Just don't tell me the debate's over…
I am a huge Penn and Teller fan. Apart from being some of the best illusionists on the planet, they also have a no-nonsense approach which is refreshingly un-PC.
I saw this video a while ago, but Catallaxy Files have just reposted it, and that was my cue to share it with ACM’s readers. Please be advised that the video contains very bad language – including f*ck, repeatedly. In fact, the third word spoken is f*ck.
That said, enjoy!
Brass monkeys
UPDATE: Read Warwick Hughes’ analysis of Sydney’s “hottest day eva” here.
But if it’s cold, it’s “just weather”. Actually, no, that’s climate change too (it’s called having an each way bet).
The agenda-driven attitudes to the reporting of any kind of extreme weather are so predictable.
Whilst the Australian media is hyperventilating over a heatwave Down Under, already attributed by several news organisations and government bodies to “global warming”, the severe snowfalls in Europe, which, we were sternly advised in 2000, would be a thing of the past, are merely an intriguing curiosity of the weather:
Extreme winter weather swept across western Europe Saturday, leaving thousands of passengers stranded at London’s main international airport and claiming several lives in Spain, Portugal and France, including those of three Mali-bound soldiers.
The frigid temperatures also caused delays and cancellations on major railway lines including the Eurostar train service, and transport authorities warned of further traffic disruptions with more blizzards forecast for Sunday.
In London, thousands of passengers were forced to camp out on the floors of Heathrow Airport overnight as hundreds of flights to and from the British capital were cancelled.
“There are lots of bodies lying around in the airport. If feels like there’s been a natural disaster,” Jerry Meng from Los Angeles, whose flight to New York was cancelled, told British broadcaster BBC.
London’s other main airports, Gatwick and Stansted, managed to operate fairly normally Saturday.
For Sunday, the snow is expected to cause a 20-percent traffic reduction at Heathrow, and French air traffic authorities have ordered a 40 percent cut in take-offs and landings at Paris’ Charles De Gaulle and Orly airports. (source)
Yes, the heat in Australia was extreme, and records were broken, but is that not to be expected? The planet is warming slowly and has been for several hundred years, primarily due to natural recovery from the Little Ice Age. It is not surprising that records will continue to be exceeded.
What is surprising is that it has taken from 1939 until 2013 for the record to be broken in Sydney, despite nearly 80 years of gradually increasing global temperatures and massive increase in the urban heat island effect in the city. And the all time record from 1960 at Oodnadatta remains.
Alarmist Broadcasting Corporation
UPDATE: They just keep on comin’…
Warming planet to threaten native species
What effect will climate change have on Australia’s animal and plant species? This is the fourth of a five-part series in which environment reporter Sarah Clarke sets out to provide answers. [Oops, Sarah is at it again…]
Taskforce names regions most at risk of coastal inundation
The National Seachange Taskforce says coastal communities between Mackay and the Gold Coast are the most at risk in Queensland from predicted sea level rises.
Fish in hot water as climate changes
What effect will climate change have on Australia’s oceans and reefs? This is the final report in a five-part series in which environment reporter Sarah Clarke sets out to provide answers. [And again…]
Experts say oceans likely to continue warming
Scientists have recorded what they describe as the most dramatic marine heatwave in recent history off the WA coast.
And just for luck, another from ABC Science:
The 2013 climate change wake-up call
OPINION: Is an extreme heatwave enough for people to start taking the science of climate change seriously in Australia? Dr Paul Willis hopes so.
Enjoy that last one – “Dr” Willis uses “denier” or variants thereof five times. Just what exactly are we supposed to be denying exactly?
More to come, no doubt…
—
Timed to coincide nicely with the IPCC gas-a-thon in Tasmania, the ABC has gone gangbusters on climate alarmism – and that’s some achievement given previous form.
Ignoring the biggest story of the past couple of weeks, the UK Met Office’s downgrading of its warming forecast for the next five years, ABC News publishes no less than twelve alarmist climate stories in four days. Here they are in all their horrible glory:
Heart attacks and strokes: the climate change link
Heatwaves kill more Australians than car accidents – and medical authorities say that amplifies the risk posed by climate change.
Human health to feel impact of warmer future
What effect will climate change have on health in the Pacific? This is the third of a five-part series in which environment reporter Sarah Clarke sets out to provide answers.
UN group links heatwave to climate change
The United Nations’s (UN) chief climate science body says there is no doubt last week’s extreme heat in Australia is part of a global warming trend.
Extreme weather driving up food prices: Oxfam
Simon Bradshaw from Oxfam says extreme weather patterns are beginning to affect the food chain.
Climate change will force farmers to adapt: CSIRO
What effect will climate change have on agriculture and food production? This is the second of a five-part series in which environment reporter Sarah Clarke sets out to provide answers.
IPCC meets in Australia for first time
Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr Rajendra Pachauri says the latest research is still a work in progress but Australia’s recent weather events are part of an unmistakable trend.
Bushfires and heat a sign of climate change: Milne
The Greens leader Christine Milne says this summer’s bushfires and record temperatures are providing a glimpse of what Australia’s climate might look like in the future.
Scientists warn of glacier melt acceleration
The Government has scoped the potential areas of the Australian coastline at greatest threat after a sea level rise.
Coastal properties facing rising seas risk
Professor Alan Stokes from the National Seachange Taskforce says rising sea levels are a serious risk and coastal councils need to deal with the issue right now.
Rising seas may put $300b of property at risk: scientists
What impact are sea-level rises predicted to have on Australian cities?
Climate change increases fire risk
A Climate Commission report says a warmer globe increases the risk of extreme fire danger conditions.
Heatwave exacerbated by climate change: Climate Commission
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.
And a couple from ABC Science, just in case you haven’t had enough:
Emissions could cut climate damage by 60%
The world could avoid much of the damaging effects of climate change this century if greenhouse gas emissions are curbed more sharply.
Heatwave suddenly shrinks seaweed’s range
SHRINKING SEAWEED: A recent marine heatwave off Western Australia rapidly shrank the distribution range of an ecologically-important seaweed, researchers report.
There must be a policy in force at the ABC. All I need is someone to leak it…
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…).
Still there!
Wishing all my readers a very merry Christmas, and a happy and prosperous New Year.
On the other hand, Professor Richard Parncutt hopes “deniers” will be sentenced to death. Feel the Christmas spirit flow…!
UPDATE: Prof Parncutt posts an apology here. Kudos, but it should never have been published in the first place…
ALP Broadcasting Corporation
I have to admit I read Mark Scott’s piece in The Australian last week with increasing bewilderment. Comments such as this:
The panel [on Q&A] includes some of the most outstanding political correspondents in the nation: Phil Coorey, Annabel Crabb, George Megalogenis, Lenore Taylor, Mark Kenny, Malcolm Farr. They are employed by News Limited and Fairfax, broadsheets and tabloids, and by media outlets across the country. And their task is to provide analysis on the events of the week. Which they do, carrying no ideological badge and pushing no line
and this:
Not everyone will agree with all his remarks, but I believe [Barrie Cassidy – host of ABC’s Insiders] works in a way that embodies journalistic standards of fairness, balance and impartiality
left me utterly dumbfounded. Is Scott really that blinded by his own organisation’s groupthink, or is he just dense? It has to be one or the other.
Andrew McIntyre responds today:
THE response by the managing director of the Australian Broadcasting Corp, Mark Scott, to Janet Albrechtsen’s piece on ABC bias, almost defies belief. It is not the first time he has argued this case, even as he presented figures to a senate inquiry on the biased make-up of the panellists on Insiders.
Somehow, Scott trusts his “outstanding” commentators, by claiming that they are “carrying no ideological badge and pushing no line”. Well that settles it, doesn’t it?
…
If there is one lesson to be learned and many of us in Australia have been saying it for years it is about the selectivity of issues, the bias that is formed by the things that are not reported, and in interviews, by the people who are not interviewed.
This is an exquisitely refined technique on the ABC. Presenters tend to interview only those experts who agree with their own opinions, thus transforming news from factual content into a point of view without appearing to express the view of the presenter. On a panel on Insiders or Q&A, one simply gets the false impression that there is a consensus.
I guess if you stand on a platform that leans to the left for long enough, it begins to seem level again.
Offensive: Williams
You will recall the story recently where ABC “science” presenter Robyn Williams opened a programme on climate “denial” with the following:
“What if I told you that paedophilia is good for children, or that asbestos is an excellent inhalant for those with asthma, or that smoking crack is a normal part, and healthy one, of teenage life, and to be encouraged? You’d rightly find it outrageous. But there have been similar statements coming out of inexpert mouths, again and again in recent times distorting the science.”
Lewandowsky got in on the act as well, naturally. I guess he’d be the go-to guy for people like Williams looking for an easy smear quote:
“I discovered that those people [sceptics] were not sceptical at all. They were rejecting the science, not on the basis of evidence but some other factor. We basically found that the driving motivating factor behind the rejection of climate science was people’s ideology or personal worldview.
[…]
Specifically what we find it that people who are endorsing an extreme view of market fundamentalism are likely to reject climate science.”
You forgot to mention that they also deny the moon landings took place, or that smoking is linked to cancer, or HIV linked to AIDS, or that the sun revolves around a (flat) earth – you’re slipping.
Former chairman of the ABC, Maurice Newman, like many of us, was incensed by these comments and lodged a formal complaint. Especially since an article he had written a while beforehand was referred to specifically in the segment.
And the result?
“ABC Audience and Consumer Affairs have carefully considered the complaint, reviewed the program and assessed it against the ABC’s editorial standards for harm and offence which state in part: 7.1 Content that is likely to cause harm or offence must be justified by the editorial context.
“ABC Audience and Consumer Affairs have also sought and considered a response from ABC Radio. Audience and Consumer Affairs have concluded that there has been no breach of the ABC’s editorial standards for harm and offence.“ (source)
What a surprise! No groupthink there, right? So the next time a filthy “denier” equates climate alarmists like Williams to paedophiles (not that “deniers” ever get invited on to ABC except to be ritually humiliated and ridiculed), and the complaints come flooding in, the ABC will dismiss them too?
Newman responds in an op-ed:
Ordinarily it should be unnecessary to object to such appalling commentary. It should have been automatically withdrawn. But no. An ABC response used sophistry to satisfy itself “that the presenter Robyn Williams did not equate climate change sceptics to pedophiles”. Tell that to his listeners.
Global warming is today more about politics than it is about science. If flawed evidence fails, coercion and character assassination is deployed. No slur is too vicious, nor, as we saw with the BBC’s 2006 seminar of the “best scientific experts”, which despite strenuous attempts to resist freedom of information requests were finally revealed to be mainly NGOs and journalists, no deceit is too great.
Lubos Motl, a climate commentator and string theory physicist, said about the ABC’s Science Show: “We used to hear some remotely similar (Czech) propaganda programs until 1989 … but the public radio and TV simply can’t produce programs that would be this dishonest, manipulative, hateful and insulting any more”.
This is not the first time I have provoked the public wrath of the ABC’s climate change clique, but it is the first time I have publicly responded to it. It is important that I do. (source)
One thing we can be absolutely sure of: nothing at the taxpayer-funded broadcaster will change an inch.
At it again…
UPDATE: A commenter jokingly suggests below that Lew should “see a shrink”, but the strange thing is that he ticks several of the boxes for the psychological characteristic of narcissism, including:
I will leave it to readers to decide…
Stephan Lewandowsky weighs in with his usual tact and diplomacy on the IPCC leak, spraying the D-word around like confetti:
“Science is one of the most transparent endeavours humans have ever developed. However, for the transparency to be effective, preliminary documents ought to remain confidential until they have been improved and checked through peer review,” he said in an emailed comment.
“The leak of a draft report by a reviewer who has signed a statement of confidentiality is therefore regrettable and dishonourable.”
“However, what is worse than the leak itself is the distortion of the content of the draft chapter by some deniers,” he said.
Prof Lewandowsky said that the report’s statement that humans have caused global warming was a “virtual certainty” meant it’s [sic] authors had 99% confidence in that view.
“That’s up from ‘very high confidence’ (90% certain) in the last report published in 2007,” he said. [Hey Stephan: How, specifically, were those 90% and 99% numbers calculated? What, specifically, changed between 2007 and now that accounts for the alleged 90% reduction in uncertainty?]
“In other words, the scientific case has become even stronger and has now reached a level of confidence that is parallelled only by our confidence in some very basic laws of physics, such as gravity or thermodynamics.”
To claim otherwise by cherry-picking part of a sentence out of context is absurd, he said.
“Although it illustrates the standard approach by which climate deniers seek to confuse the public. Climate denial lost intellectual respectability decades ago, and all that deniers have left now is to misrepresent, distort, or malign the science and the scientific process.” (h/t Tom Nelson via WUWT)
Nowhere in Lewandowsky’s world is there ever any hint of doubt, uncertainty, contrition or scepticism about his own beliefs. He’s right on everything – always.
This is evident from the UWA FOI emails (on which more will follow in due course) where the many emails of complaint to the University about his recent work are dismissed in the same cavalier manner as any legitimate questioning of the alarmists’ position on climate.
Commenting on one particular blog article critical of the Moon Landing Denier paper, the Deputy VC at UWA, Robyn Owens, emails Lewandowsky:
“The sooner we get Critical Thinking 101 back to being a compulsory unit for all university students (and the rest of the population) the better!”
To which Lewandowsky responds:
“These folks are beyond educable.”
Funny thing is that the more Lewandowsky, John Cook and others like them insult, demean and belittle their ideological opponents, the more those opponents will dig in and fight back.
Quote of the Day
UPDATE: The headbangers have all made up their minds too. Un-skeptical Pseudo-Science, the ABC, who wheel in a tame alarmist to hose the story down (see comment below).
From the It’s the Sun, stupid Department, a startling acknowledgement that the IPCC doesn’t know everything about the Sun’s effect on our climate (or the magnitude of such effects):
Many empirical relationships have been reported between GCR or cosmogenic isotope archives and some aspects of the climate system (e.g., Bond et al., 2001; Dengel et al., 2009; Ram and Stolz, 1999). The forcing from changes in total solar irradiance alone does not seem to account for these observations, implying the existence of an amplifying mechanism such as the hypothesized GCR-cloud link. We focus here on observed relationships between GCR and aerosol and cloud properties.
Delingpole writes on it here.
Download everything from AR5 if you so choose at WUWT.
Do ha, so good.
One result of Doha is to allow the dumbest countries on Earth to continue poisoning their economies by extending the pointless Kyoto Protocol (which no longer includes Japan, New Zealand, Russia and Canada, and has never included the US, or any developing countries) until 2020. Even the Kiwis are smart enough to have bailed out, but not Australia, with Greg Combet proudly shackling us to the stern of the Titanic as she sinks beneath the waves.
More important than that is talk of “compensation” for “loss and damage” to developing countries caused by climate change.
As Tim Wilson puts it in The Australian this morning:
Unsurprisingly, developing countries want a blank cheque. Doing so would give life to the comments at the start of the summit from the chief of the UN climate body, Christiana Figueres, that “in the whole climate change process is the complete transformation of the economic structure of the world”.
If anything will ensure failure to secure a new global treaty to cut emissions, it is that statement. But for many countries a “complete transformation of the economic structure of the world” is what they are hoping to achieve with climate change as their Trojan horse. (source)
But once again, the muddled thinking would, if taken to its logical conclusion, result in unintended consequences.
China and India are two of the worlds largest emitters – China is THE largest. So I guess compensation should flow from China and India to, say, Australia, for the costs that we will incur adapting to rising sea levels [allegedly] caused by those emissions? Why should funds flow from Australia to pay countries that emit many, many times more CO2 than Australia?
No wait, they say. You evil developed countries started all this with the Industrial Revolution. Maybe, we say, but there was less than one degree of warming in 150 years. Look at the predictions now – 4 to 6 degrees in just 88 years! Your emissions, developing countries, are swamping everything we did since the 1850s.
The likelihood, of course, is that the compensation won’t actually be for our emissions, but for the behaviour of the Sun, or natural multi-decadal climate cycles, or some other factor the IPCC has missed or ignored, over which we have no control whatsoever, essentially reducing all of this to little more than global wealth distribution.
Australian Climate Madness 
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