Climate Commission’s latest report slammed as ‘environmental activism’


The Climate Commissioners on their days off...

The Climate Commissioners on their days off…

Tell us something we don’t already know. The Climate Commission has got nothing whatsoever to do with impartial, free-thinking scientific enquiry. It’s sole purpose is to regurgitate government climate policy, couched in pseudo-science and alarmism.

Monday’s “Critical Decade” report, which claimed that there is a one-in-two chance that there will be no humans left on the planet by 2100, has been rightly exposed as extremist environmental propaganda:

THE mining industry has lashed out at the latest Climate Commission report, labelling it taxpayer-funded environmental activism that would devastate the Queensland economy.

Minerals Council of Australia chief executive Mitch Hooke said the report, which called for an end to most coal mining, crossed the line from scientific analysis into environmental campaigning.

The report warns that unchecked climate change would hit hard at Queensland’s biggest industries: mining, cattle and potentially tourism, through impacts on the Great Barrier Reef and Wet Tropics.

Climate Commissioner Will Steffen said an orderly transition had to be made from most fossil fuel use such as coal if the climate was to be stabilised this century.

Mr Hooke said extreme green groups had promoted an end to the coal industry in a secret campaign called Stopping the Coal Export Boom.

The document outlined a plan to eliminate the industry and he wanted to know why a taxpayer-funded agency with a charter that demanded scientific rigour was following the same approach.

Professor Steffen hit back, saying there were no conspiracies [Conspiracy? Quick, where’s Loon-dowsky when you need him? – Ed], he had not heard of the campaign and his organisation had no contact of any sort with conservationists.

“If he’d cared to read the report [Sarcasm, lowest form of wit – Ed], he would find pages of [alarmist] scientific references in it [and none that challenged the consensus],’’ Professor Steffen said. “(The report) is based on the [fudged and fiddled] science and consistent with what the International Energy Agency says, what the Grantham Institute says and what (economist) Lord Stern says.

“It’s well understood in investment and science communities [both of which are making shed-loads of cash from the climate scare].’’

The stopping coal document, which is sponsored by Greenpeace, Coalswarm and the Graeme Wood Foundation [remember to boycott Wotif.com] and is available on the internet, says its strategy is to disrupt and delay key projects while eroding support for coal mining.

Mr Hooke said there would be severe economic consequences if coal mining ended but no tangible environmental dividend.

“Eliminating the Australian coal industry would reduce Australia’s GDP by between $29 billion and $36 billion per year,’’ he said. “It would reduce Australian jobs by almost 200,000 and reduce income to the Commonwealth by $6 billion.’’ (source)

But that’s OK, because the activists’ quasi-religious duty to ‘save the planet’ trumps everything, including common sense, apparently.

Climate Commission’s emotive alarmist blackmail


You just need to take a close look at this image to see all that’s wrong with the government funded propaganda mouthpiece the Climate Commission. It has been annotated with some ACM comments:

Propaganda, alarmism and blackmail

Propaganda, alarmism and blackmail

Planet’s been here for four and a half billion years, yet this microscopic blink of ten years is critical, right chaps?

Read the whole sorry thing here – and see if you can find any reference to the divergence between models and reality. Most of it is just a cut-and-paste job from IPCC AR4. This is where your tax dollars are going. Aren’t you glad?

UK: Tim Yeo steps down amid corruption claims


source: Cartoons by Josh

source: Cartoons by Josh

Conflict of Interest Alert as Tim Yeo, who is alleged to have £1,000,000 (AU$1.65m) in Green interests, and who chairs the UK parliament’s Energy and Climate Select Committee, was caught in a Sunday Times sting, offering to lobby government figures in exchange for payment (allegedly).

The Telegraph reports:

The Conservative MP who scrutinises energy policy has been filmed boasting that he can be paid to introduce businessman to members of the Government.

