Queensland floods: Alarmist-in-Chief's weasel words

11 January, 2011 by

Never lets a good disaster go to waste

Linking the tragic Queensland floods to climate change in 3..2..1… Who cares about the dead, injured and missing? Never let a good disaster go to waste, right? Such is the utter, disgraceful, jawdropping callousness of the warmists, they manage to link weather events to climate change by expressly not linking weather events to climate change, but just by chance happening to talk about the subjects at the same time – brilliant! Will Steffen (link to ANU page – search here for email), Gillard’s Alarmist-in-Chief does exactly that, in a typically sickening soundbite:

Climate change committee member Professor Will Steffen, the executive director of the ANU Climate Change Institute, said there was no direct link between global warming and the tragic flash flooding in Toowoomba which has killed at least nine people in southeast Queensland.

But he told The Australian Online that climate change would lead to heavier, more frequent rain.

“As the climate warms, there is more water vapour in the atmosphere,” he told The Australian Online.

“This means that there is a probability that there will more intense rainfall events around the world.

There is some evidence that we can see them now. I think the place where the best data is the US.” (source)

We have a term at ACM for people like Steffen. It’s [censored].

UPDATE: Marc at ABC NewsWatch usefully summarises the flood history of SE Queensland here. Guess what, there have been less severe floods and more severe floods and no floods at all… and nothing has changed. Did anthropogenic CO2 cause the floods in 1893 perhaps? Hang on, let’s get the script right [clears throat]: “No direct link between global warming and the 1893 floods, but climate change would lead to heavier, more frequent rain.” Unspoken conclusion: leading to more floods like the one we just happen by chance to be talking about right now… That’s the sneaky thing about flood plains, they flood… duh.

News just in: Queensland floods blamed on George Bush, John Howard, Sarah Palin…

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Monckton's own goal

11 January, 2011 by

UPDATE: Lord Monckton responds to ACM on this post – see here.

I avoided posting on this yesterday, because I could see that it was heading for a train wreck – I left a comment on WUWT expressing my concerns.

Mike Steketee is a columnist for the Weekend Australian, and has a history of writing articles that plug the AGW line. Last weekend he wrote a “hottest-year-since-the-dawn-of-time” scare piece, comprising many of the usual alarmist viewpoints trotted out about climate change – hurricanes, bushfires – ticks in all the boxes. He should read my post “What does ‘in history’ mean?” In response to this article, Christopher Monckton prepared a dense and detailed response in PDF form with a proper SPPI cover, a flashy graphic and all the trimmings – an error in itself, I thought, since it dignified Steketee’s piece far beyond what it deserved. The trick with his columns is simply to ignore – far safer. But in doing so, Monckton exposed himself to attack, by apparently misrepresenting what Steketee had said in several cases, and thereby letting in a simple own goal. Steketee’s response is considered, and makes Monckton look shrill.

I think Christopher Monckton has done a great deal to help communicate scepticism and the debunking of AGW myths (that is if you can get past the unnecessary aristocratic coronets on every Powerpoint slide he shows) but he will insist on plugging the “no warming since 1998” line, which I’m afraid, is an open goal. 1998 was a huge El Niño year, and the spike in temperatures that year cannot be used to justify that there has been “no warming since 1998”. I ignore the surface temperature records entirely, since they have warmists’ sticky fingers all over them (eg. James Hansen and GISS – potential conflict, NASA? Apparently not…) so let’s look at the satellite record, which is less susceptible to fudging and “adjustment”:

Satellite temperatures, 1979 - 2010

We can see clearly that temperatures for much of the first decade of the 21st century were indeed higher than the last decade of the 20th. To argue otherwise is asking for trouble. And 2010 had another major El Niño, which pushed up temperatures in the first part of the year. A La Niña is now acting to reverse that increase, and it will be interesting to see how much further temperatures will drop in the next few months.

However, none of this tells us anything about the cause of that warming. So what if this decade is warmer than last? The planet has been warming slowly since the end of the Little Ice Age, well before there were any anthropogenic CO2 emissions, so is it any wonder that this decade is warmer than the last? There is a temporal relationship between increasing temperature and rising CO2 levels, but no proven causal link. That is the point that Monckton should have made.

If you really want to run the “no warming” line, you could choose 2002 if you wish, but it’s just getting a little silly then. In any case, why bother? The planet’s warming? Big deal. It warms, it cools, it does just what the hell it likes. Nobody can link the warming of the late 20th and early 21st centuries directly to anthropogenic emissions, and that is the weak link in the armour that Monckton and sceptics in general should aim for.

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How to end uncertainty on carbon [dioxide] pricing

10 January, 2011 by

Through the shredder

Simple: abandon it.

The Australian agonises at length about “business certainty”:

IN 2007, as southern Australia ground through the hottest average temperatures on record, a national carbon price was high on the agenda.

Both John Howard and Kevin Rudd had committed themselves to an emissions trading scheme to combat global warming as they geared up for the November election, which Rudd, who was pushing the issue hardest, won.

But three years, a global financial crisis and a hung parliament later, any certainty about a carbon price, or its form, has quickly dried up.

In the electricity sector alone, the uncertainty has led to $10 billion, or 56 per cent, of power generation investment planned over the next five years being slashed. (source)

I think we all know the solution.

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US: Republicans to limit EPA on emissions

9 January, 2011 by

House leader John Boehner

As we all know, Obama failed to get congressional approval for his plan to “tackle climate change” (code for destroying the economy – although he’s done a pretty good job of that anyway), but that wasn’t going to stop the Marxist POTUS, who thinks that the whole democracy thing is just an annoying inconvenience. He just encouraged the EPA to classify the harmless trace gas carbon dioxide as a dangerous pollutant, which they meekly did. However, the Republican majority in the House is doing its best to put an end to Obama’s undemocratic methods:

Republicans in the US Congress have wasted no time in using their new majority in the House of Representatives to try to block the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency to act on climate change.

In their first full day in the new Congress, Republicans outlined three different bills – encapsulating three different strategies – aimed at limiting the agency’s powers.

The first would declare that greenhouse gas emissions are not subject to the Clean Air Act. The second would block funding to any government agency associated with cap-and-trade. The third is seeking a two-year delay in EPA regulation of carbon dioxide and methane emissions.

The Republicans also shut down a House committee that had tackled energy and climate issues. (source)

Bravo. Climate sense from the US at last.

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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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