Chief sceptics explain everything about climate denial

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h/t – Mike Jowsey

E.M. Smith, known in blogworld as Chiefio, replied at Jo Nova to Paul Bain’s response to Jo’s letter critical of Bain’s Nature “paper” on climate scepticism, which uses the deplorable term “deniers”.

Here is Jo’s delicious letter to Bain, wherein she takes a rational machete to tangled thickets of climate denial and produces an irrefutable exculpation of climate sceptics:

——————–
Dear Dr Paul Bain,

Right now, it’s almost my life’s work to communicate the empirical evidence on anthropogenic climate change.

I can help you with your research on deniers. I have studied the mental condition of denial most carefully. There is a simple key to converting the convictions of people in this debate, and I have seen it work hundreds of times. Indeed, my own convictions that lasted 17 years were turned around in a few days. I can help you. It would be much simpler than you think. Continue Reading →

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Wyndham on wind farms to the bishop

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Sent to me three days ago from Outside The Beltway Group (thanks!) – You can link here to Rupert’s MS Word document for distribution.

14 June 2012.

Rt. Rev. Michael Langrish
Bishop of Exeter
The Bishop’s Office
The Palace
Exeter, EX1 1HY

Dear Bishop Langrish

Earlier in the week I listened to what you had to say following the welcome decision to withdraw the diocese’s application to erect wind turbines in Devon. I see that your remarks have now been republished in The Daily Telegraph. In particular, it is striking that you consider that you and your staff were subjected to abuse by objectors. Well, I was not part of any such exchanges and do not condone, in your own words, ‘bullying tactics’. On the other hand, I cannot help pointing out – to a churchman and so an ethical standard bearer, most especially – that such tactics are an absolutely routine component of the dialectical arsenal favoured by climate change proselytisers, Continue Reading →

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Climate warrior’s only sword is science

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Steve McIntyre

New pinnacle for climate sceptics

Steve McIntyre reaches new heights in his resolute scrutiny of climate science and raises the bar for fellow sceptics. For the lead author of a new paper has acknowledged McIntyre’s work in identifying an error so serious it may alter the paper’s results and has certainly forced a delay in its publication.

But note that although McIntyre “also” identified “this data processing issue”, he wasn’t first – the team beat him to it.

Anthony at WUWT describes the story and Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit is the story. Here’s the letter to Steve from the paper’s senior author, David Karoly. Continue Reading →

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Imagine — a computer predicts our demise just as…

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… our demise occurs!

Here’s an argument against the validity of climate catastrophe, straight out of the “too good to be true” basket. It goes something like this:

“After several centuries of humanity’s meandering technological development, the odds are remote that, at precisely the time of our demise, we developed computer hardware and models sophisticated enough to predict our imminent demise.”

Computers are now sophisticated enough to model our demise but not so sophisticated that they know more than we do. The likelihood of our demise actually being imminent is vanishingly small because:

  1. We don’t know how the climate works.
  2. There’s been no warming since 1995, despite a 20% increase in CO2.
  3. The atmosphere (since 2001) and the ocean (since 2004) have been cooling.
  4. Models fail hindcasts, thus inspiring no confidence in their forecasts.
  5. The IPCC, from whom the government takes its advice, is utterly discredited.
  6. There’s been no alteration in natural rates of sea-level change.
  7. We don’t know how the climate works.

But don’t believe me – ask any climate scientist (warmist or sceptic) and they’ll tell you we don’t know how the climate works.

h/t – GJB

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If it was “settled science” how did you improve it?

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For if it had no defects, why did you study it?

But if you studied it, why did you never deny the claim that it was settled?

Climate scientists of New Zealand: you have deceived us.

_______

The RSNZ is planning to announce progress in climate science since the AR4 in 2007.

Since 2007 and earlier, from Al Gore down, these arrogant shouts around the world have escaped challenge by the scientific establishment: “the science is settled” on climate change! The claim has been around for most of the century.

The Royal Society of New Zealand has never, to my knowledge, used the phrase “the science is settled.”

It did set up the government-funded Science Media Centre (SMC), with its Sciblogs department, which re-blogs numerous odious posts from such celebrated centres of scientific excellence as Hot Topic and Open Parachute. And those blogs and their manic commenters provide all the spittle-lipped propaganda you could ever wish for the “settled science” believers without needing contributions from the respected scientists at the RS. Continue Reading →

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Exguesstrapolation

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Close your eyes. Think of glaciers. Now, exguesstrapolate.

This comment from Historical Imagery of Greenland Glaciers Lessens Sea Level Rise Alarm at WUWT is too good to be allowed to languish in the comments section:

*****
Severian says:
June 4, 2012 at 10:00 pm

As for extrapolations and such, remember what Mark Twain said:

“In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. Continue Reading →

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Little authority for dog of a job

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tyrants

Are you getting used to it?

First, random stopping of any innocent person on the public street, with no cause needing to be shown, to catch the occasional miscreant. You got used to that. Now it’s mere local body bureaucrats breaking into our formerly sacrosanct houses to enforce some obscure little bylaw about keeping pets. Ready to march down the Queen Street, are we? I wish. But by now we’re all too used to it!

Week after week we chase the couldn’t-care-less dog owners to renew their licence. They want the dog — we let them have it. Why can’t they pay up on time? Sure, we put the price up 300%. But we go to a lot of trouble and expense in administration. Like I say, we chase the little buggers all year long, and it’s always the same culprits.

So there I am, I can hear the dog in the house, and the owner’s obviously not home. I want that dog. There’s only one thing the owners understand, and that’s losing their precious bloody pet. I’m going in. I find a window ajar and unlock the front door. Don’t tell me I need a damned search warrant.

