Run for the hills: sea levels to rise 70 feet by, er, sometime…

20 March, 2012 by

It will happen, but we don't know when…

This kind of pointless, gratuitous alarmism does nothing but damage The Cause. It’s like saying “planet will be swallowed by Sun – entire population to die… in 4.5 billion years”.

But I’m not complaining. If the alarmists want to shoot themselves in the foot with this kind of hysterical climate astrology, I’m very happy to sit back and watch them do it:

Even if humankind manages to limit global warming to 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F), as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recommends, future generations will have to deal with sea levels 12 to 22 meters (40 to 70 feet) higher than at present, according to research published in the journal Geology.

The researchers, led by Kenneth G. Miller, professor of earth and planetary sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University, reached their conclusion by studying rock and soil cores in Virginia, Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific and New Zealand. They looked at the late Pliocene epoch, 2.7 million to 3.2 million years ago, the last time the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere was at its current level, and atmospheric temperatures were 2 degrees C higher than they are now.

“The difference in water volume released is the equivalent of melting the entire Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets, as well as some of the marine margin of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet,” said H. Richard Lane, program director of the National Science Foundation’s Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the work. “Such a rise of the modern oceans would swamp the world’s coasts and affect as much as 70 percent of the world’s population.”

“You don’t need to sell your beach real estate yet, because melting of these large ice sheets will take from centuries to a few thousand years,” Miller said. “The current trajectory for the 21st century global rise of sea level is 2 to 3 feet (0.8 to1 meter) due to warming of the oceans, partial melting of mountain glaciers, and partial melting of Greenland and Antarctica.”

Miller said, however, that this research highlights the sensitivity of Earth’s great ice sheets to temperature change, suggesting that even a modest rise in temperature results in a large sea-level rise. “The natural state of the Earth with present carbon dioxide levels is one with sea levels about 20 meters higher than at present,” he said.

Read it here.

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New HadCRUT temperature record makes 2010 hotter than 1998

20 March, 2012 by

GISS: Tortured (click to see animation)

My advice: ignore all the surface temperature records full stop. GISS (administered by warmist activist James Hansen), HadCRUT (Phil “Climategate” Jones), they’re all as bad as each other – “homogenised” to within an inch of their lives. So it comes as little surprise that the latest version of the Hadley/CRU temperature database now shows 2010 as being warmer than 1998. How convenient.

And isn’t it amazing that it now better fits the global warming narrative? Just like GISS – it was inconvenient that the 1930s were warmer in that dataset than the present, but never mind, they found a way round it (click the image) – magic!

And oddly, despite massive urbanisation in the 20th century, many of the adjustments make earlier years COOLER, the opposite of what would be expected in order to compensate for modern UHI.

If you torture the data enough, they will surely confess:

Researchers have updated HadCRUT – one of the main global temperate records, which dates back to 1850.

One of the main changes is the inclusion of more data from the Arctic region, which has experienced one of the greatest levels of warming.

The amendments do not change the long-term trend, but the data now lists 2010, rather than 1998, as the warmest year on record.

The update is reported in the published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

HadCRUT is compiled by the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre and the Climatic Research Unit (Cru) at the University of East Anglia, and is one of three global records used extensively by climatologists.

The other two are produced by US-based researchers at Nasa and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa).

Cru’s director, Phil Jones, explained why it was necessary to revise the UK record.

“HadCRUT is underpinned by observations and we’ve previously been clear it may not be fully capturing changes in the Arctic because we have had so little data from the area,” he said.

“For the latest version, we have included observations from more than 400 (observation) stations across the Arctic, Russia and Canada.”

Prof Jones added: “This has led to better representation of what’s going on in the large geographical region.”

Despite the revisions, the overall warming signal has not changed. The scientists say it has remained at about 0.75C (1.4F) since 1900. (BBC)

Oh well, I guess there’s only so much you can do in one hit, but give it time.

Much more at WUWT.

