhoe continued to rise past 175 per cent and then 190 per cent, the situation was becoming critical as the available buffer for more rain had been almost fully taken up. Nobody wanted the dam to go to 200 per cent, and the theoretical maximum of 225 per cent needed to be avoided at all costs.
One of the crucial questions that will be asked in a commission of inquiry, called late yesterday by Premier Anna Bligh, is whether the releases from the flood storage compartment of a little over 200,000ML on the weekend were too little, too late, necessitating a huge outpouring to get levels down quickly.
The operators of the dam gave the order on Tuesday, cranking up the release to a staggering peak rate of 645,000ML a day. At that point the Brisbane River flood was not a case of if but when: the computer modelling showed major flooding from this Wivenhoe discharge was inevitable and would peak in the 36 hours the water would take to reach the city gauge.
The release from Wivenhoe at a peak rate of 645,000ML a day represented up to 30 per cent of the dam’s total capacity. Nobody was under any misapprehension about the consequences. It was this release from Wivenhoe that represented about 80 per cent and perhaps more of the volume in the Brisbane River.
A rainfall event that could have been comfortably managed by the dam if its flood compartment had been lower had turned into a major flood that would devastate thousands of homes. (source)
So the question to be asked is, was it an oversight not to release water earlier, and at a more controlled rate, in anticipation of the floods, or was it to preserve water in the dam due to some diktat from the climate change department? Hopefully the inquiry will answer that question.
Impartiality personified
Yes, you read that right – the same Will Steffen who is the Labor government’s Chief Alarmist, and who has already made up his mind and linked the Queensland floods to climate change (see here). Kind of like the University of East Anglia investigating Climategate – no, wait, they did. What hope is there for an impartial, balanced report? None. The people of Queensland deserve better.
A report on the flood disaster and climate change will be undertaken by an expert on the federal government’s multi-party committee which is investigating ways to price carbon.
Professor Will Steffen, a member of the climate change committee set up by the Gillard government in September last year, told AAP he was working on a report covering the floods.
And just in case you missed the bias, here it is again:
Prof Steffen said there was evidence that extreme weather events appear to be increasing.
“We are getting more intense rainfall events as the earth warms, but it’s difficult to pin down any individual event,” he told AAP. [Oh, but how I wish I could, he thought – Ed]
“Rainfall events like the type we’ve seen in Queensland are becoming more likely as the earth warms.
“There is a long-term warming trend with or without La Nina.”
And lastly, so that you’re all thoroughly reassured about this process.
Prof Steffen said he would produce an update on the science for the committee, as part of the Garnaut climate change review update, as well as write his own independent report. (source)
Phew that’s OK then. Seriously, this guy is so compromised he shouldn’t be let anywhere near an “independent” enquiry.
Bunch of cynical ecotards
“Never let a good crisis go to waste” could have been written for Bob Brown. No depths are too low for the Greens’ leader, exposing his “party” as a bunch of hysterical ecotards, more concerned with using the Queensland floods to push their extremist environmental agenda than for the suffering of so many people as a result of this tragedy. Fortunately, he has been criticised for his comments by all sides:
GREENS leader Bob Brown is facing mounting condemnation after calling on coal companies to foot the bill for the Queensland flood recovery.
Senator Brown said coal companies, as major climate change contributors, should pay a 40 per cent resources super profits tax to pay for the clean-up.
Minerals Council of Australia deputy chief Brendan Pearson accused Senator Brown of “rank opportunism”, unworthy of a serious political leader.
And Australian Coal Association director Ralph Hillman said domestically-mined coal made a tiny contribution to global carbon emissions.
Liberal Senator Eric Abetz said the Greens leader should apologise for his “insensitive” comments.
“Senator Brown’s comments expose the Greens and his leadership as shallow and cynical; willing to peddle political propaganda in the face of a natural disaster,” Senator Abetz said. (source)
The Greens are hardly worthy of the title “political party”, just a rag-tag bunch of Marxist environmental fruitcakes.
