climate change

I was struck by a comparison of this week's flooding, South Australia's power failure, and the talk not even a year ago (15 Dec 2015) on "their" ABC: [update: link added]

Is drought the new normal for the once lush south-east of SA?

Yet here we are today with much of south east Australia in flood. It's a great pity they listened to climate "scientists", when the facts have been known almost from the beginning. Or, at least, since 1911 (from Dorothea Mackellar's My Country):

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When sick at heart, around us,
We see the cattle die -
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady, soaking rain.

But regardless, on the ABC drones:

Climate change: droughts more severe and frequent

Hmmm.. I wonder. Here's what the Bureau of Meteorology has to say about it:

Something amusing (or perhaps absurd?) that I noticed the other day.

An old article in The Australian from October 10, 2013: Climate change tipping point revealed by study published in Nature.

THE dreaded climate-change "tipping point", when changes to weather patterns will become irreversible, has been identified. And it is terrifying.

Starting in about a decade, Kingston, Jamaica, will probably be off-the-charts hot - permanently. Other places will soon follow. Singapore in 2028. Mexico City in 2031. Cairo in 2036. Phoenix and Honolulu in 2043.

Australia will not be far behind, with dates ranging from 2038 in Sydney to 2049 in Adelaide.

Virtually the whole world will have changed by 2050.

This, as usual, is all based on computer models:

To arrive at their projections, the researchers used weather observations, computer models and other data to calculate the point at which every year from then on will be warmer than the hottest year ever recorded over the past 150 years.

So how well are they doing? They give a long list of cities and the dreaded year when all h*** breaks loose in the poor blighted district. Examples:

Melbourne 2045

Sydney 2038

Perth 2042

Adelaide 2049

Conveniently far enough out that we'll all have forgotten this piece of idiocy when the prediction fails to come to pass. But someone didn't do their proofing well enough! They let slip one near-term prediction:

Manokwari (West Papua) 2020

Well we're nearly half way there. Things should be getting pret-ty sticky in poor Manokwari by now. So how is it panning out?

"Our", "Your", whatever, ABC has just shown another beatup interview to attack the Abbott government, this time with the President of Kiribati, Anote Tong. The trigger was a joke told by Immigration minister Peter Dutton: "Time doesn't mean anything when you're about to have water lapping at your door."

Now before we get to point of this post, let's just think about that for a microsecond or two: Does anyone really think - really, really think - that if a labor/green politician had said it, it would even be reported, let alone blown up into a national issue when we are involved in a war to stop one of the world's most evil movements ever from beheading people, crucifying them or enslaving and raping them? Seriously? Then get your head examined.

But what does "Our" ABC do? This:

I came across this utter howler of a quote today:

There is no longer any credible scientific debate about the basic facts: our world continues to warm, with the last decade the hottest in modern records, and the deep ocean warming faster than the earth’s atmosphere. Sea level is rising. Arctic Sea ice is melting years faster than projected…we must continue efforts to reduce the climate-altering pollutants that threaten our planet. The only uncertainty about our warming world is how bad the changes will get, and how soon. What is most clear is that there is no time to waste.” - WILLIAM D. RUCKELSHAUS, LEE M. THOMAS, WILLIAM K. REILLY and CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN (heads of the EPA under Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George Bush and George W. Bush), NYTimes, 8/2/13

The planet is awash with nonsense like this, but this one got my goat, probably because the collective bunch of shysters who penned it have taken a whole lot of taxpayers' money to come up with this dangerous pack of lies. It needs to be taken apart, piece by piece.

Scott Adams is trying to figure out which side of politics is less rational. But he assumes the answer to his question before he even gets started when he wrote:

Climate Change Claim 1: Human activity plus natural factors are changing the climate in ways that could be calamitous.

Verdict: True. The overwhelming majority of credible scientists agree.

Scott needs a lesson in science. I replied:

Your climate change claim 1 verdict assumes that one side is right and the other wrong, and it does so on the basis of popular consensus, which plays no part in science (so I won't mention the 30,000 scientists who signed a letter saying otherwise). Science is built, not on consensus but on evidence, hypotheses, and testing. Let me illustrate by summarising the entire global warming debate in a few sentences..

The global warming theory is that doubling CO2 will cause something "around" a degree C warming. A bit more, a bit less, but something thereabouts.

Everyone agrees. Everyone sane, that is, both alarmists and skeptics alike.

But the alarmist theory goes on as follows: Yes, but that ~1C will cause more evaporation from the oceans, and H2O is a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, so the 1C gets multiplied 2,3, 4, 6, you name it, times, causing catastrophic warming of 4C, 6C, whatever hairy scary figure you care to pick.

That's it. The difference is between skeptics who say CO2 causes 1C warming and alarmists who say it causes a multiplied amount limited only by how frightened they want you to be today.

So, how to test it?