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Government's chief alarmist: more floods and more droughts

19 March, 2012 by

Chief Alarmist

UPDATE: Check out the comments, which put Steffen and his alarmist spoutings in their proper place. 

—

A bob each way from Will Steffen, the Gillard government’s chief alarmist:

Climate change is influencing more than just droughts, as the recent CSIRO-Bureau of Meteorology State of the Climate 2012 report clearly outlines.

Temperatures over land and in the oceans continue to increase rapidly, sea levels are rising and extremely hot days have become more common. But it is the recent period of very wet, cool weather bringing floods to many parts of Australia that has grabbed the most attention in the past few months.

The Climate Commission’s report on the science behind southeast Australia’s wet, cool summer provides the broader, long-term perspective needed to understand the significance of the big wet.

…

This emerging pattern of long-term drying across southern Australia, exacerbated by hot days and weeks and periodically interrupted by very intense rainfall and flooding, comes as no surprise to climate scientists. It is entirely consistent with what we expect from a changing climate. (source)

Despite the fact that temperatures have slowed in the last decade (if you look at satellite records rather than corrupted and unreliable surface records), sea levels are rising more slowly (and have not accelerated), Steffen continues to claim that any weather event is “consistent with climate change”. My letter to The Australian editor sets out my response:

Sir,

Perhaps Will Steffen (opinion, 19 March 2012) would kindly inform us what weather pattern would not be “consistent with climate change”. The truth is that the theory of anthropogenic climate change, as stated by Steffen, is an unfalsifiable hypothesis, where any event, be it floods, droughts, higher temperatures, lower temperatures, more cyclones, fewer cyclones, is consistent with climate change. Such a hypothesis cannot be disproved by empirical observations, and therefore isn’t science at all.

Yours faithfully,

Editor, ACM

And if you want another belly laugh, read this pile of tripe in The Age.

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If you thought 'world government' is a conspiracy theory…

19 March, 2012 by

World government

To all those smug warmists who crow that those filthy deniers, who claim the climate ‘crisis’ is being used as a convenient socio-political tool to implement a system of world government, are just indulging in crazy conspiracy theories, Scientific American sets us all straight:

Effective World Government Will Be Needed to Stave Off Climate Catastrophe

“Human societies must now change course and steer away from critical tipping points in the Earth system that might lead to rapid and irreversible change. This requires fundamental reorientation and restructuring of national and international institutions toward more effective Earth system governance and planetary stewardship.” 

…

“If we are ever to cope with climate change in any fundamental way, radical solutions on the social side are where we must focus, though.”

…

“To be effective, a new set of institutions would have to be imbued with heavy-handed, transnational enforcement powers.“

It’s a little difficult to avoid conclusions about the aim of social re-engineering and world government when it is spelled out so clearly. If you don’t want conspiracy theories to emerge, stop your warmist friends from providing the substance on which they are based – simple.

Read it here.

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BBC: seawater sprays to stop 'planetary emergency'

18 March, 2012 by

Yeah, that'd work

More bonkers geoengineering proposals from the UK, puffed by the ever willing Richard Black at the BBC. Reading the BBC is like reading Fairfax or the ABC. All the environmental journos have drunk the climate change Kool-aid and are fully paid up members of the alarmist community.

So we shouldn’t be surprised when Richard Black plugs some crazy geoengineering idea to “save the planet”:

An eminent UK engineer is suggesting building cloud-whitening towers in the Faroe Islands as a “technical fix” for warming across the Arctic.

Scientists told UK MPs this week that the possibility of a major methane release triggered by melting Arctic ice constitutes a “planetary emergency”.

The Arctic could be sea-ice free each September within a few years.

Wave energy pioneer Stephen Salter has shown that pumping seawater sprays into the atmosphere could cool the planet.

The Edinburgh University academic has previously suggested whitening clouds using specially-built ships.