Tim Yeo, the chairman of the Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee, also said he had coached John Smith, managing director of GB Railfreight, before the executive gave evidence to the committee last month. Yeo is a paid director and shareholder of Eurotunnel — the firm’s parent company.

Mr Yeo was filmed by undercover reporters working for The Sunday Times saying: “I told him [Mr Smith] in advance what to say. Ha-ha.”

When asked if he would be interested in a £7,000-a-day consultancy contract with a solar company, the MP said: “If you want to meet the right people, I can facilitate all those introductions and I use the knowledge I get from what is quite an active network of connections.”

The reporters queried if this included Government figures. Mr Yeo replied “Yes”.

The House of Commons’ code of conduct forbids MPs from acting as paid advocates, including by lobbying ministers. (source)

For those with their snouts in the trough (allegedly), the green economy is a nice little earner.

See also James Delingpole here, and plenty on Guido here.

Going nowhere…


Dead right.gillard_dog_0

Warmist ‘integrity’ on display


Respect and integrity

Respect and integrity

In what other area of scientific discourse would this kind of exchange take place?

Marshall Shepherd: learned n strange emails/blogs some disagree with my #Tedx Talk, @MichaelEMann HockeyStick discredited (hasn’t), & wx varies-gee “who knew”

Bishop Hill: @DrShepherd2013 I attended a debate with a paleoclimate guy a few months ago. In q&a he was asked about the hockey stick. He said “it’s broken”.

Marshall Shepherd: @aDissentient why don’t you ask @MichaelEMann

Marshall Shepherd: @aDissentient and fyi, I generally don’t debate anything that isn’t published in the peer-reviewed lit, best regards

Then Mann shows up:

Michael Mann: @DrShepherd2013 Marshall, I don’t engage disinformation-spewing trolls. It just encourages them…

Marshall Shepherd: @MichaelEMann indeed

Marshall Shepherd: @MichaelEMann I am loving the block function immensely…

Michael Mann: @DrShepherd2013 You and me both 😉

Marshall Shepherd: @MichaelEMann @skepticscience [of course – Ed] unfortunately already blocked the folks that need to see this 🙂

No comment required. The tweets speak for themselves. By the way, Marshall Shepherd is the President of the American Meteorological Society.

P.S. Note to Michael Mann, Shepherd and all the other blockers, all you need to do is log out of Twitter and you can see everything, which is how ACM (which was blocked by Mann) can post all the tweets. 

H/T Bishop Hill

Here’s the exchange as it appeared on Twitter:

Twitter has a long memory

Twitter has a long memory…

How Cook ‘n’ Lew do science


Climate Clowns

Climate Clowns

Here’s a summary of the Scientific Method, according to John Cook & Stephan Lewandowsky:

Step 1: Develop a quasi-religious belief in a particular point of view (e.g. that human-caused emissions are causing dangerous climate change);

Step 2: Convince yourself that you are morally and intellectually superior to those who hold a different view, since your view is naturally “right” and “good”, and the other is “evil” and “bad”;

Step 3: Look for ways to caricature, demean, ostracise and ridicule your ideological opponents whilst at all times avoiding any rational discussion of the subject matter in dispute;

Step 4: Find some suitably catchy phrases, like “deniers are all conspiracy theory fruitcakes who think the Moon landing was faked” or “97% of scientific papers support the ‘consensus’ on global warming“, with which to frame the “research” and portray your opponents as fools;

Step 5: Beat, batter and torture whatever data you get until it fits said phrase;

Step 6: Use said phrase in the title of your paper so that MSM journalists, who never read anything beyond the title anyway, will do all the hard work for you (especially when one of your mates writes part of the story…!);

Step 7: Continue to pretend that the research is “impartial” and of the highest standard, despite the fact that the entire world and his dog is aware of the researchers’ firmly held beliefs and biases. How?  Mainly because they publish them every day on web sites.

Step 8: Sit back and wait for moonbat universities, governments and supposedly learned societies to award you great honours for doing such valuable “research“, and for the grants to flood in.

By the way, that whirring noise in the background is Karl Popper spinning in his grave.

Role of CO2 in climate change questioned


CFCs to blame?

CFCs to blame?

It’s all one way traffic for the carbon dioxide mongers at the moment. Not only is the climate refusing to play ball, and the pesky media is starting to ask awkward questions of the alarmists, but a new paper hints at CO2 being less of a factor in climate change than CFCs.

From The Science is Settled department:

BANNED aerosols that caused the ozone hole – not carbon dioxide – were responsible for global warming since the 1970s, according to published research from one of Canada’s leading universities.

The research predicts global temperatures will continue to fall for the next 50 to 70 years and sea levels will rise for two decades before starting to retreat.

The peer-reviewed research by Qing-Bin Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy, biology and chemistry at Waterloo University, was published in the International Journal of Modern Physics B.

The findings of Professor Lu’s paper – Cosmic-Ray-Driven Reaction and Greenhouse Effect of Halogenated Molecules: Culprits for Atmospheric Ozone Depletion and Global Climate Change – are at odds with the consensus view that climate change is driven by increasing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere. Waterloo University said Professor Lu’s research provided “new fundamental understanding of the ozone hole and global climate change”. Critics said it might be “nothing more than coincidental correlation”, but it warranted further study.

Chlorofluorocarbons are known to deplete ozone, but conventional thinking is the emission of human-made non-CFC gases such as carbon dioxide had mainly contributed to global warming.

“But we have observed data going back to the industrial revolution that convincingly shows that conventional understanding is wrong,” Professor Lu said. “In fact, the data shows that CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays (solar activity) caused both the polar ozone hole and global warming.”

By proving the link between CFCs, ozone depletion and temperature changes in the Antarctic, Professor Lu said he was able to draw almost perfect correlation between rising global surface temperatures and CFCs in the atmosphere. “The change in global surface temperature after the removal of the solar effect has shown zero correlation with CO2 but a nearly perfect linear correlation with CFCs,” he said.

If correct, the theory would have dramatic implications for forecasting global climate change.

“Most conventional theories expect that global temperatures will continue to increase as CO2 levels continue to rise, as they have done since 1850,” Professor Lu said. “My calculations of CFC greenhouse effect show that there was global warming by about 0.6 degrees C from 1950 to 2002, but the Earth has actually cooled since 2002. The cooling trend is set to continue for the next 50-70 years as the amount of CFCs in the atmosphere continues to decline.” (source – $)

Next step will be for the UN to tax underarm deodorants, I guess.

Rising scepticism and falling alarmism


seesaw

Swings and roundabouts

Three articles of note today. First, UK chair of climate committee says warming may be natural, second, Met Office admits that warming of last century isn’t statistically significant, and finally, Aussie scientists downgrade alarmist predictions.

To the UK first, where Tim Yeo, chairman of the parliamentary Energy and Climate Change Committee, has embraced free-thinking, rational scepticism and has abandoned dogmatic and quasi-religious alarmism, in a shift which will send shock waves through the climate community.

As the Telegraph reports, in 2009 Yeo said this:

“The dying gasps of the deniers will be put to bed. In five years time, no one will argue about a man-made contribution to climate change.”

We didn’t need to wait five years for that, since Yeo has now finally acknowledged the uncertainties himself:

Humans may not be responsible for global warming, according to Tim Yeo, the MP who oversees government policy on climate change.

The chairman of the Commons Energy and Climate Change committee said he accepts the earth’s temperature is increasing but said “natural phases” may be to blame.

Such a suggestion sits at odds with the scientific consensus. One recent survey of 12,000 academic papers on climate change found 97 per cent agree human activities are causing the planet to warm [that’s John Cook’s crock on consensus, by the way. What has consensus got to do with it anyway? If more people think the Sun goes round the Earth, does that somehow make it true? “8 out of 10 cats prefer Whiskas“… – Ed].