Thou shalt not… call us deniers
Busy weekend, so posting is a little sparse. However, Willis Eschenbach’s post on WUWT in response to Kevin Trenberth’s ludicrous statement that the burden of proof in climate science should be reversed (in other words it should be for the sceptics to prove little or no human influence rather than the other way round – climate madness of the week) contained a wonderful set of recommendations for climate scientists, which I have renamed The Commandments. There’s way more at WUWT, but here they are in all their glory:
You want to regain the trust of the public, for yourself and for climate science? It won’t be easy, but it can be done. Here’s my shortlist of recommendations for you and other mainstream climate scientists:
• Stop trying to sell the idea that the science is settled. Climate science is a new science, we don’t even have agreement on whether clouds warm or cool the planet, we don’t know if there are thermostatic interactions that tend to maintain some temperature in preference to others. Or as you wrote to Tom Wigley, Dr. T,
“How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!” [SOURCE: email 1255550975]
Curious. You state strongly to your friend that we’re not close to knowing where the energy is going or to balancing the energy budget, yet you say in public that we know enough to take the most extraordinary step of reversing the null hypothesis … how does that work again?
At this point, there’s not much about climate science that is “unequivocal” except that the climate is always changing.
• Don’t try to change the rules of the game in mid-stream. It makes you look desperate, whether you are or not.
• Stop calling people “deniers”, my goodness, after multiple requests that’s just common courtesy and decency, where are your manners? It makes you look surly and uncivilized, whether you are or not.
• Stop avoiding public discussion and debate of your work. You are asking us to spend billions of dollars based on your conclusions. If you won’t bother to defend those conclusions, don’t bother us with them. Refusing to publicly defend your billion dollar claims make it look like you can’t defend them, whether you can or not.
• Stop secretly moving the pea under the walnut shells. You obviously think we are blind, you also clearly believe we wouldn’t remember that you said we have a poor understanding of the climate system. Disabuse yourself of the idea that you are dealing with fools or idiots, and do it immediately. As I have found to my cost, exposing my scientific claims to the cruel basilisk gaze of the internet is like playing chess with Deep Blue … individual processors have different abilities, but overall any faults in my ideas will certainly be exposed. Too many people looking at my ideas from too many sides for much to slip through. Trying anything but absolute honesty on the collective memory and wisdom of the internet makes you look like both a fool and con man, whether you are one or not.
• Write scientific papers that don’t center around words like “possibly” or “conceivably” or “might”. Yes, possibly all of the water molecules in my glass of water might be heading upwards at the same instant, and I could conceivably win the Mega-Ball lottery, and I might still play third base for the New York Yankees, but that is idle speculation that has no place in scientific inquiry. Give us facts, give us uncertainties, but spare us the stuff like “This raises the possibility that by 2050, this could lead to the total dissolution of all inter-atomic bonds …”. Yeah, I suppose it could. So what, should I buy a lottery ticket?
• Stop lauding the pathetic purveyors of failed prophecies. Perhaps you climate guys haven’t noticed, but Paul Ehrlich was not a visionary genius. He was a failure whose only exceptional talent is the making of apocalyptic forecasts that didn’t come true. In any business he would not have lasted one minute past the cratering collapse of his first ridiculous forecast of widespread food riots and worldwide deaths from global famine in the 1980s … but in academia, despite repeating his initial “We’re all gonna crash and burn, end of the world coming up soon, you betcha” prognostication method several more times with no corresponding crashing burning or ending, he’s still a professor at Stanford. Now that’s understandable under tenure rules, you can’t fire him for being a serially unsuccessful doomcaster. But he also appears to be one of your senior AGW thinkers and public representatives, which is totally incomprehensible to me.
His string of predicted global catastrophes that never came anywhere near true was only matched by the inimitable collapses of the prophecies of his wife Anne, and of his cohorts John Holdren and the late Stephen Schneider. I fear we’ll never see their like again, a fearsome foursome who between them never made one single prediction that actually came to pass. Stop using them as your spokesmodels, it doesn’t increase confidence in your claims.
• Enough with the scary scenarios, already. You’ve done the Chicken Little thing to death, give it a rest, it is sooo last century. It makes you look both out-of-date and hysterical whether you are or not.
• Speak out against scientific malfeasance whenever and wherever you see it. This is critical to the restoration of trust. I’m sick of watching climate scientists doing backflips to avoid saying to Lonnie Thompson “Hey, idiot, archive all of your data, you’re ruining all of our reputations!”. The overwhelming silence of mainstream AGW scientists on these matters is one of the (unfortunately numerous) reasons that the public doesn’t trust climate scientists, and justifiably so. You absolutely must clean up your own house to restore public trust, no one else can do it. Speak up. We can’t hear you.
