This is a good summary of the Himalaya glacier story. Jonathan Leake and Chris Hastings, at The Times Online, go through the details and discuss the implications.
The IPCC tell us constantly that they use experts in every field to assemble its reports. It’s scandalous that any of their teams might be led by a person who could know so little that this kind of school-boy error is possible.
Their reputation is getting worse by the day.
Views: 74
UPDATE 1 Jan 19, 3:54 pm: I’ve just come across Roger Pielke Jr’s view on this. He’s disgusted.
Dr Richard North, at Eureferendum, explains how a mistaken claim from about five years ago made its way into the latest IPCC “summary of the latest science” on climate change, has been thoroughly discredited and disproven, and yet still allows Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman and public front of the IPCC, to make a lot of money from it.
We’re constantly told that the IPCC reports “are put together by 2500 scientists” but so what, if they miss this kind of thing?
How can we trust this man and the alarming climate predictions he gives us?
Views: 60
The Times of India, under an odd-sounding headline, carry the following story on their web site today:
Pachauri-led TERI under UK scanner
LONDON: The British government is to carry out due diligence on New Delhi-based The Energy Research Institute following a local newspaper’s relentless campaign against the organization and its director-general, Rajendra Pachauri, who is also the IPCC chairman.
A British Department for International Development statement said, ‘‘As is routine, DFID is undertaking a full Institutional Assessment of TERI as part of our due diligence process.’’
The Sunday Telegraph’s persistence seems to have ‘‘triggered the routine’’.
The paper attacked DFID and its secretary of state (cabinet minister) Douglas Alexander for presenting 10 million pounds of British tax-payers money to TERI in Delhi last September. In its most recent piece, titled ‘‘The curious case of the expanding environmental group with falling income’’, it once again questioned TERI and Pachauri’s probity.
It alleged, ‘‘He (Pachauri) enjoys a lavish lifestyle; his Delhi home is in the Golf Links area, the most expensive stretch of residential real estate in India, and he is famous for his $1,000 suits.’’ The piece also insinuated that while the registered charity, TERI Europe’s business in the past six years had increased, its published turnover had decreased.
When ‘‘The Sunday Telegraph’’ reportedly put it to one of its two directors, Dr Ritu Kumar, a south London resident, that the body’s income and expenditure in recent years were both much greater than the figures it declared, she is said to have admitted anomalies in the accounts. Teri Europe’s accountants have now been instructed to produce a revised version.
Let us hope it achieves a frank disclosure of the financial affairs of arguably the most important figure in the climate change scandal. With the reputation of the IPCC taking almost daily hits on multiple fronts, it’s little wonder recent polls show fewer New Zealanders now worried by “global warming”.
Views: 77
Once upon a time, people thought they would stop global warming, caused by carbon dioxide, by extinguishing their fossil-fuelled fires. But everybody loved their fossil fires and depended on them for every good thing in modern life. So they didn’t want to give them up. What would be the best way to persuade the people to extinguish the lovely fires?
The people decided that they just had to make the lovely fires more expensive and invent other ways of providing every good thing in modern life. That gave them two options to choose between: let the government put an extra tax on the fossil fuels, or create licences to emit carbon dioxide and let everybody trade them with each other. That was called an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), sometimes “cap and trade”.
Either scheme would have the effect of making the lovely fires more expensive because the cost of the tax or the emission certificates would be added to the price of the goods and services. Naturally, the people would end up paying more, but that was the whole point. All the good things in modern life were destroying the planet so they had to become too expensive to buy and the leaders said that was a sacrifice they were willing to make. Continue Reading →
Views: 331
Anybody studying global warming comes across a lot of obscure blogs and online magazines which rail at “sceptics” and “deniers” for destroying the earth with their obstructionism and their oil-industry-funded arguments. They seem to think that it’s impossible for intelligent people to have reasonable questions about a complex, controversial topic and that therefore sceptics are being deliberately difficult. So they must be shouted at.
Quite a few of those articles get my careful attention because I’m looking for evidence of dangerous man-made global warming. I reason that when they talk about the overwhelming weight of evidence, they could be about to mention the evidence. But none of them do.
Actually, to be precise, many of them mention the evidence but none of them reveal it. Many of them point to the IPCC’s latest report, AR4, but, though it waffles around a lot, there’s nothing conclusive that links human emissions with damaging climatic effects. If I’m wrong, I challenge anyone to point it out to me.
Some writers give references to this or that piece of the puzzle, which on examination turn out to be full of holes, guesswork or based on modelling.
Others go into admirable detail about what could happen if warming got bad. They cannot be refuted because they’re probably right — it would happen. They don’t show any link between human activities and the warming they describe but they make me feel guilty for disagreeing with them — as if I don’t care what happens to the natural world.
Evidence does not consist of statements such as “the weight of evidence indicates…” or “there is a mounting body of opinion that…” or “it is highly likely (95% probability) that…”.
This question will probably be ignored. However, I must ask: what is the evidence for dangerous man-made global warming?
What persuaded you that the global climate is being changed to a dangerous degree by human activities? There must have been something that persuaded you!
Real Climate and Tamino have banned me and Hot Topic insult me and tell me I’m not welcome because I don’t believe them. These people are afraid of honest questions. Still nobody tells me the evidence.
I’m really curious to know how the believers keep going.
Views: 330
In a dramatic recent article on his blog, Clouds Dominate CO2 as a Climate Driver Since 2000, Roy Spencer sets out clear evidence for internally-forced changes in the climate system. An internal forcing is a feedback, as when a change in temperature causes some other change which itself also changes the temperature.
For example, when temperature rises, it may cause an increase in atmospheric water vapour; that water vapour may condense into clouds, which in turn, by reflecting the incoming sunlight back to space, may cause the temperature to drop.
Such a process might be termed a thermostat, a natural regulator, keeping the temperature within its natural bounds, much as it has done for half a billion years and more.
In our example, the forcing was a temperature increase and the feedback was a temperature decrease – a negative feedback, moving the temperature in the opposite direction from the forcing. A positive feedback would move the temperature in the same direction as the forcing.
To date, the IPCC assumes two vital things: that climate sensitivity is high and internal forcing (feedback) is positive.
I do not follow every detail that Dr Spencer describes, but, after challenging these two assumptions and showing them to be wrong, his conclusion pulls no punches.
Last year I posted an analysis of satellite observations of the 2007-08 global cooling event, showing evidence that it was due to a natural increase in low cloud cover. Here I will look at the bigger picture of how the satellite-observed variations in Earth’s radiative budget compare to those expected from increasing carbon dioxide. Is there something that we can say about the relative roles of nature versus humanity based upon the evidence?
What we will find is evidence consistent with natural cloud variations being the dominant source of climate variability since 2000. Continue Reading →
Views: 77
The day before yesterday I read a comment somewhere (perhaps WUWT) about “Mother Nature, whom I call Climator”. So from now on, remember just who is in charge of the climate. It is not mankind, IT IS
You heard it here first.
Views: 69
I missed the announcement in the Herald yesterday, but it’s just as welcome for hearing it late: after 52 long days on a hunger strike, Peter Spencer, farmer, has given in to “the concerns of family and friends” and been winched back down to earth.
