Tag Archives: global warming

What makes you think global warming types care about facts?

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alan moran climate change the facts

I am happy to find that the facts are with the sceptics, but I wouldn’t be all that sure that the politics are as well. Tim Blair wrote a brief note the other day on He Continues to Believe, the he being Chris Bowen and the belief being climate change. Here’s the core:

Evidently enjoying his time in opposition and wishing to extend it, Labor’s Chris Bowen revives the carbon tax:

We continue to believe firstly that climate change is real.

Secondly, that it’s caused by humankind and thirdly, the best way of dealing with it is a price on carbon.

We continue to believe that, and that will be reflected in our detailed policy that we announce and seek a mandate to implement.

Really, Chris? A mandate for the carbon tax? That’ll be a first. Of course, this is less about saving the planet than it is about saving inner-city Labor seats from metastasising Greens. Look for Labor in coming elections to form an alliance with the Arts Party. Whatever; here’s some timely news for Bowen on the sainted occasion of his carbon quest renewal:

Updated data from NASA satellite instruments reveal the Earth’s polar ice caps have not receded at all since the satellite instruments began measuring the ice caps in 1979. Since the end of 2012, moreover, total polar ice extent has largely remained above the post-1979 average. The updated data contradict one of the most frequently asserted global warming claims – that global warming is causing the polar ice caps to recede.

Whatever Chris does or does not believe – and he may be as sceptical as any of us – he knows where the votes are. The biggest mistake is to believe that carbon taxes and global warming hysteria is election poison. I watch the Coalition’s climate man in action, and no sceptic he. Facts on the left are mere confetti, to be tossed in the air when you have some and ignored when you don’t.

Lies, damned lies and temperature records

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Top scientists start to examine fiddled global warming figures is the story, reported here as well, but how can they know the records were fiddled before they check?

Last month, we are told, the world enjoyed “its hottest March since records began in 1880”. This year, according to “US government scientists”, already bids to outrank 2014 as “the hottest ever”. The figures from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) were based, like all the other three official surface temperature records on which the world’s scientists and politicians rely, on data compiled from a network of weather stations by NOAA’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN).

But here there is a puzzle. These temperature records are not the only ones with official status. The other two, Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) and the University of Alabama (UAH), are based on a quite different method of measuring temperature data, by satellites. And these, as they have increasingly done in recent years, give a strikingly different picture. Neither shows last month as anything like the hottest March on record, any more than they showed 2014 as “the hottest year ever”.

It ought to be a mystery, but it’s not really. If you hide the decline the number must go up.

One of the great scandals in the history of science

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That the promoters of global warming are prone to exaggerate if not actually lie has made me sceptical of any of the recent nonsense that this is the warmest year ever. It is, unfortunately, a full-time job to keep an eye on the weather-gauge, and with Andrew Bolt on leave, who’s around to do it. Luckily, John Hinderaker at Powerline is onto it. His latest article is Was 2014 Really the Warmest Year Ever? I’ll give you a hint: it wasn’t. First he goes back over the long series back a few thousand years, which makes the present one of the coolest periods in the planet’s history. Then he turns to the recent record:

Moreover, contrary to the activists’ claims, 2014 wasn’t even the warmest recent year. The “warmest ever” designation came from NASA and NOAA, which are run by global warming activists. They have distorted surface temperature records by surreptitiously “adjusting” historical records to make the past (e.g., the 1930s) look cooler and the present warmer. This is one of the great scandals in the history of science, which we have written about repeatedly. Since the activists won’t say what changes they have made and why they have made them, their records must be considered hopelessly corrupt. Beyond that, they aren’t even adjusted for the urban heat island effect, which obviously exists. Most temperature recording stations are in urban areas, and they have gotten warmer in recent decades as a result of economic development and population growth, not carbon dioxide.

The only global temperature records that are fully transparent are satellite records in the lower atmosphere. These go back only to 1979. They show no warming during the last 18 years. The satellite records, interpreted by two different groups, find 2014 to be either the third warmest or the sixth warmest since 1979. But the real point is that the differences are infinitesimal. The uncorrupted atmospheric data show that no significant warming is going on.

The corruption, driven as it is by an anti-capitalist, anti-free-market band of vandals – who nevertheless are in large part in it for the grant money it allows them to collect – is merely one of the ways we are being ruined, but as important as any of the rest. The left used to say that capitalism would make the workers poor. Now that we have seen that capitalism has made the workers extraordinarily well off, the left are determined to make sure we all end up poor, and they will certainly succeed if we let them.

MORE REALITY TO ADD TO THE REST: This is from a climate blog linked to at Drudge:

Climate Depot’s Marc Morano: ‘Claiming 2014 is the ‘hottest year’ on record based on hundredths of a degree temperature difference is a fancy way of saying the global warming ‘pause’ is continuing.’

Astrophysicist Dr. Dr David Whitehouse: ‘The NASA press release is highly misleading…talk of a record is scientifically and statistically meaningless.’

Climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer: ‘Why 2014 Won’t Be the Warmest Year on Record’ (based on surface data)– ‘We are arguing over the significance of hundredths of a degree’

Climatologist Dr. Pat Michaels debunks 2014 ‘hottest year’ claim: ‘Is 58.46° then distinguishable from 58.45°? In a word, ‘NO.’

No Record Temperatures According To Satellites

Physicist Dr. Lubos Motl: ‘Please laugh out loud when someone will be telling you that it was the warmest year’

Climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke Sr.: ‘We have found a significant warm bias. Thus, the reported global average surface temperature anomaly is also too warm.’

Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry: ‘With 2014 essentially tied with 2005 and 2010 for hottest year, this implies that there has been essentially no trend in warming over the past decade.’

These Australians are so subtle

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That Julie Bishop is a political genius. At the moment, the third world is in pursuit of handouts from the first world to encourage these poorer nations along the road towards a greener, less carbonated future. So far as these third world countries are concerned, it is all upside with nothing to lose. Pretend there’s global warming, that they are in danger and then collect billions (trillions?) from the wealthier nations on the planet, at least the ones that are currently wealthier. So she has put the fox into the chicken coop so to speak:

AUSTRALIA has called on China and India to do more to combat climate change as it prepares to challenge the notion that developing countries should have less onerous obligations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

During a meeting on the sidelines of the UN Climate Change Conference in the Peruvian ­capital, Lima, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop yesterday urged the vice-chair of China’s National Development and Reform Commission, Xie Zhenhua, to do more to tackle emissions reductions.

Ms Bishop plans to tell the conference today that the binary definition of developed and ­developing countries “is misleading and doesn’t lead to best outcomes’’ in combating climate change “because the divide is ­arbitrary”.

“It doesn’t matter where the emissions come from, they are global emissions,’’ she will say.

After her meeting with Mr Xie, Ms Bishop told The Australian: “I said I thought there would be more China could do to reduce its emissions and that it was not ­appropriate for China to be claiming to be a developing country.”

Genius. Pure Alinsky. Make them live up to their professed positions on global warming, which everyone knows is nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more. Press them on doing something positive this side of 2034. This is the shortcut to causing the whole system to break down while pretending to do all you can to limit carbon emissions. Very clever when you perfectly well understand that global warming is all nonsense, an academic scam that got out of hand.

All very clever, that is, unless you happen to believe it yourself which, surely, she does not.

Magic thinking

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We have all kinds of innovation and we have them all the time, but you cannot decide on what will be invented next. The magical thinking of the global warming crowd who believe that if you make fossil fuels really expensive that a cheaper alternative will simply materialise is so bordering on the insane that I actually don’t know what can be done about it. Making energy more expensive will certainly mean that some of us will use less of it, with the less well off the ones who will suffer the most. And those who live in genuinely poor communities will find their standard of living falling below where it now is. This is not a matter of theory but is an absolute arithmetical necessity. If you have less of something, some people who used to have a particular quantity will have less and some may even have none at all.

Tonight I went along to hear Sinclair Davidson on the great moral question of our time: is coal on its way out as a source of energy. The audience was what I suspect a Q&A audience must be like, all well meaning and quite comfortable, thank you very much, but oh so concerned about the future about a hundred years from now when the oceans have risen and our farmlands have all turned to desert. We must therefore get rid of fossil fuels, and coal in particular, immediately. The replacement technologies are already available; its only the lack of will that prevents us from taking the steps we need to take.

Bob Brown led the offence for the yeas, while Professor Davidson played anchor for the nays stressing the moral case for fossil fuels. Every one of the five speakers except one agreed that global warming and greenhouse gases was the greatest issue of our time. The sixth made the hilarious point that no one really cares about people who will be inhabiting the planet a hundred years from now, evidenced by the fact that they don’t seem to care all that much about people who are inhabiting the planet right at the moment. This brought a strong round of applause from at least one member of the audience, but if there was anyone else applauding at the same time, I think I may have missed it.

Shockingly ignorant about the climate facts of life

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For a change, we actually can see the true agenda in the person of Naomi Klein in her new book on global warming:

The thesis of This Changes Everything is that global warming is a war of capitalism against the planet, and that we need a people’s uprising to reclaim true democracy from the venal and corrupt politicians who have been co-opted by Big Oil. If this sounds like the Occupy movement all over again, you’re right. “We need an ideological battle,” Ms. Klein told The Guardian.

The article this is from is actually a fantastic read, in which the writer, Margaret Wente, hews into Klein’s arguments. It’s short but here is a sample where she comments on the ignorance of many of those who write about the climate as if it’s all from first world capitalist economies:

The folks who revere Ms. Klein and gushingly review her books don’t have a clue about this stuff either. I wouldn’t expect Vogue to know. I wouldn’t even expect the Guardian or the Nation to know. The CBC should know, but frequently does not. As for The New York Times – its chief climate drum-banger is currently Mark Bittman, who was formerly the newspaper’s chief recipe-writer. He knows how to make a mean Thai beef salad (you should look it up) but is shockingly ignorant about the climate facts of life. He thinks Ms. Klein walks on water. He, too, says that neoliberalism is the problem and reclaiming democracy is the solution. He thinks we could fix the climate – if only we took on the evil greedy corporations and put our minds to it. As for the rest of the world, he doesn’t seem to know it exists.

There’s not enough of this sort of thing around, but it’s good that there is at least some.

Dangerous lunatics in politics

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There are, it seems, quite a few of them. In this case, we are talking about Robert Kennedy Jr who is found to have said this:

Those who contend that global warming “does not exist,” Kennedy claimed, are guilty of “a criminal offense — and they ought to be serving time for it.”

He knows nothing about the climate, he knows nothing about constitutional protection, and he knows nothing about the problems that beset the US amongst which global warming must be next to last.

Suppose the planet is cooling and not warming

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You can find at Quadrant Online a review, taken from the magazine, of Twilight of Abundance by an Australian, David Archibald, that for me was one of the most devastating critiques of the global warming hysteria I have ever read. What made it so extraordinary is not that it began from the premise that global warming is a con and that the planet is not warming and whatever temperature changes there may be are only to a very slight degree affected by human industrial activity. Lots of people say that so there would be nothing new if all he did was add his name to the chorus. Making the book somewhat more remarkable is that he began from the premise that the planet may be cooling and not warming at all which while still unusual is not all that unusual any longer since the evidence of potentially falling temperatures is all around us (did you see, for example, the level of ice cover on Lake Superior in June?).

What, in fact, made the book extraordinary is that he combines the possibility of global cooling with every other green scare I have ever come across, but does it in a way that I find plausible. What he argues is that if we end up with falling temperatures, contracted growing seasons, resource depletion, energy shortages and an over-populated planet, the result is the kind of catastrophe once forecast by Paul Ehrlich which he described as the population bomb. Here is Ehrlich’s famous first sentence, published in 1968, that has kept his name before the public ever since:

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.

None of this happened, of course, so that I along with many others have become inured to the arguments of catastrophists of every kind. And every one of these has been wrong, including the global warming crowd, for whom the only evidence they ever had has evaporated over the years since around 1999. The planet is not warming even though greenhouse gases continue to pour into the atmosphere. So what exactly are Archibald’s credentials to be discussing any of this:

David Archibald is a Perth, Australia-based scientist working in the fields of oil exploration, climate science, energy and geostrategy. After graduating from Queensland University in geology in 1979, he worked in coal and oil shale exploration in Queensland and then in oil exploration with Exxon in Sydney. A long period in stockbroking in Sydney as an analyst was followed by moving to Perth in 1999 to work for a private investor. He subsequently started the oil exploration company Oilex in 2003 and then joined a Canadian-listed oil exploration company in 2006. Also at that time, he was CEO of the mineral explorer Westgold Resources.

What intrigued me about Twilight of Abundance is that it has proposed an equal and opposite future to everything that the greens have come up with that, if true, is something that is truly frightening. And given that there is as much if not more plausibility in what he has written than in the entire green-AGW campaign which has been discredited at every turn, one wonders why this is not now being thought about as one possible future that needs to be taken on board.

I have been astonished myself that during my lifetime, the population of the world has gone up from around two billion to seven billion. If this has been a consequence of an abnormally warmer climate, the Green Revolution and the abundance of cheap energy, then we should be thinking about what might happen if the warm weather disappears while the cheap energy provided by carbon-based fuels are depleted.

The Greens as well as other parties to the left have grabbed hold of global warming as one more vehicle to attack market economies and give them political power. If Archibald is anywhere near right, it will only be those economies that are capable of adjusting in the face of new circumstances that will avoid the disasters that would follow. I therefore invite you to read the review, and then the book after that. Since none of us know what is really happening, this is one conjecture that ought to be put on everyone’s watch list since things could turn very nasty more quickly and in ways quite different from what most people at the present time are prepared to believe.

Lies, damned lies and rising temperatures

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global warming aust

This would not be just a minor fraud but the basis of a tens-of-billions dollar loss to the future growth and wellbeing of Australians. No one would have robbed more people of more of their potential earnings than anyone who might have undertaken this:

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has been caught red-handed manipulating temperature data to show “global warming” where none actually exists.

As we motor through the weirdly extraterrestrial stand of windmills you see by the highways all over France, but which I had never run across before, what occurs each time is the phenomenal scandal of the entire global warming con. This story must be big news back home – although a quick look has not seen it mentioned on any of the usual sites. But it is part of a worldwide determination on behalf of the most ignorant to demonstrate that they are right about what appears to be completely unproven, and near enough unprovable.