In response to this:

2015 ACT Arts Fund successful applicants

• Aspen Island Theatre Company: $18,793 to assist with costs of the creative development of a new theatre work, 'Kill Climate Deniers'.

I was very rude (seriously!):

Dear oh dear! All those naive newborns who trust "climate scientists"! Wake up and smell the scandal. Case in point, Wattsupwiththat carries a report today from the University of Wisconsin-Madison of a new study that can't avoid the fact that the models and the data are now in clear, unambiguous contradiction. From the report:

“We have been building models and there are now robust contradictions,” says Liu, a professor in the UW-Madison Center for Climatic Research. “Data from observation says global cooling. The physical model says it has to be warming.”

A real scientist, of course, would conclude that, things having been checked and rechecked (see definition of "robust"), the models are wrong. And since the models are the only evidence for the catastrophic global warming theory, which is already in serious disagreement with reality, that the theory is wrong too. But what do the authors of this "study" conclude?

I blog less often than I would like, and sadly it often happens because I am spurred into action by something ridiculous. So it is today. In a nonsense piece called "Should Scientists go on strike over climate change?", the author writes:

I hesitate to make an estimate, but a brief Google search suggests there are approximately (depending on definitions) six million ‘Scientists’ in the world.

At present, these six million or so Scientists do not have what Marx and Engels referred to as ‘class consciousness’, but they have a great deal to unite around; a shared commitment to certain methodologies, principles, values and practices and a worldview that respects appropriate responses to data and evidence.

From this shared sense of identity and purpose they would generally respect the verdict of their climatologist colleagues (better not to say ‘comrades’…) that climate change is happening because of what governments are allowing people and businesses to do, and that we ought to ‘do something’ rapidly to change that.

I notice he capitalises "Scientist". Capitalisation is used to make something a name rather than a plain descriptor. A scientist is someone who applies the scientific method to discover truth. But who knows what a "Scientist" is? Because scientists certainly do not and should not share a "class consciousness" (a concept odious enough in any context, but vastly more so here). Scientists try to disprove each others' work, because that way, the thing they all respect, truth, is more likely to emerge because the false notions will fail while the correct ones will withstand all challenges.

People are still being hoodwinked by the dishonest term "climate change", which I previously discussed at http://peacelegacy.org/articles/rose-rose-really . Here's a comment I added to an article at Wattsupwiththat to inform yet another misled innocent:

Kip Hansen says:

"It’s not as bad as it seems. They would just like to shut down the obvious nonsensical ” ‘debate’ over whether climate change is real or a hoax, however, should be confined to conspiracy websites and political blogs where truth takes a backseat to ideology.”

Sorry Kip, you've been tricked by your friends good and proper. "Climate change" is 100% caused by humans, and it is a real question whether there is lots of it or only a minuscule irrelevant amount.

Confused? I don't blame you. But here's the official definition:

The other day I found myself outside a newly-discovered library, and so naturally a few seconds later I was walking in. Aha! Book shelves! Walked up, pulled out the very first book on the shelf, and it was James Hanson's “Storms of My Grandchildren”. Hanson is, for those who came late, an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. He is one of the key promoters of catastrophic anthropomorphic global warming (CAGW), and his testimonies and activism have done much to promote the theory.

The reason I rejected CAGW in 2008 when I first looked at the global warming dispute was that I easily found evidence that contradicted the theory, but, having looked long and hard for solid science backing the CAGW claims, I never found any. So, with Hanson's book in my hand, I wondered if this might be a serendipitous moment; perhaps this book contained what I had been looking for? So I found a comfy chair.

Unfortunately, for a book written by a scientist, it was harder than I expected to find the science. It seemed to me mainly an account of how a plucky and socially conscious scientist (Hansen, of course) with an important message overcame indifference, hostility, and the opposition of the evil fossil fuel industry to finally triumph and alert the world to the evils of carbon dioxide (that's plant food to you and me and all other sane people). Chapters started, continued, and ended with the personal story of his struggle (mixed in with lots of photos of his grandchildren) and, once in a while, a bit of science.

In short, it took less time to read than I thought because all I looked for and read was the science. What I found didn't impress me, but it sure was written in an impressive style, and I could easily imagine non-scientists getting swept up by it. That's a problem, because our political rulers are non-scientists, almost to the last person.

Cause and Effect?

My first issue with Hanson's presentation was centred on the embarrassing fact for the CAGW theory that ice core samples that show how temperature changes precedes carbon dixode changes by about 800 years - a fact that is close, in itself, to disproof of the theory. An effect cannot come before its cause. Amazon.com won't post me a book yesterday because I decide to purchase it today; how clear could a simple fact of life in this universe be? Every philosopher, every scientist, indeed, every sane person for 2,500 years has understood why. On page 38 Hanson talks about these ice cores. He honestly points out this embarrassing fact, but then makes this remarkable statement: