UN climate report "one-sided"

7 July, 2010 by

Biased from the start

Prize to The Australian for the most blindingly obvious headline of 2010 (so far). But what did anybody expect from the IPCC? It was founded in the late 1980s solely for the purpose of finding evidence to bolster a conclusion already reached by its founders – namely that human activity was dangerously warming the planet – and everyone is shocked when that’s exactly what they find! Its terms of reference refer to “human-caused warming” – not any other cause should even be considered, according to the IPCC. So the whole process was completely biased from the start:

THE UN body that advises governments on climate change failed to make clear how its landmark report on the impact of global warming often presented a worst-case scenario, an investigation has concluded.

A summary report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on regional impacts focused on the negative consequences of climate change and failed to make clear that there would also be some benefits of rising temperatures.

The report adopted a “one-sided” approach that risked being interpreted as an “alarmist view”.

For example, the IPCC had stated that 60 per cent of the Great Barrier Reef was projected to suffer regular bleaching by 2020 but had failed to make clear that this was the worst projected outcome and the impact might be far smaller.

The wording of a statement on between 3000 and 5000 more heat-related deaths a year in Australian cities had suggested that all of the projected increase would be the result of climate change, whereas most of it would be caused by the rising population and an increase in the number of elderly people.

The report, which underpinned the Copenhagen summit last December, wrongly suggested that climate change was the main reason communities faced severe water shortages and neglected to make clear that population growth was a much bigger factor. (source)

And with impeccable timing, and having clearly learnt nothing about the perception of climate science, The Guardian and AAP publish yet more alarmism, helpfully reprinted by the moonbat Age:

THE world is heading for an average temperature rise of nearly 4 degrees, according to a global analysis of national pledges. Such a rise would bring a high risk of major extinctions, threats to food supplies and the near-total collapse of the huge Greenland ice sheet.

More than 100 heads of state agreed in Copenhagen last December to limit the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 to 2 degrees above the long-term average before the industrial revolution, which started a huge global rise in greenhouse gases.

But after a concerted international effort to monitor the emission reduction targets of more than 60 countries, including all the major economies, the Climate Interactive Scoreboard now calculates that the world is on course for a rise of nearly double the stated goal by 2100. (source)

Where do you start? The stupidity of such comments beggars belief. Not only does it blindly assume that the planet’s climate has a single dial, marked “CO2”, which can be twiddled like a thermostat to determine the temperature in 90 years, but also it is based solely on incomplete, flaky computer models, which, even the IPCC admits, cannot predict anything. No wonder climate science has so little credibility, especially when journalists and politicians spin it so appallingly.

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Climate nonsense from Australia's Chief Scientist

2 July, 2010 by

Eyes closed, ears closed, brain closed

Who isn’t really a scientist at all any more. She has become an alarmist environmental advocate, along with the majority of the climate science community. She has already decided that “the debate is over” and that we should all be blindly committed to “tackling the problem”, and screwing our economy for no benefit whatsoever. All of this is evidenced by her wholly unscientific comments at the Gold Coast climate conference:

”Often a scientific argument for climate change, and the ways in which humanity has contributed to it, is confused with political or economic arguments for or against a particular course of action to mitigate or adapt to climate change,” she said.

‘‘The consensus within the scientific community about the main points of the science is strong, [sorry what has consensus to do with science again?] whereas the consensus within the political community – and those who elect them – about what to do about it is less strong.

”While it is unfortunate that Australian politics and a large fraction of the citizenry may be polarised with respect to the best course of climate action, it would be not only unhelpful but tragic if this polarisation led to a societal divide in our commitment to act.”

On the ”gap” between the scientific understanding of climate change and that of policymakers and the public, Professor Sackett said scientists needed to better translate their work into lay terms.

Yet more weasel words, and more blaming “lack of communication” for the fact the public aren’t buying the spin.

Eyes closed, ears closed and brain closed. What hope is there for impartial, freethinking scientific enquiry with quasi-religious dogma like this from Australia’s Chief Scientist?

Read it here.

