IPCC admits uncertainty in extreme weather link

18 November, 2011 by

Yasi - no link to climate change

[I know I’m on a break, but this story was too important not to comment – Ed]. The risk of more frequent extreme weather is one of the most potent scare tactics used by climate alarmists and politicians alike. The Greens are the experts at this kind of moral posturing, with the following being a classic example:

GREENS leader Bob Brown is facing mounting condemnation after calling on coal companies to foot the bill for the Queensland flood recovery.

Senator Brown said coal companies, as major climate change contributors, should pay a 40 per cent resources super profits tax to pay for the clean-up. (source)

Or this:

The Australian Greens say Tropical Cyclone Yasi is a “tragedy of climate change”.

The party was heavily criticised after it linked the Queensland floods to climate change and blamed coal miners.

Greens deputy leader Christine Milne says the cyclone is another example of why it is important to cut carbon pollution.

“This is a tragedy, but it is a tragedy of climate change,” she said. (source)

But the Greens don’t care about the facts. They are more interested in pushing their extreme-Left agenda of social change via the Trojan horse of environmentalism, and they will use any tools and tactics they can find to achieve that aim.

The UN is very similar in its response, blaming global warming for increased extreme weather events (naturally to justify its position of advocating urgent action on climate). The Russian heatwave and Pakistani floods were a prime example (see here).

But today we read that a leaked report, astonishingly from the IPCC itself, analysing the link between climate change and extreme weather, has admitted to considerable uncertainties:

WIDELY-HELD assumptions that climate change is responsible for an upsurge in extreme drought, flood and storm events are not supported by a landmark review of the science.

And a clear climate change signal would not be evident for decades because of natural weather variability.

Despite the uncertainties, politicians – including US President Barack Obama in his address to federal parliament yesterday – continue to link major weather events directly to climate change.

Greens leader Bob Brown yesterday highlighted Mr Obama’s climate change comments and said the extreme weather impacts were “not just coming, they are happening”.

But rather than bolster claims of a climate change link, the scientific review prepared by the world’s leading climate scientists for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change highlights the level of uncertainty. After a week of debate, the IPCC will tonight release a summary of the report in Kampala, Uganda, as a prelude to the year’s biggest climate change conference, being held in Durban, South Africa.

The full report will not be released for several months but a leaked copy of the draft summary, details of which have been published by the BBC and a French news agency, have provided a good indication of what it found.

While the human and financial toll of extreme weather events has certainly risen, the cause has been mostly due to increased human settlement rather than worse weather.

There is only “low confidence” that tropical cyclones have become more frequent, “limited to medium evidence available” to assess whether climatic factors have changed the frequency of floods, and “low confidence” on a global scale even on whether the frequency has risen or fallen. (source – behind paywall)

They can’t even determine the sign of the effect! You can’t get much more uncertain than that!

Overconfidence in its own results by the IPCC is one of the greatest challenges that must be overcome to sweep away the political spin that clouds the IPCC’s reports. Suppression of uncertainty is one of the main criticisms of later reports (especially 2003 and 2007), so an acknowledgement that uncertainty exists is a positive step. It’s very surprising to see the IPCC apparently reporting the science in a more impartial way than has been seen before. Previously such off-message results would have been twisted and spun to keep the agenda going. But here we have the IPCC publishing material which challenges the agenda.

This story is important for two reasons: firstly, that politicians can no longer continue to parade extreme weather events as evidence of climate change to justify their policies, and secondly, it shows (I hope) a change in the attitude of the IPCC, which appears to be more willing to accept the level of uncertainty in the science of climate change in general.

However, I wouldn’t hold out too much hope – the next main report will no doubt be back to business as usual…

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ACM on vacation

13 November, 2011 by

ACM will be taking a break for a while. Other priorities are demanding more of my attention for the time being, and the passing of the pointless carbon tax into law seemed an appropriate juncture for a time out.

