The NZ Herald has finally burned any bridges it may have retained with decently sceptical climate scientists by publishing the above advertisement today pretending the obvious falsehood that the “science on climate change” is “settled”. Continue Reading →
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A really sensible and balanced note is sounded by a leading alarmist blogger. Is some common sense emerging after all the name-calling?
Mark Lynas writes yesterday:
Climate campaigners 350.org recently had an ‘India Beyond Coal’ day of action, supported by assertions such as this:
Our excessive dependence on coal threatens a future where we can pull millions of Indians out of poverty. Rising costs of coal, reduced availability, excessive deforestation, negative health impacts and the climate crisis are strong reasons to begin the transition towards renewable energy and energy efficiency.
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Gareth Renowden at Hot Topic has finally lost whatever finger-nail grip he ever had on climate science.
He now claims (incredibly) that national temperature records “play no part in planning” since forecasts come from computer models, not carefully-kept historical records. It’s sad, really, that NIWA totally disagrees with him. And we shall prove it.
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A story on Mother Jones last July by John Vidal described the world’s highest glacier, Khumbu, turning visibly darker as particles of fine dust, blown by fierce winds, settled on the bright, fresh snow. “One-week-old snow was turning black and brown before my eyes,” said American geologist Ulyana Horodyskyj. Unfortunately she lacked the presence of mind to make a photographic record of this startling event. Continue Reading →
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According to the Herald:
Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority boss Roger Sutton said: “Hugs, jokes … I do do those things, and I’ve hurt somebody with that behaviour and I’m very, very sorry about that.”
Another man bullied into apologising for being a man. Continue Reading →
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We learned that some wind turbine greenhouse gas emissions are easily visible.
It is time to eschew the use of the term ‘wind farms’. We should expunge it from our vocabulary, strike it from every text book and exclude it from every school. Continue Reading →
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You are my family; we’re precious to each other. I strive to preserve your good opinion of me. But some of you have newly discovered my dirty secret: climate change opponents consider me loathsome and call me by odious names. Continue Reading →
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Victoria University of Wellington is to quit its modest investments in fossil fuel.
“The University recognises that the world is still reliant on the fossil fuel industry and the intent of this decision is not to vilify responsible companies in the sector. The University [wants to align] its investment decisions with the results of its scientific research and its public stance on climate change,” said vice-chancellor Grant Guilford.
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In What Mullan actually says on 7 November I answered the Hot Topic post Danger Dedekind heartbreak blah blah of 5 November, in which Mr Gareth Renowden, presumably advised by Dr Brett Mullan, principal climate scientist at NIWA, had levelled criticisms at the recently published reanalysis of the NZ temperature record. I set out to identify clear, falsifiable statements that Gareth Renowden (or Brett Mullan) was making. There were nine debating points, which you can find in What Mullan actually says. We promised every one would be rebutted. Continue Reading →
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In What Mullan actually says on 7 November I answered the Hot Topic post Danger Dedekind heartbreak blah blah of 5 November, in which Mr Gareth Renowden, presumably advised by Dr Brett Mullan, principal climate scientist at NIWA, had levelled criticisms at the recently published reanalysis of the NZ temperature record. I set out to identify clear, falsifiable statements that Gareth Renowden (or Brett Mullan) was making. There were nine debating points, which you can find in What Mullan actually says. We promised every one would be rebutted. Continue Reading →
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In What Mullan actually says on 7 November I answered the Hot Topic post Danger Dedekind heartbreak blah blah of 5 November, in which Mr Gareth Renowden, presumably advised by Dr Brett Mullan, principal climate scientist at NIWA, had levelled criticisms at the recently published reanalysis of the NZ temperature record. I set out to identify clear, falsifiable statements that Gareth Renowden (or Brett Mullan) was making. There were nine debating points, which you can find in What Mullan actually says. We promised every one would be rebutted. Continue Reading →
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… much of it at the price of hard labour.
The man responsible for maintaining India’s power supply says he wants the country’s coal production to double within the next five years. Continue Reading →
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Len Mills tells us of a study showing past climate change was caused not by atmospheric carbon dioxide but by changed ocean circulation releasing heat into the atmosphere.
Most of the concerns about climate change have focused on the amount of greenhouse gases that have been released into the atmosphere, but in a new study published in Science, a group of Rutgers researchers have found that circulation of the ocean plays an equally important role in regulating the earth’s climate. Continue Reading →
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From The Hockey Schtick (h/t Richard Cumming) we learn that the Ivanpah solar thermal plant (the world’s largest), on the edge of the Mojave desert in California, has failed to keep its promise of renewable, reliable, cheap, climate-changing electric power. Which is a shame, but at least it’s their own money they’re playing with. Continue Reading →
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I’ve been laid low for the last three days by a virus (according to my ever-accurate wife it’s a virus, though it might be a bacterium; when I asked her why she calls it a virus, she was nonspecific—so it left me unsatisfied but ended the conversation) which has gone through the family from one end and out the other from babies to grandparents. Nobody said life would be easy.