At a meeting in Westminster organised by the Arctic Methane Emergency Group (Ameg), Prof Salter told MPs that the situation in the Arctic was so serious that ships might take too long.

“I don’t think there’s time to do ships for the Arctic now,” he said.

“We’d need a bit of land, in clean air and the right distance north… where you can cool water flowing into the Arctic.”

I love this bit:

In summer, seawater would be pumped up to the top using some kind of renewable energy

Which kind? Sunbeams? Wind? And then the alarmism just piles on:

“With ‘business-as-usual’ greenhouse gas emissions, we might have warming of 9-10C in the Arctic. [might – Ed]

“That will cement in place the ice-free nature of the Arctic Ocean – it will release methane from offshore, and a lot of the methane on land as well.”

This would – in turn – exacerbate warming, across the Arctic and the rest of the world.

Abrupt methane releases from frozen regions may have played a major role in two events, 55 and 251 million years ago, that extinguished much of the life then on Earth. (source)

It’s amazing that even with the BBC spinning such climate astrology, the public are still more sceptical than they were five years ago. Fail.

And while we’re on the subject of Richard Black, there’s a new blog dedicated to exposing his climate alarmist agenda: Black’s Whitewash. Add it to your bookmarks. 

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Idiotic Comment of the Day: Fairfax's Jessica Irvine

17 March, 2012 by

Worthy winner

The Fairfax journalists’ training program works a treat:

LIES, damned lies and statistics. Many’s the poor statistic that has been tortured into yielding a false confession at the hands of a merciless interrogator.

Climate sceptics have turned such torture into an art form, picking point-to-point time comparisons to show a falling trend in global temperatures, focusing on ”outlier” cool years and redrawing trend lines on graphs. (source)

Funny how she conveniently forgets that its the warmists are the “merciless interrogators” that torture the data until it confesses – just ask Michael Mann, Phil Jones or James Hansen. It’s the sceptics that have to release the battered and weary data from the dungeon so they can finally tell their true story.

Actually, the hapless Irvine then has to concede that the correlation is not causation argument is correct. But don’t let that get in the way of a cheap smear against the filthy climate sceptics, right? That’s on page 1 of the Fairfax journalists’ manual.

Same ol’ same ol’.

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Bankrupt EU still obsessed with 'tackling climate change'

17 March, 2012 by

Glover - Chief Alarmist

You would have thought the EU had bigger fish to fry – like staying in the black, avoiding the collapse of the Euro zone, patching up relations with trading partners over the malicious airline tax, that kind of thing.

But no, the EU is still obsessed with wrecking its economy with pointless measures to “tackle climate change” – at least Poland has thrown a spanner in the works for the time being – but their latest paid hack, its first chief scientist, has thrown her weight behind climate action, despite economic troubles:

The European Union cannot use the economic slowdown as an excuse to delay action on fighting climate change, the bloc’s first-ever chief scientific adviser has warned.

Molecular biologist Anne Glover took on the newly created role reporting to European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso at the start of this year, having previously served as chief scientific adviser to Scotland’s devolved government. [But she’s not a climate scientist – she isn’t qualified to speak – no wait, she’s on the right side so we ignore that – Ed]

Despite the fact that many EU governments are slashing their public budgets in an attempt to reduce debt levels, and industry is warning against the cost of climate policies, Glover said Europe cannot afford to postpone action to cut emissions.

“It has been extremely disappointing to see many member states cut back on their emission reduction efforts because they say ‘we’re going through a recession‘,” she said. [Yeah, feeding your population and keeping them in jobs is such a bore -Ed]

“Make no mistake, if we had unabated man-made climate change, we would go through an absolutely horrible period of conflict and migration, until the world’s population started diminishing very rapidly.” [See, no exaggeration there! – Ed]

As Europe’s leaders begin to switch their focus from spending cuts to boosting growth and jobs, constraints on natural resources also mean that the EU cannot just spend its way out of recession as it has in the past.

