The weather isn't getting weirder

16 February, 2011 by

Big weather for sure, but weather just the same

Try telling that to Bob Brown, or Tim Flannery or any of the countless other alarmists who have no concept of geological time, or even recent weather history. All you need to do is search the news archive to find countless stories of terrible disasters well before man’s emissions of carbon dioxide could possibly have had any effect.

But instead, whenever we suffer extreme weather, the Chicken Littles rush to blame “man-made global warming” because they cannot think of anything else, and they have a political agenda to advance by whatever means possible. We saw it with the Queensland floods, and Cyclone Yasi, the Big Dry and the Victorian bushfires, and we will no doubt continue to see it for every extreme weather event in the foreseeable future.

But unfortunately, a recent study shows no evidence of increasing severe or extreme weather, as the Wall Street Journal reports:

Last week a severe storm froze Dallas under a sheet of ice, just in time to disrupt the plans of the tens of thousands of (American) football fans descending on the city for the Super Bowl. On the other side of the globe, Cyclone Yasi slammed northeastern Australia, destroying homes and crops and displacing hundreds of thousands of people.

Some climate alarmists would have us believe that these storms are yet another baleful consequence of man-made CO2 emissions. In addition to the latest weather events, they also point to recent cyclones in Burma, last winter’s fatal chills in Nepal and Bangladesh, December’s blizzards in Britain, and every other drought, typhoon and unseasonable heat wave around the world.

But is it true? To answer that question, you need to understand whether recent weather trends are extreme by historical standards. The Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project is the latest attempt to find out, using super-computers to generate a dataset of global atmospheric circulation from 1871 to the present.

As it happens, the project’s initial findings, published last month, show no evidence of an intensifying weather trend. “In the climate models, the extremes get more extreme as we move into a doubled CO2 world in 100 years,” atmospheric scientist Gilbert Compo, one of the researchers on the project, tells me from his office at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “So we were surprised that none of the three major indices of climate variability that we used show a trend of increased circulation going back to 1871.”

In other words, researchers have yet to find evidence of more-extreme weather patterns over the period, contrary to what the models predict. “There’s no data-driven answer yet to the question of how human activity has affected extreme weather,” adds Roger Pielke Jr., another University of Colorado climate researcher. (source)

And the conclusion makes even more sense: “prosperity and preparedness help”. In other words, we must have strong economies in order to adapt to the inevitable climate changes that will affect humanity in the future, not economies that are fatally crippled by pointless emissions reduction taxes.

(h/t Peter C)

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A thousandth of a degree for $2,000 per family

16 February, 2011 by

Climate sense

That’s the cost/benefit analysis of a price on carbon in Australia, as Bob Carter points out in a letter to The Australian this morning:

OUR new Climate Commissioner, Tim Flannery, says that his role is to provide accurate information to the public about climate change. (Letters, 15/2).

Perhaps he might start by answering the two most critical questions that taxpayers have in mind.

The first is how many degrees of warming will be averted by a cut in Australian CO2 emissions of, say, 20 per cent by 2020. Second, what extra costs, including all flow-through costs, will be imposed on an average family by the taxation strategy that is aimed at producing such a cut. Available estimates indicate that the answers to these questions are: (i) less than one one-thousandth of a degree Celsius by 2020; and (ii) more than $2000 per family of four per year.

Australian battlers, on whom the extra costs will impinge the most, are unlikely to view this as a good public policy option, and if Flannery has more policy-favourable figures in mind, then now might be a good time to share them with us.

Bob Carter, Townsville, Qld

Seems like great value, doesn’t it?

Source.

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Joke of the Week: Flannery appointed Climate Commissioner

10 February, 2011 by

Official government alarmist

Seriously, this is no joke. It’s a savage indictment of our government’s blinkered attitude to climate change:

ENVIRONMENTALIST and former Australian of the Year Tim Flannery has been appointed to a newly-created position as Australia’s climate commissioner.

The well-known global warming activist will chair a panel of six other experts, including scientists and economists.

The commission will work independently of government to advance awareness of climate change issues in the community.

The body was a Labor climate change election commitment, but was overshadowed by the now aborted citizen’s assembly plan. (source)

Seriously, this is a total joke. Andrew Bolt exposes the total, utter idiocy of this appointment here.

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Earth's natural negative feedbacks

7 January, 2011 by

Negative feedback

Feedbacks are what climate alarmism is built on. The warming effect of carbon dioxide alone is already almost at its maximum, and a doubling of the concentration would at most add less than 1 degree C to the global temperature. But the alarmist models use that modest warming to initiate positive feedbacks, increasing and accelerating it to dangerous and catastrophic levels.

Here, however, is a great example of the planet’s natural tendency for negative feedbacks:

Bacteria ate nearly all the potentially climate-warming methane that spewed from BP’s broken wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico last year, scientists reported on Thursday.

Nearly 200,000 tons of methane — more than any other single hydrocarbon emitted in the accident — were released from the wellhead, and nearly all of it went into the deep water of the Gulf, researcher David Valentine of the University of California-Santa Barbara said in a telephone interview.

Bacteria managed to take in the methane before it could rise from the sea bottom and be released into the atmosphere, but the process contributed to a loss of about 1 million tons of dissolved oxygen in areas southwest of the well.

That sounds like a lot of oxygen loss, but it was widely spread out, so that the bacterial munching did not contribute to a life-sapping low-oxygen condition known as hypoxia, said Valentine, whose study was published in the journal Science.

What happens to methane has been a key question for climate scientists, because methane is over 20 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. Like carbon dioxide, methane comes from natural and human-made sources, including the petroleum industry.

…

The BP spill offered an “accidental experiment” that showed particular bacteria with an all-methane diet multiplied quickly as the methane spread with the underwater plume from the broken well. Peak consumption of methane probably came in late July and early August, Valentine said.

Other organisms dealt with other hydrocarbons, including ethane and propane emitted in the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history. The methane-eating bacteria were the last to the hydrocarbon banquet, and based on past observation, the scientists questioned whether they could do the job.

“Given observations about how slowly methane is normally consumed, we didn’t think the (bacteria) population was up to the challenge at all … we thought it would be a lot slower,” Valentine said. (source)

How wrong they were. It’s not surprising if you think about it – in a massively complex ecosystem such as our own planet, when a particular variable begins to increase (methane concentration), there will be some natural process (explosion of methane-consuming bacteria) to act as a negative feedback to restore the system to a quiescent state. Crikey, I’m beginning to sound like a Gaia-freak!

Speaking of Gaia freaks, ACM stalwart Andy Pitman (see here for one of Pitman’s previous classics) comes to a fellow warmist’s aid in today’s Australian, playing down Tim Flannery’s “earth-mother” nonsense on The Science Show (see here), and spouting all the usual alarmist nonsense we would expect from someone on the AGW funding bandwagon:

Flannery made a series of eloquent points in his interview and the transcript is worth reading in full. However, he also said: “I think that within this century the concept of strong Gaia will actually become physically manifest.” This is about as silly, in my view, as Flannery’s statement on the ABC’s Lateline program in November 2009 that global warming had not occurred over the past 10 years, that “there hasn’t been a continuation of that warming trend”. This statement was incorrect and highlights the dangers of a scientist commenting outside their area of expertise. (source)

So the one statement Flannery gets right, Pitman complains about! You get the picture…

And finally, a moral tale of junk science which cost millions of dollars (and possibly lives), which was finally exposed as fraud. Sound familiar?

RESEARCH linking childhood vaccination to autism is not only flawed but a fraud, the British Medical Journal declared yesterday.

The journal thus “closed the door” on the health scare of a decade.

It branded the bombshell study by Andrew Wakefield – published by its prestigious rival The Lancet in 1998 and retracted last year – as an “elaborate fraud”.

Mr Wakefield had been secretly working for a class-action law firm that planned to sue the manufacturers of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, at the time he published his paper linking the jab to childhood autism, the BMJ claimed in an article published yesterday.