Your host is back with reduced but reviving vigour.
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Len Mills sends us a study of wind farms reported in the Daily Mail. It emerges that their real production history falls a long way short of the breathless claims some make for them.
I too wish to save the world, but not by using wind turbines, because they’ll ruin us first. They’re expensive, ugly, short-lived, noisy to the point of ill-health, ugly, kill bats and birds, they stop generating if there’s too little or too much wind, they demand lots of rare metals and they’re ugly. Continue Reading →
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This is dynamite. Heartland’s November Environment & Climate News reports scientist Jennifer Marohasy and environment editor Graham Lloyd, among others, have learned the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) has been “fudging” historical temperature records to fit a warming narrative. Continue Reading →
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We were discussing the difficult peer review of the new local paper A Reanalysis of Long-Term Surface Air Temperature Trends in New Zealand when one of the authors sent me this cartoon, remarking simply: Continue Reading →
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In Renowden’s latest apologia at Hot Topic it is quite difficult to discern Brett Mullan’s arguments through the thicket of abuse and misdirection created by Renowden. But I think these are the debating points he’s trying to make, lined up with the passages in which he makes them.
When he says:
Let me pose a question. What does Dedekind think Rhoades and Salinger were doing in their 1993 paper? Indulging in a purely theoretical exercise? In fact, they developed their techniques by working on what became the Seven Station Series (7SS), and from 1992 onwards the 7SS was compiled using RS93 methods properly applied.
We’ll call that Debating point 1. From 1992 onwards the 7SS was recalculated using the Rhoades & Salinger (1993) measurement techniques.
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The Climate Conversation web site has been under determined attack by cyber criminals over the last two months. Over 5.5 million web requests and 1.3 million spam messages deluged the server during September and October. I wondered at the persistently slow responses and recently complained. My web host provider was already diagnosing the problem and yesterday brought the attacks to an end, though at the cost of isolating China. Sorry, China!
Our web traffic, already busy, had soared to three times normal, 80% to 90% of it from China, enormously inflating our log files. The SysAdmin told me:
Your logs have been much larger than normal for months, but only caused the server to stop all processing in the last few weeks. Your logs haven’t processed for over a month but others on the server only stopped when yours hung for a week.
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First foray against Renowden’s latest polemic. There’ll be more.
Hot Topic keeps its hands grubby with another poisonous piece of writing. In Danger Dedekind! Heartbreak Ahead (still wrong, still digging, NZ still warming fast) Gareth Renowden first attacks Chris de Freitas:
Given de Freitas’ track record, it is unsurprising that I queried the peer review process at Environmental Modelling and Assessment.
No, it IS surprising, since it’s a completely different journal and Chris is not the editor. Continue Reading →
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I have rediscovered an incomplete skirmish with NIWA’s chief executive, Mr John Morgan; all that remains for me is to concede defeat. This is my last post mourning the passing of good science. Continue Reading →
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Great! Chris de Freitas got through to Anthony Watts and there’s an announcement up on the world’s biggest climate blog.
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… and another bite…
There’s a third bite to be had from Gareth Renowden’s inept rebuttal of the new paper A Reanalysis of Long-Term Surface Air Temperature Trends in New Zealand by de Freitas, Dedekind and Brill (2014), just published in Environmental Modeling & Assessment. Recall that he said:
The paper as published contains no workings or supplemental material that would allow reproduction of their results,
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— by Bob Dedekind
I chuckled at Gareth Renowden’s attempt to rebut our paper, for two reasons: he makes many mistakes and whoever is feeding him bits of information seems to let him down.
I printed out and highlighted his mistakes so I could deal with them individually. However, when I had finished the whole article was one big highlighted blob, so I’ll focus just on the most glaring mistakes. Continue Reading →
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Now for another bite…
Let me take a second bite at Gareth Renowden’s toxic commentary on the new national temperature reanalysis.
Remember that Renowden says in his vitriolic post:
dFDB 2014 repeats the old canard that NIWA’s Seven Station Series (7SS) before the 2010 review was based on the adjustments made in Jim Salinger’s 1981 thesis. This was … so transparently at odds with written reports and papers from 1992 onwards that it was easy for NIWA to refute.
There are two rebuttals I can make: Continue Reading →
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