HadCrut3 Temperature Anomaly March 2009 April 18, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in Temperature.Tags: climate change, global warming, hadcrut3, uk met office
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HadCrut3 Temperature Anomaly March 2009
(March 2008 to March 2009 )
Co2 classified as “dangerous pollutant” April 18, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: Barack Obama, climate change, global warming, hypocisy, obama
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Co2 classified as “dangerous pollutant”
Don't worry, I've bought carbon offsets from Al Gore for my smoking habit
By the blogowner honestclimate, April 18, 2009
Last year year Barack Obama said that, if he were to be elected into office, he would classify carbon dioxide as a dangerous pollutant and that he would bankrupt those who want to build coal-powered plants.
Well, the the Environmental Protection Agency on Friday “formally declared carbon dioxide and five other heat-trapping gases to be pollutants that endanger public health and welfare, setting in motion a process that will lead to the regulation of the gases for the first time in the United States.”
[Yes that's right, carbon dioxide is now a "pollutant that endangers public health and welfare" and yet smoking is still legal....we live in a crazy world.]
Indeed, Obama takes climate change very seriously as he has told as before that: “Few challenges facing America—and the world – are more urgent than combating climate change… My presidency will mark a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change…”
and…
“We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK.”
Let’s see how serious Obama is about climate change:
-Last week he flew a chef 850 miles to make some pizza at the White House.
-Drives a gas guzzling Hemi V8 Sedan
-He cranks up the thermostat in the White House to the point where “you could grow orchids in there”
-And he smokes
Change is a cold certainty April 18, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: Antartica, climate change, global warming
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Change is a cold certainty
Greg Roberts April 18, 2009
Article from: The Australian
RUSSIAN sea captain Dimitri Zinchenko has been steering ships through the pack ice of Antarctica for three decades and is waiting to see evidence of the global warming about which he has heard so much.
Zinchenko’s vessel, the Spirit of Enderby, was commissioned in January last year to retrace the steps of the great Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, marking the century of his Nimrod expedition of 1907-09.
Spirit of Enderby was blocked by a wall of pack ice at the entrance to the Ross Sea, about 400km short of Shackleton’s base hut at Cape Royds. Zinchenko says it was the first time in 15 years that vessels were unable to penetrate the Ross Sea in January. The experience was consistent with his impression that pack ice is expanding, not contracting, as would be expected in a rapidly warming world. “I see just more and more ice, not less ice.”
Rodney Russ, whose New Zealand company Heritage Expeditions has operated tourist expeditions to Antarctica for 20 years, agrees. He says ships regularly used to able to reachthe US base of McMurdo in summer, but ice has prevented them from doing so for several years.
“Vessels are usually stopped 8km to 14km short of the base. A few years ago, that was often open water,” Russ says.
“We have experienced quite severe ice conditions over the past decade. I have seen nothing in this region to suggest global warming is having an effect.”
Read the rest here
Sceptic spells doom for alarmists April 17, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, global warming, Heaven and Earth, Professor Ian Plimer
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Sceptic spells doom for alarmists
Professor Ian Plimer
Christopher Pearson April 18, 2009
The Australian
NEXT Wednesday I will be honoured to serve as the master of ceremonies at the Adelaide launch of a book that promises to be a cause celebre. It is Ian Plimer’s Heaven and Earth: Global Warming – The Missing Science.
I expect that when the history of global warming as a mass delusion comes to be written, Australia’s leading geologist will be recognised as a member of the international sceptical pantheon. As far as the progress of what passes for national debate is concerned, in all likelihood 2009 will be seen as the turning point and divided into the pre and post-Plimer eras.
Mind you, I think this year would have been a turning point in any event because global recessions have a way of forcing the great powers to behave pragmatically. Neither the US nor China is going to pay more than lip-service to global warming alarmism and even the bien-pensant Rudd Government has stopped pretending to accept the advice of its preferred adviser, Ross Garnaut, at face value.
But none of that detracts from Plimer’s achievement in giving sceptics a campaign document containing all the scientific ammunition they could want, packed into 493 eloquent pages. Heartened by it, perhaps some timid politicians in both main parties will at last feel at liberty to own up to their private reservations about warmist catastrophe and all those drowning polar bears we keep reading about in the Fairfax press.
One of Plimer’s gifts is a reassuring matter-of-factness. For example, he says: “The level of scientific acceptance of human-induced global warming is misrepresented. Furthermore, the claim by some scientists that human-induced global warming is 90 per cent certain (or even 99 per cent) is a figure of speech reflecting the speaker’s commitment to the belief.
“It has no mathematical or evidential basis. It is comparable to 100 per cent certainty professed by religious devotees that theirs is the one and only true faith.