Continue Reading →

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BREAKING NEWS: Crude oil is natural

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Oil spill

Gulf oil spill. Hideous, but transient.

But wait, there’s more: it’s biodegradable too

Let us remind ourselves that the crude oil we recover from under our feet is neither foreign nor man-made, nor is it artificial. It is produced entirely by Mother Nature who occasionally spills it. Frequently spills it.

Ecosystems around the world have been dealing with these spills for millions of years. Certain bacteria rise to the occasion by eating it, although creatures poorly equipped to handle the oil can be killed.

The Earth looks after itself remarkably well no matter how we might frighten ourselves by imagining that it doesn’t.

The web site of Greenpeace UK summarises their opposition to petroleum fuels on the grounds of the carbon dioxide “pollution”: Continue Reading →

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Russia, China want UN to run internet

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From WUWT, the Washington Times says:

Imagine if everything you did online was subject to monitoring and control by the United Nations. Powerful authoritarian states, including China and Russia, are spearheading an effort to place the most potent information system in the world under centralized international control. They want the Internet to work with the same efficiency, speed and reliability as the U.N.

The UN can’t stop wars, can’t agree on fighting climate change, appoints despots to its Human Rights Committee and lacks the initiative to cut the mould off old cheese. They’d sit on the Internet and kill it. Continue Reading →

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Gases, gases everywhere, nor any stop to think

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Emissions of greenhouse gases are quoted everywhere to illustrate how humanity is sending the world to hell in a hand basket.

The articles make much of “emissions” from various countries, from the developed and the developing worlds. How many know that these vast, hugely important quantities are not even measured?

They’re only calculated from reported energy use — and they are far from reliable. That’s the first point. The second point is that emissions lead, presumably, to a global temperature increase. If they didn’t, there wouldn’t be a problem, would there?

But emissions don’t automatically mean higher temperatures. For a start, about 45% of human emissions — regardless how they increase — are absorbed somewhere in the gigantic natural system. Nobody knows where it all goes. It’s immensely complicated to track our puny emissions of carbon dioxide as they mix with the truly gargantuan streams out of and into forests and the oceans.

So most authors make no attempt to convert the net emissions into a temperature increase, but why not, actually?

The main reason would be that nobody — and I mean nobody, from the IPCC, NASA, the CRU at East Anglia and Al Gore all the way down to me — has the foggiest idea of the temperature that will result from these emissions.

Amazing, eh? There’s no knowledge or evidence of the inconvenient disaster we’re supposed to be creating with our selfish lifestyles. This gives rise to two questions:

  • Why does nobody demand some evidence?
  • What has persuaded everyone, without evidence, that there’s a problem?

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Grand climate deal dead

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The Star-Tribune, published somewhere in the United States, ran an article by Peter Passell, economics editor of Foreign Policy’s “Democracy Lab” and a Senior Fellow at the Milken Institute.

He comes to a radical conclusion:

The idea of a global grand bargain, in which emerging market countries would join the West in an ambitious, cost-minimizing containment program, is dead. The best hope, at least for now, is a pragmatic search for common ground, one that appeals to the angels but relies on self-interest.

A decade late and a trillion dollars short, you say? To paraphrase a former secretary of defense, you go to war with the army you’ve got, not the one you’d like to have.

I’d say the army the warmists actually have is past its best and anyway it has no weapons.

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Propaganda watch

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Activists are everywhere, particularly in our public service, those Wellington gnomes who crawl about the city each working day living from the taxes we pay them and steadily arranging our futures.

Their various agendas continue to creep, to slither, to insinuate themselves into every crevice of our civic existence. I’ll try to post examples as I see them and please send in your own. I’d be very happy to post them.

Here’s my first sample of the secret activists’ tireless, surreptitious toil. Continue Reading →

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Mokihinui River saved, renewable energy lost

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mokihinui river

A lovely part of the Mokihinui River saved from inundation. Perhaps this river should have been saved, but we need some rivers for industrial purposes, including power generation. It’s wrong to say we must never use the earth’s resources.

What do the Greens want?

On the surface, this is an example of the extreme green position. Don’t touch the earth, don’t change it for any reason, never mind the benefits. Never mind that we have no other resources (there’s just the one planet, you know), but we can’t use these resources, because we’ll kill a few snails.

The Green Party is crowing about this victory, which is fair enough, but it says all rivers should be protected. This is wrong. The Mokihinui might have special qualities that deserve protection, but it would be anti-human to deny access to all rivers. Continue Reading →

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Ross Ice Shelf melt and other cool fables

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Ross Ice Shelf

The heroic Ross Ice Shelf. The tiny figures on top are people, 60 metres (200 feet) above the waves. Beneath the water, the ice cliff continues a further 1000 feet straight down. You might travel south from here for over 600 km before reaching land; you might go straight across the great shelf for over 800 km. At 500,000 km2 it’s nearly twice the area of NZ. You won’t melt this with the smoke from your puny fires. This sucker’s not going anywhere in a hurry. Oh, and when it calves those bergs the size of Manhattan, it’s not from melting — they snap off.

Rob Fenwick, in Accelerating melt reason to worry (The Press, 21 May 2012), launches into a worry-fest about all the fabulous calamities said to be on the way with “continued” man-made global warming.

The astute reader will know that the word “fabulous” is derived from “fable”. It means unreal or imagined more than it means magnificent. I chose that word because all the disasters Mr Fenwick briefly catalogues are fantastic (cf. “fantasy”). But I should begin at the beginning of his niggle-gala. He says:

When the world’s polar scientists gathered in Montreal last month – all 3000 of them – it seemed like a case of preaching to the choir.