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Brace yourselves for even more alarmism

2 July, 2010 by

Where's the acceleration?

No matter what happens to the climate between now and the publication of the IPCC’s 5th Assessment Report, we can be sure that the alarmism will be ratcheted up to ever more preposterous heights to keep the research funds flooding in. Everything will be bigger, faster, badder, worse than we thought, quicker than we thought etc, etc. The IPCC, and thousands of climate scientists, are too dependent on the “global warming” scare to let it go without a fight. And it’s started already. The IPCC’s AR4 predictions for sea level rise were exaggerated enough, but AR5 will be worse:

THE world’s peak scientific body on climate change [I think not] will ”almost inevitably” make an increase in its predictions of sea-level rises due to global warming in its next landmark report in 2014, the vice-chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says.

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele told The Age recent satellite observations showed extensive melting in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.

That new data will be considered in the IPCC’s next assessment report – regarded by governments and scientific groups as the world’s pre-eminent scientific document on climate change – and should lead to an increase in predictions of sea-level rises, Professor van Ypersele said.

The sea-level rises estimated in the IPCC’s last assessment report, released in 2007, were now on the low side. [See, what did I just say? It’s all bigger, badder, faster]

That report put sea-level rises at 18 to 59 centimetres above 1990 levels by 2100.

Members of the IPCC met in Kuala Lumpur last week to discuss the consideration of the Greenland and Antarctic data for the IPCC’s next report – its fifth. Analysis of the extent of reduction in mass of the two major ice sheets will be the report’s main focus.

”The reason there was a workshop in KL is that the IPCC knows very well this is an area that needs particular attention and where a lot of progress has been made,” Professor van Ypersele said.

New satellite data ”are starting to show – but are quite convincing, I must say – that both the Greenland ice sheet and the Antarctic ice sheet are losing net mass, not on the margins but as an ice sheet”, he said.

Funny that the sea level record shows no acceleration of sea level rise, despite attempts to show otherwise.

Strap yourselves in, folks, it’s gonna be one hell of a ride.

Read it here.

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Shock: poll by climate activists shows "public want climate action"

27 June, 2010 by

No we don't, we peddle self-serving propaganda

Gee, what a surprise – never would have thought that, hmm? Blatant Vested Interests Alert as a poll conducted by the Climate Institute and The Australian Conservation Foundation (which runs Al Gore’s despicable Climate Project indoctrination seminars) shows that “more and more Australians are concerned over growing pollution.” Skating over the fact that <shouts>carbon dioxide isn’t pollution</shouts>, how much of a surprise is that, given that the Climate Institute and ACF are climate advocacy groups full of enviro-headbangers, whose very existence depends on the continuation of the climate scare, and who wage campaigns of misinformation against filthy sceptics and “deniers”? But hey, the media will report anything these days, as long as it fits the politically correct notion of man-made climate change.

It says voters would welcome action on climate change, giving new Prime Minister Julia Gillard a clear indication on what the public want.

CEO of the Climate Institute John Connor has told Sky News of the public’s concern over the ETS.

‘The backflip over the ETS had a very significant backlash that damaged brand Rudd but also damaged brand ALP, and so we’ve seen ALP as a better party for handling climate change go to historic lows,’ Connor said.

The research also shows global warming could be a key issue for undecided voters.

‘If there’s a strong plan on pollution and climate change, that will reward the government or the opposition, and the government in this instance by about three to one’.

Yawn.

Read it here (if you can be bothered)

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Latest climate scare: whales

18 June, 2010 by

Yet another scare

Add them to the list… hang on, they’re there already. The Sydney Moonbat Herald is recycling climate scares now:

A record number of whales is expected to be spotted passing Sydney this winter, but scientists warn that global warming could put their future at risk.

The first big-picture review of the world’s oceans shows human activity is driving changes at a rate not seen for millions of years. Many species are threatened and increases in disease are predicted.

This could have dire consequences for hundreds of millions of people, a series of scientific reports concludes. Oscar Schofield, of Rutgers University in the US, said environmental change had been profound in the West Antarctic Peninsula and was altering the food chain on which whales in that region depended.