“My experience of dealing with blindingly obvious arguments against creation ‘science’ was that data and logic were treated with anger, rejection and hostility. Scientific arguments were never addressed. With some rabid environmentalists, human-induced global warming has evolved into a similar religious belief system.”
He demystifies the use and abuse of models in climate science.
“The extensive reliance by global warmers on computer models impresses those with little scientific training. However, the significant manipulation of the source data and the lack of use of many known variables create uncertain outputs. Furthermore, scientific data yet to be discovered cannot be used in a model.
“It is very easy for the modeller to produce the predestined outcome before the model can be run. This is a common flaw in mathematical modelling. A model is not real. Models are not evidence. Models with simulations, projections and predictions prove nothing. All a model shows is something about the model itself and the modellers, normally their limitations. As the Talmud states: ‘We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are.”‘
In the chapter on climate history he tackles warming’s anthropocentric delusion head-on. “The Roman warming, the Dark Ages, the medieval warming and the little ice age invalidate all arguments supporting human-induced global warming. This is because climates far warmer than the late 20th century warming existed before industrialisation and human emissions of CO2. The notion that climate change is tied only to human activity with known atmospheric and ocean feedbacks is a simple and erroneous explanation of modern and ancient climates.
“To argue that modern climate is driven by slight changes in a trace gas in the atmosphere (CO2) requires many non-scientific leaps of faith.”
Plimer was once involved in a high-profile dispute with fundamentalists over their claim to have discovered Noah’s Ark and he has a particularly sure grip on the role of unquestioning faith.
“The environmental religion embraces anti-human totalitarianism. Some environmentalists consider their ideas and arguments to be an indisputable truth and use sophisticated methods of media manipulation and public relations campaigns to exert pressure on policymakers to achieve their goals. Their argument is based on the spreading of fear and panic to declare the future of the world to be under serious threat.
“In such an atmosphere they continue pushing policymakers to adopt illiberal measures, impose arbitrary limits, regulations, prohibitions and restrictions on everyday human activities and make people subject to omnipotent bureaucratic decision-making.
“In science, we are in awe of nature. In religion, we are in awe of God. Yet the new environmental religion is in awe of nothing. It is spiritually vacuous and negative. Christianity has a long tradition of using music for worship. The music, especially from the time of Bach and onwards, underpins all Western music. The environmental religion has no music, no traditions, no scholarship, no nothing. The new environmental religion has no big questions. It has no unknowns.”
As well as being a nullity, eco-fundamentalism is atavistic in character.
“The environmental romantics have a loathing and fear of population increase, seek to return to the past and promote pagan superstitions. Well before the crunch of global warming appeared, the environmental romantics hated the modern world despite the fact that in industrial societies we live longer, we are healthier, the air and water are getting cleaner, the area of forests is expanding and we have far greater freedom than in past times. It is the energy-intensive communication systems of the modern world that allow the environmental romantics to spread the word.”
I have tended to concentrate on those parts of Plimer’s book that particularly appeal to me. In doing so I have failed to mention a lot of fascinating detail about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the falsification of climate history via the notorious “hockey stick” graph, the antics of influential warmists such as James Hansen and the skulduggery of British learned bodies under pressure from the Blair government and the likes of Nicholas Stern.
As well, there is a wealth of information on the various effects of the sun on climate and the advantages of considering climate variability from the perspective of geological time, all set out very cogently.
But there is one mystery that can’t be neglected and that Plimer attempts to address. How could such a solid-seeming expert consensus so quickly develop on such an absurd hypothesis?
Part of the answer lies in the pseudo-scientific pronouncements coming out of the IPCC, long captured by a small group of eco-fundamentalists, and particularly by its summaries for policymakers. The Nobel committee that rewarded IPCC panellists and Al Gore also has a lot to answer for.
The rest he explains by reference to Trofim Lysenko, an insignificant agricultural scientist but adept propagandist who, despite the complete lack of evidence, managed to persuade Joseph Stalin and his henchmen that he could triple or quadruple Soviet grain production. Plimer reminds us that “opposition to Lysenko was not tolerated. Mendelian geneticists were demonised as ‘fly lovers and people haters’ and between 1934 and 1940 numerous geneticists were shot or exiled to Siberia. Genetics research stopped. In 1948 genetics was officially labelled as ‘bourgeois pseudo-science’. The ban was lifted in 1965 but the USSR had lost 30 years of advance inagriculture.”
Plimer doesn’t pretend that the international scientific community today lives in terror comparable to the gulag, but he has some telling things to say about the politicisation and bureaucratisation of science.
