If it's hot, it's climate change

20 January, 2013 by

Brass monkeys

Brass monkeys

UPDATE: Read Warwick Hughes’ analysis of Sydney’s “hottest day eva” here.

But if it’s cold, it’s “just weather”. Actually, no, that’s climate change too (it’s called having an each way bet).

The agenda-driven attitudes to the reporting of any kind of extreme weather are so predictable.

Whilst the Australian media is hyperventilating over a heatwave Down Under, already attributed by several news organisations and government bodies to “global warming”, the severe snowfalls in Europe, which, we were sternly advised in 2000, would be a thing of the past, are merely an intriguing curiosity of the weather:

Extreme winter weather swept across western Europe Saturday, leaving thousands of passengers stranded at London’s main international airport and claiming several lives in Spain, Portugal and France, including those of three Mali-bound soldiers.

The frigid temperatures also caused delays and cancellations on major railway lines including the Eurostar train service, and transport authorities warned of further traffic disruptions with more blizzards forecast for Sunday.

In London, thousands of passengers were forced to camp out on the floors of Heathrow Airport overnight as hundreds of flights to and from the British capital were cancelled.

“There are lots of bodies lying around in the airport. If feels like there’s been a natural disaster,” Jerry Meng from Los Angeles, whose flight to New York was cancelled, told British broadcaster BBC.

London’s other main airports, Gatwick and Stansted, managed to operate fairly normally Saturday.

For Sunday, the snow is expected to cause a 20-percent traffic reduction at Heathrow, and French air traffic authorities have ordered a 40 percent cut in take-offs and landings at Paris’ Charles De Gaulle and Orly airports. (source)

Yes, the heat in Australia was extreme, and records were broken, but is that not to be expected? The planet is warming slowly and has been for several hundred years, primarily due to natural recovery from the Little Ice Age. It is not surprising that records will continue to be exceeded.

What is surprising is that it has taken from 1939 until 2013 for the record to be broken in Sydney, despite nearly 80 years of gradually increasing global temperatures and massive increase in the urban heat island effect in the city. And the all time record from 1960 at Oodnadatta remains.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

Canberra's coldest mornings since 1965

9 July, 2012 by

A light dusting of global warming there…

From the Weather Isn’t Climate department. Cue Tim Flannery, Will Steffen or David Karoly saying that this is “consistent with global warming” in 3, 2, 1…

Canberra has shivered through its eighth straight freezing, frosty morning, the coldest stretch of winter mornings in 47 years.

The mercury dropped to a chilly minus 4.8 degrees at 6.51am this morning, topping off eight consecutive mornings below minus 2.3 degrees.

The eight-day cold spell, with an average minimum temperature of minus 4.9, is the coldest string of July mornings since 1965. The all-time record was in July 1962, when the average temperature over an eight-day period was minus 7.

Canberrans felt the worst of the cold on Wednesday, when temperatures fell to minus 6.1 degrees, 6 degrees colder than the long-term July average of minus 0.1.

Wednesday’s low is still far from the record July minimum of minus 10 degrees, recorded in 1971, but is just shy of the lowest temperature recorded this year, which was minus 6.3 degrees on June 20. (source)

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ABC: "warm weather" caused Moscow's freezing chaos

29 December, 2010 by

"Unseasonably warm"

Stop laughing at the back, the ABC is being deadly serious here. The closure of Moscow’s airports is nothing to do with “extreme cold”, which itself is a sign of global warming (© ABC, CSIRO, New York Times, Sydney Morning Herald etc etc), but “unseasonably warm weather” which itself is, of course, a sign of global warming… or something. My brain hurts.

Russian prosecutors have launched a probe into how bad weather caused massive disruption at Moscow’s two largest airports as passengers staged protests against the chaos that has left thousands stranded.

Freezing weather and power outages have delayed more than 200 flights at Moscow’s Domodedovo and Sheremetyevo airports, with some passengers staging protests in security check areas.

Moscow transportation prosecutor Yevgeny Pospelov says he has launched a probe into the massive delays aimed to “protect the rights of passengers”.