The resulting public health scare caused by the original article triggered a boycott of the vaccine in Britain, where immunisation rates crashed to 80 per cent.

The BMJ article, by investigative journalist Brian Deer, claims that Mr Wakefield was paid a total of $677,000.

“The paper was in fact an elaborate fraud,” the BMJ says in a separate editorial. “Meanwhile, the damage to public health continues.” (source)

And this is just small fry compared to the fraud being perpetrated by the GW alarmists on the global economy and standards of living.

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ABC's loathsome propaganda machine

26 December, 2010 by

Double whammy

The fact that the national broadcaster has a well-known and self-confessed climate alarmist as the presenter of its “flagship” science programme, The Science Show, is a perfect example of the ABC “groupthink” Maurice Newman exposed so clearly in March 2010. Robyn Williams is well known to the readers of ACM, having achieved a veritable litany of guest appearances (see here for a few examples) and is someone who accepts the politically motivated pronouncements of the IPCC, cobbled together as they are from environmental advocacy groups’ tatty leaflets, without a hint of scientific impartiality or healthy scepticism. So it is little wonder that whenever climate matters are discussed, it is invariably from the alarmist viewpoint, with generous helpings of “denier”, “flat earther”, “Big Oil”, “tobacco” and all the usual tedious ad hominems hurled at sceptics thrown in for good measure.

Oddly, for some strange reason, the audio and transcript from the 1 January 2011 programme, which opens with Williams wishing everyone a Happy New Year, has already been published on the ABC web site (making readers feel like they have tunnelled through some space-time wormhole), and therefore I can advise you to AVOID IT LIKE THE PLAGUE [and avoid the following week’s show even more, for reasons which I will discuss later – Ed]. For Williams’ guest on the show is none other than that other ACM favourite, Tim “Flannel” Flannery, whose name is almost invariably prefaced by “Australian Alarmist of the Year”  to add a bit of street cred. However, since the alarmists love to do this, I will just point out, purely for the record you understand, that Flannery isn’t a climate scientist, he’s a mammalogist and palaeontologist (according to Wikipedia), but despite that he is a “global warming activist” and since he’s plugging the consensus/IPCC/ABC/Labor view, that’s just fine. We only worry about qualifications when it’s a climate realist we’re talking about, right?

To an extent, the details of the interview are irrelevant (the transcript runs for a mind-numbing 20 pages), but as would be expected, Williams gives Flannery a free ride to plug his new book and spout all the usual misrepresentations about the current state of the climate. The two of them seem perfectly happy to inhabit this cosseted world, insulated from reality, where they can stew in their own alarmist juices. There’s lots of Gaia talk, a theme of the new book, which Flannery tries to argue has some scientific merit, which shouldn’t surprise anyone, since it has the same level of pseudo-scientific credibility as catastrophic AGW:

Robyn Williams: So there you’ve got an image of the earth, the planet as a god, but also a very sophisticated and credible scientific idea.

Tim Flannery: That’s right. I was tempted in the book to simply give in and call it Earth System Science, because Gaia is earth system science and in many university departments around the world, as you’ll know, Robyn, earth system science is a very respectable science. But as soon as you mention Gaia of course, the scepticism comes out. I didn’t do that though, because I think there’s a certain elegance to Gaia, to that word and the concept, and also because I think that within this century the concept of the strong Gaia will actually become physically manifest. I do think that the Gaia of the Ancient Greeks, where they believed the earth was effectively one whole and perfect living creature, that doesn’t exist yet, but it will exist in future. That’s why I wanted to keep that word.

“Physically manifest”? “It will exist in the future”? But that’s just the start – things get even more astrological, straying dangerously close to “energy crystals”, tarot cards and ouija boards, accompanied by the stench of patchouli wafting from the monitor screen. Williams actually dares ask a tricky question, but then doesn’t follow through:

Robyn Williams: How will it exist in the future? Because an organism is one thing; the earth is complicated, but it is after all a lump of rock with iron in the middle and a veneer of living things outside, and a very thin atmosphere. It’s not an organism, so how is the feedback system such that it stabilises things, temperature anyway, like an organism?

