Just don't tell me the debate's over…
David Karoly
I haven’t had a chance to read the FoI materials on this yet, but Climate Audit and Bunyipitude dissect the Karoly/Gergis Hockey Stick debacle, on-hold, correction, retraction, withdrawal or whatever it really was.
Prof Bunyip has an ongoing series of posts here.
Climate Audit reports on the discovery of the error here, and the battle with the Journal of Climate here.
You can download all the documents here.
Everyone agreeing with everyone else…
“Snowcone and the Snowflakes.”
Oh but the ABC is completely balanced, the Left will wail. And to them it probably is – every view is of the alarmist Left.
Monday’s Q&A was a disgrace. Five alarmists plus Leftist Tony Jones discuss the “science” and – surprise surprise – everybody agrees with everybody else!
How about getting Richard Lindzen to take part? Or Peter Ridd? Or Stewart Franks? Or any one of the thousands of respected, qualified scientists from around the world who question the rabid scaremongering of the Green machine?
Here are just a few examples (including old Snowcone chiming in to agree):
No wonder we are raising an entire generation of children suffering from pathological climate anxiety, bombarded as they are by a constant stream of apocalyptic alarmism without any element of moderation.
Transcript is here.
The climate bureaucracy is reduced to rubble
This blog started in September 2008, when we were one year into the Kevin Rudd Labor government. It was Labor policy to introduce an emissions trading scheme (ETS), and as we approached the end of 2009, Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull was indicating that he would give it bipartisan support.
But Coalition backbenchers were stirring, as ACM reported on 20 October 2009:
Now is the time for all good men (and women) to come to the aid of the Party – in this case, the Liberal party. The backbenchers need to stand up for their principles and not be steamrollered by their worryingly green-tinged leader:
MALCOLM Turnbull is on a collision course with his own back bench after staking his leadership on a demand that they back his climate change strategy.Several MPs immediately refused to do so.If the partyroom refused to back his strategy of negotiating amendments to the government’s emissions trading scheme, Mr Turnbull said yesterday, the Coalition would “literally be a party with nothing to say … a party with no ideas”, and that was “not the party I am prepared to lead”.
Throwing down the gauntlet to his internal critics, Mr Turnbull said: “I am asserting my authority as the leader of the Liberal Party and the Leader of the Opposition.”
“If the partyroom were to reject my recommendation to them, that would obviously be a leadership issue. That’s perfectly plain, perfectly clear,” he told ABC Radio in Adelaide.
By 20 November, things were beginning to look very grim as Tony Abbott abandons his previous support for the ETS: [Read more…]
Torcello – criminal sanctions to scientific argument
An assistant professor of philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Lawrence Torcello, claims that climate ‘misinformation’ should be treated as criminal negligence.
Writing at the taxpayer-funded, and invariably Left-wing, Conversation site, Torcello compares the dissemination of climate ‘misinformation’ with the liability of scientists in relation to the L’Aquila earthquake in 2009:
The earthquake that rocked L’Aquila Italy in 2009 provides an interesting case study of botched communication. This natural disaster left more than 300 people dead and nearly 66,000 people homeless. In a strange turn of events six Italian scientists and a local defence minister were subsequently sentenced to six years in prison.
The ruling is popularly thought to have convicted scientists for failing to predict an earthquake. On the contrary, as risk assessment expert David Ropeik pointed out, the trial was actually about the failure of scientists to clearly communicate risks to the public. The convicted parties were accused of providing “inexact, incomplete and contradictory information”. As one citizen stated:
We all know that the earthquake could not be predicted, and that evacuation was not an option. All we wanted was clearer information on risks in order to make our choices.
Torcello links to the inevitable ‘97% of climate scientists believe…’ myth and continutes:
We have good reason to consider the funding of climate denial to be criminally and morally negligent. The charge of criminal and moral negligence ought to extend to all activities of the climate deniers who receive funding as part of a sustained campaign to undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus.
