Yasi: media madness

5 February, 2011 by

Stirring up the gullible

TC Yasi has brought all the gullible hysterics out of the closet, especially in the Fairfax press, which has had a field day cynically cashing in on the oh-so-obvious link to “climate change”. Mike Carlton first, whose ranting piece oh-so-wittily entitled “Flat earthers [that’s us, by the way – Ed], it’s time for a cold shower”, sums up the idiocy of the warmists who have no concept of Australia’s (or the planet’s) climate history:

PARDON me for pointing out the bleedin’ obvious but for those who have not been paying attention much of the planet has been devastated by extraordinary weather in the past year.

We have had our floods in eastern Australia and, as the doughty Anna Bligh called it, the most terrifying cyclone of all [since the last one, that is – Ed]. Floods have also swept China, India, Pakistan, the Philippines and southern Africa, killing thousands and leaving tens of millions homeless.

Kenya is suffering a long drought that threatens widespread famine. A vast area of South America is also in severe drought, although record January rains in Brazil triggered mud slides that killed more than 700 slum dwellers near Rio de Janeiro.

Massive and unseasonally early snow storms pummelled Europe and North America before Christmas, taking more lives, and this week again the US has been hammered by what the US National Weather Service called ”a historic killer blizzard”.

Given this catalogue of global disaster, would now be a good time for the climate change flat-earthers to shut up and listen, do you think? Just for a day or two, or even five minutes?

They won’t, of course. The global warming denialists ignore the great body of world scientific opinion. When the Queensland catastrophe leaves the headlines the local lot will be at it again, barfing up their crackpot notions. (source)

What more can you say about that? Life is too short. Next up is The Age, or Pravda on the Yarra as it is less than affectionately known, writing a sombre editorial about how we have “created a fierce new climate”, and using the clever trick of claiming that they are not making a link to climate change, and then immediately make a link to climate change!

THE debate has already begun over whether climate change and global warming caused cyclone Yasi, or somehow made it worse. It is an oversimplification. No direct link could ever be proved. This week is likely to see the longest sustained period of temperatures above 30 degrees since records have been kept. Is that proof climate change is happening? By itself, no, it is not. Weather statistics cannot prove a link. But as the government’s adviser on climate change, Ross Garnaut, says, as global warming continues, larger cyclones will become more frequent. There will be more cyclones, and more of them will be as big as Yasi. There will be more long hot spells. Australia has just emerged from a long drought. There will be more of those, too, and longer ones, as weather becomes harsher around the world. The extreme events seen in the past 12 months in Europe and the US will become more common. Even if, as seems rather unlikely now, the world manages to keep the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere below its current target of 450 parts per million, the world’s average temperature will still rise 2 degrees, with untold environmental consequences. (source)

Again, because man-made global warming is the current scare, and because The Age is desperate to push the climate change agenda, it rushes to link it to current events, ignoring the obvious fact that more severe events like this have happened in the past. I guess if they had happened in the early 1970s, The Age would have linked them to global cooling. They always need to blame something – they just don’t understand that as the saying goes “shit happens” and has done so for thousands of years.

Even The Australian isn’t immune:

Meanwhile, as attention returns to the immediate dangers of these natural climatic systems, there is more trouble on the horizon because of global climate change. Scientists stress that a single event such as Yasi cannot be attributed to global warming.

However, Walsh says sea surface temperatures in tropical waters, typically about 27C, will continue to rise, maintaining a 50-year warming trend due to global climate change.

However, air in the upper atmosphere, where temperatures currently reach about -50C, will warm more rapidly, and this will decrease the temperature gradient between the sea and the atmosphere, lessening the frequency of tropical cyclones.