Then there are the burgeoning numbers ofso-called climate scientists, all with research grants and vested interests in defending what they’ve come to think of as mainstream climatology.
Finally there are all the rent-seekers in the academy, in government departments and in commerce who expect to make a living out of regulating carbon emissions. It will be fascinating to watch when the smarter among them realise that the jig is up.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25348644-7583,00.html
Monckton Testimony Before US House Committee April 17, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, global warming, lord monckton
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Monckton Testimony Before US House Committee
Via ICECAP
By Bob Ferguson, SPPI
On March 25th, Christopher Monckton gave testimony before the US House Committee on Energy and Commerce. That testimony gave rise to a letter to both Democrat Ed Markey and Republican Joe Barton, members of the committee. The letter has been formatted and posted at SPPI here.
As context, the Committee held a hearing on the desirability of, and opportunities for, adapting to anthropogenic “global warming”. Congressman Joe Barton introduced Monckton to the Committee as “the world’s most knowledgeable climate skeptic.” His opening statement concentrated on three scientific graphs and an economic graph. The scientific graphs (each featured in SPPI’s Monthly CO2 Report, showed that global temperature had been falling for seven years; that CO2 concentration had been rising at about half the UN’s central estimate, requiring its warming projections to be halved and rendering them harmless; and that 20 years of satellite observations of changes in outgoing long-wave radiation had demonstrated conclusively that the UN had exaggerated the effect of CO2 on temperature by a factor of 7-10. The economic graph showed the cost of adapting to “global warming” (if and when it resumed) as being many times cheaper than the cost of attempting to mitigate it.
These graphs aroused considerable interest. Provoked by Congressman Markey’s alarm at hearing real science, Mr. Tom Karl, the Director of the US National Climatic Data Center, a Democrat witness, disputed the temperature graph on the insubstantial ground that Monckton had compiled it by inappropriately combining two satellite and two surface temperature datasets; disputed the CO2 graph on the ground that carbon emissions were rising far faster than the UN had predicted; and disputed the satellite data on outgoing long-wave radiation on the ground that all satellites are prone to orbital degradation.
Monckton replied that each of the four temperature datasets individually demonstrated that global temperatures had been falling for fully seven years; that it is not CO2 emissions but CO2 concentrations remaining in the atmosphere that matter, and the concentrations, while rising, were doing so far more slowly than even the lowest of the UN’s projections; and that the analysis of the satellite data that he had displayed had been confirmed – precisely because the results were so surprising to those who believed the UN’s exaggerated estimates of climate sensitivity – by at least four further scientific papers.
Congressman Barton said it was essential that the Committee should know who was telling the truth, and he invited Mr. Karl and Lord Monckton to write to the committee, giving further and better particulars in support of what they each had said.
Icecap Note: This letter is Monckton’s reply. It is a remarkable work and you should take the time to read it. Hopefully it will influence some of the fence sitters in congress on this issue and help derail congressional action on cap-and-trade (tax-and-trade) and other similar efforts to drive up the cost of energy to benefit the government, NGOs, traders and corporations who care less about the environment but see profit in green efforts.
Update: Sun and Ice April 16, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in sunspots.Tags: climate change, global warming, sun, sunspots
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Update: Sun and Ice
From ICECAP
By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM
The sun remains in a deep slumber.
Today we are 15 days into April without a sunspot and with 603 sunspotless day this cycle minimum, 92 already this year. 2009 at this rate, is likely to enter the top 10 years the last century along with 2007 (9th) and 2008 (2nd) this summer.
If it stays quiet the rest of this month, the minimum can be no earlier than November 2008, at least a 12.5 year cycle length. I believe January 2009 is a better shot to be the solar minimum as sunspot number would have to be below 0.5 in June 2008 to prevent the running mean (13 month) from blipping up then. April needs only to stay below 3.2 and May 3.4 to get us to January. This would be very like cycles 1 to 4 in the late 1700s and early 1800s, preceding the Dalton Minimum. That was a cold era, the age of Dickens and the children playing in the snow in London, much like this past winter.
THE ARCTIC AND ANTARCTIC ICE STORY
As for the ice, we hear in the media the hype about the arctic and Antarctic ice. The arctic ice we are told is more first and second year ice and very vulnerable to a summer melt.
Actually the arctic ice is very 3rd highest level since 2002, very close to 2003, in a virtual tie to last winter and the highest year according to IARC-JAXA. The anomaly is a relatively small 300,000 square km according to The Cryosphere Today.
There was much attention paid in the media to the crack in the Wilkins Ice sheet bridge. It was not even reflected as a blip on the Southern Hemisphere ice extent, which has grown rapidly as the southern hemisphere winter set in to 1,150,000 square kms above the normal for this date and rising rapidly.