Ironically, the chaos was caused not by a cold snap but by unseasonably warm weather which meant torrential freezing rain, rather than snow, fell at the weekend, leaving a treacherous layer of ice on roads and runways. (source)

Pass the vodka.

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Japan shelves ETS – Australia should do the same

29 December, 2010 by

Mt Fuji: try offsetting that...

China and India have no intention of strangling their economic growth with emissions reductions, the US won’t be enacting climate legislation anytime soon, but plucky little Australia, with its massive 1.28% contribution to global emissions (down from 1.5% as those from developing countries skyrocket) is prepared to sacrifice its prosperity on the altar of “tackling global warming”. Why shouldn’t we, says our Julia? The EU has an ETS (which hasn’t reduced emissions and is bogged down in corruption and fraud), New Zealand has an ETS (on their 0.11%, or just over one thousandth, of global emissions), and very soon Japan will as well… no, wait, reality check ahead:

JAPAN’S decision to postpone its plans for an ETS by 2013 has increased pressure on Julia Gillard over her goal of pricing carbon next year.

The postponement has also set back efforts for a global market to cut global carbon pollution [harmless carbon dioxide gas – Ed]

Opposition climate action spokesman Greg Hunt called on the Prime Minister to rule out an emissions trading scheme by New Year’s Day in the wake of the Japanese move.

The decision by the world’s fifth-largest greenhouse gas emitter and Australia’s second-largest trading partner to postpone the scheme for a year comes after the US also stepped back from a national emissions trading scheme and as international firms remain concerned about lax pollution controls in China, which has no obligations under the Kyoto Protocol.

…

Two weeks ago, [Greg Combet] defended the Rudd government’s carbon pollution reduction scheme, dumped by the former prime minister. He said it had included an emissions trading scheme that would have “provided the greatest certainty that Australia would meet its emissions reductions targets”.

But, Mr Hunt said, the government’s plans were “now in tatters”.

“First Canada, second the US and now Japan have all determined that there is a better way to cut emissions than a massive electricity tax.

“The Prime Minister should drop this electricity tax before New Year’s Day.” (source)

Not a chance, Greg Hunt. Don’t forget, Bob Brown and the Greens have a loaded gun pressed to Labor’s head – drop the carbon price, they pull the trigger. They’ll probably pull the trigger anyway, when Labor don’t agree to 90% cuts by next year, or whatever nonsense the Greens want.

In other news, The Australian’s Cut and Paste section is devoted to the cognitive dissonance emanating from the US warmists as snowstorms hit New York:

Judah Cohen in The New York Times, December 25:

THE earth continues to get warmer, yet it’s feeling a lot colder outside. All of this cold was met with perfect comic timing by the release of a World Meteorological Organisation report showing that 2010 will probably be among the three warmest years on record, and 2001 through 2010 the warmest decade on record. How can we reconcile this? The not-so-obvious short answer is that the overall warming of the atmosphere is actually creating cold-weather extremes. It’s all a snow job by nature. The reality is, we’re freezing not in spite of climate change but because of it.

John Goetz on the website Watts Up With That? on December 27:

[JUDAH Cohen] had to be joking, right? There is no way a “director of seasonal forecasting at an atmospheric and environmental research firm” could possibly believe the weather we are experiencing out here on the east coast is in any way different from the past. The New York City blizzard of March 1888 certainly left a lasting impression, as it was used to measure several other bruising storms. (source)

And an editorial warns us that watching the climate has blinded us to watching the weather:

Failure to watch the weather as well as the climate has arguably led to loss of life and injury that might have been avoided if authorities had spread grit on British roads as well as spreading the word about global warming. International airlines, so busy selling carbon offsets for global miles, might have been better employed ensuring that Heathrow bought a few more snow ploughs. The tendency to see the wood and not the trees was illustrated last month as ABC TV’s Lateline interviewed Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti, the British special envoy on climate and energy security. While he was busy in Canberra talking about the long-term impact of climate change on national security, back in Britain the weather threat from cold and snow was looming as a real and present danger. (source)

A tiny puddle of climate sanity in a mighty ocean of climate madness.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , ,
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