Hockey Stick lives! In Australia, apparently…

17 May, 2012 by

Mann's Hockey Stick: on life support in Australia

UPDATE 2: Thanks to Baldrick in the comments for this. Joelle Gergis is, guess what, a climate activist. Her blog is here, and although it hasn’t been updated for some time, a five minute glance found the following, which praises the election of Rudd in 2007, gleefully celebrates the end of Howard, and looks forward to “action on climate change”:

“After 12 long years, we have a progressive prime minister who will ratify the Kyoto protocol, prioritise a rehaul of the education system and have the humility to say sorry to the indigenous people of our country.

This hilarious article by The Age columnist Catherine Deveny sums up how many of us felt about the end of the Howard era. Tracee Hutchison’s piece celebrating the rise of women in politics is also great.

As a climate scientist, I am hopeful that we will finally see real action on climate change.”

Are these the words of an impartial scientist? Which comes first, being a climate activist or a climate scientist? How can we rely on papers written by climate activists?

UPDATE: The paper claims that the MWP was 0.09°C below 1961-1990 levels. That’s 9 HUNDREDTHS of a degree , with a margin of error of over twice that (±0.19°C). The abstract goes on to cite the usual, “we dunno, so it must be us” reason for the recent late 20th century warming:

“The unusual 20th century warming cannot be explained by natural variability alone, suggesting a strong influence of anthropogenic forcing in the Australasian region.”

Full abstract here (paper behind paywall).

More warmism leading up to IPCC AR5:

For the first time scientists have provided the most complete climate record of the last millennium and they found that the last 50 years in Australia have been the warmest.

The researchers from Melbourne University used 27 different natural indicators like tree rings and ice cores to come to their conclusion, which will be a part of the next United Nations intergovernmental panel on climate change report.

The findings show that no other period in the last 1,000 years matches the temperature rises Australia and the region has experienced in the last 50 years.

Report co-author Joelle Gergis says the findings are significant.

“It does show that the post-1950 warming is unusual in the Australasian region,” she said.

27 different proxies? Sounds worryingly like a re-run of the Hockey Stick to me.

But at least we have finally got rid of the Medieval Warm Period! Would you expect anything less from our own David Karoly, committed believer, and one of the authors?

All lovingly reported by the ABC (Alarmist Broadcasting Corporation).

Expect much, much more of the same.

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Flying Spaghetti Monster 'cannot be excluded' as driver of Queensland floods

16 May, 2012 by

AGW or FSM?

It’s the Holy Grail of alarmism. Even though there is almost no hope of ever doing so, the team are desperate to point to an extreme weather event and say that man-made climate change caused it, or made it worse.

Professor Matthew England (one of Anna Rose’s advisers in ABC’s I Can Change Your Mind about Climate – see here) has another go here, and uses weasel words to hijack a study – unrelated to climate change – to advance The Cause:

Abnormally high ocean temperatures off the coast of northern Australia contributed to the extreme rainfall that flooded three-quarters of Queensland over the summer of 2010-11, scientists report.

A Sydney researcher, Jason Evans, ran a series of climate models and found above average sea surface temperatures throughout December 2010 increased the amount of rainfall across the state by 25 per cent on average.

While the study did not look at the cause of ocean warming in the region, a physical oceanographer, Matthew England, said climate change could not be excluded as a possible driver of this extreme rainfall event.

Matthew England, who was not involved in the study, said ocean temperatures off northern Australia were the highest on record at the time of the Queensland floods.

“While the La Nina event played a big role in this record ocean warmth, so too did the long-term warming trend over the past 50 years,” Professor England, the co-director of the UNSW Climate Change Research Centre, said. (source)

Interfering with SST data now are we?

The study “did not look at the cause of ocean warming”, so the “abnormally high ocean temperatures” may have simply been natural variability at work. But according to England, climate change “could not be excluded”. Similarly, therefore, we cannot exclude the possibility that the Flying Spaghetti Monster was behind it, sneakily raising sea temperatures with his noodly appendage…

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

20 March, 2012 by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read it here.

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Government's chief alarmist: more floods and more droughts

19 March, 2012 by

Chief Alarmist

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

—

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

Sir,

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

Yours faithfully,

Editor, ACM

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

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Bankrupt EU still obsessed with 'tackling climate change'

17 March, 2012 by

Glover - Chief Alarmist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Bureau's Annual Alarmism Summary

14 March, 2012 by

Bushfires = climate ©BoM

UPDATE: Graham Lloyd, The Australian’s environment editor displays a staggering gullibility in his accompanying opinion piece “Plenty of data to compel doubters” – at least he didn’t say “deniers”. Take the following:

“For anyone who doubts the role played by mankind in rising levels of atmospheric CO2, the graph that shows how it remained at a constant level for 2000 years before shooting up with the industrial revolution should be compelling.”

Er, really? Ignoring the fact that such a visual trick is achieved by choosing the y-axis scale appropriately, few people doubt the fact that mankind has raised CO2 levels. So your point is? That such a rise correlates with higher temperatures? Lloyd avoids all the issues with causation, the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods (which occurred when CO2 levels were “safe”) and the fudging of feedbacks, trusting completely the words of the BoM and CSIRO. The rest is just as bad here.

—

When you look at the cover image of the latest Bureau of Meteorology Climate Summary for 2011, it tells you all you need to know. Illustrated with a raging bush fire (didn’t know bush fires were “climate”) it gives the impression that such events are something we haven’t ever experienced until the last 50 years, when we started pumping out evil carbon dioxide.

Like the UK Met Office, the Bureau is now less a weather reporting organisation than a political activist group, plugging the consensus AGW line and abandoning any vestiges of scientific impartiality.

Therefore, as we would come to expect from the Bureau, the report is packed full of alarmism, and despite the fact that temperatures have been much lower in 2011, it blames that squarely on La Niña, and assures us that underneath, temperatures are still rising.

Throughout, it is painfully obvious that the Bureau is desperate to prop up “The Cause” at any cost, as The Australian reports:

COOLER weather in Australia in the past two years due to the rain-inducing La Nina weather pattern does not undermine the collective evidence of climate change, the nation’s peak scientific and weather organisations say.

In their second State of the Climate report released today, the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology say evidence shows global warming continued and human activities were mainly responsible.

The report says natural climate variability had affected the global mean temperature and sea levels during the past century but much less than greenhouse gases, which continued to rise.

“It is clear that increasing greenhouse gas concentrations will result in significant further global warming,” the report says.

…

Bureau of Meteorology climate monitoring manager Karl Braganza said the scientific community found it difficult to communicate the climate change message because of the long timeframes involved.

“People want to see the things projected for the next 20 to 30 years happening now and if they don’t see it, their acceptance of the science is ameliorated by that,” Dr Braganza said.

Maybe it’s because people have lost trust in climate scientists, because of evidence of data manipulation and other unscientific and disreputable activities. And any old excuse is suddenly wheeled out for the lack of warming, reduced solar activity and aerosols:

“We are probably at a period where solar forcing (the sun’s energy) has been lower than recent decades,” he said.

There was an influence from China’s rapid economic development, which was causing more particles to be put into the atmosphere that reflect sunlight. “I think all of those things are affecting the climate system but the dominant, real standout influence is the increase in greenhouse gases, mostly CO2,” Dr Braganza said.

And we all know why they reach this conclusion – because every climate model accentuates the effect of CO2 relative to natural drivers.

The report says the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere last year was 390 parts per million, higher than at any time for the past 800,000 years. (source)

And just to round off, a lovely piece of pointless alarmism, which just about sums up this report.

The only thing to be said is: “We will see.”

The full report is here.

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Climate change to cause 'mass migration'

13 March, 2012 by

More fearmongering?

Add it to The List. Mass migration is the latest scare to be attributed (very tenuously) to ‘climate change’ – it doesn’t specify whether that means man-made or natural, but I think we can guess:

THE Asian Development Bank is warning countries to prepare for influxes of people fleeing natural disasters as climate change exacerbates rising sea levels, soil degradation and seasonal flooding.

Natural disasters drove 42 million people from their homes in the Asia-Pacific in 2010 and 2011, though it was unclear how many of those were caused by climate change, the bank said in a study released today.