According to Greg Ansley, Peter was “taken to hospital in the nearby alpine town of Cooma to help recover from the ordeal and a diet of lemon juice, vitamins and water.”
Congratulations to a determined champion of justice. We hope he can keep the farm he’s worked so valiantly to save.
He has not achieved the demands he made of the authorities, like a royal commission and a face-to-face meeting with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, but he seems to have made a strong point around the country which will now be followed up by supporters and sympathetic politicians.
Australian Opposition National Senator Barnaby Joyce will take Spencer to Canberra next month to continue his “courageous” fight. Opposition Leader Tony Abbott said Spencer had made an important point.
Spencer, who faces the sale of his property and is deeply in debt, said yesterday he intended to continue his fight against laws that prevented him from clearing trees from his property.
From The Canberra Times:
The hunger strike was the latest in a long line of measures Mr Spencer took to draw attention to his plight and those of many other farmers and graziers in NSW and Queensland.
Mr Spencer said he plans to continue to lobby the Federal Government for a Royal Commission into legislation that bans farmers from clearing native vegetation on their properties.
So the crisis is over and Spencer is safe; I wonder how the real battle will end? This dispute is not just about global warming, it’s about private property, land rights and the rightful powers of the state.
Views: 86
Is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), dealing with us (his global constituents, as it were) honestly?
Richard North, in a blog piece called Pachauri: How much is this man getting?, says:
What we are seeing here … is an interesting modus vivendi — three different payments to support the chairman of the IPCC, yet each payment is made by a different organisation to a different organisation — one in the US, one in the UK and one in India. No one knows what the other is doing — except Pachauri, of course.
Why were these payments made in such complex fashion? Apparently his United Nations salary is not publicly disclosed — why not?
On January 6, 2010, in an article entitled Pachauri: the smoking gun, Dr Richard North describes how
TERI Europe was engaged in the production of a report for which it must have attracted funding in the order of £70,000 and incurred considerable expense, yet it shows an income of £9,000 and an expenditure of £5,000.
Even if there is a substantial discount on the SI2 report, it is simply not credible that TERI Europe could have operated that year with an income so low, or spent so little. On the face of it, we are very much closer to showing that this organisation has indeed been guilty of false accounting, and misleading the Charity Commission. Continue Reading →
Views: 98
Dr Andrew Reisinger, Senior Research Fellow, New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute (CCRI), sits at the right hand of God. The god, that is, of the IPCC — Dr Rajendra Pachauri. Andy is head of the Technical Support Unit for the Synthesis Report group of the IPCC, and from that exalted position controls what the world’s national leaders get to know about climate change.
For he was responsible to his “core group” co-author Rajendra Pachauri for co-ordinating the drafting of the Synthesis Report for the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). The SR is “the concluding summary of the IPCC’s most recent assessment of our current knowledge on climate change,” as Andy’s cv puts it.
That sounds like proper influence to me — real, transformative power. For what comes out of the IPCC’s Assessment Report (or more particularly the summary of it) goes straight into the ears of national leaders around the globe and they will act upon it. They don’t read the actual reports, so they won’t spot the differences between them and the summary. Neither will they fault the summary for themselves, because they are not scientists.
So they are necessarily at the mercy of the authors (or manipulators) of the Summary Report. Much has been said elsewhere about the politically-motivated alterations that were made to many of the IPCC reports. The reports are meant to represent the best of current scientific knowledge, but in practice they are watered down, uncertainties are grossly understated, certainty is claimed where it doesn’t exist and what the scientists said has even been reversed — without their approval.
Views: 418
Jo Nova gives no quarter as she attacks The Australian newspaper for its coverage of Peter Spencer’s hunger strike against his unjust treatment by his own government.
Jo chastises it strongly for the long delay before it covered Spencer’s strike and its inadequacy since. She compares the paper’s reporting of other hunger strikers, including a sex offender, a serial killer and some asylum seekers, with its reporting of Spencer. The criminals got extensive and sympathetic coverage after a mere few days of their hunger strike. But The Australian waited 26 days (nearly four weeks) to mention Peter Spencer’s strike — as a sideline. They provided no substantive coverage until Day 42 — six weeks after it began — and even then were bitingly unsympathetic.
Jo suggests that “The Australian appears to go out of its way not to report the case of an Australian facing ruin, feeling suicidal and asking for a fair go. Spencer has had it tough within our legal system — even a Justice decreed his case was unconscionable“. She asks:
Could it be that The Australian cares more for our carbon emissions than they do about the lives of our farmers? Do the editors feel that somehow the country is better off if we don’t look too closely at any of the drawbacks of legislation aimed to reduce our carbon output?
Jo obviously did a lot of reading on the coverage and asks about the balance one might reasonably expect from Australia’s flagship newspaper but which is lacking in this series of stories of hunger strikes. It’s remarkable (even striking!) how on the one hand the paper is sympathetic to the criminals and migrants and yet on the other hand distinctly stonyhearted towards an innocent Australian farmer.
Whatever the editors’ motivations, they add a further injustice to Peter Spencer’s already long list of injustices.
Views: 83
The mainstream media are becoming involved in Peter Spencer’s story now, although apparently some reporters are looking at Peter himself rather than the big picture.
Some less savoury details have emerged from Peter’s past, which have the potential to obscure the real and substantial matters of his treatment by successive governments and his undeserved misfortunes at their hands.
Still, lots of people are interested in his welfare and Joanne Nova is doing a sterling job keeping up with the play and badgering the news professionals to protect citizens from the government, not the other way around.
We can see how the story develops further at Jo Nova’s blog.
Views: 77
NIWA (National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research) has been accused of “propaganda posing as science” in its claim that the 2000s have been the warmest decade on record. The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition says the claim that the “noughties” decade is the warmest is based on a statistic for which the margin of error is far greater than the claimed warming.
The Coalition says it fully agrees with the criticism by Blue Skies weather forecaster Tony Trewinnard that NIWA’s own numbers show there is no long-term warming trend.
The warm decade claim is one of five by NIWA which amount to advocacy rather than science, and as such represents propaganda which should not be expected from a Crown research institute, especially one claiming to be based on science. The examples of advocacy are:
1) The warmest decade: NIWA principal climate scientist Dr James Renwick told newspapers that temperatures at seven key stations over the past 10 years were one-tenth of a degree above the 1971-2000 norm, adding “the next warmest were the 1980s, about 0.07°C above that normal, so it’s only a few hundredths of a degree difference”. Dr Renwick should know that a few hundredths of a degree is well inside the margin of error for temperature readings and is, therefore, meaningless. The Coalition says if Dr Renwick doesn’t know about margin for error he shouldn’t be in the job; and if he does know it, he has misled the public.
2) NIWA constantly claims that spot temperatures are just ‘noise’ and only long-term trends are important in climate science. NIWA’s statement notably fails to mention that the upward trend in the nineties has unexpectedly disappeared in the ‘noughties’.
3) Most of the warming in New Zealand occurred prior to about 1955, well before the build-up of atmospheric CO2. There has been little or no statistically significant warming in New Zealand over the past 55 years. NIWA fails to put its information in its proper context.
4) Climate is always warming or cooling. There no evidence whatsoever that ‘climate change’ in New Zealand over the past 150 years is outside the expected range of normal climate system variability.