We can rely on our old friend Ove Hoegh-Guldberg to come up with an idiotic quote to get some column-inches (and more funding):

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, of the University of Queensland, the co-author of another review, said the world’s oceans were the heart and lungs of the planet, but they were showing signs of ill health due to greenhouse gas emissions.

“It’s as if the Earth has been smoking two packs of cigarettes a day,” he said. “We are entering a period in which the very ocean services upon which humanity depends are undergoing massive change and, in some cases, beginning to fail.”

Yawn. Next.

Read it here (if you really must).

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Alarmists should learn some common courtesy…

17 June, 2010 by

"Manners maketh man"

Anthony Watts of Watts Up With That? fame is currently in Australia on a speaking tour. I had the pleasure of meeting Anthony at the talk in Rockdale, Sydney on Sunday. Now it appears that Anthony has been given a rough time by our old “friend” Ove Hoegh-Guldberg (see here), who demonstrates that he has fewer manners than you’d expect to find in a kindergarten playground:

The Tuesday night meeting in Brisbane on the WUWT Australian tour had a bit of unexpected fireworks courtesy of Aussie reef scientist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg. The meeting started off with some protestors outside holding placards with the tired old messages claiming “funding by big oil”…etc. Ove actually incited this on his blog, saying that “The Climate Shifts crew and other scientists will be there en masse to record and debunk the lies that will be told.”

The “en masse” was about 5, maybe 6 people by my count.

I’ve never met Ove, never corresponded with him, and after watching his behavior firsthand, I’m not sure I would have wanted to. His behavior left me with the impression that he was the antithesis of a professional person. At least the lady from Oxfam and the fellow in the green shirt who came up to me afterwards had manners, even though they disagreed with me, and I thank them for that. Ove never made the effort to say hello.

I think that tells us all we need to know about Ove.

Read it here.

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Climate scientists meet to improve brainwashing skills

15 June, 2010 by

Washes away scepticism faster than other leading brands

Note that they’re not meeting to hang their heads in shame and discuss the shonky science, fudged data, blocking of FOI requests or intimidation of sceptical climate journals, which is all par for the course. No, this is all about communication – it’s just that they’re not getting their message across properly, obviously. The science is just fine, the public are just too stupid to understand:

REPRESENTATIVES of scientific organisations including the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology will meet today to discuss better communication of the science behind man-made climate change, in the wake of crumbling political and public consensus on global warming.

The conference in Sydney, organised by the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies (FASTS), is part of a long-term bid to develop a ”national communication charter” for major scientific organisations and universities to better spruik the evidence of climate change.

The conference will hear an address from Australia’s chief scientist, Penny Sackett [who is a fully paid up alarmist – see here]. Representatives of the CSIRO, Bureau of Meteorology, Australian Academy of Science and Department of Climate Change, among others, will attend [all on the alarmist bandwagon, of course, because without it, they would lose their juicy funding cheques].

…

FASTS president Cathy Foley said although public scepticism was on the rise, scientific evidence of man-made climate change had not changed, and it was sad the community was less and less trusting of scientists. [And who do you have to blame for that? The scientists themselves – think “Hockey Stick” and “Climategate”]

Dr Foley said a well-organised and funded climate sceptics’ movement had increasingly captured attention [That old chestnut again – a bunch of retired scientists and lone bloggers are better funded and better organised than the entire global warming industry? Yeah, right].

”We are concerned the debate around climate change has become a left-wing versus right-wing debate – or a kind of religious argument – when it should really be about the strength of the scientific evidence,” Dr Foley said.

The conference was not about politics or ”brainwashing” the public, she added.

The thought never entered my head. Oops, just noticed the title. Maybe it did.

Read it here.

UPDATE: Listen here to how the ABC treats this entire story with kid gloves, and allows Cathy Foley to misrepresent the science as having been settled for hundreds of years. Yes, the principle of greenhouse warming is settled, but the science of climate feedbacks (which is what we need to understand to determing whether we will get catastrophic warming) is most definitely not.

