US: Yet more bad science

29 September, 2011 by

Double standards

It is an ugly theme that runs through the consensus camp – proper scientific processes corrupted in order to get the right result.

You will recall that the US Environmental Protection Agency declared CO2 to be a “dangerous pollutant”, thereby enabling it to regulate emissions by the back door with no Congressional approval. Now it appears that one of the key scientific reports on which that conclusion was based was not subjected to those proper, rigorous processes and that “corners were cut” in order to rush it through.

Internal investigators at the Environmental Protection Agency said the agency failed to follow peer-review guidelines when developing a key scientific document that underpins its greenhouse-gas regulations.

The findings are likely to stoke Republican opposition to the EPA’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gases and could arm industry groups that are fighting the regulations in court. One prominent Republican is already calling for congressional hearings on the issue.

EPA said it “disagree[s] strongly” with the findings. An EPA spokeswoman said the findings focus on “wonky” government processes and do nothing to cast doubt on the underlying science.

The document in question was developed by the EPA and used to support its 2009 “endangerment finding.” That finding concluded that greenhouse gases—including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide—pose a threat to public health. It paved the way for the EPA to begin developing greenhouse-gas standards for refiners, power plants and other large emitters.

In a report released Wednesday, the EPA’s inspector general said the agency didn’t follow federal guidelines for peer review when developing a 200-page scientific document to support its findings. While EPA had the document reviewed by a dozen federal climate-change scientists, the agency did not publicly report the results of the review, the inspector general says. (source)

But that’s OK isn’t it, because the consensus boys don’t have to bother with tedious inconveniences like proper peer-review. Just ask the IPCC. Anyway, they can rely on “pal-review” if they get stuck. And the hypocrisy of the EPA is breathtaking, casually brushing aside the criticisms as a trivial irrelevance. Can you imagine the outrage if this had been a sceptical report? Double standards exemplified.

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Ian Chubb: "warmest decade we have ever had on this planet"

27 September, 2011 by

Politics, not science

Don’t forget, Ian Chubb is Australia’s Chief Scientist, but he appears to have obtained his understanding of climate from the back of a cornflake packet (or a WWF campaign leaflet, otherwise known as the IPCC’s 4th Assessment Report), given some of his quotes in the Joint Select Committee hearing yesterday. It’s really quite embarrassing.

Here are a few examples:

  • “I think there does need to be a recognition that the evidence of science is suggesting that we will have changed weather patterns and extreme weather events with much greater frequency than we have at the moment.”
  • “I have read the literature that says that a lot of work is being done in a lot of countries to try and get stabilisation [at 550ppm CO2], yes, and that there are a lot of countries now taking action, on the basis of the scientific evidence, to reduce their emissions.”
  • “The argument at the moment is that there will be, for example, much more intense cyclones and whatever they are called in the Northern Hemisphere, and more intense rain and flooding.” 
  • “With respect to this cooling stuff, I have seen the claim, but the evidence that I have seen is that the last decade has been the warmest decade that we have ever had on this planet, so I do not know what this cooling stuff means.”
  • “So I think where the modelling is at the moment makes it is quite clear that, for example, you do not get the Arctic ice melt just by natural events. You cannot reproduce it through modelling if you just factor in natural events, but if you factor in human activity then you get what is happening and you get the reduction.“
  • “The latest information I have seen shows that the CO2 levels are high and that the rate of accumulation is accelerating. The scientists who study this would argue that it is getting to the point where something has to be done quickly in order to cap them at least and start to have them decrease over a sensible period of time. You could easily argue that it is urgent and that something needs to be done because of the high level presently and the accelerating accumulation presently. We do need to do something.”

Extreme weather events? Warmest decade we have ever had on this planet? “Ever had”? We need to “do something”? Am I listening to a scientist or a spokesperson for Greenpeace? Sadly, Prof Chubb has fully bought into the alarmist line, and is now clearly on the bandwagon of advocating urgent action. This is politics, not science.

You can read the whole transcript in a PDF here.