5) The NIWA press statement wrongly contended that 2009 was a year of warm weather extremes, when it is usually at pains to distinguish weather from climate. It dwelt on cyclones in the Pacific without mentioning the vanishing hurricanes in the Atlantic. It studiously avoided mention of the blizzards which disrupted the Copenhagen conference and are currently setting coldness records throughout the Northern Hemisphere. The entire piece is a classic example of the use of selective and misleading data.
The Coalition statement concludes: “Until NIWA responds to our request to come clean on the full extent of its adjustments to raw temperature data, exactly what adjustments were made, and why, any statement that institute makes about climate variation must be taken with a grain of salt.”
Views: 69
The letter below surfaced in an email group today (on the right is its earliest incarnation). It’s creative writing and, if you’re in a good mood when you read it, finely stimulating, even hilarious.
But I was moved to investigate. Google gave several recent references, the earliest was May 7, 2006. I kept looking; there are a score of references dated December 2009.
Then, on a blog from Quite Interesting Ltd (www.qi.com), came word it was from 1982. The writer traces it back from 2006 to an entry in Hansard in October 1994. I urge you to take a look; the story is interesting enough, to be sure.
The matter has by now quite fastened on our writer’s imagination and he presses his investigation on and on, discovering it on both sides of the Atlantic and in ever earlier decades. Eventually he turns it up, almost fully formed, in 1935, with beginnings in Hansard, no less, in a shipping context, in 1934!
Old or new, early or late, it contains elementary economics lessons for ever. Not to mention some of the driest British (or American) humour you’ll find anywhere.
Rt Hon David Miliband MP
Secretary of State.
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA),
Nobel House
17 Smith Square
London
SW1P 3JR
16 July 2009
Dear Secretary of State,
My friend, who is in farming at the moment, recently received a cheque for £3,000 from the Rural Payments Agency for not rearing pigs. I would now like to join the “not rearing pigs” business. Continue Reading →
Views: 115
On Friday afternoon I asked for technical help from my web hosting provider. Something went wrong when they moved the site to a new server. While I was waiting for them to fix it, I formed a desire to install a second copy of WordPress as a test bed. I thought: what could possibly go wrong?
The minute I created the second database, the first one stopped working, meaning nobody, myself included, could access the Climate Conversation Group blog.
However, it turned out that there was no connection between the two events; they just coincided.
It’s very frustrating not having the blog available. The traffic logs show that a lot of people visit here every day, so I’m sorry about the lack of service.
Feel free to leave any comments, questions or complaints below.
Well, the upgrade still hasn’t happened, but the whole site is now on a server with the latest software that WordPress requires, hurrah! My thanks to the technical support staff at The Kiwi Web Hosting Company in Wellington for their help.
After the nameservers have replicated the new details I’ll do the WordPress upgrade. Boring, really, isn’t it? Computers have nothing to do with the subject, yet without them we’d wait weeks to hear each others’ messages, so it’s sensible to take care of them.
Views: 80
This is an Australian story. It is for us all.
Noble resistance has often created martyrs, those who die in defence of their cause. Let us hope we’re not watching the final days of the first climate change martyr.
Peter Spencer is a courageous, intelligent and resourceful man. But he has been destroyed by the Australian government, through the legal system, in the name of climate change. The only rescue possible for him is by the government and they are refusing to get involved.
It is worse than disgraceful. It is tragic.
The only hope for him now is a public outcry, which is beginning in Australia.
He came to my attention through this story on Jo Nova’s web site. It is a disgrace that the mainstream Australian media are not reporting it (though some are beginning to).
It is no great surprise that the New Zealand media aren’t reporting it either. For one thing it’s happening overseas but doesn’t involve Paris Hilton and for another our media have largely lost their spine. Especially where climate change is involved, almost no journalists will challenge the government line.
The page I link to above has important links to parts of the story. In addition, Joanne posted this story yesterday which contains a harrowing radio account by Peter himself of the troubles he faces and the strenuous, creative efforts he’s made over several years to confront them.
The tremendous strain of being parted from his family for the last three years and the imminent loss of his farm and personal effects in the next few days causes him to break down several times. Throughout his account, even after more than 40 days without food, he speaks clearly of events and his hope that the government can yet be persuaded to change what it has done.
Jo’s latest post reports the rally was quite well supported. However it includes a very disturbing account of possible government intervention making the rally more difficult to stage. Bus inspectors threatened a snap inspection which effectively stopped the organisers from using buses.
And we thought Australia was a modern country with advanced notions of freedom and democracy.
What’s possible over the ditch is possible right here.
What to do? Post a comment about your support on Jo Nova’s blog. There’s an address there to write to the Australian Prime Minister. Post a comment here. Write to anyone you know in Australia to make sure they’ve heard about this amazing injustice.
If you think of something else we can do, post it here.
Views: 334
I prefer the term Warmergate (it’s so near the original!) to refer to this scandal but most people are by now familiar with Climategate, so I bow to the public search engines, er, I mean public opinion.
On 12 October, 2009, thousands of emails and data files laboriously collated by a whistle-blower perhaps within the CRU at the University of East Anglia were sent to Paul Hudson, BBC climate change expert. He did nothing with them. On 19 November they arrived anonymously on a server in Tomsk, Siberia, from where they were sent to blogs around the world.
On 13 December the Daily Mail’s rather excellent summary of an important part of those emails began:
The claim was both simple and terrifying: that temperatures on planet Earth are now ‘likely the highest in at least the past 1,300 years’.
As its authors from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) must have expected, it made headlines around the world.
Yet some of the scientists who helped to draft it, The Mail on Sunday can reveal, harboured uncomfortable doubts.
Views: 74
Our laughter can wound or caress. It’s hard to laugh with real amusement at our enemy because it feels like embracing them. We don’t want to approve.
I invite you to do so now. Of course, this cartoon isn’t a bit funny. Is it?
Views: 25
1 January 2010
His Excellency Mr. Kevin Rudd,
Prime Minister, Commonwealth of Australia.
Prime Minister,
Your speech on 6 November 2009 to the Lowy Institute, in which you publicly expressed some concern at my approach to the climate question, has prompted several leading Australian citizens to invite me come on tour to explain myself in a series of lectures in Australia later this month. I am writing to offer personal briefings on why “global warming” is a non-problem to you and other party leaders during my visit. For convenience, I am copying this letter to them, and to the Press.
Your speech mentioned my remarks about the proposal for world “government” in the early drafts of what had been intended as a binding Copenhagen Treaty. These proposals were not, as you suggested, a “conspiracy theory” from the “far right” with “zero basis in evidence”. Your staff will find them in paragraphs 36-38 of the main text of Annex 1 to the 15 September draft of the Treaty. The word “government” appears twice at paragraph 38. After much adverse publicity in democratic countries, including Australia, the proposals were reluctantly dropped before Copenhagen.