“In the Australian region, the prediction is for a decline in the number of tropical cyclones, but the most intense cyclones are likely to become even more intense,” he says. (source)

So whatever happens, be it more frequent cyclones, less frequent cyclones, more intense cyclones, less intense cyclones, you can be sure of one thing. Man-made climate change is the only explanation. The belief is that climate is static and only man-made influences can possibily change it – the reality is that climate change happens for a whole raft of natural reasons, but those are studiously ignored…

And The Oz also regurgitates an AAP scare piece as well:

QUEENSLANDERS should brace for more ferocious storms and floods in the wake of Cyclone Yasi, climate researchers say.

Warmer temperatures are expected to produce more intense torrential downpours, particularly in the state’s tropical north.

“For Queensland, this is likely to spell storms and floods of increasing ferocity over a greater part of the state,” The Climate Institute says in a fact sheet released today.

The think tank’s chief executive John Connor is calling for urgent measures to arrest global warming as north Queensland recovers from the category five cyclone.

“Sadly, Australia must prepare for more of these types of catastrophic events and even greater extremes as climate change drives more frequent and more intense wild weather,” he said. (source)

The Climate Institute isn’t a think tank, it’s an environmental advocacy group which has made up its mind on climate change, which, like The Age, demonstrates that it has no concept of history, believing that what we have seen in the last few weeks is somehow “unprecedented”.

But the public aren’t buying the hype any more. It’s telling that all five letters in The Australian’s Talking Point are critical of Ross Garnaut’s latest pronouncments:

ROSS Garnaut tells us that climate change has played a large part in the recent extreme weather events in Queensland.

There is nothing to support this scientifically. It is more scaremongering and pressuring for a repressive, controlling carbon tax. Some could equally conclude that the weather events are due to Australia and Queensland having leaders that are openly atheist and are being punished by God.

The proof for either conclusion comes down to personal perception.

And for today’s best rebuttal of all the hysterical Yasi nonsense, head to Andrew Bolt’s column:

IT HADN’T even hit yet, and already a gibbering horde was shrieking that Cyclone Yasi proved we’d warmed the world.

There was Christine Milne, of course, deputy leader of the Greens, the most deceitful party to shame Parliament. How fast she flapped up the microphones to crow: “It is a tragedy of climate change.”

Then there was ABC Melbourne 774 host Jon Faine, snapping that sceptics should finally “join the dots”, and inviting alarmist scientist Graeme Pearman to say we’d never had such cyclones before.

Oh, and here comes John Hewson, the former Liberal leader and sniffer of business opportunities, saying warmists had predicted “more frequent cyclones” and “that’s what we’re seeing”.

John, give up the green, mate. The colour doesn’t suit and that market’s set to tank.

Add to them the Gillard Government’s warming guru, Professor Ross Garnaut (actually an economist), who groaned that “a warming climate does lead to intensification of these sorts of extreme climatic events that we’ve seen in Queensland”, and “you ain’t seen nothing yet”.

Wrong, Ross. We have actually seen all this before, and worse. Nothing new here at all, expect this shameless scare-mongering.

But the trouble is that we no longer remember our past, and that’s what the warmists are exploiting: our deep forgetting.

Read it all.

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Garnaut's cynical opportunism

4 February, 2011 by

Cynical

Turning up like a bad penny [Wong? – Ed], Ross Garnaut appears at the most inappropriate moment, this time by cynically citing TC Yasi as an example of the more severe weather events which are “consistent with global warming” … or something:

CYCLONE YASI is probably early real-world evidence of scientific predictions that global warming will lead to more extreme weather events, according to the government’s expert climate change adviser, Professor Ross Garnaut. [Who is an economist, by the way – Ed]

He says that if it is, given the evidence that global warming is tracking at the highest end of international predictions, then future cyclones could prove that we ”ain’t seen nothing yet”. [Total, utter, horse shit, as anyone who reads this blog would know. Global temperature anomaly is below zero this month – Ed]

Professor Garnaut said scientists and climate change modelling had predicted global warming would lead to more frequent extreme weather events, including cyclones and bushfires. [Which is why accumulated cyclone energy is at its lowest for 30 years – Ed]