• Stop re-asserting the innocence of you and your friends. It makes you all look guilty, whether you are or not … and since the CRU emails unequivocally favor the “guilty” possibility, it makes you look unapologetic as well as guilty. Whether you are or not.
• STOP HIDING THINGS!!! Give your most private data and your most top-secret computer codes directly to your worst enemies and see if they can poke holes in your ideas. If they can’t, then you’re home free. That is true science, not hiding your data and gaming the IPCC rules to your advantage.
• Admit the true uncertainties. The mis-treatment of uncertainty in the IPCC reports, and the underestimation of true uncertainty in climate science in general, is a scandal.
• Scrap the IPCC. It has run its race. Do you truly think that whatever comes out of the next IPCC report will make the slightest difference to the debate? You’ve had four IPCC reports in a row, each one more alarmist than the previous one. You’ve had every environmental organization shilling for you. You’ve had billions of dollars in support, Al Gore alone spent $300 million on advertising and advocacy. You’ve had 25 years to make your case, with huge resources and supercomputers and entire governments on your side, and you are still losing the public debate … after all of that, do you really think another IPCC report will change anything?
Brilliantly put, and it’s all anyone could ask.
Regular ACM contributor Bruce (brc) wrote a lengthy comment on an earlier item which I believe rightly deserves a post of its own. I would like to thank Bruce for his thorough and down to earth assessment of the current Queensland floods which commentators on all sides would do well to imitate:
Look, as a 3rd generation lifelong South East Queensland (“SEQ”) resident, all this world wide attention and theories are starting to irk me as talking heads start to spout off things of which they appear to have little understanding. SEQ (and Queensland in general) is periodically subject to intense widespread rain events: 1893, 1974, 2011. They happen. Even smaller intense rain events occur at least once a decade. The 1893 floods were larger, and peaked on 3 separate occasions. Does anyone care to tell me how AGW could have done that, given that horseback was the primary transportation method at the time, and electricity was something played with in laboratories?
If anything, the lower levels in 1974 and 2011 is proof that AGW makes the flooding less worse (I say with tongue in cheek). There’s also a popular meme going around (James Delingpole and Andrew Bolt) that somehow green interfering caused the death and destruction. Nothing could be further from the truth. And believe me, I love a good outing of ridiculous green policy as much as the next person.
Here are the facts:
- The majority of loss of life was caused by flash-flooding in and around Toowoomba (700m above sea level) and the Lockyer valley below the Toowoomba range. The streams that caused the devastation in Toowoomba are normally babbling brooks one can leap with a vigorous jump. While some warning may have helped, many deaths were caused by people undertaking risky actions like trying to drive across flooded bridges.
- The scrapped Traveston Crossing dam project on the Mary river would not have saved Gympie from flooding. It would have been 100% full (like every other dam in the region) prior to the large rain events – it has been raining steadily for two months. In any case, it was the residents of Gympie that campaigned the most against the dam. Not because of lungfish (the figleaf that the environment minister used) but because it was a bad idea. A flat alluvial sandy plain is not the ideal location for a dam. It would have been wide and shallow on porous soil. And it would have subsumed a huge area of productive farmland. It was correct for the dam to be scrapped, and many engineers publicly stated this. That it was scrapped under environmental reasons was just the out for an embarrassed Federal government saddled with the plans after the former premier announced it to save his political hide (Brisbane was under severe water restrictions at the time) but then scarpered anyway. It was chosen because the area had never, and would never, vote for Labor anyway, so it was the best place to put it, safely away from Brisbane voters. It would have been full, and would not have saved Gympie from flooding. And the townspeople in Gympie are used to flooding anyway, and go about moving out of the way with a cheery disposition.
- Wivenhoe dam – conceived and built after the 1974 floods – has done a very good job in extremely difficult circumstances. It has managed to keep the peak level of floods 1m lower than predicted, by delicately balancing the inflows and outflows and timing with the low tide in the Brisbane river. It was already at 150% (and releasing continually, as it has been for months) when this large rainfall event hit. SEQ Water are to be commended with the way they handled this, with the Dam balanced within 1m of the peak level allowable before dam-protection levees give way to protect the wall (with devastating consequences for those downstream).
