Snow in summer – Sydney Morning Herald blames "climate change"

21 December, 2010 by

10cm of global warming fell in NSW yesterday

I hope to do the occasional post over the next few weeks, as time permits, and I couldn’t resist this one. From the Weather Isn’t Climate (Except When We Say It Is) Department…

Once again, we have to ask the simple question: to a climate alarmist, what weather phenomenon would not be a sign of “climate change”? Warmer temperatures? Obviously not – it’s global warming, stupid. Colder temperatures. No, because climate change creates more “extremes” (apparently, when it suits their cause – like today). More rain? No, because one of our models predicted more rain. Less rain? No, because a different model predicted less rain as well. We could go on (and on, and on). The answer is, that there is nothing that isn’t a sign of climate change. Everything and everything is “consistent with it”.

So when snow fell in the New South Wales mountains yesterday, at the height of the southern hemisphere summer, the Moonbat Herald blames climate change in the first sentence of its report this morning:

AS CLIMATE change tips the planet inextricably towards a more complicated future the weather already presents as downright confusing. (source)

So the question for the warmists is this: what weather conditions would not indicate “climate change”? This needs an answer, because at the moment, if everything is a sign of climate change, the flip side of that same argument is that nothing is.

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Settled science: warming effect of CO2 cut by 65%

13 October, 2010 by

We know all there is to know

Once again, here we have an example of settled science, where no new discoveries about the climate are ever made these days and everything was set in stone ages ago. No, wait…

The warming effect of evil [harmless] carbon dioxide has been significantly overstated, and it is almost impossible to determine the “climate sensitivity”:

[…] the report is clear – CO2 does not account for even a majority of the warming seen over the past century. If other species [of atmospheric substance] accounted for 65% of historical warming that leaves only 35% for carbon dioxide. This, strangely enough, is in line with calculations based strictly on known atmospheric physics, calculations not biased by the IPCC’s hypothetical and bastardized “feedbacks.”

Of course, the real reason for the feedbacks was to allow almost all global warming to be attributed to CO2. This, in turn, would open the door for radical social and economic policies, allowing them to be enacted in the name of saving the world from global warming. The plain truth is that even climate scientists know that the IPCC case was a political witch’s brew concocted by UN bureaucrats, NGOs, grant money hungry scientists and fringe activists.

Now, after three decades of sturm und drang over climate policy, the truth has emerged – scientists have no idea of how Earth’s climate will change in the future because they don’t know why it changed in the past. Furthermore, it will take decades of additional study to gain a useful understand climate change. To do this, climate scientists will need further funding. Too bad the climate science community squandered any public trust it may have had by trying to frighten people with a lie. [my emphasis]

Read it here.

In other news:

  • Jo Nova eviscerates Robyn Williams, the ABC’s non-science journalist, who has forgotten what proper science is, doesn’t have a single sceptical brain cell in his head, but is pretty good on alarmism, pseudo-science, mudslinging and propaganda.
  • The government’s unofficial alarmist in chief, Will Steffen, who also doesn’t have a single sceptical brain cell, tells a conference in Hobart that sea levels are rising “at the top end of estimates”. Not sure how 3mm per year works out to be 1m by 2100. But hey, it’s just detail, and it sure makes a good story.
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Postcards from the future of climate change

6 October, 2010 by

Buckingham Palace surrounded by shanty towns full of "climate refugees"

Another post that had to interrupt my short break. The UK Telegraph, which used to be a respectable newspaper, but which has been changing slowly into little more than an upmarket gossip rag, has lost its mind completely and has published a gallery of ridiculous postcards depicting a post-climate change London. There are the hackneyed images of a flooded River Thames and “extreme weather”, but the two “artists” have here gone much further. From the introduction:

A display of photomontages imagining how London could be affected by climate change is on display at the Museum of London from 1 October 2010 to 6 March 2011. The display and events form part of the Mayor’s Story of London festival and the events are funded by Renaissance London. Like postcards from the future, familiar views of the capital have been digitally transformed by illustrators Robert Graves and Didier Madoc-Jones. They bring home the full impact of global warming, food scarcity, rising sea levels and how all Londoners will need to innovate and adapt to survive.