The prediction of more extreme storms already appeared to be verified by data from the north Atlantic. While there was not yet sufficient statistical data to prove more frequent extreme cyclones in Australia, ”there is no reason to think the physics will work differently in Australian air than north Atlantic air”, Professor Garnaut said. ” [Who cares if there’s not enough data, it’s never stopped us before! – Ed]

”I would say the odds seem to favour the proposition that cyclonic events will be more intense in a hotter world and bear in mind … if this is the case we are just at the beginning of the warming process, the warming since pre-industrial times is 1 degree, the science says without mitigation … that first degree is just the beginning, and so if we are seeing an intensification of extreme weather events now, you ain’t seen nothing yet.” (source)

You’re right, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. We haven’t yet seen a fraction of the hysteria and alarmism from ill-informed commentators and politicians with an agenda to push, who have the memory span of a goldfish and don’t have the intellectual capacity to understand that cyclones have been part of Australia’s climate for thousands of years, like floods and droughts. Total climate madness.

The Australian injects some sanity by quoting the eco-tards who have tried to link Yasi to global warming, and it’s all the usual suspects: ABC, Fairfax, Clive Hamilton… yawn.

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Climate madness and climate sense

29 January, 2011 by

Moon(-bat)

A few articles caught my eye this morning – more madness than sanity, as usual. Firstly a truly extraordinary rant by Paddy Manning in Fairfax, which I show just for amusement, really:

HOW pathetic watching sceptics squirm over the link between the recent floods and climate change. How much more risk do they want us to tolerate while we wait for the proof that might satisfy them?

Way too much. For decades we’ve been told that global warming will lead to more extreme weather events. Now it’s happening before our eyes. (source)

The rest’s the same. What’s even more pathetic, however, is watching pig-ignorant journalists and politicians with the memory span of a goldfish use the floods to make cheap political points, when there have been worse floods before, even in the microscopic 150 year flood record, with no evidence of increasing frequency or severity. But don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story, right?

Now, on to the UN. Whenever a sceptic dares mention that there may be an ulterior motive behind climate change action, like anti-globalisation, or anti-capitalism, or scaling back western economies, the Fairfax-reading, ABC-watching lefty heads can’t wait to pop. So isn’t it odd that Ban Ki-Moon(bat) is advocating precisely that:

The world’s current economic model is an environmental “global suicide pact” that will result in disaster if it isn’t reformed, Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, warned today.

Ban said that political and business leaders need to embrace economic innovation in order to save the planet.

“We need a revolution,” he told a panel at the World Economic Forum inDavos, Switzerland, on how best to make the global economy sustainable. “Climate change is also showing us that the old model is more than obsolete.”

He called the current economic model a recipe for “national disaster” and said: “We are running out of time. Time to tackle climate change, time to ensure sustainable … growth.” The Guardian revealed yesterday that Ban is ending his hands-on efforts to reach a global climate deal through UN negotiations, and move to focus on a broader sustainability agenda. (source)

“Sustainability” being a codeword for massive wealth redistribution, abandoning capitalism and its replacement with socialism and Marxism, of course.

But amongst all the madness, a glimmer of hope. Remember that the basis of science is scepticism and that “Question everything” should be the mantra… except in climate science, however, where the mantra is “climate models trump empirical evidence”. The opposite of sceptical is “gullible”, and more and more people are abandoning gullibility for scepticism:

The number of climate change sceptics has almost doubled in four years, official research showed yesterday.

A quarter of Britons are unconvinced that the world is warming following successive freezing winters and a series of scandals over the credibility of climate science.

The figures suggest that a growing proportion of the public do not share the belief of all three major political parties and Whitehall – that climate change is a major and urgent challenge requiring radical and expensive policies.

The survey, carried out by the Office for National Statistics, has plotted levels of acceptance of the theory of man-made global warming since 2006.

In that year it found that 87 per cent of people were at least ‘fairly convinced’ that climate change was happening.