Criminal negligence is normally understood to result from failures to avoid reasonably foreseeable harms, or the threat of harms to public safety, consequent of certain activities. Those funding climate denial campaigns can reasonably predict the public’s diminished ability to respond to climate change as a result of their behaviour. Indeed, public uncertainty regarding climate science, and the resulting failure to respond to climate change, is the intentional aim of politically and financially motivated denialists. (source)
But as with all those overcome with such totalitarian instincts, the arguments could quite easily be turned around. For example, the 97% figure Torcello cites is itself a blatant example of climate misinformation. It may be that 97% of scientists accept that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that an increase in the proportion of that molecule in the atmosphere will increase warming. But to claim that 97% of scientists subscribe to the alarmism of catastrophic AGW vastly overstates the certainty of the science.
As a result of that overconfidence in the apocalyptic projections of climate models, many of the poorest in society will be denied access to cheap electricity as a result of harsh emissions reduction measures, and will be prevented from enjoying the economic growth from which others have benefitted. If those emission reduction measures are eventually shown to be unnecessary, and that many have suffered as a result, should those responsible for the 97% figure be held criminally negligent as well?
Or perhaps these too:
I could go on…
Once again, we see the double standards that are applied to the consensus and those that challenge it. The moral here is that those in glass houses should not throw stones.
Climate witchcraft (© Flickr)
Paraphrasing Andrew S Tanenbaum, the nice thing about warmist excuses is that you have so many to choose from.
The science is so settled that ‘the Cause’ has at least seven different explanations for ‘the Pause’. And of course, they all studiously avoid the obvious answer: that the climate’s actual sensitivity to increasing CO2 is less than the warmists want it to be.
So here we present the Seven Excuses of the Cause:
Excuse 1 – Low Solar Activity
We all know, from the IPCC down, that high solar activity had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with late 20th century warming. How ridiculous to suggest such a thing! But oddly, low solar activity can be invoked as a reason for a sudden stop in that warming. Go figure.
Excuse 2 – Ocean heat
Ah yes, the old ‘dog ate my warming’ excuse. The oceans have mysteriously sucked all the heat out of the atmosphere and have hidden it deep down, conveniently where nobody can measure it. This makes perfect sense, as everybody knows that in order to heat up a cold bath, all we need to do is turn the fan heater on in the bathroom, right?
Excuse 3 – Coal burning in China
Burning coal has added more particulates to the atmosphere, which has reduced insolation and therefore reduced warming. So burning coal good because it stops global warming, but er, burning coal bad because it causes global warming… ouch, my head hurts.
Excuse 4 – Montreal Protocol
The ‘success’ of the Montreal Protocol in reducing CFCs in the atmosphere, themselves greenhouse gases, is the reason why the planet is not warming as fast. At least it achieved something, then, because the Ozone Hole is still there. But David Karoly says CFCs are a far smaller component of warming than CO2… oh dear, another quandary.
Excuse 5 – Pause? What pause?
The Wilful Blindness excuse. Rather than actually work out why the pause has occurred, it’s much easier just to disappear it (a la Medieval Warm Period) by miraculously cooling the past and pretending that warming is continuing exactly the same, or even better, accelerating. I mean, GISS do it all the time, so who will notice?
Excuse 6 – Volcanoes, not pollution
Please forget you just read Excuse 3 above. It’s the volcanoes what done it.
Excuse 7 – Stratospheric water vapour
Please forget you just read all of the above excuses. It’s this one. No, really. Or all of them. Whatever. Just give us more money.
Thanks to Marc Morano, who has all the links over at the ‘Depot.
Activists, all of them…
I wonder how much of the same goes on at our own publicly funded broadcaster? Probably all of it.
Whenever there is a climate change story to be covered, the ABC will rush to its favourites: David Karoly (alarmist), Matthew England (alarmist), Clive Hamilton (Green, activist), Stephan Lewandowsky (“scepics are conspiracy theorist fruit cakes”), Will Steffen (alarmist), Tim Flannery (alarmist), and the list goes on.
