CSIRO has "breached trust"

30 May, 2010 by

Can't be trusted any more?

So says Terry McCrann, in an article comparing the cheerleading of the CSIRO for climate alarmism with the cheerleading of the Treasury for the resources super profits tax:

In March, [CSIRO] joined with the Bureau of Meteorology to produce a “snapshot of the state of the climate to update Australians about how their climate has changed and what it means”. Although the pamphlet had a neutral title, “State of the Climate”, it was clearly designed to bring the great weight of the apparent credibility of these two organisations to bear against, and hopefully crush, those pesky climate change sceptics.

But as one of the peskier of them, Tom Quirk — our version of Canada’s even peskier Stephen McIntyre — discovered, there was a very curious omission in one of the CSIRO graphs. It showed the rise and rise of concentrations in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and its fellow greenhouse gas methane. It was an almost perfect replica of the infamous (Michael) Mann Hockey Stick. After being virtually stable for 900 years, concentrations of both CO2 and methane went almost vertical through the 20th century. But as the eagle-eyed Quirk noticed and wrote about on Quadrant Online, methane was plotted only up to 1990, while the plots for CO2 continued to 2000.Why so, when the CSIRO measures methane concentrations and has data up to last year?

Did the answer lie in the inconvenient truth that methane concentrations have plateaued since the mid-1990s? Yet here is the CSIRO, the organisation dedicated to scientific truth, pretending — even stating — that they’re still going up, Climategate style. This is bad enough, but just as with Treasury, real policies are built on this sort of “analysis”. The first version of the so-called carbon pollution reduction scheme included farming to address the methane question. But as Quirk has shown in a peer-reviewed paper, atmospheric methane is driven by a combination of volcanos, El Ninos and pipeline (mostly dodgy old Soviet) leakage.

A second curious, and even dodgier, thing happened after Quirk’s Quadrant report. CSIRO “updated” its main graph to include the more recent methane data. No admission was made and the graph’s scale made it all but invisible and did not show the plateauing. Further, the CSIRO published a more detailed second graph showing what has happened in the past 30 years, as opposed to the first graph’s 1000 years. But only for CO2, despite the fact that it had exactly the same data for methane.

In short, the CSIRO is a fully signed-up member of the climate change club. It wanted to project the horror story of continually rising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. So it simply disappeared inconvenient evidence to the contrary, in the process announcing it cannot be trusted ever again to deliver objective scientific evidence.

CSIRO, The Bureau of Meteorology, the UK Royal Society, the American National Academy of Sciences and hundreds of other organisations have all nailed their colours to the climate change mast, abandoning objective scientific enquiry in favour of environmental advocacy. As the Royal Society has discovered, it only works for so long, before credibility starts to disappear. As he concludes:

In short and in sum, our two pre-eminent centres of knowledge and public policy analysis across the social and hard sciences spectrum are now literally unbelievable. It is not an attractive or an appropriate state of affairs.

Read it here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , ,

Climate staff discovered ETS was dumped via media

29 May, 2010 by

Not good at communicating…

Kind of like ditching your girlfriend via text message. Strange the government was so shy in telling its own staff that the ETS had been scrapped, when it plans to spend millions of your taxpayer dollars (in breach of its own advertising guidelines) about how the nasty, evil mining companies are “misleading” the electorate on the super profits tax:

SENIOR officials in the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency were unaware of the government’s decision to shelve the emissions trading scheme until it was leaked to the media, a Senate estimates committee was told yesterday.

The department’s secretary, Martin Parkinson, said the decision had also left many officials ”terribly, terribly disappointed”.

Dr Parkinson said staff were establishing ”time capsules” of their work to be opened ”whenever this current impasse is broken and we can have an appropriate debate … around climate change”. ”For many people, they could see their hard work, their commitment and their professionalism was not going to have a pay off at the moment,” he said, though he respected the Prime Minister’s decision.

Dr Parkinson added ”there is no point gilding the lily” and there were people within the department who ”were terribly terribly disappointed” about the decision to delay.