After 20 years of intense study of the effects of changing climate conditions at the poles, there is certainly no longer any debate over what is going on. Continue Reading →

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May 2012 petrol and diesel prices

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From AA Petrol Watch, 21 May 2012

Pump prices have finally fallen – after the AA first called for prices to drop a month ago – with Z cutting the price of petrol 4 cents per litre, and diesel 3c. It’s the first price change in 10 weeks, and the first price drop since early February. It’s also the longest period that motorists have ever paid so much – $2.20/litre – for petrol. While petrol prices peaked at $2.22/litre in May 2011, that lasted less than a week – the previous longest run was a month on $2.19/litre in early 2011. The highest diesel price was $1.92/litre for 10 days in 2008.

View full post.

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Letters to the Editor

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The Soda Water scare

quill pen

To the Editor
Climate Conversation

22nd May 2012

The climatists have a new alarm – the soda water scare.

We are told that the oceans, which weigh 300 times more than all the gases in the atmosphere, are being turned acidic by the 0.0012% (12 parts per million) of man-made additions to the carbon dioxide (CO2) in Earth’s atmosphere.

CO2 is a natural gas that dissolves in water. The amount absorbed depends upon how much CO2 there is in the air, and the temperature of the water. CO2 dissolves best in cold water and is expelled as the water warms. And far more would be absorbed if there was 100% CO2 in the atmosphere above.

When concentrated CO2 gas is bubbled under high pressure into ice-cold water much CO2 dissolves, producing acidic soda water whose pH (acidity) could be as low as 4. This is 1,000 times more acidic than pure water whose pH is a neutral 7.

But oceans are much warmer than that and atmospheric CO2 is at much lower pressure. Therefore in the open ocean, pH seldom gets below 8, ten times more alkaline than pure water.

This weak soda water could only be described as “acidic” by someone pushing an alarmist agenda. Continue Reading →

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Our water use raises sea levels

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A new article in Nature Geoscience attributes 42% of recent sea level rise to discharge of groundwater to the oceans by human activities.

Pokhrel, Y.N. et al., 2012. Model estimates of sea-level change due to anthropogenic impacts on terrestrial water storage. Nature Geoscience, advance online publication.

Abstract

Global sea level has been rising over the past half century, according to tide-gauge data. Thermal expansion of oceans, melting of glaciers and loss of the ice masses in Greenland and Antarctica are commonly considered as the largest contributors, but these contributions do not entirely explain the observed sea-level rise. Continue Reading →

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Cabinet ETS paper makes my toes curl

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I have received a copy of a confidential Cabinet briefing paper obtained under an Official Information Act request. It was prepared by Nick Smith as Minister for Climate Change Issues before his resignation.

The paper sets out proposed amendments to the Climate Change Response Act 2002 and the ETS.

It begins by stating the Minister’s key motives. I could scarcely believe them — they so strongly exclude each other they make my toes curl, yet the language makes me feel good! I trust them, I really do! I’m sure I do. No matter what self-contradictory aims the government expresses, I’m full of faith that a) it means well and b) it can do exactly what it says. Continue Reading →

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No treaty, no ETS

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Treaty of Versailles

Treaty of Versailles, 1919, which ended the First World War. No treaty, no peace.

The NZ Climate Science Coalition has lodged its submission on the government’s proposed amendments to the Emissions Trading Scheme. The submission is unemotional, even subdued, yet it makes compelling reading.

Readers of the Climate Conversation Group will not be surprised to hear that the Coalition thinks New Zealand’s response to so-called Anthropogenic Global Warming should strictly follow international agreements.

The Coalition does not like the extreme green idea that we should be an inspiration to the rest of the world — light some kind of beacon, stick our necks out.

So, it recommends that at the end of this year, when the Kyoto Protocol expires, our involvement should expire with it. Continue Reading →

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Retirement of Huntly power generator

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Energy News has announced an inaugural survey of the electricity industry. The headline promised to test the market on “renewables, smart grid, Huntly retirement, Brownlee reforms”.

Some folk saw “Huntly retirement” and took it to mean the station was about to be closed. Understandable, but that’s not the case. The first clue was in the description of the survey:

Key topics covered in the inaugural survey include the options to replace Genesis Energy’s coal-fired Huntly units

So the unadorned “Huntly retirement” becomes “replacement of Huntly coal generation” – not the whole plant, just the coal-fired parts of it! Big difference. It’s covered in the first survey question:

1. With the impending retirement of the Huntly coal-fired units (1000MW) this raises some questions around generation fuel mix. What should replace it? Taking an NZ Inc view and thinking about transmission capacity, dry-year risk, fuel diversity, smart grids and fuel availability what do you think Huntly should be replaced with as it’s phased out?

  • One new mainframe gas-fired generator (assume gas availability)
  • Lots of small sub-25MW generation
  • 8 mid-sized, geographically positioned gas-fired peakers (assume gas availability)
  • Demand response and energy efficiency
  • Solar PV and battery storage at a residential level
  • Scale renewables

Industry insiders wouldn’t have been confused but this clears things up for the rest of us. When they’re filling out their survey, let’s hope those insiders aren’t persuaded that avoiding about 1 °C of warming is better than the multifarious benefits brought to us by public power reticulation. In other words, let’s hope they choose a properly reliable source of base-load power generation like gas, oil, coal or nuclear. Oh, that’s right, nuclear’s verboten in God’s Own. – h/t Robin Pittwood

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Oil prices down as Europe staggers

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Oil prices have been falling for six days [see oil price widgets in right margin]. The dire European economic crisis is part of the reason, since economies in trouble buy less oil. In addition, oil production has been raised to bring the price down a bit in a controlled fashion. AFP reports:

New York’s main contract, West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude for delivery in June, dropped 51 cents to $96.50 a barrel, two days after hitting a near-five month low at $95.34.

