Joke organisation
The Climate Commission, the (very handsomely) paid climate propaganda wing of the Gillard government, trots out the drearily predictable line that the recent heatwave in Australia is all due to climate change and that if only we would reduce our emissions, the planet would get back to how it was in the Little Ice Age. At the same time the Greens are claiming the fires are “punishment” for the evils of burning coal. Who says the Renaissance and the Enlightenment never happened?
All of which is ably aided and abetted by the ABC, the Alarmist Broadcasting Corporation, naturally:
A new report from the Federal Government’s Climate Commission says the heatwave and bushfires that have affected Australia this week have been exacerbated by global warming.
The report – Off the Charts: Extreme Australian Summer Heat – warns of more extreme bushfires and hotter, longer, bigger and more frequent heatwaves, due to climate change.
It says the number of record heat days across Australia has doubled since 1960 and more temperature records are likely to be broken as hot conditions continue this summer.
When Prime Minister Julia Gillard linked the heatwave with climate change this week, the acting Opposition Leader Warren Truss said that was utterly simplistic.
But climate change experts have no doubt that climate change is a factor in the current conditions.
The scientific advisor to the Climate Commission, Professor David Karoly, has written the report for the Climate Commission to answer questions about the link between heatwaves and climate change.
“What we have been able to see is clear evidence of an increasing trend in hot extremes, reductions in cold extremes and with the increases in hot extremes more frequent extreme fire danger day,” he said.
“What it means for the Australian summer is an increased frequency of hot extremes, more hot days, more heatwaves and more extreme bushfire days and that’s exactly what we’ve been seeing typically over the last decade and we will see even more frequently in the future.”
OK, who DIDN’T see that coming? Just like the recent floods and the drought and [insert any weather phenomenon you care to mention], it’s all caused or “exacerbated” by climate change. Well duh! Maybe the climate is changing. It says nothing about the cause. As any reader of this blog will know, if it’s hot it’s climate change, if it’s cold it’s “just weather”. Yawn, yawn, yawn.
Meanwhile, in the real world, the Met Office has actually downgraded its warming forecast for the next five years:
AS Australians sweltered through a record-breaking summer heatwave this week, one of the world’s leading scientific bodies revised down its five-year projection for the world’s average temperature.
The revision, slipped quietly into the public domain on Christmas Eve by Britain’s Met Office, has fuelled a significant and growing debate about what exactly happened to global warming.
On one analysis, the forecast confirms what many people have been saying for some time. Global warming effectively stopped 17 years ago and, if the new forecast is accurate, that “pause” will be extended to 20 years.
Using new computer models, the Met Office now believes global temperatures up to 2017 will most likely be 0.43C above the 1971-2000 average, with an error of plus or minus 0.15C.
The Met Office had previously estimated the most likely global temperature increase to be 0.54C above the 1971-2000 average during the period 2012 to 2016.
The Met Office says despite the change, “we will continue to see near-record levels of global temperatures in the next few years”.
“This means temperatures will remain well above the long-term average and we will continue to see temperatures like those which resulted in 2000-2009 being the warmest decade in the instrumental record dating back to 1850.”
But the release of the data – and the way in which it was released – has fuelled a strong reaction. David Whitehouse, of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, said the new prediction challenged the assertion that the underlying rate of change of global warming was unchanged.
“If the latest Met Office prediction is correct, and it accords far more closely with the observed data than previous predictions, then it will prove to be a lesson in humility,” Whitehouse said.
“It will show that the previous predictions that were given so confidently as advice to the UK government and so unquestioningly accepted by the media, were wrong, and that the so-called sceptics who were derided for questioning them were actually on the right track.”
In response, Britain’s science media organisation released quotes from leading climate scientists to explain the revision.
Richard Allan, reader in climate science at the University of Reading, said: “Global warming is not ‘at a standstill’ but does seem to have slowed down since 2000 in comparison to the rapid warming of the world since the 1970s.”
He said the slowdown reflected greater scientific understanding and was due in part to increased heat being trapped in the world’s oceans. “Nothing in their (Met Office) data leads me to think that global warming due to human influence has stopped, or is irrelevant. It hasn’t, and it isn’t,” he said.
Professor Myles Allen, head of the Climate Dynamics Group at the University of Oxford, effectively said the revision provided a lesson in the dangers of spin.
“A lot of people (not the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) were claiming, in the run-up to the Copenhagen 2009 conference, that ‘warming was accelerating and it is all worse than we thought’. What has happened since then has demonstrated that it is foolish to extrapolate short-term climate trends.”
For the sceptical, the Met Office’s near-term predictions are coming home to roost. In 2007, it predicted that by 2014 the global average temperature was expected to have risen by 0.3C compared with 2004, and that half of the years after 2009 were predicted to be hotter than the current record hot year in 1998.
“Given that we have data for three of the five years of that period, and all show no departure from a constant temperature when analysed statistically, this is a prediction that will probably be totally wrong,” Whitehouse said.
“In any case, it is completely at odds with the new forecast.”
The headbangers are in strife, desperate to hose down this story, so Un-Skeptical Pseudo-Science does it’s usual trick of assembling an article by cutting and pasting lots of scary GISS graphs and portraying anyone who could possibly reach a different conclusion as somehow one thermometer short of a weather station.
Happy New Year (just the same as the last one, two, five, twenty…).