The net GLOBAL sea ice anomaly is also positive, 850,000 square km above the normal. See full PDF here.
Science behind Garnaut Report flawed, inquiry told April 15, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, global warming, Professor Bob Carter, Ross Garnaut
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Science behind Garnaut Report flawed, inquiry told
ABC News – April 15, 2009,
An inquiry into the Federal Government’s climate change policy has been told there are major flaws in the science underpinning Australia’s stance.
The Government commissioned economist Ross Garnaut to help shape its climate change strategy.
But an environmental geologist from James Cook University, Robert Carter, has told a Senate inquiry the basis for Professor Garnaut’s report is wrong.
He says there is no evidence humans are causing changes in climate patterns.
“The Stern Report and the Garnaut Report in Australia are both reports by distinguished economists – they have no basis in scientific expertise,” he said.
“It is never a good move to appoint someone to a review committee who is not competent to judge the basis for the whole review, but that is what the British and Australian Governments did.”
ETS defended
Meanwhile, Federal Climate Change Minister Penny Wong has defended the Government’s plan to reduce carbon emissions.
A group of scientists from the CSIRO have criticised the Government’s emissions trading scheme because they believe the target is far too low.
But Senator Wong says the Government’s strategy is ambitious and recognises the need for urgent action.
“We are putting forward as a government, a scheme for the first time that will reduce Australia’s emissions,” she said.
“We are putting forward a scheme that will have targets which will see a very substantial reduction into the future in Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions.”
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/04/15/2543797.htm?site=local
Energy industry warns of blackout April 14, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, emissions trading scheme, global warming
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Energy industry warns of blackout
Article from: The Australian, April 14, 2009
CONSUMERS face possible blackouts and power stations could go broke unless the Rudd Government offers an extra $6billion worth of free permits under its planned emissions trading scheme, the energy sector has warned.
If the extra assistance is not forthcoming, the sector, responsible for about 70 per cent of Australia’s carbon emissions, will ask the Government for a Rudd Bank-style financing facility to help raise the capital.
A survey by the Energy Supply Association of Australia has found the sector will need to find $100 billion over the next five years for refinancing, essential upgrades and new investments in low-emission generation to comply with the emissions trading scheme and new renewable energy targets.
The industry says it is facing a “perfect storm” of a credit squeeze caused by the financial crisis and the Rudd Government’s bank guarantee, inadequate compensation under the carbon pollution reduction scheme, and a decision by the Australian Energy Regulator that could reduce the profitability of energy network providers.
The Government has offered the electricity industry $3.9billion in free pollution permits to compensate for the “most probable and most extreme” writedowns in power station asset values because of the carbon pollution reduction scheme – an acknowledgement that the scheme will cause upheaval in the sector as it shuts down some high-polluting power plants early and invests in new low-polluting generation.
The ESAA said this amount must be increased to at least $10billion, to be delivered over the first five years of the scheme.
“If the Government does not increase the level of compensation, we will have no choice but to go to them asking for another finance facility for our sector,” association chief executive Clare Savage said.
“What is at stake here is the future of the energy market. If nothing is done, power stations are likely to be bankrupted, and if they closed, then there would be problems with electricity supply, or more likely governments would have to step in to take them over, and that would unravel the last 10 years’ hard work to set up a national electricity market.”
An ESAA survey found the energy sector would need to find $50billion for refinancing over the next five years, $6.3 billion for planned spending on existing assets, $12 billion for new lower-emission generation and $31billion for investments in the electricity networks.
The sector needs to fight for access to that capital in a market where banks and state governments have received federal government guarantees and where the carbon pollution reduction scheme means asset values are being written down.
The $40 billion energy distribution industry is facing a large reduction in its returns if the Australian Energy Regulator confirms a recent draft decision at the same time as it is being asked to fund billions of dollars in new network investments as the industry shifts to new types of generation.
According to the Energy Networks Association, the draft decision would reduce returns to the industry by more than 10 per cent.
“When you combine the effects of these decisions with the debt guarantees being offered to other sectors, it is tantamount to tying one hand behind the industry’s back while it fights for capital in the midst of a global financial crisis,” Ms Savage said.
“To help ensure these assets remain in service to support the transition to lower-emission technologies and give new investors in the energy supply sector confidence that when the Government institutes major policy change that has the potential to strand long-lived infrastructure assets, the value of these assets must be adequately recognised.”
The Government says the revenue it will raise from auctioning permits under the carbon pollution reduction scheme is already fully allocated in compensation to industry and households, meaning any increase in compensation to one sector would require taking something away from another.