UPDATE: The bizarre “warmest we have ever had on the planet” quote is going viral, with Tom Nelson and Steven Goddard reporting it so far…

UPDATE 2: The ABC swallows it all whole, and, as usual, plugging the alarmist line, and reporting these comments without an ounce of critical thought. Listen here (if you dare)

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Labor values closer to Coalition than Greens

27 September, 2011 by

Extreme and out of touch

In yesterday’s post, “Who will Julia alienate next?“, I should have included Labor voters in the list of past examples, since her alliance with the Greens after the election betrayed her mainly centre-Left base to a bunch of extreme environmental whackos. New research supports the point, which is obviously a problem for Labor, given they are now completely dependent on appeasing the Greens in order to maintain a working majority:

THE core social values of Labor voters are far more closely aligned with Coalition supporters than Greens, a new social cohesion survey finds.

On a range of questions – such as valuing the “Australian way of life”, concern over immigration rates, the importance of migrants “blending in” and whether climate change is the nation’s most pressing problem – the response from Labor voters was more in sync with Coalition supporters than Greens.

Results from the Mapping Social Cohesion 2011 survey published today highlight the politically delicate nature of the Labor-Greens alliance in Canberra, as supporters of the two political parties value vastly different social policies.

Overall, the survey found the nation’s social cohesion in decline, with trust in government recording a sharp fall since 2009. More people report being discriminated against than two years ago, and volunteering declined from 38 per cent in 2009 to 31 per cent this year.

But it’s the differences between Greens and Labor supporters and similarities between backers of Labor and the Coalition that highlight the challenge faced by Julia Gillard and her ongoing ideological struggle to hold together minority government.

The report, written by Monash University researcher Andrew Markus, says “there is less differentiation between the attitudes of Liberal and Labor supporters than between Labor and Greens”.

“For example, 70 per cent of those who indicate that they would vote Liberal ‘strongly agree’ that it is important to maintain the ‘Australian way of life and culture’, compared with 62 per cent Labor and 26 per cent Greens,” it says.

“(And) 44 per cent of Liberal supporters ‘strongly agree’ that ‘in the long run’ in Australia ‘hard work brings a better life’ compared with 39 per cent Labor and 29 per cent Greens.”

The survey of 2000 people asked questions about culture and identity, including if it was better for the country if different racial or ethnic groups maintained their distinct customs or traditions or if they adapted and blended into the larger society. Seventy-two per cent of Coalition supporters believe it better to blend in, compared with 61 per cent of Labor supporters and 28 per cent of Greens supporters. (source)

Core Labor voters are becoming increasingly alienated by Labor’s lurch to the left on social issues. The reality is that the Greens’ extremism has no place in Australian politics and has no support within the vast majority of the Australian electorate. The sooner this Labor/Green alliance is defeated, the sooner the Greens will be relegated to the dustbin of history, where their policies and views belong.

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Quote of the Day: Ian Chubb

26 September, 2011 by

Unsceptical?

Professor Chubb is the Australian Chief Scientist, and has made a few appearances on ACM in his brief time in the job (see here, here and here). Given his comments today, it is apparent that there is little hope of any improvement in the level of debate on climate change in Australia.

Displaying an astonishing lack of proper scientific scepticism and a misplaced faith in the projections of computer models, Prof Chubb has completely bought into the warmist line at a Parliamentary inquiry, recycling the tired old “more respect for scientists” argument (somehow managing to ignore calls for sceptics to be gassed or tattooed, naturally) and raising yet again the non-existent death threats at ANU (FOI request still pending on that one).

So here’s the Quote of the Day:

Professor Chubb was dismissive of arguments that the changes can be attributed to natural events.

“For example, you don’t get the Arctic ice melt just by natural events. You can’t reproduce it through modelling if you just factor in natural events. But if you factor in human activity, then you get what’s happening and you get the reduction,” he said.

So let’s get this straight, because an incomplete and flaky climate model fails to predict the degree of arctic ice melt from natural causes, it has to be all man-made?

How about the alternative? The models suck. Geez.

Read it here.

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Treasury modelling assumes global emissions trading by 2016

26 September, 2011 by

Dodgy modelling

We have always suspected the Treasury modelling of the impact of the carbon price was a crock, and now we have been proved substantially right, with the Treasuring admitting as much. Not only that, but a “finding” that carbon pricing would not increase unemployment was actually an “assumption” in its modelling. Astonishing!

