US House of Representatives kills IPCC funding

20 February, 2011 by

Hopelessly biased

A small victory for common sense. The US House of Representatives has voted to strip the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of its funding for the remainder of 2011. As Science magazine reports, the climatologists aren’t happy:

Last night the U.S. House of Representatives agreed to cut off funding for the rest of 2011 for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “My constituents should not have to continue to foot the bill for an organization to keep producing corrupt findings that can be used as justification to impose a massive new energy tax on every American,” said Representative Blaine Leutkemeyer (R-MO), the sponsor of the measure, in floor debate before the vote. Leutkemeyer said in a press release that his amendment, which passed 244 to 179 largely along partisan lines, represented “a victory for taxpayers.”

Asked about the vote, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration head Jane Lubchenco said she disagreed with the House’s action. “Science should not be partisan. [Tell that to the consensus boys, Jane – Ed] It is highly unfortunate that in many cases it is,” she said. The spending measure, which would fund the government for the rest of 2011, now goes to the Senate, which disagrees with many portions of the bill.

“It’s a real tragedy that the issue is so poorly understood that it doesn’t have the support I think it deserves given how important it is,” says Stanford ecologist Chris Field, the lead author on one of three IPCC working groups [and an old friend of ACM – see here – despite $70 billion spent on brainwashing the public, it’s still “poorly understood”? – Ed]. The House doesn’t “like the message so they are killing the messenger,” says climate scientist Mike MacCracken, former director of the U.S. Global Change Research Program. (source)

Feel sorry for them yet? No, neither do I. And Dr Roy Spencer points out a few home truths about why this happened:

The climate change deniers have no one but themselves to blame for last night’s vote.

I’m talking about those who deny NATURAL climate change. Like Al Gore, John Holdren, and everyone else who thinks climate change was only invented since they were born.

Politicians formed the IPCC over 20 years ago with an endgame in mind: to regulate CO2 emissions. I know, because I witnessed some of the behind-the-scenes planning. It is not a scientific organization. It was organized to use the government-funded scientific research establishment to achieve policy goals.

Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But when they are portrayed as representing unbiased science, that IS a bad thing. If anthropogenic global warming – and ocean ‘acidification’ (now there’s a biased and totally incorrect term) — ends up being largely a false alarm, those who have run the IPCC are out of a job. More on that later.

I don’t want to be misunderstood on this. IF we are destroying the planet with our fossil fuel burning, then something SHOULD be done about it.

But the climate science community has allowed itself to be used on this issue, and as a result, politicians, activists, and the media have successfully portrayed the biased science as settled.

They apparently do not realize that ‘settled science’ is an oxymoron.

The most vocal climate scientists defending the IPCC have lost their objectivity. Yes, they have what I consider to be a plausible theory. But they actively suppress evidence to the contrary, for instance attempts to study natural explanations for recent warming.

That’s one reason why the public was so outraged about the ClimateGate e-mails. ClimateGate doesn’t prove their science is wrong…but it does reveal their bias. Science progresses by investigating alternative explanations for things. Long ago, the IPCC all but abandoned that search.

Read it all.

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Climate of extremes

19 February, 2011 by

Climate sense

Luboš Motl, writing on his blog The Reference Frame, examines the current fad of blaming extreme weather on climate change, and recent comments by Gavin Schmidt:

There has been a lot of havoc in the media world about two recent papers in Nature whose authors argued that bad rainstorms are caused by humans (Min et al.) and that the British 2000 floods were caused by humans (Pall et al.).

The idea that climate extremes are supposed to get larger is one of the most omni-present manifestations of the climate doomsday religion.

This thesis contradicts pretty much all empirical data as well as theoretical analyses of the climate. The global temperature has probably increased in the last 100 years but the extremes have not. However, many AGW believers, including many of those you could otherwise count as doubters (e.g. the former Czech representative in the IPCC) love to parrot this complete pseudoscientific nonsense.

If you graph the intensity or number of hurricanes; the temperature fluctuations; the total number of extreme temperature events; or many other things that depend on “non-uniformity” and “non-constancy” of the quantities describing the atmosphere, you will see that there’s been no significant global trend in either of them during the last 100 years or so.

All those graphs are noisy – unlike the temperature (following a pink noise curve), all these graphs resemble white noise (because there’s no reason to think that e.g. the annual or monthly amount of precipitation should be a continuous function). But the “signal” never exceeds the “noise” in a statistically significant way.

I have created many such graphs using the WeatherData function in Mathematica. I wonder – if those people really believe that the measures of extremeness are going up, why do they do so? Haven’t they managed to draw a single graph of this type which is almost enough to see that this whole thesis is just plain rubbish?

It seems to me that the honest believers build their opinions on the climate models that suffer from some kind of numerical instability – and they’re not capable to distinguish the climate models from the reality or to see that these effects obviously can’t be happening in the real world. And by the way, they have probably never played with the same model without the CO2 increase to see that the instability is still there.