You say I am one of “those who argue that any multilateral action is by definition evil”. On the contrary: my first question is whether any action at all is required, to which – as I shall demonstrate – the objective economic and scientific answer is No. Even if multilateral action were required, which it is not, national governments in the West are by tradition democratically elected. Therefore, a fortiori, transnational or global governments should also be made and unmade by voters at the ballot-box. The climate ought not to be used as a shoddy pretext for international bureaucratic-centralist dictatorship. We committed Europeans have had more than enough of that already with the unelected but all-powerful Kommissars of the hated EU, who make nine-tenths of our laws by decree (revealingly, they call them “Directives” or “Commission Regulations”). The Kommissars (that is the official German word for them) inflict their dictates upon us regardless of what the elected European or any other democratic Parliament says or wishes. Do we want a worldwide EU? No.
You say I am one of “those who argue that climate change does not represent a global market failure”. Yet it is only recently that opinion sufficient to constitute a market signal became apparent in the documents of the IPCC, which is, however, a political rather than a scientific entity. There has scarcely been time for a “market failure”. Besides, corporations are falling over themselves to cash in on the giant financial fraud against the little guy that carbon taxation and trading have already become in the goody-two-shoes EU – and will become in Australia if you get your way.
You say I was one of “those who argue that somehow the market will magically solve the problem”. Continue Reading →
Views: 100
The Carbon Sense Coalition today called for an end to the practice of governments trying to buy support for their failing Ration-N-Tax Scheme using tax money raised in an underhand fashion from the same people.
The Chairman of Carbon Sense, Mr Viv Forbes, said that since the “Climate Scare-a-Day” campaign of 2009 has failed to spook the people, the New Year will see acceleration of the next ploy: “carbon bribery and corruption”. Continue Reading →
Views: 87
The private emails and logs leaked last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia can’t tell us whether industrial activity is really heating the earth’s atmosphere and endangering civilization. But they have settled the identity of the Great Satan of climate science. Torontonian Stephen McIntyre, a gentle, persistent amateur who had no credentials in applied science before stepping into the global warming debate in 2003, is mentioned more than 100 times. Continue Reading →
Views: 48
This post has been in the works for several weeks now but it hasn’t lost its fascination. A story appeared in the NZ Herald on 8 November about the latest sighting of icebergs, which annoyed me for its references to global warming. But on investigating I discovered some interesting science.
Let’s do something for the language
There’s no collective noun for icebergs (the situation is worse than we thought!). Here are some suggestions: a group, a herd, a glide, a float, a thunder, sizzle, swish, a gleam, a crackle or a slush? That has a lovely rhythm. Let me know your preference, or send in your suggestions. When the list is a bit longer we’ll put up an online poll.
The story is stale and the icebergs have melted, but two issues remain: The first is that there’s nothing new about icebergs floating past New Zealand. It doesn’t happen often, but evidence proves regular visits going back millennia. Believe it or not, we have photographs! Not of icebergs exactly, but where they’ve been… well, you’ll see, read on.
The second point is that NIWA scientists can be relied on to mention the magic words “climate change” any time they’re talking about ice, water, wind or weather and that, my friends, makes me angry. Continue Reading →
Views: 333
Come tell us your opinion while it’s fresh!
We want to know if you think that carbon dioxide dominates the climate. Note that does not mean simply “affects” the climate: do you think it dominates?
Because it’s quite clear to us that for carbon dioxide to be declared quite the villain it is made out to be, it must dominate climate in a very dominating way! It must be, in fact, the most dominating thing in a dominantly long time, climatically speaking. It must dominate the climate as a mushroom shades a blade of grass in that completely over-shadowing, dominating kind of mushroomy way.
What do you think? Vote here.
Tell everyone.
Thank you.
Views: 82
We Kiwis should stay in touch with Australian developments, so here’s another in a continuing collaboration with the friendly dingos across the ditch. Download the original pdf (153KB) from Carbon Sense.
The Carbon Sense Coalition today called on the Australian Parliament to repudiate the
Copenhagen giveaways promised by PM Rudd to the failed states of Africa and the welfare
beggars of the islands.
The Chairman of “Carbon Sense”, Mr Viv Forbes, said that the three Climate Crusaders,
Obama, Brown and Rudd, had been comprehensively conned in Copenhagen by African
mendicants and fakers from the islands.
“They have agreed to hand over mega-bucks of our money (anywhere from $5 billion to
$100 billion) as compensation for alleged damage caused by our production of carbon
dioxide – the Africans citing climate damage and the islanders claiming rising sea levels.
“Even a cursory examination of the facts would prove that both of these claims are
fraudulent.
“There is no evidence that carbon dioxide has caused global warming, or causes damage to
any aspect of life on earth. The vast majority of earth’s warming originates from the sun, and fluctuations there are the major cause of climate changes.
“In addition, careful recent surveys show no unusual rising of sea levels. Continue Reading →
Views: 120
UPDATE: 1 Jan 2010. I found the “flourish commerce” phrase used by Pears Soap, certainly a more salubrious context than the one I knew it from, but this is the only image I could locate. It’s not legible, but it is there (the evidence is overwhelming; 48,000 national science associations can’t be wrong).
The inside of my grandparents’ white porcelain toilet bowl had the inscription, for the regular edification of we young boys controlling our aim: “Flourish commerce, and let the country live”, enlivened by the stirring sight of New Zealand’s and Great Britain’s crossed flags, in colour.
Written probably in about the 1940s, such frank promotion of commerce was non-controversial in the days before so-called “social welfare” had smuggled its obfuscating tenets into every area of life, until nobody knows where wealth comes from.
These days, forgetting what wealth is and how it’s made, we consider even schools and universities to be centres of production, in the same category as pig farms and steel mills, and we burden their transactions with a Goods and Services and every other sort of tax.
It is fiscal misbehaviour bordering on the criminal to thus reduce funds needed for education, but nobody seems even to notice, much less to complain.
In the Christmas Eve edition of the Herald, Brian Fallow, Economics Editor, pontificates sadly over the failure at Copenhagen of developed nations to destroy their own productive capacity. Continue Reading →
Views: 411
In the thousands of emails released last month in what is now known as Climategate, the greatest battles took place over scientists’ attempts to reconstruct a credible temperature record for the last couple of thousand years. Have they failed? What the Climategate emails provide is at least one incontrovertible answer: They certainly have not succeeded.
In a post-Copenhagen world, climate history is not merely a matter of getting the record straight, or a trivial part of the global warming science. In a Climategate email in April of this year, Steve Colman, professor of Geological Science at the University of Minnesota Duluth, told scores of climate scientists “most people seem to accept that past history is the only way to assess what the climate can actually do (e.g., how fast it can change). However, I think that the fact that reconstructed history provides the only calibration or test of models (beyond verification of modern simulations) is under-appreciated.”
If temperature history is the “only” way to test climate models, the tests we have on hand — mainly the shaky temperature history of the last 1,000 or 2,000 years — suggest current climate models are not getting a proper scientific workout.
Two scientists, one British and the other American, straddle the initial Climategate battle over recent global temperature history. Later, the same two scientists appear to abandon their internal disagreements and join forces to present a united front to fight off critics and put down skeptics. Continue Reading →
Views: 97
This summary from the National Post of the Climategate emails and what has been discovered in them is the best I have seen. It is especially pleasing to hear Terence Corcoran’s moderate tone. The contents of the released emails and computer code throw strong doubt on the conclusions of the science of global warming. Everything needs further examination and there are signs this re-examination is happening, in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the USA, Britain and Russia. — Richard Treadgold
Now that the Copenhagen political games are out of the way, marked as a failure by any realistic standard, it may be time to move on to the science games. To get the post-Copenhagen science review under way, the world has a fine document at hand: The Climategate Papers.
On Nov. 17, three weeks before the Copenhagen talks began, a massive cache of climate science emails landed on a Russian server, reportedly after having been laundered through Saudi Arabia. Where they came from, nobody yet knows. Described as having been hacked or leaked from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, the emails have been the focus of thousands of media and blog reports. Since their release, most attention has been focussed on a few choice bits of what seem like incriminating evidence of trickery and scientific repression. Some call it fraud.
Email fragments instantly began flying through the blogosphere. Perhaps the most sensational came from a Nov. 16, 1999, email from Phil Jones, head of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), in which he referred to having “completed Mike’s Nature trick” to “hide the decline” in temperature.
These words, now famous around the world as the core of Climategate, are in fact the grossest possible over-simplification of what the emails contain. The Phil Jones email and other choice email fragments are really just microscopic particles taken from a massive collection of material that will, in time, come to be seen as the greatest and most dramatic science policy epic in history.
Whether the emails, containing more than 2,000 pages and links to thousands more, are smoking guns and direct evidence of scientific skulduggery is in many ways a secondary issue. The Climategate emails are an unprecedented and unparalleled record of attempts by scientists to crack the mysteries of the world’s climate. They are at the heart of a massive effort to understand the world’s climate history and create models and systems to predict climate hundreds of years into the future. Continue Reading →
Views: 108
December 21, 2009
Pity the politician in 2010: climate change policies pose an unknown but potentially strong temptation to cross party lines — a bit like abortion brought out single-issue voters a few decades ago.
Some political leaders have a messianic urge to save the planet; others have an ideological aversion to intrusive state controls. A few (perhaps) have studied the science in depth, and all have glanced regularly at fickle opinion surveys. But most are stuck with the muddle in the middle, anxious to do whatever will deliver the best outcomes for the country and their constituents.
Many would begin with the risk-averse approach …”we have to rely on the relevant experts in dealing with highly complex issues. Our official advisers tell us there is a significant risk that human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases are contributing to the recent global warming trend.”
Obvious policy implications of this ‘luke-warm’ stance are solid efforts to improve energy efficiency and to encourage promising new technology — perhaps low-emission fuels. A key consideration for any such programmes is that they are likely to deliver net benefits in any event — even if the warming stops or the causation becomes suspect. Continue Reading →
Views: 114
The NZ Herald on Saturday ran an Associated Press story headlined Global warming a tough sell for human psyche. The reporter finds experts to say how hard it is for people to accept man-made global warming (although the reporter doesn’t refer to acceptance, he calls it getting “excited”).
So the difficulty in getting people to believe in global warming is caused just by psychological factors?
I wonder if the Herald would mind, just briefly, going over the actual evidence for dangerous man-made global warming again?
It might refresh our memory. Facts usually make my mind up, but what about the Herald?
Views: 73
Copenhagen finally exposed the world-government desires of the global warming devotees.
It is now in the open. United Nations officials, environmentalists and sundry politicians have spoken over increasingly over the last year of the “need” to govern all nations’ decisions relating to the use of fossil fuels in order to get the climate under “control”. There has been the occasional leaked report discussing how to achieve such governance.
But with the release of the actual wording of the Copenhagen Treaty all camouflage and obfuscation has been put aside. What has been revealed is a naked grab for power, which—thank the gods—has been thwarted.
Even now I shrink from talking about it, since it seems simple-minded, or even paranoid, to give credence to just another conspiracy theory. But too many people have expressed a desire for world government, from the French President to the leader of Greenpeace, to disbelieve it any longer. Lord Monckton expressed the issues and the dangers in his superlative style in a speech he gave to the Minnesota Free Markets Institute on October 14.
Now, immediately following Copenhagen and with a newly sore head from police brutality, he writes in the SPPI blog this summary of the agreement and his view of its likely effects. He finishes on a note of hope, but watch for the unstated sting in the tail.
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The mountains shall labour, and what will be born? A stupid little mouse. Thanks to hundreds of thousands of US citizens who contacted their elected representatives to protest about the unelected, communistic world government with near-infinite powers of taxation, regulation and intervention that was proposed in early drafts of the Copenhagen Treaty, there is no Copenhagen Treaty. There is not even a Copenhagen Agreement. There is a “Copenhagen Accord”. Continue Reading →
Views: 116
NIWA have published misleading material on their web site and seem to have advised the Minister for Climate Change Issues to give evasive answers to questions in the Parliament.
For those unfamiliar with the story: NIWA keeps raw data for the national NZ temperature record and makes it available on their web site. The Climate Conversation Group and the NZ Climate Science Coalition conducted a joint study of the temperature record, researched by a science team and published on 25 November under the title Are we feeling warmer yet?.
That study demonstrated that the official graph does not represent the raw temperature data. NIWA told us that adjustments have been applied so we’ve asked for the details. So far they obfuscate. We don’t know why they refuse to disclose what the weather has been.
We conclude that NIWA’s response to our enquiries has been defensive, obstructive and oddly disparaging.
The Hon Rodney Hide became concerned about deteriorating standards in public science and asked in the Parliament whether the Hon Dr Nick Smith would require NIWA to release the full data for the official NZ temperature record. On the last possible day for answering, Nick finally replied: “You must ask Wayne Mapp; he’s the responsible minister (for Research, Science and Technology, the portfolio that covers NIWA).” We won’t get any Parliamentary questions answered now until well into the New Year, so Nick Smith has caused a considerable delay in getting this information to the public.
Gratuitously, he added: “I would note however that the NZCSC have had this information since 2003.” He hoped that little factoid would hurt the Coalition’s reputation, but it won’t, although it might hurt his own — because the Coalition didn’t exist until 2006.
NIWA say that the Coalition have had all the information needed to reproduce the official graph since 19 July, 2006, when, they say, “NIWA advised NZ Climate Science Coalition member Dr Vincent Gray” of the need for adjustments and gave him a couple of examples. Dr Gray has located an email of that date and we can now reveal that it was from Dr Jim Salinger, not NIWA, it was not addressed to the Coalition and did not mention the Coalition.
It was sent just a few weeks after the Coalition was created, before they ever discussed the national temperature record. Dr Gray tells us that and other emails before and since were not official communications on either side — they were letters between two scientists who had known each other for years.
But most significantly the email does not give details of the adjustments made to the temperatures, nor does it give the information required to derive the adjustments. Dr Salinger just discusses the changes in a general way and gives a few examples and that’s all. NIWA’s assertion that that email contains the requested information is not supported by reading the email. Continue Reading →
Views: 390
A mound of email arrived in my inbox over the last few days. Much of it relates to our attempt to get from NIWA the actual adjustments they have made to the national temperature record.
My first priority is to make an informal response to NIWA’s posts on their web site and to the parliamentary answers we’ve received. It’s important that the people who have trusted NIWA know just how they are pulling the wool over our eyes (or trying to) and refusing to cooperate. In fact, they are being far more obstructive than any publicly-owned utility has a right to be, and you deserve to hear the details of it.