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Thousands of IPCC scientists? Try a handful…

15 June, 2010 by

More of the same

The so-called consensus of thousands of IPCC scientists all telling us the world is going to hell in a handcart thanks to our SUVs is phoney, according to an article in the National Post (h/t WUWT).

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider.  The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was “only a few dozen experts,” he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony.

“Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous,” the paper states unambiguously, adding that they rendered “the IPCC vulnerable to outside criticism.”

More of what we have all come to expect from the IPCC: spin, spin and yet more spin.

Read it here.

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Quote of the Day – Kevin Trenberth

4 June, 2010 by

Quote of the Day

As the papers are full of James Hansen shrieking that 2010 will be the “hottest year on record” (in other words since about 1880*, and based on his own, highly suspect, GISS temperature data set), it takes a fellow warmist to get it right for a change:

“We have seen rapid warming recently, but it is an example of natural variation that is associated with changes in the Pacific [El Niño] rather than climate change.” (source)

(H/t WUWT)

*By the way, if the age of the earth were represented by one day, the period since 1880 equates to approximately 2/1000 ths of a second.

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CSIRO has "breached trust"

30 May, 2010 by

Can't be trusted any more?

So says Terry McCrann, in an article comparing the cheerleading of the CSIRO for climate alarmism with the cheerleading of the Treasury for the resources super profits tax:

In March, [CSIRO] joined with the Bureau of Meteorology to produce a “snapshot of the state of the climate to update Australians about how their climate has changed and what it means”. Although the pamphlet had a neutral title, “State of the Climate”, it was clearly designed to bring the great weight of the apparent credibility of these two organisations to bear against, and hopefully crush, those pesky climate change sceptics.

But as one of the peskier of them, Tom Quirk — our version of Canada’s even peskier Stephen McIntyre — discovered, there was a very curious omission in one of the CSIRO graphs. It showed the rise and rise of concentrations in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and its fellow greenhouse gas methane. It was an almost perfect replica of the infamous (Michael) Mann Hockey Stick. After being virtually stable for 900 years, concentrations of both CO2 and methane went almost vertical through the 20th century. But as the eagle-eyed Quirk noticed and wrote about on Quadrant Online, methane was plotted only up to 1990, while the plots for CO2 continued to 2000.Why so, when the CSIRO measures methane concentrations and has data up to last year?

Did the answer lie in the inconvenient truth that methane concentrations have plateaued since the mid-1990s? Yet here is the CSIRO, the organisation dedicated to scientific truth, pretending — even stating — that they’re still going up, Climategate style. This is bad enough, but just as with Treasury, real policies are built on this sort of “analysis”. The first version of the so-called carbon pollution reduction scheme included farming to address the methane question. But as Quirk has shown in a peer-reviewed paper, atmospheric methane is driven by a combination of volcanos, El Ninos and pipeline (mostly dodgy old Soviet) leakage.

A second curious, and even dodgier, thing happened after Quirk’s Quadrant report. CSIRO “updated” its main graph to include the more recent methane data. No admission was made and the graph’s scale made it all but invisible and did not show the plateauing. Further, the CSIRO published a more detailed second graph showing what has happened in the past 30 years, as opposed to the first graph’s 1000 years. But only for CO2, despite the fact that it had exactly the same data for methane.

In short, the CSIRO is a fully signed-up member of the climate change club. It wanted to project the horror story of continually rising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. So it simply disappeared inconvenient evidence to the contrary, in the process announcing it cannot be trusted ever again to deliver objective scientific evidence.

CSIRO, The Bureau of Meteorology, the UK Royal Society, the American National Academy of Sciences and hundreds of other organisations have all nailed their colours to the climate change mast, abandoning objective scientific enquiry in favour of environmental advocacy. As the Royal Society has discovered, it only works for so long, before credibility starts to disappear. As he concludes:

In short and in sum, our two pre-eminent centres of knowledge and public policy analysis across the social and hard sciences spectrum are now literally unbelievable. It is not an attractive or an appropriate state of affairs.

Read it here.

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