tlambert | August 11, 2011The Sunday Age plans to investigate the top ten questions on climate science and policy as voted on OurSay. Not suprisingly Andrew Bolt and company have freeped the poll. This made The Australian's Cut and Paste very excited:
Top question so far (961 votes):
The very point of Australia's carbon tax is to reduce global warming. How much will reducing 5 per cent of Australia's about 1.5 per cent contribution of global CO2 emissions reduce global temperature by?
Actually, that's not the question. Cut and Paste truncated it. It continues:
If the amount is negligible (which it is), then given…
tlambert | August 9, 2011Monckton sure didn't like it when the reporter brought John Abraham's dissection. Monckton yet again claimed that he is about to sue Abraham.
tlambert | August 7, 2011Chip Le Grand, Victorian editor of The Australian, complains that Stuart Rintoul was victimized by Media Watch. Just like Rintoul, Le Grand misrepresents Watson's paper:
[Rintoul] brought to national attention research by NSW researcher Phil Watson showing that sea levels around Australia over the past 100 years haven't risen as quickly as scientists would have expected them to as a result of global warming.
This isn't true. Watson did not compare the sea level rises with expected sea level rises as a result of global warming. As Kathleen McInnes of the CSIRO told Media Watch:
The study by…
tlambert | August 4, 2011A talk by Macquarie University's Murry Salby where he opines that the increase in atmospheric CO2 is natural is gaining some attention. (See, for example, Gavin Schmidt, Judith Curry, and Things Break). Unfortunately, we just have the audio and Salby has not responded to my request to provide the slides from his talk, so I've used a graph from Open Mind to illustrate this post.
A graph like the one below is Salby's key argument. It compares the annual change of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere (black line) with anthropogenic emissions (the red line is 55% of emissions). Salby observes…
tlambert | August 4, 2011John Mashey and Rob Coleman have a guest post at The Chronicle of Higher Education's blog replying to Peter Wood's hit piece.
Wood's article misused the platform of CHE. Its relevance to the concerns of CHE was minimal. It had little purpose but to damage the reputation of one of us, John Mashey, and the climate scientist Michael Mann, whom Wood has often denigrated elsewhere. The political false-association tactics were obvious. Climate scientists are under incessant attack, a fact strongly decried the day before Wood's article by the AAAS Board. The muddy battlefield of blogs and media has…
tlambert | August 3, 2011Media Watch does an excellent report on Stuart Rintoul's misrepresentation of Phil Watson's paper.
Count the whoppers from The Australian. The Australian:
as I understand it the CSIRO was invited to comment to Media Watch and declined to do so.
Kathleen McInnnes of the CSIRO on how they weren't invited to comment:
CSIRO ... would have appreciated the opportunity to clarify what is a complex issue for many people.
The Australian:
Phil Watson ... has made no complaint about how his research was represented in the article and will not.
Watson's Department:
Mr Watson does not agree with the…
tlambert | August 1, 2011
Kudos to John Quiggin, not for winning the 2011 Distinguished Fellow Award from The Economic Society of Australia (even though that's pretty impressive), but for winning the 2011 Distinguished glass jaw punching award, for his posts on the "mistakes, misleading headlines and outright lies" from The Australian. His prize is this lengthy article in The Australian by Michael Stutchbury on how Quiggin is a big commie. My favourite bit is this, where Stutchbury (who is economics editor at The Australian) denies that The Australian has been conducting a campaign against climate science
On climate…
tlambert | July 29, 2011The latest volley in The Australian's ongoing war on science is extended ad hominem attack on climate scientists from Jo Nova. Nova claims that climate science is a "mess", but in 1200 words Nova doesn't make one scientific argument. Instead she argues that the scientific consensus was "purchased" by the goverment from scientists who were "paid to find a crisis".
Nova doesn't explain why the Howard government and Bush administration didn't purchase themselves a scientific consensus that climate change wasn't a problem.
She asks:
Where is the Institute of Natural Climate Forces, or the…
tlambert | July 22, 2011Phil Watson, Team Leader of the Coastal Unit in the NSW Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water was probably pleased when The Australian's Stuart Rintoul asked to interview him about his work. Watson was the man who organised A snapshot of future sea levels: photographing the king tide. The photographs of the king tide in 12 January 2009 are intended to help prepare NSW to adapt to a possible 90cm of sea level rise this century. So I'm guessing he wasn't too pleased when Rintoul's front page story about his work claimed that "Watson has written a report stating that global…
tlambert | July 21, 2011Graham Readfearn writes about how Monckton is threatening the sue the ABC because he didn't like Wendy Carlisle's Background Briefing episode. This isn't really that interesting, Monckton has also threatened to sue Al Gore, John Abraham, Scott Mandia, The Guardian, as well threatening to jail Rajendra Pachauri for fraud. None of these threats materialised.