That the Telegraph chose to publish, with serious and weighty captions, and without any rational comment or criticism, these fictitious, alarmist images, whose purpose is solely to advance by fear the agenda of taking urgent action climate change, shows clearly how far journalism has sunk.

You can view the gallery here, but I couldn’t resist posting one more – the Houses of Parliament surrounded by rice paddies (honestly, you couldn’t make this stuff up):

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Alarmists' PR own goal

3 October, 2010 by

Sickening

Interrupting my short break to comment on Richard Curtis’s truly sickening video – which you will no doubt have heard about elsewhere – which shows children who do not go along with the requirement to cut their emissions being blown up in a nauseating and gory way. Despite the creators issuing a worthless apology and withdrawing it, copies are appearing on YouTube faster than they can be removed, such is the viral nature of this video – do your own search if you wish to view it (discretion advised).

This kind of stunning own goal is very welcome, since it lays bare, for all to see, the totalitarian nature of the climate alarmism, where dissent is met with violence, albeit in a “humorous” context. I hope that this video will have disgusted many people who are in the global warming camp by default, and as a result may be spurred into making their own enquiries about the kind of movement they are associating with… a movement which now includes Osama bin Laden!

The timing is interesting, since the Royal Society, which has previously abandoned scientific impartiality and jumped aboard the alarmist bandwagon, has been forced to tone down its warmist rhetoric, admitting that there are areas of climate science where doubt exists:

Climate change continues to be a subject of intense public and political debate. Because of the level of interest in the topic the Royal Society has produced a new guide to the science of climate change. The guide summarises the current scientific evidence on climate change and its drivers, highlighting the areas where the science is well established, where there is still some debate, and where substantial uncertainties remain. (source)

One thing we can be sure of is that as more doubts are acknowledged in the science, the more desperate the alarmist machine will become to keep the ship afloat.

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UN hysteria: disasters "scream for action" on climate

3 September, 2010 by

Hysterical

More disgraceful hysteria and uncritical journalism. Just yesterday, James Lee was shot dead after taking hostages at the Discovery Channel, in an attempt to force them to comply with his eco-warrior agenda. Today on Watts Up With That, Thomas Fuller writes in an article entitled “Stop the Hysteria”:

The deluge of catastrophic predictions  regarding global warming and its consequences have reached almost everyone on  the planet, and perhaps unintentionally have replaced Cold War bomb scares as  the primary source of doomsaying.

The messages are well-thought out and prepared  by professional communicators, with disturbing and graphic images of a  post-apocalyptic scenario lifted from Mad Max, and with about as much connection  to reality.

In March of this year, a couple in Argentina shot their two children before  committing suicide over fears of global warming. On Wednesday, in Maryland, James Lee apparently committed ‘suicide by cop’  after taking three hostages in an attempt to force the Discovery Channel to  alter its programming to suit his fears over the environment.

At what point will we call to account those who have preached ‘the end of  the earth as we know it’ to countless people? How many people will be driven to  desperation by those who distort the science? (source)

Yet just hours later we have the ever-responsible Sydney Morning Herald regurgitating precisely the same hysteria from the UN, which doesn’t give a sh*t about people, only about securing its role as a world government by the climate change back door:

UN climate chief Christiana Figueres on Thursday warned that a string of weather calamities showed the deepening urgency to forge a breakthrough deal on global warming this year.

Speaking before some 40 countries were to address finance, an issue that has helped hamstring UN climate talks, Figueres said floods in Pakistan, fires in Russia and other weather disasters had been a shocking wakeup call.

“The news has been screaming that a future of intense, global climate disasters is not the future that we want,” Figueres, newly-appointed executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), told reporters.

