If you thought 'world government' is a conspiracy theory…

19 March, 2012 by

World government

To all those smug warmists who crow that those filthy deniers, who claim the climate ‘crisis’ is being used as a convenient socio-political tool to implement a system of world government, are just indulging in crazy conspiracy theories, Scientific American sets us all straight:

Effective World Government Will Be Needed to Stave Off Climate Catastrophe

“Human societies must now change course and steer away from critical tipping points in the Earth system that might lead to rapid and irreversible change. This requires fundamental reorientation and restructuring of national and international institutions toward more effective Earth system governance and planetary stewardship.” 

…

“If we are ever to cope with climate change in any fundamental way, radical solutions on the social side are where we must focus, though.”

…

“To be effective, a new set of institutions would have to be imbued with heavy-handed, transnational enforcement powers.“

It’s a little difficult to avoid conclusions about the aim of social re-engineering and world government when it is spelled out so clearly. If you don’t want conspiracy theories to emerge, stop your warmist friends from providing the substance on which they are based – simple.

Read it here.

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BBC: seawater sprays to stop 'planetary emergency'

18 March, 2012 by

Yeah, that'd work

More bonkers geoengineering proposals from the UK, puffed by the ever willing Richard Black at the BBC. Reading the BBC is like reading Fairfax or the ABC. All the environmental journos have drunk the climate change Kool-aid and are fully paid up members of the alarmist community.

So we shouldn’t be surprised when Richard Black plugs some crazy geoengineering idea to “save the planet”:

An eminent UK engineer is suggesting building cloud-whitening towers in the Faroe Islands as a “technical fix” for warming across the Arctic.

Scientists told UK MPs this week that the possibility of a major methane release triggered by melting Arctic ice constitutes a “planetary emergency”.

The Arctic could be sea-ice free each September within a few years.

Wave energy pioneer Stephen Salter has shown that pumping seawater sprays into the atmosphere could cool the planet.

The Edinburgh University academic has previously suggested whitening clouds using specially-built ships.

At a meeting in Westminster organised by the Arctic Methane Emergency Group (Ameg), Prof Salter told MPs that the situation in the Arctic was so serious that ships might take too long.

“I don’t think there’s time to do ships for the Arctic now,” he said.

“We’d need a bit of land, in clean air and the right distance north… where you can cool water flowing into the Arctic.”

I love this bit:

In summer, seawater would be pumped up to the top using some kind of renewable energy

Which kind? Sunbeams? Wind? And then the alarmism just piles on:

“With ‘business-as-usual’ greenhouse gas emissions, we might have warming of 9-10C in the Arctic. [might – Ed]

“That will cement in place the ice-free nature of the Arctic Ocean – it will release methane from offshore, and a lot of the methane on land as well.”

This would – in turn – exacerbate warming, across the Arctic and the rest of the world.

Abrupt methane releases from frozen regions may have played a major role in two events, 55 and 251 million years ago, that extinguished much of the life then on Earth. (source)

It’s amazing that even with the BBC spinning such climate astrology, the public are still more sceptical than they were five years ago. Fail.

And while we’re on the subject of Richard Black, there’s a new blog dedicated to exposing his climate alarmist agenda: Black’s Whitewash. Add it to your bookmarks. 

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Idiotic Comment of the Day: Fairfax's Jessica Irvine

17 March, 2012 by

Worthy winner

The Fairfax journalists’ training program works a treat:

LIES, damned lies and statistics. Many’s the poor statistic that has been tortured into yielding a false confession at the hands of a merciless interrogator.

Climate sceptics have turned such torture into an art form, picking point-to-point time comparisons to show a falling trend in global temperatures, focusing on ”outlier” cool years and redrawing trend lines on graphs. (source)

Funny how she conveniently forgets that its the warmists are the “merciless interrogators” that torture the data until it confesses – just ask Michael Mann, Phil Jones or James Hansen. It’s the sceptics that have to release the battered and weary data from the dungeon so they can finally tell their true story.