After lawyering up and spending thousands of licence fee payer’s cash on opposing Freedom of Information requests, the story is finally out, as the Daily Mail reports:
The BBC has spent tens of thousands of pounds over six years trying to keep secret an extraordinary ‘eco’ conference which has shaped its coverage of global warming, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
The controversial seminar was run by a body set up by the BBC’s own environment analyst Roger Harrabin and funded via a £67,000 grant from the then Labour government, which hoped to see its ‘line’ on climate change and other Third World issues promoted in BBC reporting.
At the event, in 2006, green activists and scientists – one of whom believes climate change is a bigger danger than global nuclear war – lectured 28 of the Corporation’s most senior executives.
Then director of television Jana Bennett opened the seminar by telling the executives to ask themselves: ‘How do you plan and run a city that is going to be submerged?’ And she asked them to consider if climate change laboratories might offer material for a thriller.
A lobby group with close links to green campaigners, the International Broadcasting Trust (IBT), helped to arrange government funding for both the climate seminar and other BBC seminars run by Mr Harrabin – one of which was attended by then Labour Cabinet Minister Hilary Benn.
Applying for money from Mr Benn’s Department for International Development (DFID), the IBT promised Ministers the seminars would influence programme content for years to come.
The BBC began its long legal battle to keep details of the conference secret after an amateur climate blogger spotted a passing reference to it in an official report.
Tony Newbery, 69, from North Wales, asked for further disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. The BBC’s resistance to revealing anything about its funding and the names of those present led to a protracted struggle in the Information Tribunal. The BBC has admitted it has spent more than £20,000 on barristers’ fees. However, the full cost of their legal battle is understood to be much higher.
Read it all, then go and visit Tony’s blog: Harmless Sky
That’s the only consensus there is…
You’ve guessed it – come up with a new model which increases warming still further! As the Fairfax/Guardian/ABC media axis reports:
Climate change models underestimate likely temperature rise, report shows
Forecasts predicting less global warming fail to properly take into account cloud formation, say scientists.
The Earth’s climate is far more sensitive to carbon dioxide emissions than previously thought, heightening the likelihood of a 4C temperature rise by 2100, new Australian-led research of cloud systems has found.
The study, published in Nature, provides new understanding on the role of cloud formation in climate sensitivity – one of the key uncertainties in predictions of climate change.
Report authors Steven Sherwood, Sandrine Bony and Jean-Louis Dufresne found climate models which show a low global temperature response to CO2 emissions do not factor in all the water vapour released into the atmosphere.
As you can see from the graphic, the models are already overestimating warming. Sherwood, who is an Australian from the University of New South Wales (the shame, the shame…), said:
“Climate sceptics like to criticise climate models for getting things wrong, and we are the first to admit they are not perfect, but what we are finding is that the mistakes are being made by those models which predict less warming, not those that predict more.”
I’m having trouble seeing which of those models are predicting less warming that that which we have actually had in the last 15 years, since all of them comfortably exceed the satellite record. Wait, I forgot. Atmospheric temperatures don’t matter any more (despite being the most important measure of global temperature for centuries), having been replaced by the missing “ocean heat” – i.e. the “dog ate my warming” theory.
And ACM’s least favourite alarmist, David Karoly, gets hot under the collar (again) because Maurice Newman blamed manufacturing decline on “climate madness”:
From the UN down, the climate change delusion is a gigantic money tree. It is a tyranny that, despite its pretensions, favours the rich and politically powerful at the expense of the poor and powerless. But the madness of the crowds is waning and, as Mackay writes of the perpetrators: “Punishment is sure to overtake them sooner or later.” We can only hope it comes before most of us descend into serfdom.
P.S. You can keep up with all the MV Akademik Shokalskiy hilarity at WUWT.