THE Treasury has admitted that in modelling the cost of the government’s price on carbon it assumed countries would trade emissions after 2016 despite the fact there is no indication major emitters such the US and China will do so.

A senior Treasury official previously told a Senate select committee she did not assume countries would engage in emissions trading.

But critics such as economist Henry Ergas pointed out that Treasury had claimed in its modelling there would be a global price for carbon by 2016 and said the only way this could happen was if major countries were trading emissions.

At a Senate committee meeting on August 10, Treasury macroeconomic modelling manager Meghan Quinn said: “What we are assuming is there are mechanisms in countries to achieve emissions that result in an implicit or explicit carbon price based on those economies. It does not mean it specifically has to be an emissions trading scheme.”

The Treasury has now written to Professor Ergas conceding that the modelling undertaken in the Strong Growth Low Pollution report assumes “countries allow individual firms or governments to trade abatement with firms/governments in other countries through some mechanism”.

It says “some such mechanisms are currently in place under the UNFCCC framework”. All schemes under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change involve emissions trading or claiming a credit for emissions reductions.

Professor Ergas said: “They swore they were not assuming the US had an ETS. It turns out they were assuming the US had no emissions trading but some way of trading emissions. But they don’t tell us what that mechanism is or how it will come into place any time soon.”

The Treasury also admitted its finding that pricing carbon emissions would not increase unemployment was an assumption in its modelling. (source)

Henry Ergas responds in detail in an opinion piece entitled Lies, Deception and the Carbon tax. Read it all.

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Who will Julia alienate next?

26 September, 2011 by

"Pokies"

We’ve had the miners and resource workers with the MRRT, then the truckies with the “Convoy of No Consequence” comment (thanks A. Albanese), and, of course, those understandably concerned about the merits of a unilateral carbon tax (expressly ruled out before the election) being branded as fruitcakes and extremists.

As if that wasn’t enough, Gillard is now taking on real Labor heartland – the AFL and the NRL, who are opposing Gillard’s poker machine reform. But this isn’t as insignificant as it sounds. Andrew Wilkie, one of the independents currently providing a working majority for Labor, has threatened to withdraw support if the reforms are not passed into law.

So despite the fact that everyone is focussed on asylum seekers or climate change, it may be the lowly poker machine that brings down Labor:

THE Gillard government has a powerful new opponent of its poker machine reforms, with a cashed-up alliance of rival football codes to back the clubs industry’s campaign during grand final week.

In a move anti-gambling campaigners are labelling a disgrace, the AFL and NRL are planning to run television advertisements this week against mandatory pre-commitment technology for high-intensity pokies.

AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou and individual club presidents are scheduled to meet tomorrow to map out campaign strategies. (source)

Filed Under: Aussie Politics, Climate Tagged With: ,

Aussie alarmists in the news

24 September, 2011 by

Click for embiggenisation

Two of Australia’s worst alarmists are in the climate science news this morning. Firstly Andrew Glikson launches a nasty attack on sceptics, this time portraying them as “Orwellian”:

Ideologically dominated or totalitarian societies – such as George Orwell’s famous “1984” Ingsoc – are marked by:

  • attempts to alter reality (“2 + 2 = 5 if the party says so”)
  • elimination of history (“He who controls the past, controls the future”)
  • rewriting collective memory (“Oceania is at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia”)
  • The corruption of logic through aleration and elimination of language “Newspeak”
  • mind control (“thought crime”). (source)

Glikson then claims that the science on solar effects and cosmic rays are “unsupported mechanisms” despite the fact that research is still ongoing and very far from conclusive, lumps in the fringe group of Sky Dragon slayers with the majority of sceptics (who accept the scientific basis of the greenhouse effect), and claims that the Medieval Warm Period was cooler than the warming we would have had in the late 20th and early 21st centuries if something hadn’t stopped it. Follow that?

Nowhere is there any introspection as to the horribly corrupted and politicised state of climate science, any criticism of the actions of the IPCC, for example in accepting grey literature where it boosts their pre-conceived agenda of man-made warming, but strangely ignoring peer-reviewed papers which challenge that agenda, or any acceptance that the consensus side of science has been anything other than squeaky clean.