The idea that all extremes are getting stronger – a basic pillar of the climate doomsday beliefs – is actually so silly that even one of the most famous climate cranks, Gavin Schmidt, has been able to figure our and admit that it’s wrong.

Read it here.

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Chief Scientist Penny Sackett resigns

19 February, 2011 by

Politics

Penny Sackett, Australia’s Chief Scientist, is resigning from the post halfway through her 5 year appointment. Personally, I am not sorry to see her go, as she was an outspoken climate alarmist (see here, here, here, etc) and became a shrill advocate for the usual “urgent action to tackle climate change.” Unsurprisingly, therefore, she cites “lack of government progress” on climate change as one of the reasons for her departure.

Just as no-one seems bothered any more that the Governor General and various state Governors wade in on political matters, nobody batted an eyelid at Sackett’s outspoken views on climate change. Unfortunately, it’s the world we live in.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

AUSTRALIA’S chief scientist, Penny Sackett, has resigned half way through her five-year appointment.

The government’s leading scientific adviser said she was standing down for personal and professional reasons, but declined to comment further.

”This is not a decision that I have taken lightly or quickly,” said Professor Sackett, pictured, in a statement released on her website yesterday afternoon.

…

Professor Sackett was … understood to be frustrated about a lack of progress in government efforts to address climate change.

She told the Herald last May she was concerned by the government’s decision to delay its emissions trading legislation.

”Any action that is delayed puts us at higher risk of dangerous climate change,” she said. (source)

If you want to play politics, become a politician.

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Carbon price deal "months away"

18 February, 2011 by

Finally, some half-good news:

The Federal Government has indicated that it will be months before a deal on carbon pricing is reached.

The Government’s multi-party climate change committee, which is chaired by Prime Minister Julia Gillard and includes the Greens and independent MPs, held its fourth meeting in Canberra this morning.

Ms Gillard and Climate Change Minister Greg Combet were widely expected to unveil their preferred model after the meeting.

But the committee says no final decisions have been taken on how to price carbon or what assistance will be offered to industry and taxpayers.

It says the final design of the carbon price will only be decided when all the elements of the policy can be considered together, and that should happen in the coming months. (source)

What the heck does that mean? Who cares, anyway – the longer the better. Personally, I suggest starting in about 2200, when the permafrost has melted, and we’re all breathing 100% methane.

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The debunking of the Antarctic warming scare

18 February, 2011 by

Debunked again?

In the science blogs there is currently a serious bust up between Eric Steig, author of a paper claiming that the Antarctic was warming (and therefore, in his view, putting the final nail in the sceptics’ coffin) and Ryan O’Donnell, who, with Steve McIntyre, has published a challenging rebuttal. The story is taken up in the UK Spectator this week. The main story is subscription only, but the editorial makes very interesting reading:

In January 2009, Nature magazine ran the a cover story (pictured) conveying dramatic news about Antarctica: that most of it had warmed significantly over the last half-century. For years, the data from this frozen continent – with 90 percent of the world’s ice mass – had stubbornly refused to corroborate the global warming narrative. So the study, led by Eric Steig of the University of Washington, was treated as a bit of a scoop. It reverberated around the world. Gavin Schmidt, from the RealClimate blog, declared that Antarctica had silenced the sceptics. Mission, it seemed, was accomplished: Antarctica was no longer an embarrassment to the global warming narrative.

He spoke too soon. The indefatigable Steve McIntyre started to scrutinise his followings along with Nicholas Lewis. They found several flaws: Steig et al had used too few data sequences to speak for an entire continent, and had processed the data in a very questionable way. But when they wanted to correct him, in another journal, they quickly ran into an inconvenient truth about global warming: the high priests do not like refutation. To have their critique (initial submission here, final version here) of Steig’s work published, they needed to assuage the many demands of an anonymous ‘Reviewer A’ – whom they later found out to be Steig himself.

Lewis and Matt Ridley have joined forces to tell the story in the cover issue of this week’s Spectator. It’s another powerful, and depressing tale of the woeful state of climate science. Real science welcomes refutation: with global warming, it is treated as a religion. As they say in their cover story:

“Nature’s original peer-review process had let through an obviously flawed paper, and no professional climate scientist then disputed  it – perhaps because of fear that doing so might harm their careers. As the title of Richard Bean’s new play – The Heretic – at the Royal Court hints, young scientists going into climate studies these days are a bit like young theologians in Elizabethan England. They quickly learn that funding and promotion dries up if you express heterodox views, or doubt the scripture. The scripture, in this case, being the assembled reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

They went through 88 pages of correspondence in their battle to have their critique published.