“Unclear how many of those were caused by climate change”… hmm.

It said one-third of Southeast Asia’s population lived in at-risk areas, including Indonesia, Burma, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.

Six of the 10 countries most vulnerable to climate change are in the Asia-Pacific. Bangladesh tops the list followed by India, Nepal, the Philippines, Afghanistan and Burma.

The study did not make any specific projections for migration induced by climate change.

“Given that climate change acts as an aggravating factor for environmental degradation, it is expected to boost the number of people migrating because of environmental changes, both sudden and slow onset. Though the amplitude of these movements remains difficult to forecast, climate change is likely to become a major driver of migration in the 21st century,” it said. (source)

Likely, expected, could… all the weasel words we have come to expect to tie in scaremongering to climate change.

You can download the report here (large PDF).

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Scientists predict… more of whatever we've just had

12 March, 2012 by

Climate astrology

The role of natural variability in climate must be squashed at all costs. Just think of the consequences if natural variability were allowed to persist: we wouldn’t be able to “control” the climate by tinkering with a harmless trace gas, and we wouldn’t be able to shame Western civilisation into abandoning centuries of progress in order to “save the planet”. We might have to just accept what nature throws at us – and adapt.

And, more worryingly for The Cause, we wouldn’t be able to fill government and research coffers with taxpayers money, extracted by means of “carbon pricing”. And that would be a disaster. So whatever weather phenomenon happens, we can be sure that we will get more of the same, and it will be blamed on “man made global warming” to keep the bandwagon rolling.

For the last decade, Australia has suffered a period of drought. Prior to its recent end, scientists were falling over themselves to say that this was the “new climate” that we must get used to. Paid government hacks like Tim Flannery wailed about dams never filling again, and billions were spent on desalination plants to cater for the future without water.

How things change. After some of the worst floods in recent history in New South Wales, the alarmist Sydney Morning Herald finds a scientist to say that in future we will have… more floods. In other words, more of whatever we’ve just had:

EXPERTS PREDICT SURGE IN FLOODS

SPORTS fields, car parks and parklands will be important assets; houses will have walls that open, and some people might need to lose their water views to prepare for bigger, more frequent floods due to global warming, according to experts contacted by the Herald.

As global temperatures rise, short storm bursts will increase in frequency and severity, resulting in more flash flooding, especially in urban areas. But the outlook for longer periods of extreme rain, such as those that caused the flooding of the Darling, Lachlan and Murrumbidgee rivers, and which made the Warragamba Dam overflow this year, is less certain.

There is consensus in the scientific literature that ”the flooding that happens on small urban type of catchments, which is a result of short rainfall bursts, is going up, because convection is intensifying”, Professor Ashish Sharma, an Australian Research Council future fellow in the school of civil and environmental engineering at the University of NSW, said.

He said it was ”99 per cent sure” that the cause was global warming. A warmer atmosphere holds more water and releases it in shorter bursts, as seen in the tropics, Professor Sharma said. 

And notice that they have a bob each way – claiming that long term trends are less certain – so we can have more floods AND more drought and they’ll be right in both cases! There’s more:

What scientists agree on is that the assumption the future climate will mirror the past, known among scientists as ”stationarity”, no longer holds. This has implications for flood planning.

”This represents a major break with past practice”, Seth Westra, a senior lecturer in the school of civil, environmental and mining engineering at the University of Adelaide, said.

”The notion that the climatic drivers of flooding are changing through time not only poses profound challenges on how we estimate future floods, but also challenges the way we design [for] and manage future floods,” he said in a paper written for the federal government-funded National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility. (source)

How anyone could possibly “assume” that future climate will mirror the past, when climate has been changing for 4.5 billion years, is almost incredible. Even without the AGW scare, climate has always changed, over every time period, and always will.

What’s so amazing about this kind of article is the almost unbelievable lack of any historical perspective. So desperate are the Herald to link any weather phenomenon to global warming (especially with the Herald-sponsored Earth Hour just around the corner), that they will purposefully find a scientist who will say the right thing.