Brent North Sea crude for June shed 63 cents to $112.10 a barrel in London midday deals, one day after striking a four-month low at $110.53.

Continue Reading →

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… is sauce for the gander

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The Heartland billboard in Chicago

The provocative Heartland billboard along the inbound Eisenhower Expressway (I-290) in Maywood, Chicago.

What an amazing experiment.

But the alarmists don’t like this. No, they don’t like this at all. Well, many sceptics don’t like it either — it’s the raw, bleeding, white-knuckled edge of hostility. It simply points out what is true: that some loathsome people believe in dangerous man-made global warming. But it sets an objectionable context and tars its opponents with a distastefully black brush.

Of course, it just turns the warmists’ own arguments back on them. They started it, and they’ve been at it for years. The sceptics have been immensely patient. The warmists are the ones with the shredded moral fibre.

For a sample of their complaints about this detestable sceptical tactic, a reader referred me to Stephan Lewandowsky’s article Are Heartland billboards the beginning of the end for climate denial? at The Conversation, Continue Reading →

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The end of scepticism

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Tui billboard proxy

Tui billboard image removed by request of DB Breweries’ legal representatives – yeah, that’s right! The day the laughter died: 1100 hrs Thursday 10 May 2012.
OUR SPOOF BILLBOARD READ: I still believe in global warming. Yeah right.

Read about the Heartland Institute’s brief experiment with provocative marketing.

UPDATE Thursday 10 May

At five to nine this morning I received an email from Nick Downes, who works for Federation Media (“We specialise in doing the web right”) whose web site displays some spectacular work for some spectacular clients.

After taking some advice, I removed the Tui billboard facsimile above. Continue Reading →

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State of the science

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Many of us want to know the science behind global warming.

It would be reasonable to assume that the international experts would tell us what we need to know. Problem is that, strangely, they don’t make it easy for honest seekers after truth.

The UNFCCC has a page on their web site called “The Science”. But stupidly for a page with such a title, there’s not a single statement that tells us how greenhouse gases warm the earth.

This is the governing body of the IPCC, yet it can’t tell us how global warming works.

The IPCC takes a different approach: it simply swamps us with documentation without saying what we’ll find in it. It has no link to anything resembling “the science simplified” or even “science”.

Of course, it’s all science, but who wants to wade through hundreds of pages of an Assessment Report for a summary of the greenhouse effect?

They’re either really thick or they’re not the slightest bit interested in helping us.

Or perhaps they’re hiding something?

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Reflections on a changing climate

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Was Villach the start of global warming?

— by Dr John Maunder

Among the many climate science meetings I have attended, the most significant, at least as far as climate change is concerned, was my involvement in the UN-sponsored international conference held in the beautiful Austrian town of Villach in October 1985.

One hundred experts from 30 countries attended the meeting (in contrast to ten to twenty thousand who now attend such meetings), and I was privileged to be the only New Zealander invited. We were all there as experts – not representing our respective organisations – in various fields of science, endeavouring to do the best we could in looking at the complexities of climate science.

One of the principal findings of this conference was that

“while other factors, such as aerosol concentration, changes in solar energy input, and changes in vegetation, may also influence climate, the greenhouse gases are likely to be the most important cause of climate change over the next century.”

Continue Reading →

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The real climate deniers

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Paul Mulshine says it well:

This guy nails it.

The movement to use a theoretical threat from atmospheric CO2 to control other humans is a religion, not a science.

He says the issue is the role of CO2 versus cosmic rays in cloud formation, and “it can be resolved only by physicists, not the crowd I like to call ‘climate scientologists’.” He cites an article about Henrik Svensmark by Robert Tracinski.

Henrik Svensmark

Henrik Svensmark.

Svensmark, says Tracinski, “has already broken the claim of the man-made global warming “consensus” to be the only scientific explanation of the climate.”

He says:

Ignoring the past is precisely what [the alarmists] have done. Continue Reading →

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Let us destroy those myths

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Modern climate misapprehensions spread like dandelion seeds on the wind and have become intricately tangled in our everyday lives. Rampant repetition converts these empty myths into eternal truths. Refuting them with observations and reason risks mockery and scorn but it is reasonable to try.

The West Coast Environmental Network (WCEN) opposes coal mining operations on the grounds, among other things, that burning coal will destroy the earth. The following statements about coal and climate change are published on their web site. Let’s see if they’re right.

Burning and mining coal is the most efficient and fastest way to bring about disastrous climate change.

Well, some people need a rhetoric licence. This breaches several principles of logic. First, there’s surely no connection between mining anything and any kind of climate change, either disastrous or benign. Second, burning coal produces some CO2, which probably causes a little warming, but such warming is so far undetectable. Thirdly, there’s absolutely no difference between the CO2 from coal and the CO2 from any other source, so there’s no reason to put coal at the top of some demon list of dangerous fuels. Continue Reading →

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Our world-leading ETS actually hikes hydro

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Bluff aluminium smelter at Tiwai Point

Bluff aluminium smelter at Tiwai Point. This is about as far south as you can get in the South Island. If you insist on continuing and miss Stewart Island, the next stop is Antarctica. Beautiful spot. In silent witness to the smelter’s status as the country’s largest single electricity consumer, note not one but two rows of high-voltage transmission towers marching up to the door. Anywhere else, such towers would lead you to a major city. Tiwai Pt uses 15% of the country’s entire production of electricity — substantially more than Auckland’s central business district.