Actually, the hapless Irvine then has to concede that the correlation is not causation argument is correct. But don’t let that get in the way of a cheap smear against the filthy climate sceptics, right? That’s on page 1 of the Fairfax journalists’ manual.

Same ol’ same ol’.

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Bankrupt EU still obsessed with 'tackling climate change'

17 March, 2012 by

Glover - Chief Alarmist

You would have thought the EU had bigger fish to fry – like staying in the black, avoiding the collapse of the Euro zone, patching up relations with trading partners over the malicious airline tax, that kind of thing.

But no, the EU is still obsessed with wrecking its economy with pointless measures to “tackle climate change” – at least Poland has thrown a spanner in the works for the time being – but their latest paid hack, its first chief scientist, has thrown her weight behind climate action, despite economic troubles:

The European Union cannot use the economic slowdown as an excuse to delay action on fighting climate change, the bloc’s first-ever chief scientific adviser has warned.

Molecular biologist Anne Glover took on the newly created role reporting to European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso at the start of this year, having previously served as chief scientific adviser to Scotland’s devolved government. [But she’s not a climate scientist – she isn’t qualified to speak – no wait, she’s on the right side so we ignore that – Ed]

Despite the fact that many EU governments are slashing their public budgets in an attempt to reduce debt levels, and industry is warning against the cost of climate policies, Glover said Europe cannot afford to postpone action to cut emissions.

“It has been extremely disappointing to see many member states cut back on their emission reduction efforts because they say ‘we’re going through a recession‘,” she said. [Yeah, feeding your population and keeping them in jobs is such a bore -Ed]

“Make no mistake, if we had unabated man-made climate change, we would go through an absolutely horrible period of conflict and migration, until the world’s population started diminishing very rapidly.” [See, no exaggeration there! – Ed]

As Europe’s leaders begin to switch their focus from spending cuts to boosting growth and jobs, constraints on natural resources also mean that the EU cannot just spend its way out of recession as it has in the past.

“The simplest way to think about increasing jobs is to make more stuff and get people to buy more stuff. But my point is that we can’t do that, because we’re running out of resources,” Glover said.

Looks like Glover is following in the footsteps of our own Chief Scientists, Penny Sackett and Ian Chubb, both climate alarmists. And to finish off, just one more quote:

“If we take the automotive industries, if you ask people ‘do you think you’ll have a car that runs on diesel or petrol in 2020 or 2030?’, the overwhelming answer is ‘no’. All of the citizens of Europe think that their cars will be running on some eco-fuel that won’t be polluting the environment. (source)

“All of the citizens of Europe”? I don’t think so. And what will they run on? Electricity generated from coal, perhaps, because you’ve shut down all your nuclear reactors? Or sunbeams and farts?

Glover’s really living in a little fantasy land in her head. Pity the EU.

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Michael Mann's cosy chat on ABC's Lateline

16 March, 2012 by

Very cosy

UPDATE: Baldrick in the comments reminds ACM of Tony Jones’ hostile and patronising interrogation of Ian Plimer on Lateline in April 2009. What a contrast to the kid gloves employed here with Mann. Biased much, ABC?

—-

Michael “Stick” Mann has a very pleasant, cosy little chat with Emma Alberici (quelle surprise…) on Lateline last night. Mann will no doubt be regarded as a valiant hero to most of the warmist journos at the ABC, so there were no tricky questions, just an easy ride and bags of sympathy for the poor climatologists who are being “intimidated” by filthy deniers:

MICHAEL MANN: the FBI actually came in at my – when I reported to them the fact that I had received a letter, an envelope that had white powder in it. And initially I had assumed the worst, but the FBI sent it off to their lab, they checked it out, it turns out it was a false alarm. Nonetheless, as you allude to, I have been subject to all sorts of personal attacks, threats to my safety, my life, threats to my family, and it’s not just me, it’s dozens of climate scientists in the US, in Australia and many other regions of the world where our findings are finding that climate change is real and potentially poses a threat to civilisation if we don’t confront that challenge. That represents a threat to certain vested interests and they’ve tried hard to discredit the science, often by discrediting and intimidating the scientists. Unfortunately it’s not all that new a tactic. We saw the same thing back in the 1970s, 1980s with tobacco, with the tobacco industry trying to discredit research establishing adverse health impacts of their product. It’s an old tactic and it’s now being used to try to discredit climate science, mainly coming from vested interests who don’t want to see us shift away from our current reliance on fossil fuels because they – understandably, they profit greatly from our current addiction to fossil fuels.

EMMA ALBERICI: Who are these vested interest groups? [See, really tough question, eh Emma? Didn’t think to pick up Mann on any of the allegations above – Ed]

MICHAEL MANN: Well I actually talk about this in some detail in the book and I refer to some other books that have been written on this topic that actually trace much of the attacks against climate science and climate scientists to various organisations and front groups that derive most of their funding from the fossil fuel industry and what they often do is issue press releases attacking mainstream science. They publish – they have folks publish op.’ eds attacking climate scientists. They sort of create what some have called an echo chamber of climate change denial that permeates the airwaves and our media and it’s been a real challenge for scientists, for the scientific community to try to communicate the very real nature of the climate change threat in the face of this fairly massive disinformation campaign.

Tobacco, Big Oil. Echo chamber of denial. Mann should find a new scriptwriter. And yet none of this is challenged.

The fact that Exxon gives millions of dollars to Green groups is irrelevant to the ABC. The fact that the alarmist industry funding is three or four orders of magnitude greater than for sceptics is irrelevant to the ABC. The fact that the Hockey Stick was bad science debunked by Steve McIntyre is irrelevant to the ABC. The fact that the Climategate emails show repeated manipulation of data, corruption of peer review, threats to journals that dare publish papers challenging the consensus, and avoiding of FOI requests is irrelevant to the ABC. They were all “taken out of context”, right?

Michael Mann is a key player in The Cause, and here was an opportunity to ask any number of very awkward questions – unfortunately the ABC avoided them all.

Read/watch here.

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Australian temperature records 'shoddy, inaccurate, unreliable'

16 March, 2012 by

Sydney Observatory (no UHI there, no siree)

From Jo Nova:

The BOM say their temperature records are high quality. An independent audit team has just produced a report showing that as many as 85 – 95% of all Australian sites in the pre-Celsius era (before 1972) did not comply with the BOM’s own stipulations. The audit shows 20-30% of all the measurements back then were rounded or possibly truncated. Even modern electronic equipment was at times, so faulty and unmonitored that one station rounded all the readings for nearly 10 years! These sloppy errors may have created an artificial warming trend.

The BOM are issuing pronouncements of trends to two decimal places like this one  in the BOM’s Annual Climate Summary 2011 of “0.52 °C above average”  yet relying on patchy data that did not meet its own compliance standards around half the time.  It’s doubtful they can justify one decimal place, let alone two?

We need a professional audit.

Forget surface stations, just use satellites.

Read it all here.

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Australia's worst alarmists link recent rains to climate change

15 March, 2012 by

Yep, climate change

UPDATE: Guess what? The ABC swallows the whole thing, with a fawning, completely uncritical report on AM.

—

Following hot on the heels of the BoM/CSIRO climate report yesterday, today we have yet more scaremongering and alarmism.

David Karoly, Matthew England and Will Steffen are probably Australia’s three most hysterical climate alarmists. They have all featured regularly in these pages, and Will Steffen is one of the Labor government’s climate advisers.

And as we all know, any weather event, floods, drought, more cyclones, fewer cyclones, excessive heat, excessive cold, you name it, can be attributed to climate change. As has been said so many times, it is an unfalsifiable hypothesis – no event can disprove it – and therefore falls into the realm of pseudoscience. Bummer.