“So has Antarctica been warming? Mostly not – at least not measurably. Retreat of the floating Antarctic ice shelves is a favourite story for the media. But, except in a very few peripheral parts, Antarctica is far too cold to lose ice by surface melting.”

As Lewis & Ridley say in their closing paragraphs:

“Papers that come to lukewarm or sceptical conclusions are published, if at all, only after the insertion of catechistic sentences to assert their adherence to orthodoxy. Last year, a paper in Nature Geosciences concluded heretically that `it is at present impossible to accurately determine climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide’ (high sensitivity  underpins the entire IPCC argument), yet presaged this with the (absurd) remark: `Earth’s climate can only be stabilized by bringing carbon dioxide emissions under control in the twenty-first century.’Likewise, a paper In Science last month linking periods of migration in European history with cooler weather stated: `Such historical data may provide a basis for counteracting the recent political and fiscal reluctance to mitigate projected climate change.’ Sceptical climatologist Pat Michaels pointed out that the sentence would make more sense with `counteracting’ removed.

Science as a philosophy is a powerful, but fragile thing. In the case of climate, it is now in conflict with science as an institution.” (source)

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Daily Bayonet GW Hoax Weekly Roundup

18 February, 2011 by

Skewering the clueless

As always, a great read!

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Global warming to melt permafrost

17 February, 2011 by

I literally cannot keep up with the alarmism today. The warm-mongers must sense they’re on a roll and are churning stuff out for all they’re worth. Now it’s the permafrost:

Global warming could cause up to 60 percent of the world’s permafrost to thaw by 2200 and release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere that would further speed up climate change, a study warned.

Using projections based on UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenarios, scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Colorado estimated that if global warming continues even at a moderate pace, a third of the earth’s permafrost will be gone by 2200.

If the planet warms at a faster pace, the world could see 59 percent of the permanently frozen underground layer of earth thaw out; as that happens, organic matter that has been trapped in the permafrost for tens of millennia will begin to decay, releasing carbon into the atmosphere.

The NSIDC scientists then used a model to predict how much carbon the thawing permafrost would release and came up with the staggering figure of 190 gigatons by 2200.

“That’s the equivalent of half the amount of carbon that has been released into the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial age. That’s a lot of carbon,” NSIDC scientist Kevin Schaefer, the lead author of the study, told AFP. [I assume he’s just being sloppy and really means carbon dioxide – Ed]

A gigaton is one billion tons, so 190 gigatons is the equivalent of around a billion tons of carbon entering the atmosphere each year between now and 2200.

Schaefer said carbon that would be released from melting permafrost has to be accounted for in global warming strategies.

“If we don’t account for the release of carbon from permafrost, we’ll overshoot the C02 concentration we are aiming for and will end up with a warmer climate than we want,” he said.

But all was not doom and gloom, he said. [Gee, really? – Ed]

“If we start cutting emissions now [ah, there’s the rub – Ed], we will slow down the thaw rate and push the start of this carbon release off into the future,” he said. (source)

Of course, as it states at the start, this is based on the hugely exaggerated IPCC projections of 6 degrees by 2100 or something. But even if we ignore that, why didn’t all this happen thousands of years ago when temperatures were higher in the Holocene Optimum? Or the MWP? [The MWP didn’t exist, remember? Ask Michael Mann – Ed.] Why didn’t the climate spiral out of control then? Is there something different between temperature rises caused naturally and those allegedly caused by man-made CO2 which makes them melt permafrost faster? So many questions and so few answers.

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Man-made CO2 is "the only thing we can think of"

17 February, 2011 by

6th grade science FAIL

That’s a wonderfully scientific statement for you, isn’t it? We can’t think of anything else so it must be what we say it is, which just happens to be man-made CO2. A twelve-year-old physics student would be told off for writing something so unscientific in a laboratory experiment write-up, but climate scientists can get away with it.

As The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

A new study says greenhouse gas emissions have caused an increase in the intensity of floods.

Two Canadian scientists say that between 1951 and 1999 the intensity of extreme rains and floods increased by seven per cent in all of the northern hemisphere.

Published in the journal Nature, the research has found that the increase is twice what was predicted by climate modelling.

Dr Xuebin Zhang, a research scientist based at Environment Canada, said it was clear human activity had caused more intense weather.

“Our research provides the first scientific evidence that human-induced greenhouse gas increases have contributed to the observed intensification of heavy precipitation events,” Dr Zhang said in a statement.

Gosh, that sounds pretty conclusive. So let’s read further for the empirical evidence to make such a bold and sweeping conclusion:

Dr Francis Zwiers from the University of Victoria said the evidence led the researchers to a phenomenon that influenced precipitation on a global scale.