The Bluff aluminium smelter has won an award from a xenophobe group for milking the ETS (Emissions Trading Scheme). That’s interesting by itself, however the award draws our attention for the unexpected proof it provides of a little-known, hidden effect of the ETS: instead of penalising carbon dioxide “polluters” at source while making wind and solar seem cheaper, it actually increases the cost of all generators by creating windfall profits for them.

It’s a testament to years of calculated deception of the electorate and a recipe for ruin. Continue Reading →

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Levitus rewarmed

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lovely iceberg in boundary conditions

Boundary conditions are complex.

Yes, the ocean has warmed; no, it’s not ‘global warming’

And warm water does not sink

Oceanographer Dr Willem de Lange has referred us to a really clear treatment of ocean warming and ocean-atmosphere interaction in an article by a noted oceanographer (now deceased). It appeared in 21st Century Science & Technology magazine in 2000 and carried the “Yes, the ocean has warmed” headline you see above. Though written 12 years ago, it makes a solid rebuttal to the substance of the modern warming scare, emphasizing, as though marine scientists needed to be told, that warm water cannot sink.
 
The author was Dr. Robert E. Stevenson, an oceanography consultant, who trained NASA astronauts in oceanography and marine meteorology, was Secretary General of the International Association for the Physical Science of the Oceans from 1987 to 1995 and was an oceanographer for the U.S. Office of Naval Research for 20 years.

Having completed the post, I’ve discovered the new Levitus paper. How does Levitus et al. 2012 compare with the old Levitus et al. 2000? The new paper is in press, so we only have the abstracts to compare. In 2000, the heat content of the world ocean increased by ∼2 × 1023 joules between the mid-1950s and mid-1990s, representing a volume mean warming of 0.06°C. In 2012, the heat content of the world ocean increased by 24.0 × 1022 J for 1955-2010, corresponding to a volume mean warming of 0.09ºC.

With 24.0 × 1022 being 20% greater than 2 × 1023, and the temperature going from 0.06 to 0.09°C giving an increase of 50%, we have a familiar picture. It’s deja vu, only warmer.

Here’s the article’s original introduction:

Contrary to recent press reports that the oceans hold the still-undetected global atmospheric warming predicted by climate models, ocean warming occurs in 100-year cycles, independent of both radiative and human influences.

Which echoes today’s headlines about ocean heat content trying to explain why climate models don’t predict the climate. Continue Reading →

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NIWA’s data proves NZ warming halt

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It’s getting worse than they thought (for them!)

NZ monthly temperature anomalies 2001-2012 from NIWA reports

NZ monthly temperature anomalies 2001-2012 from NIWA’s monthly press releases. Although the trend is as near to zero as “damn it” is to swearing, it is, as a matter of fact, cooling. Anyway, for at least 10 years and 5 months, New Zealand has officially experienced no warming — unlike the great globe itself, which was predicted by highly skilled computer models to warm about 0.2°C over the same period, and so no doubt it did warm. Oh, no it didn’t.

This insight into the NZ temperature record is from the resourceful Bob D. I’ve promoted it because it’s priceless. Bob says:

NIWA’s Climate Updates

I thought I’d share the local New Zealand temperatures over the last decade. I downloaded all NIWA’s Climate Updates from their website (the first one I could find was Oct 2001) and plotted the temperature anomalies that were published for each month.

Of course, what with Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming and all, I expected to see temperatures rising (accelerating, even) in a wild, out-of-control fashion, as the water vapour feedbacks kicked in, tripling the initial warming that came from the gigatons of poisonous carbon dioxide pollution that we’ve spewed (spewed, I tell you) into the atmosphere over the past decade.
/sarc

I was a little surprised at what I saw. Continue Reading →

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Well, where’s your evidence, Renowden?

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HadCRUT3 graph for Feb 2012

The graph that proves no significant warming for about 15 years – since about 1996. Measured by satellite, not the unreliable hand of man. The wiggly blue line trending steadily upwards is the CO2 concentration. There is no sign of it affecting the temperature. Though CO2 probably raises the temperature a little, it is for all practical concerns irrelevant because other factors overpower it for decades at a time — which is why we point out the lack of warming over the last 15 years. The global warming hypothesis has been demolished. Click for larger version.

You’ve seen mine, now show me yours

On 29 March Hot Topic took exception to my factual assertion in relation to climate fraud that “Global warming has not happened for about 15 years, unless you take a micrometer to the thermometer. And if you have to do that just to detect warming, then it’s hardly dangerous, is it?” by thundering:

The certainty of Treadgold’s denial is only possible because he creates a carefully cultivated cocoon of ignorance around himself and around the true believers who worship at his blog. The world where the rest of us live is a much more uncomfortable place. We have to work with whatever reality throws at us. Retreating into a fantasy world where warming hasn’t happened for 15 years is a luxury only the deluded can afford.

Later that day I posted here: Continue Reading →

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Deadly effective manipulation

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This excellent post is from our friend Rupert Postlethwaite, a real scientist who is so good at putting two and two together he often has trouble getting them apart. However, he pretends to be so many people he can also, like any properly absent-minded professor, quite forget who he is. Rupert says a glance at this conference programme will reveal how professionally clever the climate alarmists are and I agree. But, given global temperatures have not risen significantly since about 1995, while at the same time the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere went up by about 9%, it is obvious that FACTORS OTHER THAN CO2 have a controlling influence on temperature. To douse this oh-so-serious sea level conference with copious quantities of cold sea water, you can easily find objective data on sea level rise in our part of the world. Visit the Australian South Pacific Sea Level and Climate Monitoring Project and check out the February 2012 report (pdf). From the Executive Summary on page 3: “Monthly sea levels during February 2012 were around 5cm higher than normal at Marshall Islands, PNG, Samoa and Cook Islands and as much as 12cm higher than normal at Solomon Islands. Sea levels were around 7cm lower than normal at Vanuatu. Sea levels at Kiribati, Nauru, Tuvalu, Fiji and Tonga were all near normal for this time of the year.” What was that about global sea levels rising with global temperature and always going up, never going down? Explain this, NIWA! – Richard Treadgold

the ocean

Gazing at the sea level; just like a navel gaze.