CLIMATE CHANGE AND WATER RESOURCES by Professor Will Alexander April 14, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, global warming, Professor Will Alexander
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CLIMATE CHANGE AND WATER RESOURCES by Professor Will Alexander
Received via email, April 2, 2009
Email 17/09.
Thursday 2 April 2009
Dear all,
CLIMATE CHANGE AND WATER RESOURCES
As I write this e-mail the world is in economic turmoil. There are riots on the streets of London as the G20 nations search for a solution. The riots are by the increasing numbers of jobless people on the streets.
On top of this there is another pressure group. These are from the more affluent members of society. They are represented by climatalogical and environmental extremists supported by NGOs and others who insist that life on this planet is under threat. Their only solution is to impose punitive and costly measures that can only further increase the cost of food, water, electricity and joblessness for the world’s poor. Our Water Research Commission has allied itself with this group.
An explosive situation is developing.
I have had a long and very satisfying professional career in the fields of civil engineering and applied hydrology. Now for the first time I find myself in a conflict situation. I cannot remain silent. It is not pleasant. Please bear with me.
After spending 30 years closely involved in all aspects of water resource development and management I cannot remain silent while I see the country and people that I love, being manipulated by alarmists in the natural sciences. I believe that it is very possible that within months South Africa could be entering a period of sustained water supply and water quality problems. Coming on top of the present turmoil these could have very serious economic and humanitarian consequences. This is the reason for my agitation.
Now this alarmism has spread to the Water Research Commission. It is very clear that the Commission is blindly following the climate change path. It has completely ignored studies by generations of civil engineers in this field as if we never existed.
Civil engineers being conscientious and cautious simply shrug their shoulders and move on. Now we are under pressure to adopt procedures that are unscientific and professionally dishonest. A crisis situation is rapidly developing. I am desperately trying to avoid it.
On Tuesday as a matter of courtesy I sent a copy of my Memo 17/09 to the Commission and informed it that I would distribute the memo today (Thursday). It included the statement that I had yet to receive a simple yes or no response to my proposal submitted on 7 December last year. This was in response to the Water Research Commission’s offer of an undefined consultancy for the amount of R200 000. I recommended that I produce a handbook on water resource development and management. I provided details and requested approval of this proposal. I am still waiting.
Yesterday, once again I received an evasive reply. After three months of supplying the necessary information in a number of emails, I was requested:
Kindly forward me your revised proposal that entails aims, methodology and deliverables for the R200 000 project as agreed with WRC as that will enable us to prepare a contract and then go ahead with the project.
My response was:
You have my revised proposal. It is the production of the handbook detailed below.
The aim is the production of the handbook. The methodology is the compilation of the handbook from a large number of documents in my possession. The deliverable is the handbook in publishable format. I have nothing more to add.
I require an immediate reply please as I intend distributing my memo first thing tomorrow morning. Thereafter you can take your time. The WRC has more than enough information on which to base its decision.
Their reply was:
The agreement that we should have will be a legally binding contractual agreement which must be finalized according to our requirements. I hope that the proposal will eventually be finalized and sent to us in the right proposal format, so that we can move forward. Consultancies are supposed to be low in transaction cost. This particular one is proving to be very high already compromising other pertinent work that we also need to take care of.
I would suggest that if we are unable to sign a contract in this month together with the other contracts deadline, then we might as well cut the losses and motivate to Executive to indefinitely suspend this particular consultancy.
NB. I copy Prof Alexander, so that we are all on the same page
Just one more comment from me. Early last July the Commission drew my attention to the research proposals the on the climate change issue knowing that this would be of interest to me. I expressed an interest and responded in the required format. It was the Commission that rejected my subsequent submissions and offered me an undefined consultancy instead. I did not ask for it. The sum of R200 000 was offered by the Commission. I did not initiate it. I provided full details of my methodology and phased submissions chapter by chapter, but this was ignored. I estimate that it will take me six months to produce the handbook. I will also have to purchase sophisticated document scanning equipment and software.
I now have the strong impression that the Commission would prefer not to have a handbook for practitioners and decision makers that would be in conflict with its own policy on climate change. This is the reason for its obvious delaying tactics.
The Water Research Commission will have to bear the consequences of its foolish decision that must inevitably result in a setback to research in this nationally important field.
My door is still open but I require an unequivocal approval of my proposal to produce the handbook before proceeding any further.
I now expect the Commission to inform me formally and in writing of its decision so that I can make it publicly available. I need to know why my responses during the past three months were deliberately ignored. Let others be the judge.
In a separate communication I recommended that this email and the accompanying Memo 17/09 be drawn to the attention of the Water Research Commission’s Executive as a matter of urgency, together with all the correspondence since July last year.