A scientific study is under way right now to make a more formal response to NIWA’s obfuscation, but that won’t be finished until some time in the New Year.
My thanks to everyone who has contributed information or suggestions, but their sheer number means it’s taking longer to review them. Which means I’m also unable to follow up for now the new connections we’ve just made with the network of Climate Realists, run by the excellent Neil and Esther Henderson, of Gisborne. But we’ll get there!
The new interest in us, but more importantly in the evidence-based doubts about the truth of dangerous man-made global warming, is wonderful.
So that’s the reason I haven’t posted anything about NIWA’s completely inadequate answers to us. But it will come soon.
Views: 346
The Carbon Sense Coalition, highlighting the hypocrisy which surrounds the global warming circus, today called for the “climate conspirators” attending the Copenhagen carnival to walk home.
The Chairman of Carbon Sense, Mr Viv Forbes, added: “Right now, over 15,000 green hypocrites, mostly funded by the world’s suffering taxpayers, have winged their way in comfortable carbon-fuelled air travel to Copenhagen’s best VIP accommodation. There they will be seeking ways to forcibly reduce our carbon footprint while doing nothing about their own.
“Top-rated airlines are booming as prominent people top up their frequent flyer carbon credits. Concierges are smiling as limousines glide in, full of exalted envoys with their entourage of minders and courtiers, all with lights blazing, air conditioners humming, kitchens cooking, champagne bubbling and caviar disappearing.”
Mr Forbes said that the global warming industry would also be there, creating scares, talking about drowning polar bears and melting ice, demanding handouts, seeking exemptions, defending paper credits and pushing for subsidies and special deals.
He said, “There will be battalions of largely gullible and fawning media, many also from government media monoliths touring on the tab of the taxpayer. We are told that Australian taxpayers have sent 114 official delegates there, all concerned to reduce our consumption of carbon fuels.”
“If they are fair dinkum,” he fumed, “they should all lead by example, use “green energy”—and walk home.”
Can’t say we disagree with too much of that, really. Drop a note to your MP and let him/her know what you think of this junket.
Views: 103
It’s been a busy day and it’s close to its end. I check out the NZ Herald for the first time and see a headline: “Tiny Tuvalu outgunned by oil giant”. Curious, I click on it. Now I’m furious. That was yesterday, it’s taken until now to finish researching and writing this damned rebuttal and adjust the images and I’m still furious.
There is no justification for a high level of alarm over future sea level rise and no reason to blame human emissions of carbon dioxide.
The “oil giant” is Saudi Arabia, apparently anxious not to have its oil exports reduced too much. “Outgunned” means opposing votes squash Tuvalu’s motion for developed nations to more aggressively curb their emissions. So Tuvalu’s leaders are distressed, thinking their island nation will soon disappear beneath the waves.
Activists claim that sea level rise is already making life difficult for islanders on Tuvalu and on Kiribati, another set of low-lying Pacific islands to the north-east of Australia.
They quote damaging effects such as fortnightly “king tides” attacking the coastline, wells contaminated with sea water—even one village in Kiribati abandoned to “waist-high water”. It is very distressing. Continue Reading →
Views: 48
Steve O’connor is a senior geologist who has studied paleoclimate for 40 years. He lives in the circulation area of the Taranaki Daily News, which today published some astonishing comments from one Trotter. I am, unfortunately, unable yet to confirm the Taranaki Daily News item or give a link to it, but I am re-publishing Steve’s letter anyway, because it is the best summary I have read of the central anxieties arising from the global warming scam.
UPDATE 14 Dec 8:30 am: To give you just an outline of Trotter’s complete abandonment of evidence-based science, his denial of the right to free speech and his denial of evidence-based doubts of man-made global warming, here are the concluding comments from his Dominion article, titled “In the war for nature, the deniers are traitors”:
“There will, of course, be people who whisper that the enemy isn’t really our enemy … In 1940, England was full of such whisperers. The British ruling class, in particular, was riddled with defeatists, Nazi sympathisers and traitors. Back then people called them “Quislings” and “Fifth Columnists”. If, therefore, the battle against climate change has to become the moral equivalent of war, with all the sacrifice that war entails, then climate change denial must become the moral equivalent of treason. Over the top? No. The stakes really are that high.”
It is sobering to reflect that, a mere 65 years after World War II, which killed so many of our finest young men as they defended the freedom we still live in against the oppression from without of the advancing fascist barbarians, we are about to subjugate ourselves from within. For the remaining vestiges of that freedom are about to be crumpled in the unelected fists of the most devoted, socialist, totalitarian, “environmentalist” bureaucrats the world has ever produced, justified solely on the grounds of non-existent evidence of man-made climate control.
When I first encountered, a couple of years ago, this menacing interpretation of the approaching “carbon crisis” I scoffed. It was alarmist nonsense; outlandish that anybody would do such a thing; an imaginary conspiracy from the paranoid—surely the movement is based on the science of the enhanced greenhouse effect? Continue Reading →
Views: 340
A momentous meeting took place last night (Wednesday, 9 December) at Parliament House in Wellington. This exclusive account comes courtesy of the Hon Rodney Hide, who was present.
The meeting was called two weeks back by Nick Smith so that MPs could be briefed by Dr David Wratt, Chief Climate Scientist, on the official NZ temperature graph published by NIWA on their web site, which Rodney Hide had posed questions about in the Parliament.
Knowing NIWA climate scientists would be there, Rodney invited Dr Vincent Gray, leading climate scientist, to accompany him as an advisor.
But before the meeting could begin, the Hon Dr Nick Smith had a surprise for them. He ordered Rodney not to bring Vincent into the meeting. Nick said roughly: “It’s a private meeting of MPs and we do not wish to have outsiders.” But, showing a distinct favouritism, he allowed the outsiders from NIWA to remain. So why did he exclude Rodney’s adviser? Was it because Vincent has known the details of the New Zealand temperature records for more than fifty years? Was NIWA afraid of what he knows? If not, why did Nick Smith refuse to admit Dr Vincent Gray?
It was, of course, a gross discourtesy for Nick Smith to brusquely issue orders to a coalition partner in front of other MPs. But that’s just my opinion.
So Vincent Gray took his leave and subsequently Dr Wratt began his address. They sat through about 25 minutes of a description of the IPCC process, its committees, scientific writers and review procedures. David talked about the climate modelling that underpins the alarming climate predictions and it was quite unnecessary and very boring.
Finally there was a moment for a question. Rodney said: “I’d just like to take you back to the graph on your web site, the one with seven stations. Can I ask about that?”
There were sudden signs of disorder as David Wratt, with the other scientist (Rodney didn’t catch his name) interrupting from time to time, seemed immediately to become angry with the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition. He ranted on about their press release and they didn’t want to know this or that. Continue Reading →
Views: 344
This story is datelined London, December 1, and comes from the Australian Associated Press. It was posted on the web site of the Royal Society of New Zealand—behind a paywall. [Full article at the end.]
First: it is frustrating, suspicious and avaricious for our Royal Society to hide its “news” behind a paywall. How widely, really, does it wish the news to spread, when it publishes only to its members?
Second: the level of uninterest evinced by this reporter in the matter he is reporting is quite awe-inspiring. There is not the merest evidence of curiosity, investigation or the most rudimentary checking of facts.