The unfalsifiable hypothesis gets stronger, and ever closer to climate astrology.

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30% of OCD patients worry about "global warming"

10 March, 2012 by

Scaring the population

I assume that those 30% also get their news from Fairfax, the ABC, BBC, Reuters, AAP etc, and believe every word of the government’s alarmist climate change propaganda.

Having whipped up so much fear over the past decade, it’s little wonder that such a high proportion of those with a predisposition towards anxiety and OCD behaviour cite “global warming” as a major concern:

A new study has found that many people with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) are worrying about the effects of climate change and global warming.

Researchers from the University of Sydney looked at patients attending an anxiety disorders clinic.

They found one-third of the patients had anxiety about the effects of climate change.

Their behaviours included checking and rechecking pets water bowls, light switches, taps and stoves.

Researchers say while these behaviours are common in obsessive compulsive disorder, the rationale was unique.

They said they were checking appliances to reduce their global footprint.

Researchers say theirs is the first study on the impact of climate change in patients with obsessive compulsive disorder.

They recommend that doctors be aware of the anxiety in the community about climate change. (source)

What a world we live in, where the mainstream media (abetted by the government) literally scares thousands of vulnerable people out of their wits.

Maybe there should be some kind of media regulator after all… /sarc.

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Flannery out of his depth as flooding rains return

8 March, 2012 by

Stewart Franks

Tim Flannery is little short of a national joke. Appointed by the Labor government as “Climate Commissioner” (whatever that is) on a juicy $180k salary for a 3 day week, his string of failed predictions would make even the most hopeless astrologers blush.

He has spread relentless alarmism about climate change, including rising sea levels (despite owning a waterfront property), and now had embarrassed himself yet further by claiming that even if it rained again, it wouldn’t fill the dams, as I sit here in Sydney with an east coast low sitting just offshore dumping widespread rain over the region (nearly 50mm in the last 12 hours at my station), Warragamba spills for the first time in 14 years, and dams across the eastern states are full.

Professor Stewart Franks, from Newcastle University, writing in The Australian, twists the knife:

TIM Flannery, Australia’s Chief Climate Commissioner, once declared that “even the rain that falls will not fill up the dams”.

This was back in 2007 at the height of the protracted drought that afflicted eastern Australia. Now, for the second year in a row, we see the effects of El Nino’s twin sister — La Nina — bringing extreme rainfall across great swaths of Australia. This is hardly the climate change future envisaged by Flannery.

Flannery has recently been the target of growing criticism for his wildly speculative claims, in particular from Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones.

Perhaps of even greater significance, Flannery is being publicly criticised by prominent meteorologists. Indeed, The Weather Channel’s Dick Whitaker recently stated: “People ideally suited to (weather forecasting) are meteorologists. From what I can see on Tim Flannery, meteorology wasn’t one of his specialties.”

In response to this growing criticism, Flannery has declared that the recent “big wet” cannot be taken as evidence that climate change is not happening — it is merely an interlude before we continue with the drying of the continent.

In a statement of extreme chutzpah, he also has declared that interpreting the recent wet is merely confusing weather with climate.

But as Franks explains, Flannery himself is confusing climate variability with climate change:

Despite our uncertainty about the PDO-IPO, one thing should be abundantly clear: to look at simple trends across a relatively short 40-year period is meaningless. If one looks at the trends in eastern Australian climate from 1950 to the present, one can see a marked, statistically significant decline in rainfall and flood risk.

However, if one looks at a similar length of records from, say, 1925 to 1975, we see a statistically significant trend, but in the opposite direction: upward. If Flannery were hawking his climate change message back in 1975, he would probably be claiming that the carbon climate future would be one of permanent flood.

Relatively short trends are clearly irrelevant given the multidecadal variability of eastern Australian climate driven by El Nino-La Nina Southern Oscillation and the PDO-IPO.

Flannery in his opinion piece has also stated: “Some commentators jump on any cold spell or rainy period to claim climate change is not happening. This cherry-picking is irresponsible and misleading.”

It is also true that some commentators jumped on the recent drought to claim climate change was happening. This cherry-picking is indeed irresponsible and entirely misleading.

Read it here.

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