I get no satisfaction whatsoever in preparing and distributing this email and the attached memo. It is humiliating to me as well as to the Commission.
Enough said. Please study the attached memo with care and understanding. Much is at stake.
Memo 17/09
Climate change and water resources
Will Alexander
2 April 2009
This is part of Raphael’s famous fresco (wall painting) titled the School of Athens in the Vatican. I had the privilege of studying it during WWII when we had plenty of time to spare. The theme of the fresco is Philosophy and this part of the fresco shows Euclid teaching mathematics to a group of enthusiastic pupils. He has a pair of dividers symbolising measurement and is pointing to a visual image on a slate. His studies have enabled us to measure distances from a point on earth to a point on the moon with a high degree of accuracy. But we still cannot predict future climate other than in probabilistic terms. This is the difference between accurate mathematical descriptions and broad probabilistic methods that we have so much difficulty in mastering.
Introduction
The post-war introduction of electronic computers facilitated the storage, retrieval and processing of large volumes of hydrological and meteorological data. It also coincided with the realisation that many countries of the world with dry climates, including South Africa, faced increasing water shortages within the normal planning horizon of 30 to 50 years.
This resulted in large, co-ordinated research programmes and frequent national and international symposia. A characteristic of the research was its multidisciplinary nature and strong desire to solve nationally and internationally important problems in the water field. This extended into other environmental concerns. Our CSIR operated a very successful National Programme of Environmental Sciences. I chaired its Inland Waters Ecosystems Committee.
Things have changed. These coordinated programmes no longer exist. The scientific disciplines jealously defend their own territories. It has been described as grain silo science. The situation has deteriorated even further.
This whole climate change issue is driven by the combination of two scientific disciplines – climatology and the environmental sciences. Multidisciplinary approaches to this difficult problem are not only ignored, but these scientists have resorted to unethical and unscientific practices of publicly humiliating those who differ from them. Sadly, there is no scientific body that has either the interest or the power to intervene.
Water resources
This contagion has spread to our Water Research Commission. I have worked co-operatively with the Commission ever since its establishment more than 30 years ago. Last December I received a letter of appreciation from the Commission. In recent memos I criticised the Commission’s policy on the climate change issue. Surely the point of departure in any research on the effects of human activities on water resources must be a sound knowledge of the undisturbed conditions. This baseline knowledge becomes increasingly important as the level of water abstraction from a river increases. The WRC’s advisers clearly do not appreciate this when they assume stable, unvarying baseline conditions.
This is what I wrote in Memo 19/07 that was distributed in May 2007 – two years ago. Why has the WRC ignored it?
Until now, the basic assumptions in the analyses of annual rainfall, river flow and flood peak maxima are that the annual data are (1) independent, (2) identically distributed, and that (3) the series are stationary in time. All three assumptions are wrong. The annual values are sequentially independent but not serially independent. The sequential values are not identically distributed as both their mean values as well as their distribution about the mean values change from year to year in 21-year sequences. The series are not stationary in time because of the presence of statistically significant 21-year serial correlation. All of these properties are related to a synchronous linkage with solar activity. This linkage was observed and reported in South Africa by Hutchins more than 100 years ago but nobody listened.
On this climate change issue we could not be further apart. I firmly believe and can prove that there is no meaningful linkage between climate change and South Africa’s water resources. Our correspondence has been distant. Also in last December, the Commission on its own initiative invited me to undertake a consultancy project as a substitute for my failed research submission related to climate change.
I immediately accepted the invitation and submitted my proposal. For the past three months I have repeatedly requested a formal decision on whether my proposal was acceptable or not. I stressed the need for urgency. The replies were evasive. I have still not received a yes or no response.
I have attached a copy of the third draft of my proposal.
Conflicting views on available water resources
There are conflicting statements in the press regarding our future water resources. The first was that we would run out of water by 2013. This was immediately denied. It was claimed that we have enough to last us until 2025. My prediction is that our troubles are likely to start within the next 12 to 24 months at the latest.
In any event, climatologists have no hesitation in making predictions for the next 100 years but we have yet to be told where our future water supplies will come from 20 years from now. There is only one possible source and that is seawater desalination. But where will the electricity come from to desalinate the seawater? I have not seen this included in any plans for the future electricity supplies in this country.
South Africa is by no means the only country whose future water supplies are under threat. Again, the associated demand for electricity does not seem to be accommodated in international plans for radical greenhouse gas emission reductions.
Surely this is an issue that should be of greater concern to our Water Research Commission than the nebulous linkages with climate change.
Present water situation
As I write, large regions of Namibia, Angola, Malawi, Zambia and Mozambique are experiencing unusually high river flows. Large numbers of people have been displaced. Fortunately the loss of life has been minimal.
