Comments

1. #1 Tony

   2007/07/13

   Actually, the best bit of the screening came after the doco was done and we got a look at the studio audience.

   You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll want to check out the link supplied by Nathan Rive in the DeSmogBlog comment section.

2. #2 SteveF

   2007/07/13

   Here’s Durkin in today’s Graun:

   http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,,2125259,00.html

   [Oh dear, why *do* the Grauniad publish this junk? -W]

3. #3 KGrandia

   2007/07/13

   The Tony Jones thrashing of Durkin is up now.

4. #4 Kevin

   2007/07/13

   Weird — the html tag is messing for me. Here’s the link:
   http://www.desmogblog.com/video-abc-australias-tony-jones-dissects-debunks-martin-durkin

5. #5 cce

   2007/07/13

   Be sure to watch the audience question segment.

   http://larvatusprodeo.net/2007/07/13/the-mad-bad-and-unhinged/

   And just to show how immensely powerful a few nutcases can be, there were 15 Larouchites in the audience of 80, 4 of asked questions.

   http://larouchepac.com/news/2007/07/12/australian-lym-raises-nazi-eugenics-roots-environmentalism.html

   Cuckoo.

   On another note, I can’t find video of the panel discussion. Does anyone know if it up yet?

6. #6 galmud

   2007/07/13

   highlight from the interview:

   Tony Jones: “Why didn’t you continue the [solar] graph from 1980 to now with more up to date data?”

   Martin Durkin: “Well it was a historical part of the program where we talked about key discoveries in the recent history of climatology.”

   Tony Jones: “Why weren’t we told that temperature and solar activity diverges sharply after 1980?”

   Durkin: “It’s a very moot point what happens after 1980.”

   As long as the data supports Durkins argument its a key discovery. When more uptodate data no longer supports his argument its a moot point.

7. #7 SteveF

   2007/07/13

   I used galmud’s post to make a point at RC that I’ll simply repeat here in the absence of anything more original to say. Bearing the interview exchange in mind, it’s interesting when he says the following in his letter:

   “However, according to the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (as used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), global temperature peaked in 1998 – the warmest year in the last decade. The temperature then fell. It did not change at all from 2001 to 2005 and then fell slightly, again, in 2006. In short, according to the IPCC’s own figures, the global temperature has been static or else slightly declining for several years. The satellite data confirms this picture. Why is this happening when increasing CO2 levels are meant to be driving the temperature up? Could it be because solar activity has waned?”

   William, on the subject of the Graun, they publish an extraordinarily amount of crazy stuff. A quick check of Comment is Free will confirm this.

8. #8 Eli Rabett

   2007/07/13

   You, noble stoat, ask

   Since we were on TGGWS-wanabe’s (can it really be true that no-one has pointed out to her that her CO2 graph is junk? Why is it still there?)

   And several possible reasons occur. First, it is vacation time. Cool. Second, the argument depends too heavily on that graph at least for the unsophisticated (those who have not a clue about climate). If it goes, cognitive disfunction ensues. Third, the people who read Stoat are not the people who ordinarily read place where Ms. Byrnes’ opus is referenced. Remember, these posts were up there for at least a couple of months before someone mentioned them on Deltoid in the comments.

   What eventually will happen is that the sensible responses will make their way up in the Google food chain.

9. #9 Luke

   2007/07/14

   You can see the debate and audience comments at:

   http://www.abc.net.au/tv/swindle/

   The sceptics didn’t look happy. The business panel members totally undermined the sceptics’ credibility IMO. The sceptics looked like Cold War Warriors fossilised in time and out of touch.

   I think Durkin should be commended though. He has drawn enormous bad publicity to the denialist side and exposed the debate for what it is. Perhaps it’s actual a double double double conter conspiracy funded by the IPCC to bring discredit to the anti-AGW side by producing a shonky doco that would easily be shot down. You heard this exclusive news breaking rumour here first on Stoat :-) Someone on the internet told me it was true :-)

10. #10 Dean Morrison

    2007/07/14

    Bernie Hobb’s takedown of TGGWS on the ABC Science site was rather good I thought:

    http://www.abc.net.au/science/features/globalwarmingswindle/

    Funny how Durkin used a graph of Arctic temps instead of a global one to impress an Australian audience.

    … and does anyone else think that Durkin looks like Stan Laurel??

11. #11 Luke

    2007/07/14

    http://www.aussmc.org/Global_Warming_Swindle.php Aussie scientists take on the Swindle

    http://www.amos.org.au/ Australian Met Society critiques the Swindle in detail

    http://www.smh.com.au/news/environment/hot-reaction-to-climate-swindle-doco/2007/07/11/1183833580553.html – read the bottom bit especially on Think Tank links

    http://www.crikey.com.au/Media-and-Arts/20070713-The-Swindle-rent-a-crowd.html Larouchites invade Swindle audience

12. #12 Munin

    2007/07/14

    Thanks Dean – I hadn’t seen that Arctic temp graph before.

    It’s funny how the “post war economic boom” now appears to start before the war. Or perhaps Durkin was referring to the Second Italo-Abyssinian War?

13. #13 Carl Christensen

    2007/07/14

    well Eli she is apparently just back from vacation and urging you to call for a visit to see the latest CA cause celebre & smoking gun — temp monitoring stations located too close to air-conditioning ducts! I find it funny her website with spurious graphs is now referenced by those nitpicky, hardcore scientists of climateaudit too!

    http://home.earthlink.net/~ponderthemaunder/index.html

    of course bear in mind that from the verbiage of the right-wing nutter stepdad, if you send a phone # I wouldn’t put it past him to claim you are propositioning his minor stepdaughter, so it may be “run rabbit, run!”