”For many people they could see their hard work, their commitment and their professionalism was not going to have a pay off at the moment.” Dr Parkinson said.

Read it here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

Royal Society to review climate message

28 May, 2010 by

Environmental advocacy

As we know, the Royal Society has become a credibility-free zone with regard to climate change, pushing hysterical environmental advocacy above the impartiality of science. Now the Society has been forced to reconsider its message after 43 fellows complained it oversimplified the issues.

They said the communications did not properly distinguish between what was widely agreed on climate science and what is not fully understood.

The society’s ruling council has responded by setting up a panel to produce a consensus document.

The panel should report in July and the report is to be published in September.

It is chaired by physicist John Pethica, vice-president of the Royal Society.

Its deliberations are reviewed by two critical sub-groups, each believed to comprise seven members.

Each of these groups contains a number of society Fellows who are doubtful in some way about the received view of the risks of rising CO2 levels.

…

A Royal Society pamphlet Climate Change Controversies is the main focus of the criticism [link here, although it will probably be posted down the memory hole pretty soon, so you can download the document from ACM here: Royal Society Climate Change Controversies]. A version of it is on the organisation’s website. It was written in response to attacks on mainstream science which the Royal Society considered scurrilous.

It reads: “This is not intended to provide exhaustive answers to every contentious argument that has been put forward by those who seek to distort and undermine the science of climate change…”

One Fellow who said he was not absolutely convinced of the dangers of CO2 told me: “This appears to suggest that anyone who questions climate science is malicious. But in science everything is there to be questioned – that should be the very essence of the Royal Society. Some of us were very upset about that.

Yes, there are some things we are all agreed on, like the fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and will cause some degree of warming when its concentration is increased. However, the scale of that warming we are not agreed on. The IPCC has wrongly concluded that the climate is very sensitive, and positive feedbacks will act to amplify that warming. Climate realists (and real world observations) show negative feedbacks, acting to reduce the warming from CO2.

As one commenter on Watts Up With That states:

In other words, they admit that they were lying all along and have been caught with their knickers down.

Read it here.

(h/t WUWT)

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With:

Daily Bayonet GW Hoax Weekly Roundup

28 May, 2010 by

Skewering the clueless

As always, a great read!

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With:

Flannel from Flannery: Rudd betrayed trust on ETS

27 May, 2010 by

More flannel than a pair of pyjamas

The environmental journos at the Sydney Morning Herald would print Tim Flannery’s farts if they could only work out how to spell them, such is the awe in which this rent-a-quote global warming advocate is held. Calling Flannery an “internationally renowned climate expert” is an insult to climate experts (and we know how highly regarded they are). But he’s a climate hysteric, so that’s good enough for the Moonbat Herald, which has already made up its mind on climate change and will print any old alarmist rubbish that flops limply on to the environment desk:

An internationally renowned climate expert has savaged Prime Minister Kevin Rudd for a “profound betrayal of trust” on climate change.

Tim Flannery, a former Australian of the Year [grovel, grovel, smarm, smarm], said he was unlikely to vote Labor again after Mr Rudd shelved plans for an emissions trading scheme.

“It’s a profound betrayal of the person I voted for,” Professor Flannery told AAP at a conference in Canberra.

“Politicians only have one thing that they trade in, which is trust … unfortunately my trust in the party’s been corroded.”

Like we care?

Prof Flannery is a scientist and author who is heavily involved in international efforts to tackle global warming. [Wikipedia says paleontologist and mammalogist, but hey, we only worry about qualifications when we’re talking about sceptics, right?]

As fresh data showed Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions are rising again after dipping during the financial crisis, Prof Flannery berated Australia for being a “wooden spooner” on climate change.

He accused both major parties of a failure of political leadership, but said the problem went deeper.

The political system was captive to big business and dominated by old men. [Please stop, my aching sides will surely split]

“They seem to have a fossilised mindset … not all the fossils are in the ground,” the 2007 Australian of the Year [again?] told a green business conference in Parliament House.

Sycophantic, nauseating tripe.