At Bali, the Hadley Centre of the UK Met office distributed a document ‘New science for managing climate risks’. It predicted that the Zambezi River would experience a 34.9% reduction in river flow. [Note accuracy to three significant figures!] But as I write, the flow in the Zambezi River at Katimo Mulilo is the highest in decades. These inconsistencies are never acknowledged by the climate alarmists nor reported in the media.
Nearer home, how many times have we not heard that the climate in our part of the world will become progressively warmer and drier? This is in direct contradiction to an analysis of the wealth of hydrometeorological observations. Basic hydrological data analysis does not feature in their computer models.
Surely, an impartial body such as the Water Research Commission should either dissociate itself from this alarmism or appoint an independent multidisciplinary panel of experts to advise it? Why does it remain silent?
In the meantime, South Africa is heading rapidly towards a water supply crisis.
An answer to my prayers
The statement by the Vice Chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand that I quoted in my last email was an answer to my prayers. The policy of the university to encourage healthy scientific debate was unequivocal. The stubborn refusal by others to enter into a constructive debate with those who disagree with them was described as scientifically and ethically unacceptable at the highest academic level.
Regrettably, the Water Research Commission has not followed this policy of encouraging vigorous debate in the nationally important water field. The Commission accepted the alarmist views of climate change scientists without question or debate. For example, it ignored the many publications on water resource development and management by the Department of Water Affairs and the Wits Hydrological Research Unit over the years. I have a garage full of this material. How can I remain silent with a clear conscience?
Recommendation to the Water Research Commission
The Water Research Commission was established to provide guidance and leadership in the days ahead. It was not established solely as a mechanism for funding research by others. With the above in mind, this is my constructive recommendation to the Water Research Commission.
I recommend that the Commission should make the following four detailed publications on this issue available to interested scientists and others in digital format, as a matter of urgency. The Commission should then establish a multidisciplinary body of experts to call for comments, process the responses, and advise the Commission on the way ahead. These are the documents.
On 21 June 2006, nearly three years ago, I drew the Commission’s attention to my 474-page technical report Climate change and its consequences — an African perspective. The report has 11 chapters, 51 tables, 33 figures and 218 references. This is the most comprehensive document on climate change in South Africa and possibly elsewhere. But the Water Research Commission ignored it. I have attached a copy of the table of contents. I intend bringing it up to date.
The second document is our refereed, five-authored paper ‘Linkages between solar activity, climate practicability and water resource development.’ <click for paper>It was published in the Journal of the South African Institution of Civil Engineering in June 2007. This refereed paper was directly relevant to the Commission’s responsibilities but was also ignored. Since then my colleague Fred Bailey demonstrated that the influence of variations in received solar energy are more than 17 times those caused by greenhouse gas emissions. This completely undermines the very basis of climate change theory. Our paper is available from the SAICE in digital format.
The third document relevant to my recommendation is the Commission’s report ‘Towards defining the WRC’s research portfolio on climate change for 2008 to 2013’. I described the shortcomings in my Memo 09/09. This report completely ignores the current practices and procedures based on generations of studies, publications and experience in the water resource development and management field. I have attached the table of contents. Compare it with the table of contents of my 474-page report.
The fourth document is the IPCC’s publication Climate Change and Water published in June 2008. Civil engineers in the water field will find it especially amusing. It is available from the IPCC website.
The establishment of the advisory committee and the call for comments should be advertised in WaterWheel as well as in Civil Engineering, which has a readership of 8000.
Alternative
The alternative option is for the Commission to continue on its present policy of suppressing contrarian research on the climate change issue. [I have examples.] The Commission should be prepared for the inevitable criticism when the predicted severe droughts occur and the public start asking awkward questions. The disintegration of its policy could commence within months.
Approval of my consultancy proposal
Hopefully this memo will also prompt the Commission to reply to my repeated requests for a decision on the consultancy project that I submitted three months ago at the request of the Commission. It is fundamentally relevant to the situation that we now find ourselves in regarding water resource development and management in South Africa. A reasoned yes or no decision would be helpful.
If the Commission has any reservations regarding my consultancy, which they themselves initiated, then please inform me so that I can inform everybody else of the Commission’s decision and the reasons for it.
Beware the climate of conformity April 14, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, global warming, Professor Ian Plimer
1 comment so far
Beware the climate of conformity
By Paul Sheehan
The Sydney Morning Herald, April 13, 2009
What I am about to write questions much of what I have written in this space, in numerous columns, over the past five years. Perhaps what I have written can withstand this questioning. Perhaps not. The greater question is, am I – and you – capable of questioning our own orthodoxies and intellectual habits? Let’s see.