Bishop Hill responds here.

And secondly, our very own Eureka Prize Winning author of the (Un-) Skeptical Science website is the subject of Josh’s pen, for having been discovered (again, by Bishop Hill here and here) rewriting articles but leaving critical comments unchanged, adding responses to those comments in order to give the impression that silly sceptics hadn’t read the articles to which they refer. See image.

Filed Under: Climate

Neutrinos clocked breaking the cosmic speed limit?

23 September, 2011 by

The carabinieri have pulled over the neutrinos and confiscated their licences

Not climate (obviously) but so fundamental to physics that it was worth noting. The BBC reports:

Puzzling results from Cern, home of the LHC, have confounded physicists – because it appears subatomic particles have exceeded the speed of light.

Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second early.

The result – which threatens to upend a century of physics – will be put online for scrutiny by other scientists.

In the meantime, the group says it is being very cautious about its claims.

“We tried to find all possible explanations for this,” said report author Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration.

“We wanted to find a mistake – trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects – and we didn’t,” he told BBC News.

“When you don’t find anything, then you say ‘Well, now I’m forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this.'” (source)

It’s far too early to conclude anything from these results, but the laws of physics [regarding the existence in nature of the hypothetical super-luminal particles known as tachyons] may need a little rewrite if found to be correct.

UPDATE: The incomparable Lubos Motl dissects the results here – well worth a read, if rather technical.

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New book by Ian Plimer

23 September, 2011 by

Tricky questions

Professor Ian Plimer has written a new book, due to be released in November through publishers Connor Court, entitled:

“How to get expelled from School – a guide to climate change for pupils, parents and punters”.

From the Connor Court website:

Are pupils, parents and the public being fed political propaganda on climate change? Now is your chance to find out. Professor Plimer gives 101 simple questions with answers for you to ask teachers, activists, journalists and politicians. The climate industry adjusts the temperature record and withholds raw data, computer codes and information from scrutiny. Computer predictions of a scary future don’t agree with measurements. Past natural climate changes have been larger and more rapid than the worst case predictions yet humans adapted.  Is human-induced global warming the biggest financial and scientific scam in history? If it is, we will pay dearly.

More information and a pre-order form can be found here.

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Climate Spin of the Week: Mark Dreyfus

22 September, 2011 by

Spin cycle…

Parliamentary Secretary for Climate Change Mark Dreyfus huffs and puffs in The Australian today, having been found out by Henry Ergas last week of planting poison pills in the carbon tax legislation. Dreyfus attempts to explain it all away by citing “certainty” – i.e. it’s certain that we’ll be screwed under this legislation.

But the most shockingly misrepresentative statements in his article must be the following:

Ergas refers to carbon pricing in Australia as “unilateral action” and claims it will undermine our international competitiveness. This ignores the fact 89 countries, accounting for more than 80 per cent of global emissions and more than 90 per cent of the global economy, have pledged to reduce or limit emissions by 2020 under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Could you be any more economical with the truth? Dreyfus’ statement is utter nonsense. The Copenhagen accord is non-binding and is barely worth the paper it is printed on, so to say they have “pledged” is simply weasel words for talking big to get a shaky agreement. The US, China and India (which make up nearly 50% of emissions globally) are doing NOTHING. Yeah, maybe China is making the right noises about cutting carbon intensity, but absolute emissions will continue to rise for decades. Ditto India. And the US is more worried about GFC Mk II than tackling climate change. The claims made by Dreyfus just don’t hold up.

Secondly, Dreyfus inflates the importance of existing trading schemes:

Key economies are already constraining emissions or emissions growth. Emissions trading schemes have operated for years in 31 European countries, New Zealand and in 10 US states.

New Zealand emits precisely square root of sod all. The “10” states in the RGGI (actually only eight since New Hampshire and New Jersey announced they were pulling out) make up a tiny token gesture. The EU ETS is in the process of helping to reduce the European economy to rubble. What a great act to follow!

And the Parliamentary Secretary really must check his facts:

California, the world’s eighth largest economy in its own right, will launch its ETS next year.

Wrong. The moonbat state has delayed it until 2013, which isn’t “next year”. Duh.

Read it here.

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