CO2 imagined to raise the oceans

Assisted by some mainly taxpayer or citizen-funded organisations, including the Royal Society of New Zealand, GNS Science, Victoria University and the Wellington City Council, the New Zealand Climate Change Centre is hosting yet another expensive climate jamboree in Wellington on May 10-11.

Sea-level Rise, Meeting the Challenge is nominally concerned with discussions of sea-level rise that is imagined as being caused by human carbon dioxide emissions.

Many Kiwis are concerned that New Zealand already has an expensive and ineffectual emissions trading scheme to help “stop climate change” (a banal and utterly impractical notion, if ever there were), and which the government shows no sign of repealing despite almost complete recalcitrance by other countries to mimic its crazy brave venture. Continue Reading →

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Even an oik has freedoms

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Imprisoned just for speaking

A Welsh district judge, John Charles, just barged through ancient legal protections for free speech and gaoled one Liam Stacey for 56 days for offensive tweets — essentially two months in pokey for speaking.

These tweets were obnoxiously filthy but the judge went too far. It should be possible to utter any offensive words in public without fear of arrest or legal sanction. If the words are wrong, if they accuse a person incorrectly, or make allegations without justification, then the speaker should expect to be charged with slander or similar. But so-called “hate speech” — merely insulting a person, organisation, community, city, nation or race gives insufficient grounds to deprive a person of liberty.

Shall it now be unlawful to craft insults or express hatred? Why should we not hate some people? Continue Reading →

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Climate Conversation v. Hot Topic et al.

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Alexa world-wide rankings

I bow to you, my reader.

As measured informally on my Alexa toolbar, you’ve raised this humble blog into a leading Kiwi site for sceptical discussion of global warming. Though many of you are silent and your participation limited to quiet reading, you’ve achieved a remarkable thing with your frequent loyal visits (I’ll be sure to keep the kettle hot).

It shows that north of sixty thousand visitors per month prefer a moderate tone over stridency and a restrained view of climate data better than a doomsday clamour. Large numbers! MSM, are you noticing?

In June last year there was a bit of a fuss over climate blog rankings and whether the numbers were reliable. Nothing to do with climate, of course.

Then a while back I reinstalled the Alexa toolbar, just out of interest. Apparently you have to give Alexa time to get settled information on your traffic, so I waited. Just now I noticed our world ranking is up to 844,719, having started at over 1.3 million. The NZ rank is under 900. Wow! So it’s time to tell you. Continue Reading →

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It’s not so easy to ignore your friends

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When being criticised, it’s relatively easy to ignore people you’ve never heard of, but it’s not so easy to ignore your friends. It’s possible that this astonishing rebuke from respected former NASA scientists, engineers and astronauts might change minds at NASA where world-wide sceptical opposition from strangers has not. h/t WUWT. Press release from SPPI.

Former NASA scientists, astronauts admonish agency on climate change position

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:

Blanquita Cullum

703-307-9510

bqview at mac.com

Joint letter to NASA Administrator blasts agency’s policy of ignoring empirical evidence

HOUSTON, TX – April 10, 2012. 49 former NASA scientists and astronauts sent a letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden last week admonishing the agency for its role in advocating a high degree of certainty that man-made CO2 is a major cause of climate change while neglecting empirical evidence that calls the theory into question.

The group, which includes seven Apollo astronauts and two former directors of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, are dismayed over the failure of NASA, and specifically the Goddard Institute For Space Studies (GISS), to make an objective assessment of all available scientific data on climate change. They charge that NASA is relying too heavily on complex climate models that have proven scientifically inadequate in predicting climate only one or two decades in advance. Continue Reading →

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Yet again: climate scepticism is founded on facts, not faith

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Scepticism is not a psychological disorder, you morons

Though climate alarmists have claimed for several years that evidence for dangerous man-made global warming is “overwhelming”, it’s actually becoming harder and harder to find.

Thus it has instead become fashionable among climate alarmists to ignore what climate sceptics say and to discredit them with pseudo-psychological, ethical or moral inventions to explain why they say it. Anything but actually address what they say. Here are five examples. At the end are four facts that explain why climate scepticism arises spontaneously around the world — even without oil money. Continue Reading →

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Runaway warming impossible — Herald uninterested

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A week ago I offered the NZ Herald this short rebuttal of some alarmist climate nonsense from Carmen Gravatt (well, it’s really from Greenpeace but Carmen didn’t check it). The Herald has neither published nor acknowledged receipt of this so now you can see it and wonder with me why they turn down even moderate sceptical material. It goes without saying that the new, radical Greenpeace will flog this dead horse for years to come, but there’s no excuse for professional journalists to persist in ignoring well-known facts. When this climate revel is finally ended the Herald’s editors will deeply regret having adopted blinkers.

Carmen Gravatt’s gravely misleading Herald article of 15 March We don’t need extreme oil gives a gross distortion of a stupendously simple truth.

She blames oil for global warming, claiming we’ll cause “global average temperature [to soar] – uncontrollably.” But runaway warming is impossible. No credible climate scientist is making that claim — and it’s never happened before. Oil can cause real pollution and injury to humans and wildlife, but the global warming threat is imaginary, for no dangerous climatic influence from our emissions has been detected.