It’s difficult for people who don’t live in Queensland to understand the volumes of water we’re talking about here. This is not some drizzling Victorian rain or misty English weather. This is a proper, tropical summer monsoon rainfall a bit further south than it normally is. The written history of Queensland is only about 200 years long, but it is peppered with tales of huge floods that astound new observers. People see the 1974 markers on buildings around Brisbane and think it can’t possibly have happened. The puny infrastructure put in the way of these periodic deluges is nothing compared with the water volumes. It will happen again, at least once per lifetime of the average person. There’s nothing that can be done. After all, it’s just weather.
Bureau's David Jones
The floodgates are open. The unfalsifiable hypothesis of dangerous man-made global warming comes to the rescue and provides the answer to the terrible Queensland floods. We can all now self-flagellate, wailing that driving our SUVs is to blame. Over a quarter of a million Google hits for +queensland +flood +”climate change” in the last week alone. But hang on a minute, when there was a drought in Australia, climate change caused that too. Referring here to New South Wales and the Murray-Darling Basin, where there have also been recent flooding rains:
IT MAY be time to stop describing south-eastern Australia as gripped by drought and instead accept the extreme dry as permanent, one of the nation’s most senior weather experts warned yesterday.
“Perhaps we should call it our new climate,” said the Bureau of Meteorology’s head of climate analysis, David Jones.
It was the 11th year in a row NSW and the Murray-Darling Basin had experienced above normal temperatures. Sydney’s nights were its warmest since records were first kept 149 years ago.
“There is absolutely no debate that Australia is warming,” said Dr Jones. “It is very easy to see … it is happening before our eyes.” [There is debate about the cause, however – Ed]
The only uncertainty now was whether the changing pattern was “85 per cent, 95 per cent or 100 per cent the result of the enhanced greenhouse effect”. [Apparently not according to Jones – Ed]
“There is a debate in the climate community, after … close to 12 years of drought, whether this is something permanent. Certainly, in terms of temperature, that seems to be our reality, and that there is no turning back. (source)
But now that Queensland is under water, Jones has another story:
“We’ve always had El Ninos and we’ve had natural variability but the background which is now operating is different,” head of climate monitoring and prediction at the Australia Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne David Jones said.
“The first thing we can say with La Nina and El Nino is it is now happening in a hotter world,” he told Reuters, adding that meant more evaporation from land and oceans, more moisture in the atmosphere and stronger weather patterns.
“So the El Nino droughts would be expected to be exacerbated and also La Nina floods because rainfall would be exacerbated,” he said, though adding it would be some years before any climate change impact on both phenomena might become clear.
Everyone’s a winner, ignoring the pointless weasel-word caveat at the end. Droughts: climate change. Floods: climate change. I’ve said it before, but will say it again: what evidence would show that climate change was not taking place? In other words, what conditions would falsify the hypothesis? I won’t wait for an answer, because there isn’t one. Everything strengthens the case for AGW, in the alarmists’ view.
And Keith “Travesty” Trenberth chimes in as well:
Prominent US climate scientist Kevin Trenberth said the floods and the intense La Nina were a combination of factors.
He pointed to high ocean temperatures in the Indian Ocean near Indonesia early last year as well as the rapid onset of La Nina after the last El Nino ended in May.
“The rapid onset of La Nina meant the Asian monsoon was enhanced and the over 1 degree Celsius anomalies in sea surface temperatures led to the flooding in India and China in July and Pakistan in August,” he told Reuters in an email.
He said a portion, about 0.5C, of the ocean temperatures around northern Australia, which are more than 1.5C above pre-1970 levels, could be attributed to global warming.
“The extra water vapor fuels the monsoon and thus alters the winds and the monsoon itself and so this likely increases the rainfall further,” Mr Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, said.
“So it is easy to argue that one degree Celsius sea surface temperature anomalies gives 10 to 15 per cent increase in rainfall,” he added.