Last year that share had dropped to 75 per cent. Numbers who say they are unconvinced went up from 12 to 23 per cent. (source)

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News Corp should "set example" by silencing sceptics

27 January, 2011 by

Jonathan Holmes

Jonathan Holmes is the presenter of the ABC’s Media Watch, and a well-known true believer in man-made climate change (see here, here and particularly here, where he implies that anyone who is sceptical is just plain stupid). So it’s little surprise that he has a go at News Corp on ABC’s The Drum today for their alleged hypocrisy in trying to become “carbon neutral” whilst at the same time allowing balance on the climate debate to appear in the pages of The Australian. You see, Holmes is from the brand of journalism, sorry, environmental totalitarianism, that believes that only the acceptable view on any issue should ever be published. Acceptable to whom, you may ask? Why, the liberal intellectual elite, of course – like Holmes – that’s who!

Matthew England (another well known climate alarmist, see here, here, here and here) had made some dubious points about 2010’s record temperatures in a telephone interview with Debbie Guest for a piece in The Australian, and in particular about the transition from El Niño to La Niña. England claimed that there was “very strong La Niña for about eight months of the year”, so therefore 2010 should have been relatively cool, when in fact it was hot, hot, hot! And of course it was all the work of the Green Climate Monster. Holmes uncritically accepts all of this. But England doesn’t qualify that statement by explaining that temperature doesn’t respond to the El Niño/La Niña phase switch immediately – there’s a time lag of a few months. The satellite record shows that global temperatures only even began to cool (after a very strong El Niño) in October (see here for a text file of global temperatures). Which means at least 10 months of the year was influenced by a very strong El Niño, and as a result, 2010 was warm.

Holmes complains that whilst England’s on-message alarmism was cut from the Australian article, it managed to find space for Christopher Monckton’s scepticism, and to the propaganda merchants and the eco-totalitarians, this is completely unacceptable:

The Oz had carried an AFP wire story about the WMO announcement [that 2010 was the “hottest year on record – see here – Ed] on the Friday, discreetly placed on an inside page. Debbie Guest’s piece for the Saturday dealt with the apparent paradox that a cool year in Australia was the hottest on record globally. But her story didn’t make it into most editions of the Weekend Oz the next morning. A severely truncated version did appear in early editions, and online, but the quotes from Professor England were conspicuously absent.

When he asked her why, Ms Guest told him that her story had had to be shortened for space reasons – though why that should have affected the online story, she didn’t explain.

Professor England says he’s satisfied Debbie Guest was genuinely trying to do a good job. The shortening was done by someone above her in the hierarchy.

So what did appear in The Weekend Australian that day? Well, nothing in the newspaper (as far as I can see) about the WMO’s announcement– although this alarming story from AFP was posted on The Australian’s website that day.

But The Weekend Oz did find room on its opinion pages for this piece by the ineffable Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. If you can’t understand its tortured mathematics, don’t worry. You’re not intended to. You are intended to think, “Well, I don’t really follow it all, but this bloke seems to be impressively learned, and he says it’s not worth doing anything about climate change”.

That, of course, is precisely the opposite message to the one Rupert Murdoch was trying to send his own troops back in 2007. The evidence for climate change, since then, has only got stronger. The reasons for taking precautionary action have only become more compelling. Of course News Ltd can’t, on its own, affect the global climate by reducing its carbon footprint, and nor can Australia. But if every company, and every nation, acted – or refrained from acting – on the basis of that logic, the chances of eventually stabilising global temperatures at less than catastrophic levels would be reduced to zero.

And here’s the money quote:

Well, you may argue, but doesn’t Christopher Monckton have a right to be heard? Don’t news stories get shortened every day? What does all this prove?

Nothing, in itself. You have to be an alert and habitual reader to notice that week after week, year after year, The Australian and The Weekend Australian massage their news coverage and grossly unbalance their opinion pages so as to send the message that the existence of human-induced climate change is highly debatable, and that any action by Australia to reduce its emissions would be economically ruinous and politically foolish.

…

As one of the world’s great media companies, News Corporation has the power to do far more to counter the risk of catastrophic climate change than merely to reduce its own emissions.