Jo Nova said in a report three years ago (Massive climate funding exposed) that the US government had poured $30 billion into pure climate research over 20 years. Yet the simple truth is that still nobody can point to a single piece of empirical evidence that man-made carbon dioxide has a significant effect on the global climate. Continue Reading →

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Quote of the week

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what a thing to say

An unimaginable proposal

“As a result — and for reasons that remain unexplained — the waters of the Southern Ocean may have begun to release carbon dioxide.”

Scientific American makes the most illogical statement I’ve heard in a while.

If there’s no reason for this event, why would one propose it?

An event is proposed for which no cause can be imagined. The author proposes something he has no reason to believe — or proposes something but can’t imagine why. This is nuts. It’s not science. Continue Reading →

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Solving the non-existent toothfish problem

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The Antarctic Ocean Alliance wants to create the largest-ever marine reserve around most of Antarctica. Why? The Herald published an article the other day by Geoff Keey, outlining the main issues. He makes a couple of strange comments.

First, he says the Ross Sea is “likely to be one [of] the last places in the Southern Ocean to lose sea ice because of climate change, making it an important refuge for ice-dependent animals.”

But Keey must be unaware that the Antarctic continent has lost no sea ice to climate change or any other cause. On the contrary, it has been gradually cooling over 30 years of observations. So it may be an important refuge, but not because its capacity to provide a refuge is diminishing or even threatened. Continue Reading →

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Sciblogs ignores climate facts

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Talk about spin.

Greenpeace went in to bat for the seabirds killed off by a bit of oil from the Rena – good on them. But they had a big, juicy agenda – killing off deep sea oil drilling near NZ. So they exaggerated the few Rena bird deaths. The 1300 little bodies collected became 20,000 dead, without evidence to justify the expansion.

Then they claimed that 1000 times more again “could” perish in a spill the size of the Gulf of Mexico disaster. That would mean 20 million dead birds. Well, that was ambiguously tentative, although they said later they weren’t talking just about bird deaths.

Our good friend Bryan Leyland complained to the Advertising Standards Authority over Greenpeace’s wild claims. The ASA agreed with him, saying Greenpeace made misleading claims and really shouldn’t. Continue Reading →

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Greenpeace shows no evidence

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Greenpeace

The NZ Herald published this article recently by Carmen Gravatt, the campaigns director at Greenpeace New Zealand.

I’m not well informed on the energy scene, but I want to comment on her outrageously distorted presentation of climate change. I reserve the right to complain to the NZ Press Council about the Herald allowing her space to spread this manifest nonsense about global warming.

First she says:

… the world is about to lose the chance to stop the global average temperature from soaring – uncontrollably – beyond two degrees.

Nobody – count them: nobody – in the IPCC predicts that global temperatures will soar “uncontrollably” if they rise by 2°C. If Miss Gravatt is unaware of that fact, she is singularly unprepared for the demands of her position. Continue Reading →

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Coal not candles

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African village

This African village shows the relationship between habitation and fuel, when wood is the only choice. The few nearby trees are being left for some other purpose and the only ones available for burning are already about a kilometre away. Whatever your fuel, you need it every day and, when it’s wood, every day you must travel a little further to get more. Auckland is clothed with a verdant blanket of trees; in places you can scarcely see the houses, but only because we’ve arranged an efficient alternative source of energy. Coal and oil preserve trees. Our continued use of hydrocarbons is nothing like an “addiction”, as misguided activists like to claim. Rather, hydrocarbons are economical, healthful and, used in modern, non-polluting engines and devices, sit more comfortably in the environment than the burning of our forests. They are more deserving of applause than condemnation.

The Carbon Sense Coalition today proposed that coal, not candles, should be the symbol of Earth Hour.

It was coal that produced clean electric power which cleared the smog produced by dirty combustion and open fires in big cities like London and Pittsburgh. Much of the third world still suffers choking fumes and smog because they do not have clean electric power and burn wood, cardboard, unwashed coal and cow dung for home heat.

It was coal that saved the forests being felled to fuel the first steam engines and produce charcoal for the first iron smelters.

It was coal that powered the light bulbs and saved the whales being slaughtered for whale oil lamps. Continue Reading →

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A certain unsustainable lack of definition

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ancient farmhouse

This Cambridge farmhouse still stands after 650 years, though built without foundations (incredible!). Planning permission these days would be denied for “unsustainability.” The world is become bland.

They can’t define WHAT?

Sustainable.

Lots of people think “sustainable” is most difficult to define. I disagree: it isn’t hard to define – the word is in the dictionary. I looked it up.

Now I will tell you what it means: “sustainable” means supportable; maintainable.

“Sure, you can quote me – and it was the Shorter Oxford… No, I’m not a hero, just an ordinary bloke, anyone else would have done the same in that situation… I don’t know what the fuss is about… Yes, at the back, do you have a question?”

During the Helengrad era in New Zealand, almost every press release emanating from the Beehive was liberally sprinkled with the word “sustainable”. Meaningless bureaucratese or “apparatchik-speak” such as this usually has a short life, but “sustainable” is clinging on – much used, for example, in Phil O’Reilly’s just-published 2012 report of the Green Growth Advisory Group, which mentions some form of the word “sustainable” 67 times. And we still don’t know what the word means. Continue Reading →

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Warmth ≠ warming

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In my previous post I said that, since the temperature hasn’t gone up (much) in about 15 years, nothing has happened as a result – in short, global warming hasn’t caused anything, harmful or otherwise.

That short chain of reasoning seemed justified by the observed and documented lack of significant warming of the near-surface atmosphere around the globe during the last 15 years, and I thought the logic unassailable.