Australian Climate Madness 
Cometh the hot day cometh the AGW alarmist loon…
Utterly nauseating here in Hobart reading and hearing some of the garbage going around. A letter in the Mercury ‘newspaper’ today gives the usual bit – no need to do science it is settled. Look at the destruction!! Think of the CHILDREN etc.
Maybe instead of sending billions overseas to third world countries just for permission to use our own fuel we should invest a bit in fireproofing homes.
Lew
I was interested in that high temperature for Hobart as I will be there on holdays in a week or so time. Thought I would have a look on google earth to see where the station was – worth a look for those not from Hobart. There is also location history available from the BoM website although the oldest site map is 1995. The station is know as HOBART (ELLERSLIE ROAD) and from looking at the GE image it would have to be one of the worst locations for a weather station I have seen, surrounded on three sides by buildings with the nearest being only about 10 m away. Bet that site has changed a bit since 1882!
The Climate Conmission! (No typo.)
The Climate Commission is not scientifically qualified to declare Australia’s heatwave as evidence of climate change. One heatwave is definitely not evidence of climate change.
What was even worse was that on tonight’s ABC evening news, predictable as ever, they had David Karoly trumpeting the global warming scare, linking the global warming to greenhouse gas emissions and how heat waves are now going to be worse in future years unless we reduced such emissions. This is the same Karoly they dragged out during the Queensland floods to trumpet similar rubbish despite the US agency, NOAA, declaring the floods had nothing to do with climate change.
The ABC, a couple of days previously, had tried to get a Bureau of Met official to link this heatwave as evidence of global warming. But to the credit of that BoM official … he kept it nice and simple with words to the effect as follows:
“At this time of year, central Australia normally has cloud cover. Currently, that cloud cover has not yet descended from the northern part of Australia. Consequently, the land in central Australia has been absorbing a significant amount of heat, thus warming the lower atmosphere more than usual, which in turn has impacted on other regions of the continent via the wind system.”
That BoM official should be made its CEO.
One of the websites which I visited recently made the point that, because ‘green” groups in Tasmania pevented controlled burns which would have reduced the amount of fuel available, the latest fires are much wore than they would have been had the controlled burns been allowed to be carried out. [snip]
Any 6th grade student will know that the current heatwaves across Australia are primarily due to a delay in the Australian monsoon season.
If only the Climate Commission would have studied the correlation between late or weak monsoons with heatwaves, they just may have found a pattern!
Baldrick they should all come down to NW Tasmania right now – 8am and it is a sweltering 7 degrees! Just don’t know how I am going to cope in this heat today (sarc)………
Not surprised Karoly kept his sunnies on for that ABC clip. Hides the eyes when telling porkies.
But if that was the Climate Commission’s spiel, then where’s Tim Flannery?
Meanwhile in China the ocean is freezing solid and in the north they reached a 43 year low of minus 15.3, can’t find any mention of that on the ABC
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2257995/Trapped-icy-prison-1-000-ships-stranded-frozen-ocean-China-gripped-extreme-cold-snap.html
I dread heat waves not for their excruciating heat, but for the opportunity it provides (EVERY TIME) for the nauseating religious set of the warm left to crawl out from under their rocks and preach.
Man, I am so tired of the preaching. The endless preaching.
Why can’t they just SOD OFF?
Keep up the good work Simon. I rely on your site to keep me abreast of the warmists’ shenanigans in Oz. Dropped a little tip in your jar from California!
[Thank you! – Simon]
The ABC (Alarmist Broadcasting Commision) is unlikely to EVER change it’s mind due to the “Paycheck” phenonemon keeping an entire team at the ABC gainfully employed.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/specials/climate-change/
Unfortunately the calibre of journalistic investigation at the ABC has dropped to such lows that “News” is allabout regurgitating what they read on Twitter or doing everything they can to protect their sad little ‘jobs’, rather than presenting real science or validated/invalidated facts.
Youv’e only got to watch their flagship ‘science’ show “Catalyst” to see these very crude concepts guide their ‘stories’.
Yes it makes me furious that my taxes are paying for this utter tripe! We can only hope the rusted-on staff are all sacked and replaced with staff who can actually do intelligent, open and unbiased journalism. Or is that just a dream?
That would be David Karoly, he of the peer reviewed report that ‘proved’ that Australia’s temperatures in the last 60 years were the hottest in the last 1,000 thus also proving that Australia had no medieval warm period.
The same David Karoly who has since had to withdraw this paper after it was torn to shreds by online bloggers at Climate Audit who exposed it for what it was – bad science.
Karoly should get in his car and roly poly off. Never have I heard such rubbish. How old is Karoly? Was he alive in 1948. I remembr the 1948 heatwave. If Karoly looked up records and newspapers he would see that in that year there were days of well over 40degrees and higher than they were over these past weeks . The Royal National Park in Sydney was nearly burnt out in the 90’s when bushfires raged. Also in the late 19th century this happened. It was worse or even much worse than we have had this year. Flood, fire and tempest have always existed so these propaganda merchants should use what little knowledge they sem to think they have to have a look at history, including the ice age which was much worse than a heatwave with crops killed off by snow and ice – no food. Those who listen to propaganda such as expounded by such as Karoly need to look back at history and they will see what rubbish Karoly and his mates speaks. Complete dishonest propaganda. Those who disagree with these propagandists are “shut up”. It is about time that those scientists who are claimed to be skeptics are allowed a voice.