“Science will show whether and how those events are related to climate change caused by humanity’s greenhouse-gas emissions, but the point is clear: We cannot afford to face escalating disasters of that kind.” (source)

Just read that last sentence: “science will show whether and how those events are” … etc etc. Which correctly states that there is no evidence whatsoever to link them to AGW. But that doesn’t stop the idiotic Figueres from her hysterical pronouncements. And the Moonbat Herald is happy to broadcast them to its gullible readers.

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Nature mag: extreme cold is global warming

29 August, 2010 by

Just loving this global warming

Because as we all know, everything and anything is now blamed on global warming, er, climate change. Extreme heat, of course, more rain, less rain, extreme cold, more hurricanes, fewer hurricanes, you name it. In fact, I’d like to ask one of these authors what weather phenomenon they could identify that wouldn’t indicate climate change. Probably none. It’s the climate change lottery where every alarmist is a winner!

The numerous recent examples of unusual cold in the southern hemisphere have all but gone unreported in the mainstream media, but the journal Nature, which has already made up its mind on climate change (it’s all our fault), realises it can’t ignore it any more and … blames the recent extreme cold in South America on “climate change”:

With high Andean peaks and a humid tropical forest, Bolivia is a country of ecological extremes. But during the Southern Hemisphere’s recent winter, unusually low temperatures in part of the country’s tropical region hit freshwater species hard, killing an estimated 6 million fish and thousands of alligators, turtles and river dolphins.

Scientists who have visited the affected rivers say the event is the biggest ecological disaster Bolivia has known, and, as an example of a sudden climatic change wreaking havoc on wildlife, it is unprecedented in recorded history. [Funny, I thought it was just weather…]

“There’s just a huge number of dead fish,” says Michel Jégu, a researcher from the Institute for Developmental Research in Marseilles, France, who is currently working at the Noel Kempff Mercado Natural History Museum in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. “In the rivers near Santa Cruz there’s about 1,000 dead fish for every 100 metres of river.”

And then the inevitable:

With such extreme climatic events potentially becoming more common due to climate change, scientists are hurrying to coordinate research into the impact, and how quickly the ecosystem is likely to recover.

It’s getting rather tedious now, don’t you think?

Read it here. (h/t Climate Depot, WUWT, Bishop Hill, etc etc)

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UN/WMO hysteria over "unprecedented weather"

19 August, 2010 by

Blocking high over northern Europe, 1990

Weather isn’t climate – except when the UN or the WMO say it is. Tiny changes in global temperature over decades or centuries hardly get the juices flowing, but a good disaster or three, that’s more like it! If we can tie “global warming” to ominous sounding effects such as “changes in atmospheric currents” we can really scare the daylights out of people.

Mass hysteria surrounds the Pakistani floods, the Russian heatwave, the ice island and the landslides in China, and the fact that these four weather events have happened at roughly the same time has given the UN the perfect opportunity to blame global warming [surely “climate change”]. The UN is therefore desperately asking climate scientists to investigate:

Climate scientists must urgently look into changes in atmospheric currents linked to devastating floods in Pakistan and wildfires in Russia, UN climate and weather bodies said on Wednesday.

Ghassem Asrar, director of the World Climate Research Program, told AFP that changes, known as blocking episodes, can prevent humidity or hot weather dispersing.

That intensified heavy rain or heatwaves and locked them over an area, he explained, potentially with a growing impact on extreme weather events that scientists expect to happen more frequently with global warming.

Asrar said that European researchers had modelled the blocking pattern in atmospheric currents and resulting weather behind the Pakistani rains and Russian heatwave a few weeks in advance.

They “clearly flagged this formation and kept track of it”, said Asrar, whose program is partly linked to the UN’s World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).

“We know for sure that the two events in Pakistan and Russia are linked,” he added.

Asrar and the WMO underlined that the intense monsoon rain in Pakistan and heatwave in Russia, as well as rain-induced landslides in China and the split of a giant iceberg in Greenland in recent weeks were exceptional even by the standards of naturally-occurring climate extremes.