Yep, dead easy if you can just pick and choose a model to fit whatever weather phenomenon is currently occurring. Even the token scientist drafted in to say that there’s no link to climate change manages to link it to climate change:
It’s a natural phenomena. We have no strong reason at the moment for saying this La Nina is any stronger than it would be even without humans,” said Neville Nicholls of Monash University in Melbourne and president of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society.
But he said global atmospheric warming of about 0.75C over the past half century had to be having some impact.
“It has to be affecting the climate, regionally and globally. It has to be affecting things like La Nina. But can you find a credible argument which says it’s made it worse? I can’t at the moment.” (source)
Well, it has to be one or the other. Either the warming is affecting La Niña or it isn’t. And of course, none of this says anything about the cause of the warming.
And we here in Australia are all deeply honoured that the Mighty Goracle has used “our” floods as “evidence of climate change.” If Big Al thinks so, it must be true. (source)
(H/t Bishop Hill)
Lord Monckton of Brenchley
UPDATE: Lord Monckton replies again, with a further clarification (see end of post)
Yesterday I wrote concerning Mike Steketee’s alarmist article in the Weekend Australian, Lord Monckton’s rebuttal, and Steketee’s response to the rebuttal. I am grateful that Lord Monckton took the trouble to write a long comment on that original post, which I have elevated to a post of its own.
The two points I made in that post were, firstly, that claiming no warming since 1998 is spurious, and secondly, that Steketee’s article was not worthy of a response. In relation to the first, Lord Monckton’s rebuttal to Steketee states:
4. THE WORLD IS NOT COOLER COMPARED TO 1998.
Actually, it is cooler. There was a remarkable spike in global temperatures in 1998, caused not by manmade “global warming” but by a Great El Niño event – an alteration in the pattern of ocean currents that begins in the equatorial eastern Pacific and spreads around the globe, lasting a few months. In the first nine months of 2010 there was another substantial El Niño, but even at its peak it did not match the Great El Niño of 1998.
The point here is that making any comparison of temperatures to a year in which there is a particularly strong El Niño is inadvisable (since it is a natural upward spike over and above the temperature had it not occurred). So whilst the 2010 El Niño spike indeed did not match that of 1998, it says nothing about the underlying trend, and more to do with the relative strengths of those El Niño events. In any case, as I said previously, who cares if the planet is warming? It’s the causation that is important.
In relation to the second, I believe that it is not worth sceptics efforts in responding to uninformed, journalistic alarmism. There are journalists all over the world who write material similar to, if not more extreme, than Mike Steketee. Responding to all of them would be impossible and pointless. Maybe Lord Monckton has a reason for choosing Steketee’s article over the thousands of climate scare stories that are published every week throughout the world – possibly that The Australian is generally regarded as more “climate realist” than any other in this country – but take a look at Adam Morton in The Age, for example. Fairfax made up its mind on climate change years ago, and regurgitates the same tired alarmist material on a daily basis. For that very reason, I have abandoned critiquing Fairfax articles. It just ain’t worth the effort (except for a bit of light entertainment now and again).
One final point I would like to make to Lord Monckton is that despite my original post, we are both on the same side here! As I said, I appreciate the work that Lord Monckton has done with the Science and Public Policy Institute, and I was first in the queue to meet him at his talk in Sydney last January.
Here is Lord Monckton’s response in full. Thoughts and comments appreciated.
Right from the get-go, Michael Steketee’s prejudice is evident in his attempted rebuttal of my article pointing out a couple of dozen questionable assertions – some of them downright false – in a scare story he had published in The Australian: Steketee says experts will continue to challenge my assertions about climate. It would have been more balanced to add that other experts will continue to support my assertions, or, better still, to leave out that redundant statement altogether.
Steketee next argues that I should not have held his remark that 2010 was the warmest year on record against him, because he was quoting the World Meteorological Organization. Yet it was his lack of balance I was criticizing: he was too prejudiced also to quote the satellite record of Remote Sensing Systems, Inc. and of the University of Alabama at Huntsville, which does not show 2010 as the warmest year on the 160-year global instrumental temperature record.
On this point, Simon-from-Sydney carelessly weighs in, accusing me of “plugging the no-warming-since-1998” line. No: in my Monthly CO2 Reports at www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org, I date the temperature graphs from both 1980, the beginning of the well-calibrated satellite record, and 2001, the beginning of the new millennium. I do not date my graphs from 1998 or draw any trend-lines starting at that date. All I did, correctly in every respect, was to point out that Steketee had said that 2010 was warmer even than the great-El-Niño year of 1998, when in fact the satellite records show it is cooler.