The main assertions in this story are inane, blatantly alarmist, undisguised advocacy and wrong. That the story is promulgated by our once-proud, independent, trustworthy and in particular scientific Royal Society is now a source of shame to all New Zealanders. There is no doubt that our Royal Society has abandoned, in respect of the global warming controversy, any pretence to objective investigation. It has instead adopted such a strong intention to champion the hypothesis of man-made control of the climate that it blinds itself to the necessity of finding evidence.
Their intention moves them to breach their founding principles. Look them up. Their behaviour is a matter of law, so it will give way, given enough pressure, to legal or parliamentary sanction. Swell, public opinion, swell!
Our Royal Society even helps champion, through web site connections, the blatantly alarmist web site Hot Topic, which routinely insults scientific sceptics asking reasonable questions with terms like crank, denialist and worse. We have come to expect that from the likes of Mr Renowden and his bigots, but the support for it from the scientists of the Royal Society is reprehensible. It is scientific misbehaviour.
Here is a sampling of the AAP story’s errors, inadequacies and naked prejudice. Continue Reading →
Views: 330
The science is never settled. Only we are settled. What we knew for certain last week, last year or even for half a life might need reforming today.
Over the last ten years or so, as the heat faded from the warming dimension of climate change, so alarm was raised about the dire effects of ocean “acidification”. The mainstream media began to describe the appalling effects on sea life, especially creatures with exoskeletons, of the increasingly “acid” waters being created by higher and higher levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere.
Coral reefs were doomed, many even now were “suffering” and all were in peril of destruction if we continued “spewing” huge quantities of CO2 into the air. Crabs, crayfish, shellfish of all kinds, plankton and krill were all at risk, and their decline spelt doom for the higher creatures in the sea, even unto man himself, who eats them.
The conch shell at left was exposed to current CO2 levels; the shell at right was exposed to the highest levels in the study. (Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)
Now, published in the December 1 issue of Geology, comes a remarkable—and remarkably courageous—study from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution that shows many denizens of the oceans benefit hugely from that increased CO2. Did you predict that?
The study makes it clear that many forms of oceanic life are disadvantaged to some degree by increased acidification, but this message is very different from the hitherto confident, ceaseless prognostications of universal doom proceeding from the pens of the alarmists. The scientists are calling for more detailed studies to be done, because there is so much to learn.
Anthony Watts, over at WUWT (hat-tip to Anthony), puts it succinctly:
And some thought ocean acidification would destroy everything.
Here’s how the media release from WHOI begins:
In a striking finding that raises new questions about carbon dioxide’s impact on marine life, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) scientists report that some shell-building creatures—such as crabs, shrimp and lobsters—unexpectedly build more shell when exposed to ocean acidification caused by elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2).
Sorry, but I guess the paper itself is behind a pay-wall; there’s no link I can find at WHOI.
Views: 374
An ancient description of a wise man is that he is the same on the inside and the outside. That means that as he thinks, so he speaks and acts. There are other things that might be said of the wise, but this simple description comes to us now as the essence of the modern term “transparency”.
It means that there should be no disjunction, no blemish in concept or communication and nothing obscured when it comes to public decisions and action.
The leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia involve just a small coterie of scientists. However, they have been at the centre of climate science for a long time and their views, aspirations and activities have had effects far beyond their immediate working environments. Continue Reading →
Views: 62
By courtesy of Mr Warwick Hughes, who kindly sent it to us, we are pleased to post this spreadsheet containing the historical New Zealand temperature series. The data are from the seven weather stations chosen by Dr Salinger and adjusted by him to represent the country’s temperatures, although it does not include the actual adjustments made or the reasons for them.
When plotted, it produces a graph similar to the one on NIWA’s web site that shows strong warming during the 20th century.
See more information and download the spreadsheet.
Just download the spreadsheet.
Views: 341
A funny thing happened last week involving Parliament but almost nobody noticed. Without my observant scientist friend, I wouldn’t know about it. We’re all pretty lucky that he put two and two together, but that’s what scientists are good at. He tells me they practise putting them together three or four times a week and some of them are so good at it they have trouble getting them apart.
So what happened? First, our study appeared, with a copy of the official NZ graph showing strong warming over the last hundred years. Second, Nick Smith said NIWA tells him New Zealand’s global warming will be much milder than elsewhere. Can both statements be true? Only if our steep temperature rise suddenly slows right down! It’s another mystery. Continue Reading →
Views: 329
A number of people have now asked us for the raw data we used to create the unadjusted versus adjusted temperature graphs in our study Are we feeling warmer yet? We will shortly post a list of station names from the NIWA CliFlo database. While we could post the data directly, it would be fairly pointless, as you would need to know in detail the weather stations and the methods we used to combine them. Each station required some experimentation and detective work, assumptions had to be made and we may well have made errors. We make no claim to be infallible, so we publish these notes to let the reader judge whether our study has merit.
We will shortly be making the Salinger adjusted dataset available. We would like to thank Warwick Hughes for providing us with that data.
In this document we want to work through an example weather station—Hokitika—to illustrate our approach and methods. We also want to address NIWA’s response, currently on their website, that the Wellington adjustments are justified by altitude differences between stations where no time series overlap is available (Thorndon, Kelburn and Airport). The assumption is made by NIWA that stations can be adjusted together in such cases (even though they have no common overlap period and are also separated both spatially and temporally) as long as they share a common height above sea level.
By giving examples of stations with both altitude separation and an overlap period, we show that the lapse rate can differ and even the sign of the temperature difference can be reversed. Some higher stations record warmer temperatures than nearby lower stations. Therefore, it is invalid to move two station records together simply because they share a station height.
Go to Supplementary Information — Hokitika
Download Supplementary Information — Hokitika
Views: 86
We’ve heard from a number of people wanting to replicate the graphs. However, we never expected such a high level of interest in our study so we were somewhat unprepared. We are now putting together a posting that will specify stations and describe our methods which we hope to post in the next few hours. In the meantime, this note outlines the difficulties. It doesn’t answer your needs, and for that we apologise, but we’re working on something more substantial right now. Continue Reading →
Views: 123
The New Zealand
Climate Science Coalition
25 November 2009
(A paper collated by Richard Treadgold, of the Climate Conversation Group, from a combined research project undertaken by members of the Climate Conversation Group and the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition)
There have been strident claims that New Zealand is warming. The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), among other organisations and scientists, allege that, along with the rest of the world, we have been heating up for over 100 years.
But now, a simple check of publicly-available information proves these claims wrong. In fact, New Zealand’s temperature has been remarkably stable for a century and a half. So what’s going on?
New Zealand’s National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research (NIWA) is responsible for New Zealand’s National Climate Database. This database, available online, holds all New Zealand’s climate data, including temperature readings, since the 1850s. Anybody can go and get the data for free. That’s what we did, and we made our own graph.
Go to paper
Download paper (pdf, 213KB).
Views: 557
This was in the Herald this morning:
Icebergs coming en masse
More than 100 Antarctic icebergs – and possibly even hundreds of them – are floating towards New Zealand.
An Australian Antarctic Division glaciologist, Neal Young, said yesterday that the ice chunks, spotted in satellite photos, had passed the Auckland Islands and were heading towards the South Island, 450km northeast.