So when confronted with real world events which contradict their previous predictions, instead of admitting that there might be more to learn about the effects of climate on our weather, our three alarmists dig their heels in even further and make yet more extreme claims.

Put all those factors together, and you get this:

THREE of the nation’s leading climate scientists have linked the past two years of record wet weather to climate change in their strongest findings yet on the impact of global warming on the nation’s climate.

Professors Will Steffen, Matthew England and David Karoly, in a paper to be released today by the Climate Commission, find global warming may have contributed to the strength of the La Nina event and the heavy rainfall and flooding.

They also contend that the heavy rains do not contradict the trend towards drier weather for southern and eastern areas of Australia and find that despite two years of above average rains, southeast Australia continues to suffer from a cumulative rainfall deficit.

They reiterate warnings that global warming will produce longer dry spells, punctuated by heavier rainfall events, in southern and southwest Australia.

The release of the paper comes as Climate Commission chairman Tim Flannery faces increasing ridicule over his earlier predictions of water shortages in major capital cities due to drier weather resulting from global warming. (source)

Top three alarmists

And from the report itself, right on cue comes the now hackneyed “consistent with” excuse:

The wetter conditions experienced in southeastern Australia in the last two years are consistent with scientists’ knowledge and understanding of how the climate is changing in the long term. 

Because everything and anything is “consistent with” climate change, right boys? Here’s a challenge for our three heroes: what weather event would not be “consistent with” climate change? Answers on a postcard.

If you were a truly impartial scientist you would say, we don’t actually know how any changes in our climate will affect us, but these kind of events really help our understanding. Not spout yet more of the kind of alarmist nonsense that those three are all too famous for.

But that’s what happens when you are driven by an agenda – to prop up “The Cause” at all costs.

Don’t forget, the Climate Commission was set up by a government that has swallowed the IPCC line and wishes to enact a carbon tax, based on the threat of dangerous global warming… it would be highly inconvenient if dangerous global warming really wasn’t happening…

The full PDF report is here.

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Warmer weather affects cognition in MS patients

14 March, 2012 by

Gore effect?

Another in the series “Warmer is bad for you”:

Warm weather may hinder cognitive performance in people with multiple sclerosis (MS), according to results of a Kessler Foundation study e-published online ahead of print by Neurology. An accompanying editorial by Meier & Christodoulou, MS and heat: The smoke and the fire, details the study’s unique aspects, ie, longitudinal followup in a cohort with apparently quiescent disease.

Victoria M. Leavitt, Ph.D., research scientist at Kessler Foundation, is principal investigator for the study, which for the first time, shows a link between warm weather and cognition in people with MS. With more research, this information might help guide people with MS in making life decisions and assist their clinicians in choosing clinical treatment. Scientists may also want to consider the effect of warmer weather on cognition when designing and conducting clinical trials. (source)

But warmer is still preferable to the alternative (pictured). Cognitive performance will be pretty close to zero after you’ve frozen to death because you can’t pay your electricity bill.

[Editor’s note: although this article doesn’t relate directly to climate change, and no link is made in the article itself, it was published in Eurekalert’s “Earth Science” feed, and also appeared in Science Daily’s “Climate change” feed, so a link is clearly implied – Simon]

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Bureau's Annual Alarmism Summary

14 March, 2012 by

Bushfires = climate ©BoM

UPDATE: Graham Lloyd, The Australian’s environment editor displays a staggering gullibility in his accompanying opinion piece “Plenty of data to compel doubters” – at least he didn’t say “deniers”. Take the following:

“For anyone who doubts the role played by mankind in rising levels of atmospheric CO2, the graph that shows how it remained at a constant level for 2000 years before shooting up with the industrial revolution should be compelling.”

Er, really? Ignoring the fact that such a visual trick is achieved by choosing the y-axis scale appropriately, few people doubt the fact that mankind has raised CO2 levels. So your point is? That such a rise correlates with higher temperatures? Lloyd avoids all the issues with causation, the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods (which occurred when CO2 levels were “safe”) and the fudging of feedbacks, trusting completely the words of the BoM and CSIRO. The rest is just as bad here.