[Update 2 Jan: post title corrected]
Pack yer bags, mate
The Herald Sun reports:
PROFESSOR Tim Flannery has been sacked by the Abbott Government from his $180,000 a year part time Chief Climate Commissioner position with the agency he runs to be dismantled immediately.
Environment Minister Greg Hunt called Prof Flannery this morning to tell him a letter formally ending his employment was in the mail.
Public service shake-up as heads go
In the letter, Mr Hunt tells Prof Flannery: “The Climate Commission does not have an ongoing role, and consequently I am writing to advise you that the Climate Commission has been dissolved, with effect from the date of this letter.
He thanked him for his personal contribution and then said “The Department of the Environment will soon write to you concerning administrative arrangements for finalising your engagement as Chief Climate Commissioner.”
All other climate commissioners will also be sacked with the move to save more than $500,000 this financial year and $1.2 million next financial year.
The Coalition will now take advice on climate change from the Department of the Environment. (source)
The Climate Commission didn’t have one single climate realist on board, and was stacked with Australia’s worst alarmists, Will Steffen, David Karoly and Flannery himself. Far from being an independent climate body, it was a mouthpiece for Labor government propaganda and shameless scaremongering.
Good riddance to the lot of ’em.
UPDATE: Commission’s Twitter account (@ClimateComm) has vanished already! Sad to see the website still there… not for long, however.
UPDATE 2: The ever-warmist ABC (Anything But Conservatives) gives Flannery space to gnash his teeth and wail about the injustice of it all:
Professor Flannery, who is also a former Australian of the Year, has defended the commission’s role.
“We’ve stayed out of the politics and stuck to the facts,” he said. [BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! – Ed]
“As a result we’ve developed a reputation as a reliable apolitical source of facts on all aspects of climate change. [Stop it!! Stop it!! My sides are splitting!!!!! – Ed]
“I believe that Australians have a right to know – a right to authoritative, independent and accurate information on climate change. [Er, I think I just wet myself… – Ed]
“We’ve just seen one of the earliest ever starts to the bushfire season in Sydney following the hottest twelve months on record.” [And, Flannery goes out true to form, with a ridiculously alarmist statement… See ya’ later pal. Glad we won’t have to hear from you any more – Ed]
(h/t Baldrick)
Swings and roundabouts
Three articles of note today. First, UK chair of climate committee says warming may be natural, second, Met Office admits that warming of last century isn’t statistically significant, and finally, Aussie scientists downgrade alarmist predictions.
To the UK first, where Tim Yeo, chairman of the parliamentary Energy and Climate Change Committee, has embraced free-thinking, rational scepticism and has abandoned dogmatic and quasi-religious alarmism, in a shift which will send shock waves through the climate community.
As the Telegraph reports, in 2009 Yeo said this:
“The dying gasps of the deniers will be put to bed. In five years time, no one will argue about a man-made contribution to climate change.”
We didn’t need to wait five years for that, since Yeo has now finally acknowledged the uncertainties himself:
Humans may not be responsible for global warming, according to Tim Yeo, the MP who oversees government policy on climate change.
The chairman of the Commons Energy and Climate Change committee said he accepts the earth’s temperature is increasing but said “natural phases” may be to blame.
Such a suggestion sits at odds with the scientific consensus. One recent survey of 12,000 academic papers on climate change found 97 per cent agree human activities are causing the planet to warm [that’s John Cook’s crock on consensus, by the way. What has consensus got to do with it anyway? If more people think the Sun goes round the Earth, does that somehow make it true? “8 out of 10 cats prefer Whiskas“… – Ed].
Mr Yeo, an environment minister under John Major, is one of the Conservative Party’s strongest advocates of radical action to cut carbon emissions. His comments are significant as he was one of the first senior figures to urge the party to take the issue of environmental change seriously.