He said more than 100 icebergs – some more than 200m across – were seen in just one cluster, indicating there could be hundreds more.
Dr Young said they were the remains of a massive ice floe which split from Antarctica in rising sea and air temperatures resulting from global warming.
– AFP
I think it’s exciting that we might see giant icebergs again, because it’s dramatic. However, the assumption that their close approach is connected with warming is odd, since the appearance of ice in my gin and tonic indicates just the opposite—a cooling trend. As you sail to Antarctica, the appearance of icebergs in the sea certainly confirms a cooling trend. A reasonable person, on hearing that icebergs appear because of warming, surely considers enquiring whether it’s actually because of cooling.
Dr Young’s easy attribution of the calving of these icebergs to “global warming” is unlikeable and unconvincing. More likely is that, as usual, the ice shelf reaches such a length (through continual plentiful production of ice, please note!) that the ocean waves can move it about with sufficient force to snap it off. If warming was causing melting, what would survive to embark on a voyage to anywhere?
It is equally likely that, because of cooling seas, the icebergs now survive the long voyage to New Zealand!
I know of no evidence supporting a global rise in temperature recently. Certainly, no more than perhaps 0.2°C, something like that, in the few months which might have influenced the calving. In the Antarctic, such a rise might get you up to around minus eleventy five which is dreadfully chilly and won’t melt anything. There’s nothing abnormal going on here. Might we not reasonably expect the Herald to know this and to question the AFP story?
They have let us down.
Views: 97
This from The Guardian of 5th November:
A global treaty to fight climate change will be postponed by at least six months and possibly a year or more, senior negotiators and politicians conceded today.
In a day of gloomy statements, the world’s key industrialised nations said they had abandoned hope of a legally binding treaty at the Copenhagen summit next month and had begun to plan only for a meeting of world leaders.
Makase Nyaphisi, the Lesothan ambassador speaking on behalf of the UN’s least developed group of 49 countries, responded by saying: “We cannot afford delaying tactics in any way. It’s a matter of life and death.”
Poor countries stand to gain enormous sums of money in the name of climate change. Just announced in Barcelona was $1.1 billion funding from the World Bank for “clean energy” and “preparation for climate change” in Africa, from a total pot of $6.3 billion pledged by donors in funds for developing nations.
It’s hardly surprising Lesotho wants the process to move on. The climate change scam scheme is promising poor nations a Lotto win, the biggest pot of gold they could imagine. The best thing is that it’s completely open-ended, since there’s no finish date. When will the climate be “changed” enough? When will western countries stop feeling guilty about causing climate change?
To be plain, once begun, there will be a Niagara of money flooding into the poor nations. How on earth will it stop? Because the climate won’t stop—it’ll keep changing forever. If there is to be an exit method or a review date, what is it? It is scandalous that our government is negotiating this treaty without disclosing to us its contents.
For undeveloped countries, it must seem like the very best kind of extortion—the kind the victim volunteers for. All the poor people have to do is keep asking for more.
With “climate change” revenue streaming into the country, despotic leaders will feed on the bounty like never before while their people remain hungry, unhealthy and uneducated. What incentives will there be seriously to improve their society?
By all means send money, but don’t connect it with climate change and tie it firmly to schemes the people know about and join with. But the most important thing is to FIRST discover the cause of the nation’s poverty.
Poverty is caused by something like land ownership, political structure or the restrictive hand of religion. It’s almost never because of lack of natural resources and is absolutely never due to lack of intelligence or skill. Change the knowledge, change the behaviour. Our aim should be to introduce right knowledge then STOP sending money and LEAVE. Let commerce and trade do the job thereafter, just as it has with us.
This international climate treaty lacks knowledge of basic human nature. It will drain the coffers of the rich but almost guarantees that poor nations never become wealthy. Continue Reading →
Views: 39
Well, this is complete vindication.
Yesterday, I sent “Carbon Dave” Hampton a private email in which I complained about his plagiarism of comments I had posted on his web site. I sent it because he was ignoring my first complaint. I admonished him to admit he had stolen my writing and presented it as his own. Quite unexpectedly, Mr Hampton has just replied and even publicly posted my email on his site. In that post, Mr Hampton admits with much bluster that “it was wrong to do it”. He’s certainly referring to my email but one cannot decipher exactly what “it” is (his writing is not at all lucid). However he does surrender with a “HANDS UP!” and talks about posting my comment so he admits he’s guilty of something and it’s related to my writing.
There’s more tedious detail following, but first I’d like to draw attention to the most important feature of Hampton’s reply to me. When I accused him of stealing my comments, there was no concrete evidence of it. That was because I could not show that my comments were created earlier than his. I hadn’t anticipated the need.
What evidence did I have? There was only the date-time stamp on the file containing a copy of my comment and, of course, my clear knowledge of what had transpired. Thin evidence, though, in anybody’s book, because those stamps can be changed and my recollection proves nothing to others. I needed a confession. Perhaps I could shame him into apologising. Continue Reading →
Views: 71
Only weeks to go before Copenhagen is due to reshape the political world as we know it, and now more signals that it will fail.
Although heads of government met in New York recently, we have been getting mixed signals on the likelihood of them reaching a meaningful agreement. As early as June this year, the UN’s top climate official, Mr Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), said global emissions reduction targets are unlikely to be reached in Copenhagen. That was quite a pessimistic outlook from the man who’s supposed to be organising it.
In early September UN Development Chief, Miss Helen Clark (remember her?), was toning down expectations for Copenhagen, even suggesting there might be no deal at all. “I think the conference will be positive but it won’t dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t’.”
Less than six weeks ago, the UK Foreign Secretary, Mr David Miliband, said that the Copenhagen conference would fail to produce an effective treaty on cutting greenhouse gases. We were daring to hope we could forget about Copenhagen committing us to any serious reduction in our energy use. Continue Reading →
Views: 89
SHAME on us all: on us in the media and on our politicians. Despite thousands of news reports, interviews, analyses, critiques and commentaries from journalists, what has the inquiring, intellectually sceptical media told us about the potential details of a Copenhagen treaty? And despite countless speeches, addresses, interviews, doorstops, moralising sermons from government ministers, pleas from Canberra for an outcome at Copenhagen, opposition criticism of government policy, what have our elected representatives told us about the potential details of a Copenhagen treaty?
With just over 40 days until more than 15,000 officials, advisers, diplomats, activists and journalists from more than 190 countries attend the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen, we know nothing. Nothing about a climate change treaty that the Rudd government is keen to sign and one that will bind this country for years to come. Continue Reading →
Views: 360
Marc Morano, well-known scourge of global warming alarmists at Climate Depot, in his latest roundup of news items, has kindly listed our nasty little plagiarism stoush with the ill-behaved Dave Hampton, a.k.a. Carbon Dave, British engineer and “social change advocate”. You can see it in the left-hand column—page down about three times and look for Claim: ‘Climate Alarmist plagiarises comments from skeptic’.
The link goes here to our original story. It’s good publicity for the CCG and the sceptical, realistic position on global warming that we represent here in New Zealand. Let’s hope it attracts more visitors to the site with an interest in reading about the climate news that we should be seeing in our national media.
Views: 82