“The only thing we can think of is the changing composition of the atmosphere. Warmer air contains more moisture and leads to more extreme precipitation,” Dr Zwiers said. (source)

Right, there isn’t any evidence. then. Just a temporal relationship and a hunch? And the “only thing they can think of” is the changing atmospheric composition? Which just happens to have been all due to man? What if the warmer air were caused by natural, internal climate variation which may cause increased precipitation? Did they think of that, perhaps? No, I doubt it as well.

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Flannery: Climate commission "isn't selling anything"

17 February, 2011 by

Hopelessly compromised

Please stop it, I think my sides have split. Joke of the Week alert, as Tim Flannery, the Grand High Commissioner of Climate (or something), huffs and puffs and blusters and flusters in defence of his hopelessly compromised band of warmists in The Daily Telegraph today:

THE opinion piece by Tim Blair “Just pay up and ignore the irony” in Monday’s Daily Telegraph is not only insulting to members of the Australian Climate Commission, but contains serious errors.

Contrary to what was written, it is not the Climate Commission’s business to “sell” anything to the public. Our role is to engage people on climate science and the state of international climate change action, and to explain carbon pricing as Australia deals with this problem.

Your readers deserve also to know that the Climate Commission is independent of government. Having publicly criticised prime ministers from both sides of politics, I value my independence greatly, and would not have taken up the Chief Commissioner position were this not crystal clear. (source)

Independent of government, and also independent of any dissenting views. It’s a one-sided talking shop, where everyone has made his mind up and they all stew in their own warmist juices. Where’s Bob Carter or Ian Plimer? Where in fact is anyone with an opinion that doesn’t neatly fit into the IPCC’s consensus? Nowhere to be seen, of course.

But the fact that, according to Flannery, the Commission isn’t a tool for communication will certainly be news to Greg Combet, however, as the Commission’s launch document states:

“The Climate Commission has been established by the Gillard Government to provide an authoritative, independent source of information for all Australians,” he said. “It will provide expert advice on climate change science and impacts, and international action. It will help build the consensus required to move to a clean energy future.”

The Climate Commission would have a public outreach role, he said, to help build greater understanding and consensus about reducing Australia’s carbon pollution.

“The Commissioners are eminent Australians who are leaders in their fields and I’m pleased one of Australia’s leading science communicators, Professor Tim Flannery, a former Australian of the Year, has accepted the role of Chief Commissioner,” Mr Combet said.

“The Climate Commission will fulfil a key information and education role, enabling the Australian community to have a more informed conversation about climate change. I am delighted to lead this new Commission,” said Professor Tim Flannery. (source – PDF)

I suppose when the spin and misrepresentations are so blatant, you know they’re in a hole.

(PDF link thanks to Andrew Bolt)

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Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO referred to National Audit Office

16 February, 2011 by

National Audit Office

I’m not sure how far this will get [probably not very far, given how every public body you care to mention seems to be infested with climate alarmists – Ed], but we can at least thank them for their efforts and wish them the best of luck – they’ll need it. From Jo Nova’s site:

A team of skeptical scientists, citizens, and an Australian Senator have lodged a formal request with the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) to have the BOM and CSIRO audited.

The BOM claim their adjustments are “neutral” yet Ken Stewart showed that the trend in the raw figures for our whole continent has been adjusted up by 40%. The stakes are high. Australians could have to pay something in the order of $870 million dollars thanks to the Kyoto protocol, and the first four years of the Emissions Trading Scheme was expected to cost Australian industry (and hence Australian shareholders and consumers) nearly $50 billion dollars.

Given the stakes, the Australian people deserve to know they are getting transparent, high quality data from the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM). The small cost of the audit is nothing in comparison with the money at stake for all Australians. We need the full explanations of why individual stations have been adjusted repeatedly and non-randomly, and why adjustments were made decadesafter the measurements were taken. We need an audit of surface stations. (Are Australian stations as badly manipulated and poorly sited as the US stations? Who knows?)

The NZ equivalent to the Australian BOM is under an official review

The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition found adjustments that were even more inexplicable (0.006 degrees was adjusted up to 0.9 degrees). They decided to push legally and the response was a litany of excuses — until finally The National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) was forced to disavow it’s own National Temperature Records, and belatedly pretend that it had never been intended for public consumption. But here’s the thing that bites: NZ signed the Kyoto protocol, arguably based very much on the NZ temperature record, and their nation owes somewhere from half a billion to several billion dollars worth of carbon credits (depending on the price of carbon in 2012). Hence there is quite a direct link from the damage caused by using one unsubstantiated data set based on a single student’s report that no one can find or replicate that will cost the nation a stack of money. NIWA is now potentially open to class actions. (Ironically, the Australian BOM has the job of “ratifying” the reviewed NZ temperature record.)

Thanks to work by Ken Stewart, Chris Gillham, Andrew Barnham, Tony Cox, James Doogue, David Stockwell, as well as Cory Bernardi, Federal Senator for South Australia.

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