Tim Flannery: That’s the great question. I must admit that as I wrote the book I was unable to come to a clear landing on the extent of Gaian control over the system, because much of the data is equivocal. I think that there is clear evidence for something that I call in the book geo-pheromones, which are elements within the earth system, which when present in very small amounts have very large outcomes, a bit like ant pheromones. But they often do multiple jobs. Some ant pheromones do as well, but many of them are specific. One of those is course carbon dioxide, a trace amount in the atmosphere, four parts per ten thousand is enough to keep the earth habitable. Ozone is another one present in just a few parts per billion. Human-made CFCs are yet another one. Atmospheric dust may well be another one. So these elements in the earth system have a profound impact on the system, and there is some evidence that there’s some sort of homeostasis established, if you want. But you don’t have to look very far into earth history to see that homeostasis change. When I say homeostasis, that’s like my temperature is always at 98.4˚ or whatever it is.

Robyn Williams: As are your body fluids largely maintained.

Tim Flannery: Yes, all balanced and everything.

This kind of pagan Earth-worship stretches credibility as thin as it can go. And as always, Flannery goes on to presents the bog-standard alarmist climate arguments – faster, bigger, badder, worser:

Tim Flannery: … The climate science is getting more dismal at the same time this is happening. We’ve seen the IPCC projections are now ground truthed against real world change, and we see that we’re tracking the worst case scenario, which is 6˚ of warming.

Robyn Williams: Six! [Why does that surprise you, Mr “100 meters of sea level rise by 2100” Williams?]

Tim Flannery: Yes, that’s for the early part of the curve. You know what happened in 2001, the IPCC produced these projections and they indicated that if we double CO2 above pre-industrial levels there’s a 60% chance that the result will be a 2˚ or 3˚ rise in temperature, a 10% chance of a 1˚ rise and 10% rise of a 6˚ rise. Because those projections were done ten years ago, scientists are now going back and looking at the real world data and saying were the projections right or not? It turns out that they were wrong. They were too conservative, at least for the early part of the projection curve. We’re seeing the worst case scenario unfold.

Is this an outright lie? I guess not, because Flannery is relying solely on the UHI-contaminated, corrupted and fudged surface temperature record, which conveniently fits the alarmist cause (wonder why, with Jimmy Hansen in charge?). If he actually stopped to consider satellite records, which cannot be “adjusted”, global temperatures are tracking well below IPCC projections. But that’s not going to grab any headlines, and it certainly doesn’t fit the ABC’s groupthink agenda.

But as I said, all this detail is irrelevant. When you have a flagship science programme hosted by a presenter with a blatant political agenda to push, it is no longer science, but propaganda – precisely what Maurice Newman was keen to avoid at the ABC. Flannery is happy to smear a geologist, Bob Carter, for not looking at the “appropriate timescales” when considering climate – the ultimate irony, given that geologists have a far better understanding of timescale than climatologists or politicians – but why doesn’t Williams actually bite the bullet and invite Carter on his show? I mean, his arguments are paper-thin, so clearly he will simply make a fool of himself, right?

But it’s not that simple. This isn’t about being persuaded by facts or rational argument – this is all about religion and faith. Just as billions of Christians put their faith in the Christmas story and the Bible, so Williams and Flannery are devout followers of the Church of Global Warming, and anything that contradicts the holy scripture (An Inconvenient Truth) is heresy. Maurice Newman should kick Williams out of the ABC – nothing prevents him from making a career as a ecotard activist or Green politician, that’s his right as a citizen in a democracy, but there is no place for him at the national broadcaster.

You can read the transcript here.

And the reason you should avoid the following programme?

“Next week on the Science Show, the dynamic Naomi Oreskes at the University of NSW on merchants of doubt – how a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. I’m Robyn Williams.”

Lumping climate realists with Big Tobacco… the ABC propaganda mill grinds ever onwards, at your expense. More on this next week, no doubt.