Don’t bother reading it here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

Abbott: man has role in climate change

27 May, 2010 by

The alarmism is still crap…

Er yes, we’ve always known that, and so has Tony Abbott – it’s the magnitude that’s important. But the Sydney Morning Herald goes into overdrive, believing it to be some kind of Damascene conversion, claiming Abbott now believes “climate change is no longer ‘crap’.” It’s nothing of the sort of course. TA just acknowledges what we have known all along – that man has an effect on the climate:

Tony Abbott, who famously declared the “so-called settled science” of climate change to be “crap” has told environmental business leaders he is now “confident …mankind does make a difference to climate”.

In a speech to the National Business Leaders Forum on Sustainable Development in Canberra, Mr Abbott repeated his view that natural variations in the climate have been happening since the beginning of time, but added that he also believed humans have influenced recent climatic fluctuations.

“I am confident, based on the science we have, that mankind does make a difference to climate, almost certainly the impact of humans on the planet extends to climate.”

Of course – but it’s a question of whether humans will make a tiny, almost imperceptible difference, as most climate realists believe, with negative feedbacks operating in the climate system, or 6 degrees, as the IPCC and alarmists would have us believe, based on huge positive feedbacks.

The IPCC science is still crap, by the way…

Read it here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With:

Climate Madness: EU signs its own economic death warrant

26 May, 2010 by

Dangerous pollution? No, steam.

The … world … has … gone … mad. I am sure many of you, like me, will simply not believe the content of this article. The EU is going through a time of almost unprecedented financial turmoil. The global economy is struggling to recover from the GFC, but in Europe things are still very precarious: Greece is sinking fast, and Spain isn’t far behind, trillions in debt, the Euro will soon be worthless, and the entire economy of the European Union may literally grind to a halt. So what do the morons at the European Commission decide to do? Set ridiculous unilateral targets for curbing CO2 emissions which will cripple Europe’s economy even faster. From the UK Times Online (via The Australian):

Europe will introduce a surprise new plan today to combat global warming, committing Britain and the rest of the EU to the most ambitious targets in the world. The plan proposes a massive increase in the target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions in this decade.

The European Commission is determined to press ahead with the cuts despite the financial turmoil gripping the bloc, even though it would require Britain and other EU member states to impose far tougher financial penalties on their industries than are being considered by other large economies.

The plan, to cut emissions by 30 per cent on 1990 levels by 2020, would cost the EU an extra £33 billion a year by 2020 [roughly AU$60 billion as of today], according to a draft of the Commission’s communication leaked to The Times.

The existing target of a 20 per cent cut is already due to cost £48 billion. The Commission will argue that the lower target has become much easier to meet because of the recession, which resulted in the EU’s emissions falling more than 10 per cent last year as thousands of factories closed or cut production. Emissions last year were already 14 per cent below 1990 levels. [What a great argument! Let’s cripple our economy, then we won’t have any emissions anyway! Brilliant!]

Business leaders fear that thousands of jobs could be lost and energy bills could soar. Carbon taxes on road fuel, heating and other sources of emissions could be introduced, with proceeds reinvested in renewable energy products. [Wind and solar, and we know how reliable they are]

The EU’s present policy is to wait for other countries to commit themselves to equivalent action on their emissions before raising its target to 30 per cent “as part of a genuine global effort”. But after the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit, a global deal on cutting emissions is now unlikely to be agreed until the end of next year.

Connie Hedegaard, the Climate Commissioner, will make the case for the EU to commit itself unilaterally to a 30 per cent cut, to inspire other countries to follow suit and accelerate the development of low-carbon industries.

This is Climate Madness on a simply staggering scale. My heartfelt sympathy goes out to those readers in the EU. It’s been nice knowing you, but sadly, by next year, you won’t be able to afford the electricity to switch on your computers…

Read it here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

Recipe for a climate scare story

26 May, 2010 by

Is the IPCC a corrupt political alarmist machine? Do polar bears shit in the Arctic?

