Quote of the Day: Ross Garnaut

18 February, 2010 by

Quote of the Day

Speaking of the Coalition’s climate policy:

“I did not take seriously the possibility that it would become part of the Australian policy discussion – I thought that debates over the Government taking huge decisions about the resource allocation ended with the fall of the Soviet Union.”

“To think that regulation, decisions by bureaucrats and governments to reach the right conclusions is, I think, delusional.”

Unfortunately, there is no pleasing dear old Ross, who, back in October described the government’s CPRS (ETS), you know, the one he helped construct, as:

“One of the worst examples of policy making we have seen on major issues in Australia”.

Read it here.

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US companies abandon climate coalition

17 February, 2010 by

USCAP

They can see when the party’s over, clearly:

Three major US companies said Tuesday they were leaving a coalition pushing for action on climate change, dealing a potential fresh blow to landmark legislation to cut carbon emissions.

The companies — oil groups ConocoPhillips and BP America and equipment maker Caterpillar Inc. — said they backed efforts for a green economy but felt that proposed laws were unfair to them.

The firms said they would not renew membership in the US Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a coalition of business leaders whom President Barack Obama’s Democratic Party often cites to bulwark its case on climate change.

ConocoPhillips and BP America, a unit of British giant BP, said the bill under consideration did not attach enough importance to natural gas — which they promote as a way to curb carbon emissions blamed for global warming.

The bills “have disadvantaged the transportation sector and its consumers, left domestic refineries unfairly penalized versus international competition, and ignored the critical role that natural gas can play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” said Jim Mulva, ConocoPhilips chairman and CEO.

“We believe greater attention and resources need to be dedicated to reversing these missed opportunities, and our actions today are part of that effort,” he said in a statement.

Read it here.

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Anglican bishops: "Give up carbon for Lent"

17 February, 2010 by

I hope they purchased carbon offsets for that…

I guess the church could start by not burning thousands of tons of palm fronds around the planet for Ash Wednesday services. That would remove a few tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere (not to mention all the heretics burnt in the past – just think of the carbon footprint of that).

Several prominent Anglican British bishops are urging Christians to keep their carbon consumption in check this Lent.

The 40-day period of penitence before Easter typically sees observant Catholics, Anglicans, and Orthodox Christians give up meat, alcohol or chocolates.

But this year’s initiative aims to convince those observing Lent to try a day without an iPod or mobile phone in a bid to reduce the use of electricity – and thus trim the amount of carbon dioxide spewed [good emotive word there – Ed] into the atmosphere.

Bishop of London Rev. Richard Chartres said that the poorest people in developing countries were the hardest hit by man-made climate change.

He said Tuesday that the “Carbon Fast” was “an opportunity to demonstrate the love of God in a practical way.”

Actually, it’s the poorest people in developing countries that will be hit hardest by the global efforts to tackle climate change, denying them cheap energy to raise their standards of living… hardly a Christian good deed, is it?

Read it here.

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Lomborg: IPCC scaremongering is destroying its credibility

17 February, 2010 by

© Scientific American

Bjorn Lombord

Bjorn Lomborg writes in The Australian on the woes of the IPCC. Now remember, Lomborg is a believer in man-made global warming, but he has realised, unlike most of his fellow believers, that sweeping the IPCC’s errors under the carpet is precisely the wrong thing to do, if you are ever to regain public confidence:

Climate evangelism is an apt description of what the IPCC has been up to, for it has exaggerated some of the ramifications of climate change in order to make politicians take note. Murari Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the section of the IPCC report that contained the Himalayan error, admitted he and his colleagues knew the dramatic glacier prediction was not based on any peer-reviewed science. Nonetheless, he explained, “we thought that if we can highlight it, it will [influence] policymakers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.”

The concrete action they had in mind was getting governments to mandate drastic cuts in carbon dioxide emissions.

Activists have been pursuing this approach to tackling global warming without success for nearly 20 years, most recently at December’s failed climate summit in Copenhagen. The problem is that it is too expensive a solution for politicians and the public to swallow easily, which is why many well-meaning climate scientists have apparently concluded that instead of relying on reasoned discussion, they might as well try to scare us witless.

Consider what the IPCC had to say about extreme weather events such as intense hurricanes. The cost of such events in terms of destroyed property and economic disruption has been rising steadily. Every peer-reviewed study has shown this is not because of rising temperatures but because more people live in harm’s way.

Read it here.

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Aussie weather data "discarded or misused" by Met Office

16 February, 2010 by

More errors?

Another diligent blogger spots yet more “minor” errors in the Met Office data:

A science blogger has uncovered a catalogue of errors in Met Office records that form a central part of the scientific evidence for global warming.