“The simplest way to think about increasing jobs is to make more stuff and get people to buy more stuff. But my point is that we can’t do that, because we’re running out of resources,” Glover said.

Looks like Glover is following in the footsteps of our own Chief Scientists, Penny Sackett and Ian Chubb, both climate alarmists. And to finish off, just one more quote:

“If we take the automotive industries, if you ask people ‘do you think you’ll have a car that runs on diesel or petrol in 2020 or 2030?’, the overwhelming answer is ‘no’. All of the citizens of Europe think that their cars will be running on some eco-fuel that won’t be polluting the environment. (source)

“All of the citizens of Europe”? I don’t think so. And what will they run on? Electricity generated from coal, perhaps, because you’ve shut down all your nuclear reactors? Or sunbeams and farts?

Glover’s really living in a little fantasy land in her head. Pity the EU.

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Michael Mann's cosy chat on ABC's Lateline

16 March, 2012 by

Very cosy

UPDATE: Baldrick in the comments reminds ACM of Tony Jones’ hostile and patronising interrogation of Ian Plimer on Lateline in April 2009. What a contrast to the kid gloves employed here with Mann. Biased much, ABC?

—-

Michael “Stick” Mann has a very pleasant, cosy little chat with Emma Alberici (quelle surprise…) on Lateline last night. Mann will no doubt be regarded as a valiant hero to most of the warmist journos at the ABC, so there were no tricky questions, just an easy ride and bags of sympathy for the poor climatologists who are being “intimidated” by filthy deniers:

MICHAEL MANN: the FBI actually came in at my – when I reported to them the fact that I had received a letter, an envelope that had white powder in it. And initially I had assumed the worst, but the FBI sent it off to their lab, they checked it out, it turns out it was a false alarm. Nonetheless, as you allude to, I have been subject to all sorts of personal attacks, threats to my safety, my life, threats to my family, and it’s not just me, it’s dozens of climate scientists in the US, in Australia and many other regions of the world where our findings are finding that climate change is real and potentially poses a threat to civilisation if we don’t confront that challenge. That represents a threat to certain vested interests and they’ve tried hard to discredit the science, often by discrediting and intimidating the scientists. Unfortunately it’s not all that new a tactic. We saw the same thing back in the 1970s, 1980s with tobacco, with the tobacco industry trying to discredit research establishing adverse health impacts of their product. It’s an old tactic and it’s now being used to try to discredit climate science, mainly coming from vested interests who don’t want to see us shift away from our current reliance on fossil fuels because they – understandably, they profit greatly from our current addiction to fossil fuels.

EMMA ALBERICI: Who are these vested interest groups? [See, really tough question, eh Emma? Didn’t think to pick up Mann on any of the allegations above – Ed]

MICHAEL MANN: Well I actually talk about this in some detail in the book and I refer to some other books that have been written on this topic that actually trace much of the attacks against climate science and climate scientists to various organisations and front groups that derive most of their funding from the fossil fuel industry and what they often do is issue press releases attacking mainstream science. They publish – they have folks publish op.’ eds attacking climate scientists. They sort of create what some have called an echo chamber of climate change denial that permeates the airwaves and our media and it’s been a real challenge for scientists, for the scientific community to try to communicate the very real nature of the climate change threat in the face of this fairly massive disinformation campaign.

Tobacco, Big Oil. Echo chamber of denial. Mann should find a new scriptwriter. And yet none of this is challenged.

The fact that Exxon gives millions of dollars to Green groups is irrelevant to the ABC. The fact that the alarmist industry funding is three or four orders of magnitude greater than for sceptics is irrelevant to the ABC. The fact that the Hockey Stick was bad science debunked by Steve McIntyre is irrelevant to the ABC. The fact that the Climategate emails show repeated manipulation of data, corruption of peer review, threats to journals that dare publish papers challenging the consensus, and avoiding of FOI requests is irrelevant to the ABC. They were all “taken out of context”, right?