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Flannel from Flannery: Rudd betrayed trust on ETS

27 May, 2010 by

More flannel than a pair of pyjamas

The environmental journos at the Sydney Morning Herald would print Tim Flannery’s farts if they could only work out how to spell them, such is the awe in which this rent-a-quote global warming advocate is held. Calling Flannery an “internationally renowned climate expert” is an insult to climate experts (and we know how highly regarded they are). But he’s a climate hysteric, so that’s good enough for the Moonbat Herald, which has already made up its mind on climate change and will print any old alarmist rubbish that flops limply on to the environment desk:

An internationally renowned climate expert has savaged Prime Minister Kevin Rudd for a “profound betrayal of trust” on climate change.

Tim Flannery, a former Australian of the Year [grovel, grovel, smarm, smarm], said he was unlikely to vote Labor again after Mr Rudd shelved plans for an emissions trading scheme.

“It’s a profound betrayal of the person I voted for,” Professor Flannery told AAP at a conference in Canberra.

“Politicians only have one thing that they trade in, which is trust … unfortunately my trust in the party’s been corroded.”

Like we care?

Prof Flannery is a scientist and author who is heavily involved in international efforts to tackle global warming. [Wikipedia says paleontologist and mammalogist, but hey, we only worry about qualifications when we’re talking about sceptics, right?]

As fresh data showed Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions are rising again after dipping during the financial crisis, Prof Flannery berated Australia for being a “wooden spooner” on climate change.

He accused both major parties of a failure of political leadership, but said the problem went deeper.

The political system was captive to big business and dominated by old men. [Please stop, my aching sides will surely split]

“They seem to have a fossilised mindset … not all the fossils are in the ground,” the 2007 Australian of the Year [again?] told a green business conference in Parliament House.

Sycophantic, nauseating tripe.

Don’t bother reading it here.

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More flannel from Flannery

20 February, 2010 by

Flannelly

The reason the “sceptics are winning” is because the scientists are not explaining climate science to the public well enough. Of course, that’s it – makes sense. Nothing to do with the scandal ridden and corrupt IPCC, or the fact that the world continues to ignore the dire predictions of the climate models, of course.

Environmentalist Tim Flannery has blamed scientists for a rise in climate scepticism, saying they had not clearly explained the science to a ”confused Australian public”.

Professor Flannery, a long-time climate campaigner [so no bias there, clearly – Ed], told The Age that scientists needed to get back into the community and explain the link between greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.

He said a lack of simple communication to the public about the science of climate change meant sceptics had been able to fill the void with misinformation.

Professor Flannery also supported comments by Climate Change Minister Penny Wong that there was a concerted world effort by sceptics to stop action on global warming.

”We’ve got a big problem with the gap between scientific information and a very confused public here in Australia,” Professor Flannery said.

”The only way to solve that is to listen to the Australian people’s questions and talk to them about it, and they [the scientists] have been rather poor at doing that.”

Unfortunately for you, the public are hell of a lot smarter than you give them credit for, Tim, and they can see straight through your flannel.

Read it here.

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Jobs for the boys: Flannery to head climate change council

14 November, 2009 by

flannery

Flannelly

Who says alarmism doesn’t pay? It does when you have a government like ours in charge:

The Coast and Climate Change Council, headed by Tim Flannery, was officially announced by Climate Change Minister Penny Wong in Sydney on Saturday, coinciding with the release of a report looking at necessary preparations for coastal maintenance.

“This report marks a new phase in our work on adapting to a climate change we can’t avoid,” Senator Wong told local government mayors, councillors, community members and reporters at Sydney’s Clovelly beach on Saturday.

“And as part of this I’m announcing that we will be establishing a Coast and Climate Change Council to be chaired by Tim Flannery to engage with the community and stakeholders, local government, state government and advise the government in the lead up to the coastal forum which we propose to hold early next year.

Just when we need cool heads and impartial judgement, we get an AGW hysteric. Nice work if you can get it.

Read it here.

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