OK folks, hope you’re all ready to put on your chef’s hats and venture to the kitchen to concoct a climate scare story. Firstly, we must have the right ingredients:

  • cuddly furry creature (in this case, a polar bear will do nicely)
  • a large serving of climate change hysteria
  • a tipping point or two (to taste)
  • a half-baked computer model
  • generous helping of hyperbole

Mix them all together, et voilà! Now feed to a desperate mainstream media organisation (the BBC) which will swallow anything.

Climate change will trigger a dramatic and sudden decline in the number of polar bears, a new study has concluded.

The research is the first to directly model how changing climate will affect polar bear reproduction and survival.

Based on what is known of polar bear physiology, behaviour and ecology, it predicts pregnancy rates will fall and fewer bears will survive fasting during longer ice-free seasons.

These changes will happen suddenly as bears pass a ‘tipping point’. [Do not pass Go, do not collect $200]

…

Dr [Peter] Molnar, Professor Andrew Derocher and colleagues from the University of Alberta and York University, Toronto focused on the physiology, behaviour and ecology of polar bears, and how these might change as temperatures increase.

“We developed a model for the mating ecology of polar bears. The model estimates how many females in a population will be able to find a mate during the mating season, and thus get impregnated.”

…

“In both cases, the expected changes in reproduction and survival were non-linear,” explains Dr Molnar.

“That is, as the climate warms, we may not see any substantial effect on polar bear reproduction and survival for a while, up until some threshold is passed, at which point reproduction and survival will decline dramatically and very rapidly.”

<sarc> I wonder if these computer models are as good as the IPCC’s climate models? </sarc>

Read the rest here, although to be honest, I really wouldn’t bother. (h/t WUWT)

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , ,

"Global warming" makes Everest harder to climb

26 May, 2010 by

So hard even a 13-year-old can do it

Note how, that without a pause for breath, the media return to the term “global warming” when it suits? Even though global warming virtually stopped in 2001? But they need to make the link between “warming” and melting ice for this story:

Mount Everest is becoming increasingly dangerous to climb because global warming is melting glacier ice along its slopes, according to a Nepalese Sherpa who has conquered the world’s highest summit 20 times.

Rising temperatures have melted much of the ice on the steep trail to the summit and climbers are struggling to get traction on the exposed rock surface, according to the 49-year-old Sherpa, known only as Apa.

The melting ice has also exposed deep crevasses which climbers could fall into, and experts have warned that people scaling the mountain risk being swept away by “outburst floods” from rising volumes of glacial meltwater.

Could this possibly be the same Apa who, just four days ago, dedicated his climb with 13 year old American Jordan Romero to the impact of climate change on the Himalayas, a fact not even mentioned in the Telegraph report? Obviously an impartial assessment, then. Add it to the warmlist.

Read it here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With:

Middle classes "bear brunt of liberal elite's obsession with climate change"

25 May, 2010 by

The green economy myth

We knew this already, but it’s refreshing to see it stated so bluntly, in the UK Telegraph. The governing intelligentsia, sitting in their ivory tower, insulated from reality, can pontificate about “sustainable lifestyles” as much as they like, without ever having to suffer the consequences of their actions. And this is also why wealthy celebrities are so quick to climb on any passing environmental bandwagon, safe in the knowledge that nothing they say or do will have the slightest effect on their cosy way of life, or their seven houses (yes, I’m talking about you, Jeremy Irons).

Joel Kotkin, an American expert in social trends, said environmental policies were being used as an excuse to restrict the expansion of the suburbs on the edge of towns and cities.

The result was “a direct assault on the quality of life for millions of working and middle class families“.

Mr Kotkin argued that working and middle class people suffered the most from well intentioned yet-ill thought out policies of liberal and urban elites.

Mr Kotkin said: “Long-term aesthetic arguments against suburbia have now evolved into a new emphasis on ‘sustainability’, largely in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.”

And the best bit of all:

Mr Kotkin argued that plans to build a new “green economy” in the UK were a myth that would never replace the economic and social benefits of traditional manufacturing.

We’ve said so all along.

Read it here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,
«Previous Page
Next Page»