Keep checking the blog roll on the right for the latest news on the fight against global climate madness.

ACM will be blogging again soon.

Cheers, Simon

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So that's that, then

8 November, 2011 by

The carbon tax we would never have will today pass the Senate, finally legislating the tax that Julia Gillard promised there wouldn’t be, back in August 2010. “Australian climate madness” finally comes true.

Let’s remind ourselves. This is a tax that:

  • will do nothing for the climate – nothing at all
  • is based on corrupted and partial science, influenced by environmental activist groups
  • will disadvantage our economy when most other nations are backing away from climate action
  • is a breach of an express pre-election promise
  • is nothing more than a bribe to buy the support of the Greens, who are today crowing at their “success”
  • commits economic suicide when GFC Mk II is just around the corner
  • the majority of the population opposes.
There isn’t much more to be said. We just have to sit and wait until the next election, and pray that the people of Australia have long memories.
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G20 to Australia: "You're on your own" on carbon

5 November, 2011 by

"Congratulations, Julia, on wrecking your economy"

“Courageous” is how the G20 describes Australia’s action on climate change! What a wonderful euphemism for bat-sh*t crazy. Yet Gillard and Combet will no doubt still argue that Australia is being “left behind” and that it’s all in the “national interest” – delusional!

As Europe sinks into economic oblivion, the US debt creeps up by the day, and a GFC Mk II looks ever more likely, the rest of the world is starting to realise that there are more important things than pointless environmental gestures which will be hugely damaging for standards of living but which will do nothing for the climate.

JULIA Gillard’s introduction of a carbon tax has been praised at the latest economic summit for showing the way on climate change but Australia is being isolated within the G20 on carbon pricing as members retreat due to changing priorities and economic pressure.

As the government prepares to cut the carbon tax debate in the Senate to pass the bills with Greens’ support, the final communique from the G20 summit in France recognises Australia’s leading role on climate change.

But with the increased economic pressures from the global debt crisis and a shift in priority to food security, particularly in Africa, climate change action is dropping down the order of importance.

Critics of the G20’s lack of action on climate change have praised Australia’s action as “courageous” and said the diminishing priority for climate change was a “big problem for the G20”.

The shift at the G20 and the praise for Australia expected in the communique highlights the Gillard government’s move ahead of the developed economies on carbon pricing.

While Australia is pursuing the most comprehensive carbon tax in the world to combat the effects of climate change, other G20 members are retreating from emissions trading schemes to cut greenhouse gas emissions, such as Canada, while others are giving greater emphasis to dealing with the immediate effects of climate change. [In other words, adaptation – Ed.]

Australia (and Gillard) are turning into standing jokes on the world stage. How embarrassing.

Read it here.

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A level playing field

4 November, 2011 by

Alarmists playing left to right

Carl Sagan famously said “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” In the case of climate change, this could be rewritten to say “Extraordinarily expensive mitigation strategies require extraordinarily unbiased and impartial evidence, resulting from research carried out with the greatest possible levels of scientific integrity.”

In other words, it is the “consensus” camp that is insisting that we take drastic climate action costing trillions of dollars in order to avert their projected catastrophe. Therefore, we should subject their claims to the highest levels of scrutiny and examination before acquiescing to their demands.

Is that what we have? No – in fact, precisely the opposite. A compliant media and scientifically illiterate governments give the consensus boys a free pass. Grey literature abounds in the IPCC reports. Environmental activist groups are in bed with lead authors and scientists. Journalists in the mainstream media are unashamedly advocates for action on climate change. Governments, desperate to appear politically correct, have swallowed the hysterical nonsense of the Greens.

Matt Ridley in his brilliant speech on “Scientific Heresy” (see here) argued:

Suppose I am right that much of what passes for mainstream climate science is now infested with pseudoscience, buttressed by a bad case of confirmation bias, reliant on wishful thinking, given a free pass by biased reporting and dogmatically intolerant of dissent. So what?

After all there’s pseudoscience and confirmation bias among the climate heretics too.

Well here’s why it matters. The alarmists have been handed power over our lives; the heretics have not. Remember Britain’s unilateral climate act is officially expected to cost the hard-pressed UK economy £18.3 billion a year for the next 39 years and achieve an unmeasurably small change in carbon dioxide levels.

At least sceptics do not cover the hills of Scotland with useless, expensive, duke-subsidising wind turbines whose manufacture causes pollution in Inner Mongolia and which kill rare raptors such as [this] griffon vulture.

At least crop circle believers cannot almost double your electricity bills and increase fuel poverty while driving jobs to Asia, to support their fetish.

At least creationists have not persuaded the BBC that balanced reporting is no longer necessary.

At least homeopaths have not made expensive condensing boilers, which shut down in cold weather, compulsory, as John Prescott did in 2005.

At least astrologers have not driven millions of people into real hunger, perhaps killing 192,000 last year according to one conservative estimate, by diverting 5% of the world’s grain crop into motor fuel*.

That’s why it matters. We’ve been asked to take some very painful cures. So we need to be sure the patient has a brain tumour rather than a nosebleed.

“The alarmists have power over our lives.” That is the key point that differentiates the alarmists from the sceptics. If we reverse the situation, with the consensus position being that the likelihood of catastrophic climate change is minuscule and in any event climate mitigation is practically useless, and the sceptics arguing that we should turn our economies upside down to counter what they allege to be a real risk, spending billions of dollars which could be otherwise spent on alleviating poverty or disease, which side of this hypothetical argument would be subjected to the greater scrutiny?

I am not suggesting such uneven scrutiny, merely a level playing field. But at the moment, we are a very long way from that.

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Daily Bayonet GW Hoax Weekly Roundup

4 November, 2011 by

Skewering the clueless

As always, a great read!

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Carbon trading "a pyramid marketing scheme"

3 November, 2011 by

John Baird - climate sense

So says John Baird, Canadian Foreign Minister. Greg Sheridan writes in The Australian:

The Conservative government of which he is part, under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, won an absolute majority for the first time at the last election on the platform of rejecting a carbon tax or an emissions trading scheme.

Australian policy should pay a lot more attention to Canada, for no other economy is so similarly structured to ours. Baird is a good friend of Australia, feels warmly towards the Gillard government, and speaks glowingly of his friendship with Kevin Rudd. He explicitly did not criticise Australian policy. But the implications of his words are deadly.

The fact that both Canada and the US have rejected a carbon tax or ETS, and that China, India and Indonesia equally will never go down such a road, means there is no prospect of global action on climate change anything like that which Australia is taking. Baird believes that neither Canada nor the US will ever implement a carbon tax or an ETS.

But it is his judgment on the international carbon trading system that is most devastating for the Gillard government’s approach. I asked Baird whether Canada would ever join an international carbon trade. He replied: “There’s nothing to join. Where is it going on today?”

More generally, on carbon trading he said: “One of the problems I have with that (approach) is that everyone just lines up to get credit. My province has a lot of trees, where do we get credit for that? We had an enhanced oil recovery project that pumps carbon into oil wells to get an additional 15 per cent of oil out of them and we had a pipeline importing carbon from the US. So they wanted to get credit for sequestration.

“I said to them ‘You’re not even doing it in our country.’ They said ‘We’re doing something good, we want the credits.’

“(Carbon trading) is like a pyramid marketing scheme. You don’t have to actually sell the dog food, you just have to get 10 of your friends to do it and you’ll get royalties.”

Sheridan’s conclusion is spot on:

“the international trading scheme [in GHGs] lies halfway between a fantasy and a fraud and is never going to make a serious contribution to diminishing greenhouse gases.”

Read it here.

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Muller flip-flops on scepticism

3 November, 2011 by

PR disaster?

He who lives by the media spin cycle dies by the media spin cycle. Just over a week ago, in an article in the Wall Street Journal, Richard Muller of BEST claimed that you couldn’t possibly be sceptical of global warming alarmism any more (see here), thanks to his temperature data set showing that the planet had indeed warmed – knock me down with a feather.

But now, in a new interview, he’s back-pedalling fast, as Tom Nelson reports:

Around the 2:45 mark of Part 1, referring to his recent Wall Street Journal article, Muller says “I never said you shouldn’t be a skeptic. I never said that.”

From his article:

Without good answers to all these complaints, global-warming skepticism seems sensible. But now let me explain why you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer.

Just before the 5-minute mark, Muller is asked if he’s in the Al Gore camp. Muller: “Al Gore camp? That’s ridiculous…what I point out is that most of what appears in An Inconvenient Truth is absolutely either wrong, exaggerated, or misleading.”

At the 8:45 mark, he says scientists will “endorse Al Gore, even though they know what he’s saying is exaggerated and misleading. He’ll talk about polar bears dying even though we know they’re not dying…”.

In Part 2, he’s asked about Eugene Robinson’s Washington Post piece.

[Q] It says “What Dr Muller says proves that the skeptics are wrong and they’ve got to get on the cap and trade train”.

Muller: “That’s ridiculous. I mean, some people say I proved that there was no ClimateGate. No. NO! The ClimateGate thing was a scandal. It’s terrible what they did. It’s shameful the way they hid the data.”

Muller is trying very hard to have a foot in both camps, but it’s getting harder and harder to maintain.

Richard Muller interview, Part 1 – YouTube

Richard Muller interview, Part 2 – YouTube

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Biofuel obsession wrecks African communities

2 November, 2011 by

Communities wrecked

Biofuels – just the latest in the long line of green mirages, which, like all the others, disappears the closer you inspect it. Driven by the madness of climate change zealots who are hectoring and badgering us to abandon cheap coal and oil to “save the planet”, biofuels succeed in only two things – depriving already poor communities of their livelihoods and the world of its precious food resources.

As The Guardian reports:

“The collapse of Sun Biofuels has left hundreds of Tanzanians landless, jobless, and in despair for the future

People feel this is like the return of colonialism,” says Athumani Mkambala, chairman of Mhaga village in rural Tanzania. “Colonialism in the form of investment.”

A quarter of the village’s land in Kisarawe district was acquired by a British biofuels company in 2008, with the promise of financial compensation, 700 jobs, water wells, improved schools, health clinics and roads. But the company has gone bust, leaving villagers not just jobless but landless as well. The same story is playing out across Africa, as foreign investors buy up land but leave some of the poorest people on Earth worse off when their plans fail.

The tale of London-based Sun Biofuels’s misadventure in Kisarawe links the broken hopes of the villagers to offshore tax havens and mysterious new owners, tracked down by the Observer, and ultimately to petrol pumps in the UK and across Europe. The final link results from the mandatory blending of biofuels into European petrol and diesel. The aim is to reduce carbon emissions, but many say biofuels actually increase pollution. The G20 meeting next week will discuss the issue, following a stark report it received in June from the World Bank, World Trade Organisation, UN and others calling for biofuels subsidies to be abandoned.

“The situation in Kisarawe is heartbreaking, but the real tragedy is that it is far from unique. Communities across Africa and beyond are losing their land as a result of the massive biofuel targets set by our government,” said Josie Cohen at development group ActionAid, which works in Kisarawe. “Like it or not, everyone who drives a car or catches a bus is involved in this problem, as all UK petrol and diesel is mixed with biofuels.”

Utterly scandalous, but just par for the course in this wonderful new “green economy”.

Read it here.

(h/t: CL-F)

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MUST READ: Matt Ridley on scientific heresy

2 November, 2011 by

Brilliant stuff – read it all. From Bishop Hill.

Filed Under: Climate
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