The above link shows the HadCRUT3 record, but you’ll see a very similar trajectory with the GISTEMP dataset, UAH, RSS or NCDC. All of these records show that, from about 1997, there’s been precious little warming or cooling and that the global monthly mean temperature anomaly has, in the last six months or less, steeply descended through exactly the same band through which it rose in 1997.

To repeat: because global warming hasn’t occurred for about 15 years, global warming hasn’t caused anything else to occur in that time. Very simple. Continue Reading →

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Climate change frauds unacceptable

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micrometer

Don’t tolerate the nonsense

I’ve been reading about famine in East Africa – the Great Horn of Africa, after its well-proportioned resemblance to the rhino’s horn. The Horn (nowhere near Cape Horn, bottom of South America) includes names iconic for armed insurrection and starvation: Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, Kenya, Mogadishu, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi.

East Africa is a fascinating study in its own right. The region has been subject to irregular cycles of feast and famine for thousands of years, so it’s rich with a theme much used by global warmers.

At any sign of a starving child someone can be relied upon to blame the situation on “climate change” and therefore on we wicked, wasteful westerners, never mind that not every drought causes a famine (not by a long shot) and corrupt or weak African politicians play a much stronger role in disastrous famines than climate does.

Anyone describing climate and consequent food security these days finds it necessary to refer to “climate change” and hence venture on to the IPCC tightrope strung up for global warming believers everywhere. When that happens, they quickly wobble and fall off; one just has to wait a bit.

So it proved in this research into famines in the Horn of Africa. Continue Reading →

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Rebalance the economy first

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The Herald published this gem two days ago. Well done, them. For some years our “cultural cringe” on hearing that foreigners might hold opinions of us has been, thankfully, fading as we mature. Unfortunately the new default position for many of us is that we are naturally held in some kind of universal esteem. Barry Brill here looks beyond that, pointing out that we’ve been marketing our country to ourselves, because around the world, still, few have heard of us. He also tells the government to leave marketing to the experts.

One thing is quite clear – “clean green” is not this country’s brand. It isn’t a brand at all, says a Government Advisory Group reporting on “Greening New Zealand’s Growth”.

The national brand “New Zealand” carries a collection of attributes for foreigners. Cleanliness and greenness can be amongst its positive attributes for tourism and food products in certain markets. But we need to understand the perceptions that accompany the words.

Newspapers

This is an adopted article.

The report highlights our ranking as one of “the top three cleanest countries” in terms of official corruption. This cleanliness “has definitely become part of our brand”. Fonterra notes that our brand is preferred because “New Zealand is seen as a natural safe and pure source of secure food nutrition”.

These words are readily associated with clean and unpolluted water, along with high standards of hygiene and quality control. Cleanliness and food safety go hand-in-hand. Continue Reading →

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Carbon War erupts in Europe

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A battle of world significance has started quietly in Europe. Like all battles it is about energy, resources and ideology.

In the red corner, with a coercive utopian green ideology, is Germany, strongly supported by Denmark and Britain. This group wants to forcibly wean Europe off carbon fuels by replacing them with sunbeams, sea breezes and fermented food crops. They get self-serving support from places like nuclear-powered France, hydro-powered Scandinavia and geothermal Iceland. They are now proposing more drastic cuts in Europe’s usage of carbon fuels after 2020. Continue Reading →

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Models of reality

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NZCSC chairman Barry Brill has suggested to Environment Waikato that its Regional Policy Statement (RPS) should not be influenced by the climate change ‘Guidance Manuals’ (here and here) issued by the Ministry for the Environment in early 2008. Like the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (4AR), their recommendations have been overtaken by recent scientific papers and data. His submission notes that modelled projections of 21st century warming rely upon two components – emission volumes and climate sensitivity. Here is his comment regarding Climate Sensitivity.

— by Barry Brill, Chairman of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition

CLIMATE SENSITIVITY (Model Uncertainties)

1: THE IPCC REPORT

The 17 models used for the 4AR produced a 2100 temperature range of 1.8°C – 4.4°C. Note at page 122 of the Manual, “this arises from taking the best estimate temperature change, and subtracting 40% to get the low end, and adding 60% to get the high end of the range”. The “most likely” temperature trend is 2.7C per century. Continue Reading →

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Local bodies deserve better than an outdated guess

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coastal erosion

Around New Zealand, this scenario is increasingly unlikely. However, notice that this house was built upon sand. It’s fate was, therefore, entirely predictable, and has nothing to do with man-made global warming.

NZCSC chairman Barry Brill has suggested to Environment Waikato that its Regional Policy Statement (RPS) should not be influenced by the climate change ‘Guidance Manuals’ (here and here) issued by the Ministry for the Environment in early 2008. Like the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (4AR), their recommendations have been overtaken by recent scientific papers and data. His submission notes that modelled projections of 21st century warming rely upon two components – emission volumes and climate sensitivity. Here is his comment regarding future CO2-e tonnages – or, in other words, emission volumes.

— by Barry Brill, Chairman of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition

1. The IPCC Report (2007)

In 1998, the IPCC commissioned consultants – economists, futurists, statisticians, demographers, etc. – to establish story-lines of how the world might develop over the following century. This group eventually brought out a detailed book, the “Special Report on Emissions Scenarios” (“SRES”) of 40 diverse story-lines, any of which might conceivably capture the emissions profile of the 21st century.

Trenberth says the IPCC itself has no view as to the correctness of the Scenarios: “They are intended to cover a range of possible self consistent “story lines” that then provide decision makers with information about which paths might be more desirable… There is no estimate, even probabilistically, as to the likelihood of any emissions scenario and no best guess.” Continue Reading →

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