He insisted such action is “prudent” given the threat climate change poses to living standards worldwide. But, he said, human action is merely a “possible cause”.
Asked on Tuesday night whether it was better to take action to mitigate the effects of climate change than to prevent it in the first place, he said: “The first thing to say is it does not represent any threat to the survival of the planet. None at all. The planet has survived much bigger changes than any climate change that is happening now.
He went on: “Although I think the evidence that the climate is changing is now overwhelming, the causes are not absolutely clear. There could be natural causes, natural phases that are taking place.” (source)
Still in the UK, the Met Office has been forced, by a climate system that simply wouldn’t comply with the wishes of the alarmist “consensus”, to admit that the past 140 years of modest temperature rises are statistically insignificant, after six questions were raised in the House of Lords:
The issue here is the claim that “the temperature rise since about 1880 is statistically significant”, which was made by the Met Office in response to the original Question (HL3050). The basis for that claim has now been effectively acknowledged to be untenable. Possibly there is some other basis for the claim, but that seems extremely implausible: the claim does not seem to have any valid basis.
Plainly, then, the Met Office should now publicly withdraw the claim. That is, the Met Office should admit that the warming shown by the global-temperature record since 1880 (or indeed 1850) might be reasonably attributed to natural random variation….
Lastly, it is not only the Met Office that has claimed that the increase in global temperatures is statistically significant: the IPCC has as well. Moreover, the IPCC used the same statistical model as the Met Office, in its most-recent Assessment Report (2007)…
To conclude, the primary basis for global-warming alarmism is unfounded. The Met Office has been making false claims about the significance of climatic changes to Parliament—as well as to the government, the media, and others — claims which have seriously affected both policies and opinions. When questioned about those claims in Parliament, the Met Office did everything feasible to avoid telling the truth. (h/t Bolta)
Finally, David Karoly, arch warmist of Melbourne University starts hedging bets as he has to admit that ludicrously scaremongering claims of 6 degrees of warming were “unlikely”, but given Karoly’s well-known ideological and activist stance on the subject, the press release makes sure that the bandwagon still rolls on:
Scientists from the University of Melbourne and Victoria University have generated what they say are more reliable projections of global warming estimates at 2100.
The paper, led by Dr Roger Bodman from Victoria University with Professors David Karoly and Peter Rayner from the University of Melbourne and published in Nature Climate Change today, found that [good news…] exceeding 6 degrees warming was now unlikely while [bad news…] exceeding 2 degrees is very likely for business-as-usual emissions…
This was achieved through a new method combining observations of carbon dioxide and global temperature variations with simple climate model simulations to project future global warming.
Dr Bodman said while continuing to narrow the range even further was possible, significant uncertainty in warming predictions would always remain due to the complexity of climate change drivers. “This study ultimately shows why waiting for certainty will fail as a strategy,” he said. “Some uncertainty will always remain, meaning that we need to manage the risks of warming with the knowledge we have.” (source – h/t WUWT)
Interesting times…
UPDATE: The headbangers over at Un-Skeptical Pseudo-Science (no link) respond to these developments with balanced and open-minded scientific curiosity… Nah, only joking! With yet more alarmism, this time from Kevin Trenberth, who, like most of the headbangers, must be worried he’ll be out of a job in a few years’ time, when “climate scientists” go the way of spear-makers, rag and bone men and gas lamp lighters:
Focusing on the wiggles and ignoring the bigger picture of unabated warming is foolhardy, but an approach promoted by climate change deniers. Global sea level keeps marching up at a rate of more than 30cm per century since 1992 (when global measurements via altimetry on satellites were made possible), and that is perhaps a better indicator that global warming continues unabated. Sea level rise comes from both the melting of land ice, thus adding more water to the ocean, plus the warming and thus expanding ocean itself.
Global warming is manifested in a number of ways, and there is a continuing radiative imbalance at the top of atmosphere. The current hiatus in surface warming is temporary, and global warming has not gone away.
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 
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