Steketee goes on complain that I criticized him for cherry-picking individual extreme-weather events that pointed in one direction only. True, he cited a professor as saying there had been some cold-weather events too, but not one of these was specifically mentioned in Steketee’s article, which was full of specifics about various hot-weather events.
Next Steketee tries to mislead his readers by complaining that I had criticized him for saying the 2010 hurricane season was among the worst in recent decades, when in fact, according to Dr. Ryan Maue, who keeps the Accumulated Cyclone Energy Index, it was just about the least active in half a century. The fact is that on this as on many other points Steketee simply got it wrong, and all his errors fell in the direction of making up a problem where there isn’t one and exaggerating it where there is – again, an indication of the prejudice that was (and is) my fundamental criticism of him.
Steketee goes on (and on) to accuse me of “complete misrepresentation” in saying he had asserted that “even cautious scientists tend to say we can blame [manmade] climate change for certain extreme-weather events. But that is what Steketee actually said. Steketee uses a get-out clause all too prevalent in his sort of journalism: he says he stated that a single proessor did not argue that climate change was responsible for any single event – except the bush-fires in Victoria, for which he had said there was strong evidence for an anthropogenic component. Yes, Steketee cited that one scientist: but his wider point – that “even cautious scientists” – in general – are attributing individual extreme-weather events to manmade climate change is not extinguished by his citation of a single professor who said that most extreme-weather events cannot be attributed to us.
Finally, Steketee says I was unfair to say he had asserted that manmade climate change had contributed to the 20% decline in rainfall in parts of southern Australia over recent decades. But that is exactly what he said. True, he attributed the statement to the CSIRO, but he did not offer any countervailing evidence.
But it is the omissions in Steketee’s attempted rebuttal that are so damning.
The simple fact is that many of the facts in his piece were simply wrong; I said so; and he was quite unable to say I was wrong to say so. Just a few examples:2010 was not the most active hurricane season on record, but just about the least. the floods of last year in Pakistan were not the worst on record; only the worst since 1980 or thereby. We will not face 2 C of locked-in warming if we stop emitting any CO2 from today: it’s more like 0.4 C at most. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 has not risen by 27.5% since 1990, but by just 10.5%; and, if one takes into account all other greenhouse gases as well, the anthropogenic component has risen by just 2%.
So, Simon-from-Sydney, take some trouble to get your facts right before you accuse me of scoring an own goal. You say you don’t think I should have responded to Steketee’s nonsense at all: however, it is precisely because he and his ilk have been peddling trashy, largely truth-free extremism for years that so many feeble-minded governments have bought into the climate scare. Sometimes it is necessary to hit back with the facts, even if those who got them wrong then complain – quite inappropriately – that they were “misrepresented”. – Monckton of Brenchley
UPDATE: Lord Monckton’s response to this post [edited]:
It was Steketee, not I, who made a comparison between 1998 and the present, and he got it wrong, by saying that 2010 was warmer than 1998. No, it was cooler. I merely corrected Steketee’s error. There was and is, therefore, no basis for Simon’s allegation that I made comparisons between 1998 (where the result was distorted by an exceptional el Nino event that caused a strong spike in warming worldwide) and 2010 (when the el Nino was less intense). No, I didn’t, and don’t.
Lord Monckton did not respond to any other points in my post. Although 2010 was technically cooler than 1998, and Lord Monckton indeed corrected Steketee’s claim (although Steketee argues he didn’t say that), it’s all meaningless. In general, alarmists love to point out that sceptics of many different varieties rely on the “no warming since 1998” line, and they rightly pull such an argument apart. In Lord Monckton’s 2008 American Physical Society paper, the first paragraph of the abstract reads (my emphasis):
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007) concluded that anthropogenic CO2 emissions probably caused more than half of the “global warming” of the past 50 years and would cause further rapid warming. However, global mean surface temperature has not risen since 1998 and may have fallen since late 2001. (source)
I merely believe 1998 should never be used as any kind of starting point for comparison of global temperatures, whether by alarmists or sceptics.
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