The subject of this column is not small. It is a book entitled Heaven And Earth, which will be published tomorrow. It has been written by one of Australia’s foremost Earth scientists, Professor Ian Plimer. He is a confronting sort of individual, polite but gruff, courteous but combative. He can write extremely well, and Heaven And Earth is a brilliantly argued book by someone not intimidated by hostile majorities or intellectual fashions.
The book’s 500 pages and 230,000 words and 2311 footnotes are the product of 40 years’ research and a depth and breadth of scholarship. As Plimer writes: “An understanding of climate requires an amalgamation of astronomy, solar physics, geology, geochronology, geochemistry, sedimentology, tectonics, palaeontology, palaeoecology, glaciology, climatology, meteorology, oceanography, ecology, archaeology and history.”
The most important point to remember about Plimer is that he is Australia’s most eminent geologist. As such, he thinks about time very differently from most of us. He takes the long, long view. He looks at climate over geological, archaeological, historical and modern time. He writes: “Past climate changes, sea-level changes and catastrophes are written in stone.”
Much of what we have read about climate change, he argues, is rubbish, especially the computer modelling on which much current scientific opinion is based, which he describes as “primitive”. Errors and distortions in computer modelling will be exposed in time. (As if on cue, the United Nations’ peak scientific body on climate change was obliged to make an embarrassing admission last week that some of its computers models were wrong.)
Plimer does not dispute the dramatic flux of climate change – and this column is not about Australia’s water debate – but he fundamentally disputes most of the assumptions and projections being made about the current causes, mostly led by atmospheric scientists, who have a different perspective on time. “It is little wonder that catastrophist views of the future of the planet fall on fertile pastures. The history of time shows us that depopulation, social disruption, extinctions, disease and catastrophic droughts take place in cold times … and life blossoms and economies boom in warm times. Planet Earth is dynamic. It always changes and evolves. It is currently in an ice age.”
If we look at the last 6 million years, the Earth was warmer than it is now for 3 million years. The ice caps of the Arctic, Antarctica and Greenland are geologically unusual. Polar ice has only been present for less than 20 per cent of geological time. What follows is an intense compression of the book’s 500 pages and all their provocative arguments and conclusions:
Is dangerous warming occurring? No.
Is the temperature range observed in the 20th century outside the range of normal variability? No.
The Earth’s climate is driven by the receipt and redistribution of solar energy. Despite this crucial relationship, the sun tends to be brushed aside as the most important driver of climate. Calculations on supercomputers are primitive compared with the complex dynamism of the Earth’s climate and ignore the crucial relationship between climate and solar energy.
“To reduce modern climate change to one variable, CO2, or a small proportion of one variable – human-induced CO2 – is not science. To try to predict the future based on just one variable (CO2) in extraordinarily complex natural systems is folly. Yet when astronomers have the temerity to show that climate is driven by solar activities rather than CO2 emissions, they are dismissed as dinosaurs undertaking the methods of old-fashioned science.”
Over time, the history of CO2 content in the atmosphere has been far higher than at present for most of time. Atmospheric CO2 follows temperature rise. It does not create a temperature rise. CO2 is not a pollutant. Global warming and a high CO2 content bring prosperity and longer life.
The hypothesis that human activity can create global warming is extraordinary because it is contrary to validated knowledge from solar physics, astronomy, history, archaeology and geology. “But evidence no longer matters. And any contrary work published in peer-reviewed journals is just ignored. We are told that the science on human-induced global warming is settled. Yet the claim by some scientists that the threat of human-induced global warming is 90 per cent certain (or even 99 per cent) is a figure of speech. It has no mathematical or evidential basis.”
Observations in nature differ markedly from the results generated by nearly two dozen computer-generated climate models. These climate models exaggerate the effects of human CO2 emissions into the atmosphere because few of the natural variables are considered. Natural systems are far more complex than computer models.
The setting up by the UN of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988 gave an opportunity to make global warming the main theme of environmental groups. “The IPCC process is related to environmental activism, politics and opportunism. It is unrelated to science. Current zeal around human-induced climate change is comparable to the certainty professed by Creationists or religious fundamentalists.”
Ian Plimer is not some isolated gadfly. He is a prize-winning scientist and professor. The back cover of Heaven And Earth carries a glowing endorsement from the President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, who now holds the rotating presidency of the European Union. Numerous rigorous scientists have joined Plimer in dissenting from the prevailing orthodoxy.
Heaven And Earth is an evidence-based attack on conformity and orthodoxy, including my own, and a reminder to respect informed dissent and beware of ideology subverting evidence.
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For more on Professor Ian Plimer’s book click here