No, what interests me is this:
"I have written to the chairman of the ABC who is a shrimp-like wet little individual and I have said to him, right mate, I warned you about this woman (Wendy Carlisle) orally over breakfast"
ABC Chairman…
tlambert | July 20, 2011The Smith School at the University of Oxford has released a report on international efforts to address climate change. Australia is rated "Poor".
Figure 1 - A map of countries of the world rated in terms of national actions and commitments on climate change. Annex I countries are rated based on submissions pertinent to the Cancun Agreements.
'Very good': meet IPCC recommendations, Annex I: 25 - 40% reduction by 2020, Non-Annex I: submitted NAMA, 15-30% below BAU by 2020, or vocal in pressing for action.
Those countries not participating in the UNFCCC process are coloured grey.
Via Desdemona…
tlambert | July 20, 2011The Australian regularly shows its contempt for science, scientists and the scientific method, titling an article "Respect the science and don't call CO2 a pollutant" is more than little hypocritical. You might think from the title that the author, Ziggy Switkowski, presents some sort of scientific argument why CO2 is not a pollutant, but he doesn't. The closest he comes is this:
Many cold regions in the northern hemisphere welcome global warming. Think of Scotland, parts of Scandinavia, Russia, Canada. To them, increasing CO2 is not a problem. Is it possible for CO2 to be a pollutant in…
tlambert | July 18, 2011Check out Wendy Carlisle's Background Briefing episode on Monckton and the Galileo Movement
I'd like to highlight a couple of things. Monckton denied that he compared Garnaut to a fascist (at 15:20):
Monckton: You said that it's been reported that I compared Ross Garnaut to a fascist?
Carlisle: Correct.
Monckton: I did no such thing. I suggest you listen to the tape and think again.
You see, Monckton's exact words about Garnaut while standing in front of a swastika:
that again is a fascist point of view that you merely accept authority without question. Heil Hitler, on we go.
Of course, a…
tlambert | July 18, 2011After The House of Lords wrote to Monckton telling him that he should not claim to be a member, Monckton kept doing it. So now The House of Lords has written an open letter to Monckton:
My predecessor, Sir Michael Pownall, wrote to you on 21 July 2010, and again on 30 July 2010, asking that you cease claiming to be a Member of the House of Lords, either directly or by implication. It has been drawn to my attention that you continue to make such claims.
In particular, I have listened to your recent interview with Mr Adam Spencer on Australian radio. In response to the direct question, whether…
tlambert | July 15, 2011Another scientist got a death threat a couple of days ago. This time it was Hans Schellnhuber. The Australian reports:
Anger against scientists involved in the climate debate is reaching dangerous levels and it's only a matter of time before one is murdered, says leading German physicist Hans Schellnhuber. ...
While he was opening a recent climate conference in Melbourne, a man in the front row waved a noose at him. "I was confronted with a death threat when I gave my public lecture," Professor Schellnhuber said.
"Somebody got to his feet and showed me a rope with a noose.
"He showed me…
tlambert | July 14, 2011In a news story in The Australian Christian Kerr claims:
Former US vice-president turned climate crusader Al Gore has used footage of the Queensland floods from earlier this year as proof of climate change, contradicting the findings of the Gillard government's Climate Commission.
A new video posted on YouTube, narrated by Mr Gore to promote his Climate Reality Program, opens with footage of the wall of water that swept through Toowoomba in January. In the video, Mr Gore says "big oil and big coal are spending big money" to distort debate on climate change.
Yet he has ignored the findings of…
tlambert | July 13, 2011The Conversation reports:
Scientists today said they were appalled and disappointed by Greenpeace protesters who whippersnippered a genetically modified wheat crop being grown as part of a CSIRO trial.
The trial crop was part of an investigation into altering wheat carbohydrate content to reduce glycaemic response and improve metabolic health. Planting began in 2009.
Greenpeace's justification?
"GM has never been proven safe to eat and once released in open experiments, it will contaminate. This is about the protection of our health, the protection of our environment and the protection of…
tlambert | July 13, 2011Bob Carter has been cherry picking for a long time, trying to make global warming go away. Tamino examines Carter's latest effort. This, for me, was the highlight
Carter does pay lip service to the idea of a trend. But he disdains the trend for the entire data set -- in fact he seems to disdain trends altogether -- instead showing these two straight lines, one ending at 1997, the other beginning at 1999:
He then tells a fable about the 1998 el Nino causing some kind of "shift" in the fundamental state of the climate system, after which it "settled in" to a different basic temperature…
tlambert | July 12, 2011You know the paper in PNAS by Kaufmann et al that found:
that recent global temperature records are consistent with the existing understanding of the relationship among global surface temperature, internal variability, and radiative forcing, which includes anthropogenic factors with well known warming and cooling effects.
Here's what John Spooner, cartoonist from The Age felt it showed:
"Sulphide [sic] emissions from Chinese coal fired power might be causing
global cooling"
"Global cooling should make the carbon tax and ETS redundant"
"There seems to have been no increase in aerosol…