The unwritten conclusion being that News Corporation should silence anyone who questions the Holy consensus, and The Australian should not give space to sceptics on its op-ed pages. Holmes seems to overlook the fact that Fairfax and ABC are fully on message, rarely if ever giving space to filthy “deniers”, and The Australian is the only paper that gives even a small hearing to sceptics.

None of this should surprise us. What I always find myself asking is this: if the case for man-made global warming is so strong, why the need to silence dissent? Surely they will simply make fools of themselves? But unfortunately, the eco-totalitarians in the liberal intelligentsia want to control the media, and therefore the message, so the proletariat will be kept in the dark on the true uncertainties in the climate change consensus.

Read it here (if you must)

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Alarmist of the Year

27 January, 2011 by

Alarmist of the Year

Having awarded the Australian of the Year to alarmist Tim Flannery in 2007, whose wild predictions concerning the effects of the Green Climate Monster are well known, and almost always wrong, they have this year awarded the honour to another climate evangelist, Simon McKeon. McKeon was given the role of CSIRO chairman… despite not being a scientist, but it seems that being a warmist makes him even better qualified for the job. Miranda Devine does the business:

YOU don’t want to rain on the parade of a man who is so highly regarded that he has just been named Australian of the Year.

Nor do you want to detract from the charitable works for which Simon McKeon has been so honoured.

But the former Macquarie banker deserves censure for his pronouncements on climate change on ABC radio yesterday in which he enthusiastically described himself as a “100 percent believer” who wants to push Australia into a carbon trading scheme by stealth.

He deserves censure not least because last year he was appointed chairman of the CSIRO, despite having no background in science.

Asked by Melbourne radio host Jon Faine if he saw his role at the CSIRO as an opportunity to “shape and influence” its work on climate change, the 55-year-old lawyer said: “Oh, absolutely – it doesn’t need any encouragement from me.”

…

Why a non-scientist should be considered a suitable chairman of our pre-eminent scientific body is anyone’s guess, but it is another indication of the decline of a once great institution.

It is a tragedy that the CSIRO is a shadow of its former self, reduced by to a mouthpiece for climate alarmism.

McKeon, 55, should be careful about sullying his philanthropic name with warmist politics. More importantly, he should refrain from using his new platform to further damage the credibility of the CSIRO. (source)

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Pakistani floods: no link to "climate change"

26 January, 2011 by

Just weather…

Of course there’s no link to “climate change” – it’s the Green Climate Monster at work, as we all know. Seriously, however, every alarmist and his dog (on a string, probably) rushed to cite the Pakistani floods as “evidence of climate change”, as did many politicians, Hillary Clinton included.

Now, however, a new peer reviewed paper reaches the boringly predictable conclusion that it was all “just weather”. Those of us in the sceptic blogosphere are not in the least bit amazed by this, since this is the proper, default position to adopt, in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary (which there never is). There is no mention of climate in the paper… From Watts Up With That:

Last summer’s disastrous Pakistan floods that killed more than 2,000 people and left more than 20 million injured or homeless were caused by a rogue weather system that wandered hundreds of miles farther west than is normal for such systems, new research shows.

Storm systems that bring widespread, long-lasting rain over eastern India and Bangladesh form over the Bay of Bengal, at the east edge of India, said Robert Houze, a University of Washington atmospheric sciences professor. But Pakistan, on the Arabian Sea west of India, is substantially more arid and its storms typically produce only locally heavy rainfall.

The flooding began in July and at one point it was estimated that 20 percent of Pakistan’s total land area was under water. Structural damage was estimated at more than $4 billion, and the World Health Organization estimated that as many as 10 million people had to drink unsafe water.

Houze and colleagues examined radar data from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite and were able to see that the rainfall that caused the Indus River in Pakistan to overflow was triggered over the Himalayas, within a storm system that had formed over the Bay of Bengal in late July and moved unusually far to the west. Because the rain clouds were within the moisture-laden storm from the east, they were able to pour abnormal amounts of rain on the barren mountainsides, which then ran into the Indus.

The progress of the storm system stood out in the satellite radar data, Houze said.

“We looked through 10 years of data from the satellite and we just never saw anything like this,” he said. “The satellite only passes over the area a couple of times a day, but it just happened to see these systems at a time when they were well developed.” (source)

But even ten years of satellite data is virtually nothing. What does that tell us about historical rainfall patterns? Square root of sweet FA, that’s what. And even they have concluded it’s just weather. Wonder what they would have said if they had had 1000 years of satellite data to consider…

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Green Climate Monster to cause "more natural disasters": expert

23 January, 2011 by

Blamed for more extreme weather

Look, he actually says global warming and greenhouse gases (which he refers to as if they are just two sides of the same coin, rather than totally independent phenomena) but readers of this blog know better. The Green Climate Monster causes all these natural disasters and severe weather events, but people haven’t woken up to the fact yet. Give it time.

An expert says Australia will see a higher incidence of extreme weather events like the flooding in Queensland.

Global Change Professor Peter Grace from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) says greenhouse gases and global warning are contributing factors, whether people want to accept it or not.

He says it will not happen tomorrow, but it will happen in years to come and people will come to know major flooding. [Like they “came to know” the severe flooding in 1893 and 1974, before the global warming scare was more than a twinkle in Bert Bolin’s eye – Ed]

“We will have an increased frequency of quite major events similar to what we had, particularly the flooding event in south-east Queensland,” he said. [I mean, has he actually looked at the flood records for SEQ? – Ed] (source)

Perhaps Professor Grace could let us know what climate signal or weather phenomena would demonstrate that the Green Climate Monster wasn’t to blame…

We can’t stop the Green Climate Monster – he will just keep on doing whatever he wants. All we can do is adapt and prepare for it – and look at history to remind ourselves (we have very short memories) that nothing that’s happened in the last few weeks, tragic though it is, can possibly be regarded as unprecedented, even just taking into account our tiny record of 150 years, let alone in any longer timescale.

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World's media: 2010 "hottest year evah"!

21 January, 2011 by

Cooler than 2010, according to world's media

“Ever”? Really? What hotter than when the planets coalesced from a swirling disk of white hot stellar matter 4.5 billion years ago? Well no, of course not. But the media regularly make nonsensical statements like this because they haven’t a clue about history, or any concept of time.

What they mean is “since about 150 years ago.” The fact that 2010, like 1998, was a major El Niño year, and therefore tells us very little about what global temperatures are really doing, is of no consequence. It is likely that 2011, influenced as it will be by a strong La Niña, will be significantly cooler. But there will be wall-to-wall excuses for that – “just a blip”, “warming will resume faster than evah next year” – because a cooling blip is just a blip, whereas a warming blip is evidence of man-made global warming. Add that to a slow recovery from the depths of the Little Ice Age over the past 200 years means that it is almost inevitable that each decade will be warmer than that preceding it.

However, the media’s love of scare stories and the gullibility of the general public ensures that idiotic headlines like this go largely unchallenged.

Both the ABC and Fairfax (natch) fall into the trap of demonstrating their ignorance of any concept of history by copying the same headline from AFP:

Fairfax: 2010 warmest ever year, says UN weather agency

ABC: 2010 officially the hottest year ever

The articles go on to cover much the same ground (but always remember, the WMO is a body operating under the auspices of the UN, just like the IPCC, which, as any fule kno, is little more than a corrupt mouthpiece for a bunch of politically-motivated environmental activists):

The UN’s World Meteorological Organisation said Thursday that 2010 was the warmest year on record [at least they say “on record” here, but they don’t go on to explain that means 150 years, or 50 atoms across on the Age of Earth Ruler – Ed], confirming a “significant” long-term trend of global warming and producing exceptional weather variations.