Michael Mann is a key player in The Cause, and here was an opportunity to ask any number of very awkward questions – unfortunately the ABC avoided them all.

Read/watch here.

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Australian temperature records 'shoddy, inaccurate, unreliable'

16 March, 2012 by

Sydney Observatory (no UHI there, no siree)

From Jo Nova:

The BOM say their temperature records are high quality. An independent audit team has just produced a report showing that as many as 85 – 95% of all Australian sites in the pre-Celsius era (before 1972) did not comply with the BOM’s own stipulations. The audit shows 20-30% of all the measurements back then were rounded or possibly truncated. Even modern electronic equipment was at times, so faulty and unmonitored that one station rounded all the readings for nearly 10 years! These sloppy errors may have created an artificial warming trend.

The BOM are issuing pronouncements of trends to two decimal places like this one  in the BOM’s Annual Climate Summary 2011 of “0.52 °C above average”  yet relying on patchy data that did not meet its own compliance standards around half the time.  It’s doubtful they can justify one decimal place, let alone two?

We need a professional audit.

Forget surface stations, just use satellites.

Read it all here.

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Australia's worst alarmists link recent rains to climate change

15 March, 2012 by

Yep, climate change

UPDATE: Guess what? The ABC swallows the whole thing, with a fawning, completely uncritical report on AM.

—

Following hot on the heels of the BoM/CSIRO climate report yesterday, today we have yet more scaremongering and alarmism.

David Karoly, Matthew England and Will Steffen are probably Australia’s three most hysterical climate alarmists. They have all featured regularly in these pages, and Will Steffen is one of the Labor government’s climate advisers.

And as we all know, any weather event, floods, drought, more cyclones, fewer cyclones, excessive heat, excessive cold, you name it, can be attributed to climate change. As has been said so many times, it is an unfalsifiable hypothesis – no event can disprove it – and therefore falls into the realm of pseudoscience. Bummer.

So when confronted with real world events which contradict their previous predictions, instead of admitting that there might be more to learn about the effects of climate on our weather, our three alarmists dig their heels in even further and make yet more extreme claims.

Put all those factors together, and you get this:

THREE of the nation’s leading climate scientists have linked the past two years of record wet weather to climate change in their strongest findings yet on the impact of global warming on the nation’s climate.

Professors Will Steffen, Matthew England and David Karoly, in a paper to be released today by the Climate Commission, find global warming may have contributed to the strength of the La Nina event and the heavy rainfall and flooding.

They also contend that the heavy rains do not contradict the trend towards drier weather for southern and eastern areas of Australia and find that despite two years of above average rains, southeast Australia continues to suffer from a cumulative rainfall deficit.

They reiterate warnings that global warming will produce longer dry spells, punctuated by heavier rainfall events, in southern and southwest Australia.

The release of the paper comes as Climate Commission chairman Tim Flannery faces increasing ridicule over his earlier predictions of water shortages in major capital cities due to drier weather resulting from global warming. (source)

Top three alarmists

And from the report itself, right on cue comes the now hackneyed “consistent with” excuse:

The wetter conditions experienced in southeastern Australia in the last two years are consistent with scientists’ knowledge and understanding of how the climate is changing in the long term. 

Because everything and anything is “consistent with” climate change, right boys? Here’s a challenge for our three heroes: what weather event would not be “consistent with” climate change? Answers on a postcard.

If you were a truly impartial scientist you would say, we don’t actually know how any changes in our climate will affect us, but these kind of events really help our understanding. Not spout yet more of the kind of alarmist nonsense that those three are all too famous for.

But that’s what happens when you are driven by an agenda – to prop up “The Cause” at all costs.

Don’t forget, the Climate Commission was set up by a government that has swallowed the IPCC line and wishes to enact a carbon tax, based on the threat of dangerous global warming… it would be highly inconvenient if dangerous global warming really wasn’t happening…

The full PDF report is here.

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