The WMO called the four “an unprecedented sequence of events” that “compare with, or exceed in intensity, duration or geographical extent, the previous largest historical events”. [Note that it says “compare with or exceed”, so I guess, like the ice island that was the “largest since, er, the last one”, and the last one had nothing to do with “global warming”, events like this have happened before for millions of years, mostly unobserved – Ed]

Now we have the great AGW cause, we can pin every disaster on it knowing we can never be proved wrong. By the way, growing up in the UK in the 70s and 80s, blocking patterns were a common event every summer (as they still are) – we actually looked forward to them. A big high pressure area would squat over northern europe forcing the jetstream to deviate north (see image), taking all the low pressure systems with it, and away from the UK. It would often give us several weeks of warm, settled weather. But the media report this stuff as if it’s something new and scary – because they have no understanding of weather, or climate, or more importantly, history.

Read it here.

See here for a description of anticyclones and blocking highs, which includes the following:

“Dry spells over Britain (such as the very pronounced drought of 1975–6 and the series of drought episodes during the period 1988–92) are usually the result of persistent blocking anticyclones close to the British Isles. Hot summers are often the result of slow-moving anticyclones situated either over Scandinavia or to the east or south-east of Britain, with very warm and dry continental air being advected across the country. Cool but relatively dry summers are caused by high pressure persistently reforming to the west of Ireland.”

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

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Australian Academy of Science sells out to alarmism

18 August, 2010 by

Sold out to alarmism

Just like so many formerly-learned societies that have gone before it, such as the UK Royal Society (see here for example), the Australian Academy of Science has published a climate change document pushing the usual alarmist line, and advocating the inevitable “deep cuts” in emissions, as The Australian reports:

THE Australian Academy of Science has pitted its expertise against the greenhouse sceptics in a report stating that humans are changing our climate.

The statement expresses for the first time the consensus among Australia’s top climate scientists on the evidence for human-caused global warming.

In it, nine eminent climate scientists declare that global average temperatures has risen during the past century, and that increased greenhouse gas levels due to human activity are mostly to blame. The academy issued the statement, The Science of Climate Change: Questions and Answers, in Canberra on Monday as part of National Science Week.

The document sets out the evidence for human impact on climate and outlines the possible consequences of failure to make deep cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.

Of course, the reality is that there is no evidence of this whatsoever. All we know is that the small additional amount of CO2 added since the Industrial Revolution will have warmed the climate by a fraction of a degree. Apart from that, it’s all supposition and models. And look who’s in the list of authors:

Among the authors of the academy’s report are David Karoly, of the University of Melbourne; Matthew England, of the University of NSW; Michael Bird, of James Cook University; and the CSIRO’s Mike Raupach. (source)

Two of the best known climate alarmist scientists – Karoly in particular makes regular appearances at ACM (see here). I wonder if they asked Bob Carter (also of James Cook Uni, probably just along the corridor from Bird) or Ian Plimer to contribute? Don’t make me laugh. They don’t want their precious warming faith attacked by free-thinking scepticism.

The AAS document can be downloaded here (PDF).

(h/t WipeOut)

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More hysterical climate alarmism from the ABC

2 August, 2010 by

Banging the Green drum

The ABC is the campaign wing of the Labor/Green Alliance Party (as it should now be called) in all but name. Spruiking Jooolya’s policies whilst at the same time dissing Tony’s. Dredging up any tiny embarrassment from Tony’s past, but leaving Jooolya’s communist connections well alone. And of course, using the Drum as a platform for climate hysteria is just all part of the grand scheme. For every sceptical article that gets the nod, about 10 alarmist ones get through – there’s balance for you, ABC-style. Last week we had Kellie “Ranter” Tranter’s climate nonsense, deconstructed expertly by Jo Nova here, and now we have another climate evangelist, spouting deep Green propaganda:

The inertia of the climate system, particularly the slow warming of the oceans, means that the results of our emissions today only become evident decades hence. Thus, unless we take rapid action now, we may well be locking in irreversible climate change of catastrophic proportions for future generations [nonsense – there is no evidence whatsoever of irreversible climate change in our planet’s history – it’s been here for 4.5 billion years, for f***’s sake]; indeed we may have already done so.