The trend also helped to melt Arctic sea ice cover to a record low for December last month, the WMO said in a statement. [Nobody ever mentions the Antarctic of course, because that end of the planet isn’t playing ball – Ed]

Last year “ranked as the warmest year on record, together with 2005 and 1998,” the WMO added, confirming preliminary findings released at the global climate conference early December that were based on a 10-month period.

“The 2010 data confirm the Earth’s significant long-term warming trend,” WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud said. “The 10 warmest years on record have all occurred since 1998.”

Which is like saying the 10 warmest days this year happened since the end of winter. Shock. It says nothing about the cause – we all know the cause (it’s the Green Climate Monster). But that doesn’t stop typical “cracked record” remarks from the Grantham Institute’s Bob Ward, wading in for no other purpose other than to bash sceptics (and alarmists are much better at bashing sceptics than they are at playing by the rules of science, like actually sharing their data and models for example):

“Self-proclaimed climate change ‘sceptics’ may still try to claim that global warming stopped in 1998, but they cannot explain away the fact that nine of the 10 warmest years on record have all occurred since 2000,” said Bob Ward, of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics (LSE).

“Self-proclaimed”? And what’s with the quotes around ‘sceptics’? Following that lead you’re a self-proclaimed ‘alarmist’ whose livelihood is funded by the climate scare, then? Actually most sceptics don’t claim warming stopped in 1998, I certainly don’t. 1998 is a poor year to choose because of the large El Niño spike, but I would suggest that temperatures (as measured by satellite, rather than the fudged and homogenised surface records) have been largely static since about 2002. But of course Phil Jones of CRU previously went as far as to say that there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995…

But it’s all meaningless. None of this says anything about the cause, and that’s really all we’re interested in.

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Monckton's own goal

11 January, 2011 by

UPDATE: Lord Monckton responds to ACM on this post – see here.

I avoided posting on this yesterday, because I could see that it was heading for a train wreck – I left a comment on WUWT expressing my concerns.

Mike Steketee is a columnist for the Weekend Australian, and has a history of writing articles that plug the AGW line. Last weekend he wrote a “hottest-year-since-the-dawn-of-time” scare piece, comprising many of the usual alarmist viewpoints trotted out about climate change – hurricanes, bushfires – ticks in all the boxes. He should read my post “What does ‘in history’ mean?” In response to this article, Christopher Monckton prepared a dense and detailed response in PDF form with a proper SPPI cover, a flashy graphic and all the trimmings – an error in itself, I thought, since it dignified Steketee’s piece far beyond what it deserved. The trick with his columns is simply to ignore – far safer. But in doing so, Monckton exposed himself to attack, by apparently misrepresenting what Steketee had said in several cases, and thereby letting in a simple own goal. Steketee’s response is considered, and makes Monckton look shrill.

I think Christopher Monckton has done a great deal to help communicate scepticism and the debunking of AGW myths (that is if you can get past the unnecessary aristocratic coronets on every Powerpoint slide he shows) but he will insist on plugging the “no warming since 1998” line, which I’m afraid, is an open goal. 1998 was a huge El Niño year, and the spike in temperatures that year cannot be used to justify that there has been “no warming since 1998”. I ignore the surface temperature records entirely, since they have warmists’ sticky fingers all over them (eg. James Hansen and GISS – potential conflict, NASA? Apparently not…) so let’s look at the satellite record, which is less susceptible to fudging and “adjustment”:

Satellite temperatures, 1979 - 2010

We can see clearly that temperatures for much of the first decade of the 21st century were indeed higher than the last decade of the 20th. To argue otherwise is asking for trouble. And 2010 had another major El Niño, which pushed up temperatures in the first part of the year. A La Niña is now acting to reverse that increase, and it will be interesting to see how much further temperatures will drop in the next few months.

However, none of this tells us anything about the cause of that warming. So what if this decade is warmer than last? The planet has been warming slowly since the end of the Little Ice Age, well before there were any anthropogenic CO2 emissions, so is it any wonder that this decade is warmer than the last? There is a temporal relationship between increasing temperature and rising CO2 levels, but no proven causal link. That is the point that Monckton should have made.