Mr Yeo, an environment minister under John Major, is one of the Conservative Party’s strongest advocates of radical action to cut carbon emissions. His comments are significant as he was one of the first senior figures to urge the party to take the issue of environmental change seriously.

He insisted such action is “prudent” given the threat climate change poses to living standards worldwide. But, he said, human action is merely a “possible cause”.

Asked on Tuesday night whether it was better to take action to mitigate the effects of climate change than to prevent it in the first place, he said: “The first thing to say is it does not represent any threat to the survival of the planet. None at all. The planet has survived much bigger changes than any climate change that is happening now.

He went on: “Although I think the evidence that the climate is changing is now overwhelming, the causes are not absolutely clear. There could be natural causes, natural phases that are taking place.” (source)

Still in the UK, the Met Office has been forced, by a climate system that simply wouldn’t comply with the wishes of the alarmist “consensus”, to admit that the past 140 years of modest temperature rises are statistically insignificant, after six questions were raised in the House of Lords:

The issue here is the claim that “the temperature rise since about 1880 is statistically significant”, which was made by the Met Office in response to the original Question (HL3050). The basis for that claim has now been effectively acknowledged to be untenable. Possibly there is some other basis for the claim, but that seems extremely implausible: the claim does not seem to have any valid basis.

Plainly, then, the Met Office should now publicly withdraw the claim. That is, the Met Office should admit that the warming shown by the global-temperature record since 1880 (or indeed 1850) might be reasonably attributed to natural random variation….

Lastly, it is not only the Met Office that has claimed that the increase in global temperatures is statistically significant: the IPCC has as well. Moreover, the IPCC used the same statistical model as the Met Office, in its most-recent Assessment Report (2007)…

To conclude, the primary basis for global-warming alarmism is unfounded. The Met Office has been making false claims about the significance of climatic changes to Parliament—as well as to the government, the media, and others — claims which have seriously affected both policies and opinions. When questioned about those claims in Parliament, the Met Office did everything feasible to avoid telling the truth. (h/t Bolta)

Finally, David Karoly, arch warmist of Melbourne University starts hedging bets as he has to admit that ludicrously scaremongering claims of 6 degrees of warming were “unlikely”, but given Karoly’s well-known ideological and activist stance on the subject, the press release makes sure that the bandwagon still rolls on:

Scientists from the University of Melbourne and Victoria University have generated what they say are more reliable projections of global warming estimates at 2100.

The paper, led by Dr Roger Bodman from Victoria University with Professors David Karoly and Peter Rayner from the University of Melbourne and published in Nature Climate Change today, found that [good news…] exceeding 6 degrees warming was now unlikely while [bad news…] exceeding 2 degrees is very likely for business-as-usual emissions…

This was achieved through a new method combining observations of carbon dioxide and global temperature variations with simple climate model simulations to project future global warming.

Dr Bodman said while continuing to narrow the range even further was possible, significant uncertainty in warming predictions would always remain due to the complexity of climate change drivers. “This study ultimately shows why waiting for certainty will fail as a strategy,” he said. “Some uncertainty will always remain, meaning that we need to manage the risks of warming with the knowledge we have.” (source – h/t WUWT)

Interesting times…

UPDATE: The headbangers over at Un-Skeptical Pseudo-Science (no link) respond to these developments with balanced and open-minded scientific curiosity… Nah, only joking! With yet more alarmism, this time from Kevin Trenberth, who, like most of the headbangers, must be worried he’ll be out of a job in a few years’ time, when “climate scientists” go the way of spear-makers, rag and bone men and gas lamp lighters:

Focusing on the wiggles and ignoring the bigger picture of unabated warming is foolhardy, but an approach promoted by climate change deniers. Global sea level keeps marching up at a rate of more than 30cm per century since 1992 (when global measurements via altimetry on satellites were made possible), and that is perhaps a better indicator that global warming continues unabated. Sea level rise comes from both the melting of land ice, thus adding more water to the ocean, plus the warming and thus expanding ocean itself.

Global warming is manifested in a number of ways, and there is a continuing radiative imbalance at the top of atmosphere. The current hiatus in surface warming is temporary, and global warming has not gone away.

Lewandowsky invents new pseudo-science of psycho-climatology™


Pseudo-science rules!

Pseudo-science rules!

Stephan Lewandowsky knows nothing about climatology, meteorology, geology, atmospheric physics or thermodynamics, but that trivial obstacle does not prevent him believing the alarmist consensus with such fervour that he uses his own “discipline” (if you can call it that) of psychology to label those who question said consensus as suffering from some kind of mental condition, his favourite label being “conspiracy theorist”.

If that wasn’t enough, however, Lewandowsky has also invented “recursive idiocy” by taking the above approach a step further, so that anyone who questions Lewandowsky’s psychological assessment is themselves branded a “conspiracy theorist” and the recursion goes on, presumably, ad infinitum. Seriously, I’m not making this up. And Lewandowsky is something called a “Winthop Professor” at the University of Western Australia. And a recipient of the UK Royal Society’s Wolfson Research Merit award. No, really.

By himself, Lewandowsky, with a bit of help from John Cook over at Un-Sk Ps-Sc, has invented the shiny new pseudo-science of psycho-climatology™, whereby scientific study and debate regarding the earth’s climate system is replaced by psychological demeaning of those with whom the learned professor (for a professor he is © Media Watch Dog) happens to disagree, on a subject about which he knows nothing.

Enough already. Just read Ben Pile’s majestic demolition of Lewandowsky and his pseudo-science psycho-climatology-babble here.

Climate sensitivity “lower than previously thought”


Not as bad as thought?

Not as bad as thought?

It’s only taken years of effort from “deniers” but now the mainstream media is finally catching up. Climate sensitivity is likely to be far lower than the alarmists claim, making frighteningly expensive attempts to regulate CO2 even more futile:

GLOBAL temperature increases as a result of increased carbon dioxide levels in the Earth’s atmosphere are likely to be lower than previously thought, an international research team has found.

The Oxford University-led study found that a predicted doubling of CO2 concentrations, expected to occur later this century, is likely to raise global temperatures in the short term by between 1.3C and 2C.

Previous estimates, based on climate data from the 1990s, predicted steeper rises of up to 3.1C. The new study, published today in the journal Nature Geoscience, used data gathered more recently, when the average rate of global warming was slowing down.

The latest estimate is “arguably the most reliable”, the paper says, partly because it is less affected by the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in The Philippines, but caution is still required in interpreting the available data.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change previously estimated a temperature rise of between 1C and 3C, with increases outside that range described as “very unlikely”. The new study team, which included an oceanographer from CSIRO’s marine and atmospheric research division in Hobart, estimates this rise could be as little as 0.9C.

The researchers also found that some of the modelling being used for the fifth IPCC assessment report, which is due next year, could be inconsistent with their observations.

As always, however, dogma must come first:

Ultimately, however, they found their new predictions suggested little difference to the global temperature increase in the long run. Their best estimate of the “equilibrium climate sensitivity” – the long-term temperature rise once the effects of higher CO2 concentrations had bedded down – was 2C, with an upper limit of 3.9C. This compares with other previous estimates, the study said.

Steven Phipps, a research fellow with the University of NSW, said the study provided “the most accurate estimates yet of climate sensitivity” and, in broad terms, confirmed what has long been known.

“Our planet faces a very uncomfortable future if our emissions of greenhouse gases continue unabated,” he said. (source)

If we actually spent even a tenth of the money wasted on greenhouse gas mitigation on research into alternative energy sources, we wouldn’t need unabated emissions to continue. However, it’s a step in the right direction.