There will always be scientific uncertainties on an issue this complex, with year-to-year climatic variations continuing to be used selectively by deniers [cheap ad hom] to discredit the mainstream science; but the overall trends are clear and they are all moving in the wrong direction. It is tempting to believe the deniers [and again] are right, but faced with the mounting empirical evidence, prudent risk management dictates we should not gamble on inaction.

The world is starting to understand that, if catastrophic outcomes and climatic tipping points are to be avoided [which don’t exist], the real target for a safe climate is to reduce atmospheric carbon concentrations back to the pre-industrial levels of around 300ppm CO2 from the current 392ppm CO2 [despite CO2 levels being at least 20 times greater in the past, with no significant effect on warming] This will require emission reductions in the order of 40-50 per cent by 2020, almost complete decarbonisation by 2050 [could have been written by the Greens] and continuing efforts to draw down legacy carbon from the atmosphere.

The author is a fellow of the Centre for Policy Development, which has already made its mind up on climate change, as it states here:

The short-term thinking of the election cycle is damaging Australia’s long-term interests. From the global economic crisis to the climate emergency, the costs of poor public policy are increasingly clear. (source)

So is it any wonder that one of their “fellows” writes such undiluted horseshit? And is it any wonder that the ABC publishes it so uncritically?

Read it here, if you must, but frankly, don’t bother.

UPDATE: From the author’s CPD biography:

He is Chairman of Safe Climate Australia, Deputy Convenor of the Australian Association for the Study of Peak Oil and a Member of the Club of Rome.

Let’s always remember that the Club of Rome once pronounced that “the Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man”. Says it all really.

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UK Met Office: greenhouse gases "the glaringly obvious explanation"

29 July, 2010 by

"Pollution kills polar bears" - the climate debate according to the Telegraph

The moonbat papers are gleefully trumpeting alarmist stories this morning about the latest State of the Climate report from the UK Met Office and the US NOAA,  like this one in the UK Telegraph:

The State of the Climate report shows “unequivocally that the world is warming and has been for more than three decades”.

And despite the cold winter in Europe and north east America, this year is set to be the hottest on record [in other words since about 1880, ignoring all the previous warmings which were likely to have been warmer].

The annual report was compiled by the Met Office and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Both the NOAA and Nasa have stated that the first six months of this year were the hottest on record [i.e. since 1880], while the Met Office believes it is the second hottest start to the year after 1998.

None of this tells us anything about the cause of that warming, but hang on, here’s the killer argument from the Met Office:

Dr Peter Stott, Head of Climate Monitoring and Attribution at the Met Office, said “variability” in different regions, such as the cold winter in Britain, does not mean the rest of the world is not warming.

And he said ‘greenhouse gases are the glaringly obvious explanation’ for 0.56C (1F) warming over the last 50 years.

Ah, the “glaringly obvious explanation”! That’s the answer clearly! Just like the “glaringly obvious explanation” that irate gods cause thunderstorms, or the “glaringly obvious explanation” that stress and spicy foods cause gastric ulcers. It’s all just correlation, without causation.

Read it here.

UPDATE: And the ever-calm, ever-balanced ABC reports it thus:

Climate check-up ‘screams world is warming’

Peter Thorne, of the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites, says the scientists were not swayed by the debate over climate data and whether it had previously been manipulated.

“What this data is doing is screaming that the world is warming, and that cannot be driven by any single individual or even a small set of groups, because the evidence is there to see – there are lots of groups doing this stuff,” Mr Thorne said. (source)

Laughable, if it weren’t so tragic.

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