If you really want to run the “no warming” line, you could choose 2002 if you wish, but it’s just getting a little silly then. In any case, why bother? The planet’s warming? Big deal. It warms, it cools, it does just what the hell it likes. Nobody can link the warming of the late 20th and early 21st centuries directly to anthropogenic emissions, and that is the weak link in the armour that Monckton and sceptics in general should aim for.

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"Suspicion" of link to global warming is enough

5 January, 2011 by

All that's required

The SBS headline this morning screamed “‘Drastic shifts’ in Atlantic sea currents”, a quote lifted directly from a press release from EAWAG Aquatic Research in Switzerland. So why is SBS news interested in an arcane paper about ocean currents? Because the press release contains the magic words “global warming”, which sets off all the alarm bells at SBS (and every other news network on the planet – there are over 600 hits on Google for “drastic shift in ocean current” in the last week). Here’s part of the press release from EAWAG:

Examination of deep sea corals reveals that there have been drastic changes to oceanic currents in the western North Atlantic since the 1970s. The influence of the cold water Labrador Current, which is in periodic interchange with the warm Gulf Stream, has been decreasing continually since the 1970s. Occurring at the same time as Global Warming this phenomenon is unique in the past 2000 years. These results are reported by researchers from the University of Basel and Eawag in the current edition of the scientific journal «PNAS».

One of the oldest known weather systems in the world is the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), the periodic variation of atmospheric pressure difference between the Azores and Iceland. It dictates not only whether the winters in Europe will be cold and dry or wet and warm, but also influences the oceanic currents in the North Atlantic. On the continental shelf off Nova Scotia, the NAO seems to control the interaction between different water masses. During positive phases, the oceanography of the north-west American continental shelf is dictated by a relatively warm water mass at 10 degrees Celsius which is salty and nutrient-rich, originating from the Gulf Stream. If the NAO is in a negative phase, the Labrador Current is dominant, a relatively cold water mass at 6 degrees Celsius, which is relatively nutrient-poor scarce and originates from sub-polar regions.

Using new geochemical methods, an international team of researchers including the biogeochemists Prof. Moritz Lehmann (University of Basel) and Dr. Carsten Schubert (Eawag – Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology) were able to prove that a drastic change to a «warm water mode» occurred in the western North Atlantic in the early 1970s. This change, the timing of which coincides with and may be directly related to Global Warming, is unique in the last 2000 years.

Now I am no expert in ocean currents, and for all I know, their research may have been carefully undertaken and of a high standard. But look at the flimsy and tenuous links to “global warming” thrown in:

  • “Occurring at the same time as Global Warming this phenomenon is unique in the past 2000 years” – in other words, the researchers have made a temporal association with GW, but haven’t any evidence to show causation
  • “the timing of which coincides with and may be directly related to Global Warming” – again, a coincidence, and surely might it also not be directly related to GW? Apparently that option wasn’t considered.

And they can’t seem to get the story straight. On the one hand, the Labrador current has been decreasing continually since the 1970s, but later, they claim there has been a drastic change in the warm water mode in the early 1970s. And the last paragraph sweeps away any remnants of scientific impartiality:

The researchers suspect there is a direct connection between the changes in the oceanic currents in the North Atlantic and Global Warming primarily caused by human activities.

Let me get this straigh:

  • “suspect” – so a hunch is enough now, is it? Apparently so when we’re talking about global warming…
  • “direct connection” – where’s the evidence?
  • “primarily caused by human activities” – this is a peach, and completely exposes the agenda, since even if the changes in the ocean currents were linked to changes in climate, why single out changes allegedly caused by human activities? Why wouldn’t the ocean currents respond to natural climate changes? The currents can’t exactly tell what is causing those changes, can they?

This is another perfect example of decent science being compromised by researchers desperate to play the global warming joker – for publicity I expect. And it worked. But if all these changes happened in the 1970s, surely it would have been caused by global cooling… wasn’t that the scare du jour back then?

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