14. #14 Dean Morrison

    2007/07/14

    In the Tony Jones interview with Durkin he asks: “How many versions of the Swindle have you produced?”

    - Durkin come back with : “I don’t know – you’d have to ask channel 4″

    - Jones then points out that he’s counted four – each one presumably having corrected ‘minor mistakes’ made in the former.

    Durkin’s excuse that the graphs were wrong because the graphics guys came in the day before transmission: “and you know how it is in TV Tony” – sounds rather like:

    “The Dog ate my homework”.

    It rather undermines Hamish Mykura’s ( the commissioning editor of C4 who is the real vilain of the piece IMHO) claim that the prog was thorougly fact-checked before broadcast.

    In other words Hamish let a guy with a track record of deception direct access to the C4 audience without even viewing the final prog C4 was about to show.

    .. such random leaps of faith might be ‘cutting edge’ but they aren’t exactly in line with the broadcasting code.

    …..

    As for the ‘post war economic boom – you’ll find there are four variants of this now Munin – one each for each distorted graph that Durkin has produced for each transmission.

    Durkin clearly feels as free to mess around with history as he does with science….

15. #15 Hank Roberts

    2007/07/15

    Won’t anybody please care about the drumlins?
    http://geology.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/35/2/127 (first author is at BAS)
    http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/315/5818/1529

    (I asked in the ‘why do science in Antarctica’ about this whole passel of studies here; I realize they’re not in our host’s area exactly, but I’m hoping someone who’s studying them comes along to add something — or that someone at BAS is encouraging more of the scientists there to blog in their copious spare time —- this is the stuff Hansen’s worried about. I don’t see it being explained much.)

    [I'm really not sure why the drumlin bit is supposed to be so interesting? -W]

16. #16 SteveF

    2007/07/15

    Aaaah Drumlins. The eternal glacial geomorphological question. Basically, we don’t really know how they form; there are two broad mechanisms and two camps, angrily opposing each other. The divide concerns a mechanism whereby drumlins are produced at the ice-bed interface vs the so called “megaflood” hypothesis, in which drumlins (and other glacial features) are formed during catastrophic subglacial floods. The former is accepted by the majority, with the latter being proposed by a small, but vocal, group of Candadian geomorphologists (lead by a chap called John Shaw who is utterly mad – he has been known to bark at conferences).

    The debate involves plenty of shouting at conferences and catty exchanges in journals. Both sides argue about sedimentological minutiae, but probably the key point is that the floodites have never adequately explained where the water comes from (plenty of water under an ice sheet, but they are proposing floods of extraordinary scale).

    The latest work is about as close as we can get to observing a Drumlin forming and strongly favours the ice people. However, the debate doesn’t end there are there is no consensus within icy types as to how they form.

17. #17 Hank Roberts

    2007/07/16

    What SteveF points out is why I find it interesting — it’s an observation of a drumlin being formed, and formed very fast by sudden flows of mud and gravel and meltwater underneath the ice.

    The question goes way back to the uniformitarian versus catastrophist view of how geology happens. And we’ve long been told the Antarctic isn’t going to do anything suddenly. But what if lurches do happen? Where would we find the evidence? Probably out at the edges of the continental shelf, in layers, hard to get at under the ice. Maybe ANDRILL …..

    See the earlier posts where I put some links on the Channeled Scablands —- examples of the long argument whether icecaps can produce large enough volumes of water to create huge outburst floods has included the question whether drumlins were formed over long slow flow periods or suddenly under the ice as the mud and ooze and water got extruded in a gush.

    I’ve seen for decades textbook pictures of “lakes behind glaciers dammed up” and stories about how “ice dams break” and never thought to wonder why the water was on top of the ice in all those pictures. But, I’ve recently seen more and more about how the water can build up _underneath_ the ice (as in the Antarctic which is a huge bowl with masses of extruded mud and gravel packed up around the outside edge, forced out there as the ice cap formed and sank.

    Look at the radar maps — lots of detail under the deep ice, lots of valleys and ridges and drainage channels, but out toward the edge it gets smoother. And out past the edge are what look like blobs of mud pushed out over time.

    You have water and mud flowing uphill under the ice caps under pressure.

    Try this at home, kids: put a cup of mud in the bottom of a bowl, fill the bowl with water and freeze it.

    Put the bowl outside later and wait a while.

    Press down on the middle.

    Squirt!

    Or maybe not. If there’s nobody at BAS who thinks this is even possible, I’m happy to hear it. I just haven’t heard people putting together the observations about voids and meltwater flows and erosion channels changing under the ice fast, and reports that glaciers are dammed-up by sills of moraine material out at their ocean ends.

    And I’ve squeezed too many tubes of toothpaste, or mustard, or glue, that had a gummy glop blocking the opening, and been just a bit surprised when the plug let go how much happened. How much _does_ the middle Arctic ice press down on the basin under it, and how much would it flex if the muck around the edges got squirted away?

    Just, you know, asking. Not even writing a screenplay.

    But hey, I’d sure like to hear from John Shaw. I’ve barked at conferences myself, so I don’t think that’s all that strange. Sometimes it’s the proper response, in context.

    Thanks SteveF. Appreciated. I go be quiet and listen now.
    I only get to see further than the giants by getting in their hair.

    [Sadly, not anything I know about directly. But I rather doubt there can be huge volumes of water waiting to burst out... its all somewhat connected. And you'd probably see it in the sfc elevation... you can see lake Vostok by the sfc above it being flat, for example -W]

18. #18 Hank Roberts

    2007/07/16

    Jökulhlaups — word from Andrew Alden, a good explainer
    http://geology.about.com/od/flooding/a/aa_041397jokul.htm

19. #19 Hank Roberts

    2007/07/18

    Aha. British secret weapon?
    http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn12289-dambusting-megaflood-made-britain-an-island.html

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