The mistakes, which led to the data from a large number of weather stations being discarded or misused, had been overlooked by professional scientists and were only discovered when the Met Office’s Hadley Centre made data publicly available in December after the “climategate” e-mail row.

Although the errors do not alter the bigger picture on climate change, they have been seized upon as a further sign that scientific institutions have not been sufficiently transparent. “It makes you wonder how many other problems there are in the data,” said John Graham-Cumming, the programmer who spotted the mistakes. “The whole idea of doing science without releasing your data is quite worrying.

…

After trying to reproduce figures shown in scientific publications and on the Met Office website, Dr Graham-Cumming identified a number of problems with the way measurements from Australian weather stations were being averaged. He found that data from seven stations were being accidentally discarded. Data from a further 112 Australian stations, 28 per cent of the total, were not being fully included in calculations of year-on-year temperature differences.

“I’m not a climate sceptic, I think it’s pretty sure that the world is warming up, but this does show why the raw data and not just the results should be available,” said Dr Graham-Cumming.

During the checking procedure Met Office officials discovered further problems with US temperature calculations. They realised that 121 of the US stations did not have unique identifier codes, meaning that data for these stations was either being overwritten or assigned to the wrong location.

Hardly instils a feeling of confidence. Especially when we’re about to spend trillions of dollars “tackling climate change” based on this data…

Read it here.

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IPCC: Hurricane data questioned

16 February, 2010 by

Sorry, Al - wrong again.

Another day, another dodgy claim from AR4. We’ve already had the link between “global warming” and natural disasters debunked, and now this:

More trouble looms for the IPCC. The body may need to revise statements made in its Fourth Assessment Report on hurricanes and global warming. A statistical analysis of the raw data shows that the claims that global hurricane activity has increased cannot be supported.

Les Hatton once fixed weather models at the Met Office. Having studied Maths at Cambridge, he completed his PhD as metereologist: his PhD was the study of tornadoes and waterspouts. He’s a fellow of the Royal Meterological Society, currently teaches at the University of Kingston, and is well known in the software engineering community – his studies include critical systems analysis.

Hatton has released what he describes as an ‘A-level’ statistical analysis, which tests six IPCC statements against raw data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric (NOAA) Administration. He’s published all the raw data and invites criticism, but warns he is neither “a warmist nor a denialist”, but a scientist.

Hatton performed a z-test statistical analysis of the period 1999-2009 against 1946-2009 to test the six conclusions. He also ran the data ending with what the IPCC had available in 2007. He found that North Atlantic hurricane activity increased significantly, but the increase was counterbalanced by diminished activity in the East Pacific, where hurricane-strength storms are 50 per cent more prevalent. The West Pacific showed no significant change. Overall, the declines balance the increases.

“When you average the number of storms and their strength, it almost exactly balances.” This isn’t indicative of an increase in atmospheric energy manifesting itself in storms.

Even the North Atlantic increase should be treated with caution, Hatton concludes, since the period contains one anomalous year of unusually high hurricane activity – 2005 – the year Al Gore used the Katrina tragedy to advance the case for the manmade global warming theory.

The IPCC does indeed conclude that “there is no clear trend in the annual numbers of tropical cyclones.” If only the IPCC had stopped there. Yet it goes on to make more claims, and draw conclusions that the data doesn’t support.

Read the rest of it here. (h/t WUWT)

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The IPCC's "warming bias"

16 February, 2010 by

© Times Online

Robert Watson

It’s curious, isn’t it, that all of the errors that have been picked up in IPCC AR4 over the past few weeks have been in the warming direction? They all exaggerate the effects of climate change to some extent. If there were random errors, then one would assume that there would be a roughly equal amount indicating less warming as more warming. But no, they all indicate more warming.  To my mind this can only indicate one thing: there is a pre-conceived agenda that global warming is real and dangerous, and the IPCC is desperately looking for evidence to back that up. What it should be doing is looking impartially at the evidence and evaluating it free from such preconceptions. But when your organisation’s very existence depends on one particular outcome, it isn’t surprising that that is precisely what you find…

The UN body that advises world leaders on climate change must investigate an apparent bias in its report that resulted in several exaggerations of the impact of global warming, according to its former chairman.

In an interview with The Times Robert Watson said that all the errors exposed so far in the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) resulted in overstatements of the severity of the problem.

Professor Watson, currently chief scientific adviser to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said that if the errors had just been innocent mistakes, as has been claimed by the current chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, some would probably have understated the impact of climate change.

The errors have emerged in the past month after simple checking of the sources cited by the 2,500 scientists who produced the report.

The report falsely claimed that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 when evidence suggests that they will survive for another 300 years. It also claimed that global warming could cut rain-fed North African crop production by up to 50 per cent by 2020. A senior IPCC contributor has since admitted that there is no evidence to support this claim.

The Dutch Government has asked the IPCC to correct its claim that more than half the Netherlands is below sea level. The environment ministry said that only 26 per cent of the country was below sea level.

Professor Watson, who served as chairman of the IPCC from 1997-2002, said: “The mistakes all appear to have gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating the impact. That is worrying. The IPCC needs to look at this trend in the errors and ask why it happened.”

I think we know the reason.

Read it here.

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Voters deserting Rudd and the ETS

16 February, 2010 by

Climate "front and centre"

Kevin Rudd, in one of his rare comments on the subject, recently said that climate change would be “front and centre” at the next election. And that’s good news – for the Coalition, that is – since voters are deserting Labor and its ETS in droves:

VOTERS have been turning off Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading scheme at a faster rate than they have stopped believing in the existence of climate change.

Although Australians overwhelmingly believe climate change exists and it is at least partly a result of human activity, there has been a sharp rise in the percentage of people who do not believe in climate change.

The shift follows the collapse of the UN’s climate change conference in Copenhagen in December and widespread publicity of false claims in the UN’s 2007 climate change report.

In the week when the Rudd government made its latest attempt to pass an ETS through parliament, public opposition to the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme jumped.

The Prime Minister remains committed to the ETS as a central part of the government’s election strategy and continues to attack Coalition opposition to the CPRS.

According to the latest Newspoll survey, taken exclusively for The Australian last weekend, support for the CPRS fell from 67 per cent two months before the Copenhagen summit and before Tony Abbott became Opposition Leader, to 57 per cent.

In October 2008, support for the CPRS was at 72 per cent.

Since Copenhagen and the release of climate change scientists’ emails casting doubt on their research and false claims being exposed in the UN’s 2007 climate report, opposition to an ETS jumped from 22 to 34 per cent.

Whilst the rest of the world has moved on, Kevin Rudd and his government are stuck firmly in the past.

Read it here.

Also read Terry McCrann’s excellent article in the Herald Sun here.

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John Christy: Is the world even warming?

15 February, 2010 by

So, are you saying the jet blast from two or possibly four turbofan aircraft engines might somehow affect the readings on our temperature sensor a few yards away? Is that important? Rome Airport (from WUWT)

It’s like a house of cards in a (global warming intensified) hurricane. Bits flying everywhere – the fragile structure reduced to its constituent molecules. That’s what the global warming movement looks like right now. All four wheels have parted company from the bandwagon, it’s out of gas, driverless, out of control, sliding towards the edge of a thousand metre drop, and all we can do is look on and watch the ghastly spectacle unfold before our eyes.

THE UN climate panel faces a new challenge, with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.

In its last assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that greenhouse gases had already heated the world by 0.7C and there could be 5-6C more warming by 2100.

New research has cast doubt on such claims.

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama, in Huntsville, and a former lead author on the IPCC.

The doubts of Professor Christy and several other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.

They believe these stations have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, frequently, being moved from site to site.

Professor Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa and the US states of California and Alabama.

“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”

Read it here. Original Times article here. UK Telegraph article here.

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BBC: Phil Jones Q & A

14 February, 2010 by

Candid answers

The BBC’s Roger Harrabin has interviewed Phil “CRU” Jones and put to him a number of questions, many from a decidedly sceptical viewpoint. The questions, labelled A – W, provide many revealing answers. Here are some of the most interesting:

A – Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?

An initial point to make is that in the responses to these questions I’ve assumed that when you talk about the global temperature record, you mean the record that combines the estimates from land regions with those from the marine regions of the world. CRU produces the land component, with the Met Office Hadley Centre producing the marine component.

Temperature data for the period 1860-1880 are more uncertain, because of sparser coverage, than for later periods in the 20th Century. The 1860-1880 period is also only 21 years in length. As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different (see numbers below).

I have also included the trend over the period 1975 to 2009, which has a very similar trend to the period 1975-1998.

So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.

Translation: There is nothing unusual about the late 20th century warming.

B – Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?

Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

Translation: There has been no statistically significant warming since 1995.

D – Do you agree that natural influences could have contributed significantly to the global warming observed from 1975-1998, and, if so, please could you specify each natural influence and express its radiative forcing over the period in Watts per square metre.

This area is slightly outside my area of expertise. When considering changes over this period we need to consider all possible factors (so human and natural influences as well as natural internal variability of the climate system). Natural influences (from volcanoes and the Sun) over this period could have contributed to the change over this period. Volcanic influences from the two large eruptions (El Chichon in 1982 and Pinatubo in 1991) would exert a negative influence. Solar influence was about flat over this period. Combining only these two natural influences, therefore, we might have expected some cooling over this period.

Translation: We don’t know what caused the warming, so it must be us.

E – How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?

I’m 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 – there’s evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.

Translation: Despite my answer to “D”, I know which side my bread is buttered.

Read it here.

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