—

When you look at the cover image of the latest Bureau of Meteorology Climate Summary for 2011, it tells you all you need to know. Illustrated with a raging bush fire (didn’t know bush fires were “climate”) it gives the impression that such events are something we haven’t ever experienced until the last 50 years, when we started pumping out evil carbon dioxide.

Like the UK Met Office, the Bureau is now less a weather reporting organisation than a political activist group, plugging the consensus AGW line and abandoning any vestiges of scientific impartiality.

Therefore, as we would come to expect from the Bureau, the report is packed full of alarmism, and despite the fact that temperatures have been much lower in 2011, it blames that squarely on La Niña, and assures us that underneath, temperatures are still rising.

Throughout, it is painfully obvious that the Bureau is desperate to prop up “The Cause” at any cost, as The Australian reports:

COOLER weather in Australia in the past two years due to the rain-inducing La Nina weather pattern does not undermine the collective evidence of climate change, the nation’s peak scientific and weather organisations say.

In their second State of the Climate report released today, the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology say evidence shows global warming continued and human activities were mainly responsible.

The report says natural climate variability had affected the global mean temperature and sea levels during the past century but much less than greenhouse gases, which continued to rise.

“It is clear that increasing greenhouse gas concentrations will result in significant further global warming,” the report says.

…

Bureau of Meteorology climate monitoring manager Karl Braganza said the scientific community found it difficult to communicate the climate change message because of the long timeframes involved.

“People want to see the things projected for the next 20 to 30 years happening now and if they don’t see it, their acceptance of the science is ameliorated by that,” Dr Braganza said.

Maybe it’s because people have lost trust in climate scientists, because of evidence of data manipulation and other unscientific and disreputable activities. And any old excuse is suddenly wheeled out for the lack of warming, reduced solar activity and aerosols:

“We are probably at a period where solar forcing (the sun’s energy) has been lower than recent decades,” he said.

There was an influence from China’s rapid economic development, which was causing more particles to be put into the atmosphere that reflect sunlight. “I think all of those things are affecting the climate system but the dominant, real standout influence is the increase in greenhouse gases, mostly CO2,” Dr Braganza said.

And we all know why they reach this conclusion – because every climate model accentuates the effect of CO2 relative to natural drivers.

The report says the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere last year was 390 parts per million, higher than at any time for the past 800,000 years. (source)

And just to round off, a lovely piece of pointless alarmism, which just about sums up this report.

The only thing to be said is: “We will see.”

The full report is here.

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Climate change to cause 'mass migration'

13 March, 2012 by

More fearmongering?

Add it to The List. Mass migration is the latest scare to be attributed (very tenuously) to ‘climate change’ – it doesn’t specify whether that means man-made or natural, but I think we can guess:

THE Asian Development Bank is warning countries to prepare for influxes of people fleeing natural disasters as climate change exacerbates rising sea levels, soil degradation and seasonal flooding.

Natural disasters drove 42 million people from their homes in the Asia-Pacific in 2010 and 2011, though it was unclear how many of those were caused by climate change, the bank said in a study released today.

“Unclear how many of those were caused by climate change”… hmm.

It said one-third of Southeast Asia’s population lived in at-risk areas, including Indonesia, Burma, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.

Six of the 10 countries most vulnerable to climate change are in the Asia-Pacific. Bangladesh tops the list followed by India, Nepal, the Philippines, Afghanistan and Burma.

The study did not make any specific projections for migration induced by climate change.

“Given that climate change acts as an aggravating factor for environmental degradation, it is expected to boost the number of people migrating because of environmental changes, both sudden and slow onset. Though the amplitude of these movements remains difficult to forecast, climate change is likely to become a major driver of migration in the 21st century,” it said. (source)

Likely, expected, could… all the weasel words we have come to expect to tie in scaremongering to climate change.

You can download the report here (large PDF).

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