An Honest Climate Debate

The Earth Cools, and Fight Over Warming Heats Up October 31, 2009

The Earth Cools, and Fight Over Warming Heats Up

By JEFFREY BALL
The Wall Street Journal, October 30, 2009

Many Scientists Say Temperature Drop From Recent Record Highs Is a Blip, While a Few See a Trend; Inexact Climate Models

Two years ago, a United Nations scientific panel won the Nobel Peace Prize after concluding that global warming is “unequivocal” and is “very likely” caused by man.

Then came a development unforeseen by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC: Data suggested that Earth’s temperature was beginning to drop.

That has reignited debate over what has become scientific consensus: that climate change is due not to nature, but to humans burning fossil fuels. Scientists who don’t believe in man-made global warming cite the cooling as evidence for their case. Those who do believe in man-made warming dismiss the cooling as a blip triggered by fleeting changes in ocean currents; they predict greenhouse gases will produce rising temperatures again soon.

The reality is more complex. A few years of cooling doesn’t mean that people aren’t heating up the planet over the long term. But the cooling wasn’t predicted by all the computer models that underlie climate science. That has led to one point of agreement: The models are imperfect.

“There is a lot of room for improvement” in the models, says Mojib Latif, a climate scientist in Germany and co-author of a paper predicting the planet will cool for perhaps a decade before starting to warm again — a long-term trend he attributes to greenhouse-gas emissions. “You need to know what you can believe and can’t believe from the models.”

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Beware the UN’s Copenhagen plot October 30, 2009

Beware the UN’s Copenhagen plot

By Janet Albrechtsen
The Australian, October 28, 2009

SHAME on us all: on us in the media and on our politicians. Despite thousands of news reports, interviews, analyses, critiques and commentaries from journalists, what has the inquiring, intellectually sceptical media told us about the potential details of a Copenhagen treaty? And despite countless speeches, addresses, interviews, doorstops, moralising sermons from government ministers, pleas from Canberra for an outcome at Copenhagen, opposition criticism of government policy, what have our elected representatives told us about the potential details of a Copenhagen treaty?

With just over 40 days until more than 15,000 officials, advisers, diplomats, activists and journalists from more than 190 countries attend the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen, we know nothing. Nothing about a climate change treaty that the Rudd government is keen to sign and one that will bind this country for years to come.

Of course, there is no final treaty as yet. That is what they are hoping to finalise in Copenhagen. But there are 181 pages that make up the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change dated September 15, 2009: a rough draft of what could be signed in Copenhagen. And yet, not one member of the media or political class has bothered to inform us about its contents as an important clue to what may happen in Copenhagen. The shame of that state of affairs started to trickle in last week.

Emails started arriving telling me about a speech given by Christopher Monckton, a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, at Bethel University in St Paul, Minnesota, on October 14. Monckton talked about something that no one has talked about in the lead-up to Copenhagen: the text of the draft Copenhagen treaty.

Even after Monckton’s speech, most of the media has duly ignored the substance of what he said. You don’t need me to find his St Paul address on YouTube. Interviewed on Monday morning by Alan Jones on Sydney radio station 2GB, Monckton warned that the aim of the Copenhagen draft treaty was to set up a transnational government on a scale the world has never before seen. Listening to the interview, my teenage daughters asked me whether this was true.

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Let me relieve you of your beachfront estate October 27, 2009

Let me relieve you of your beachfront estate

Andrew Bolt
Herald Sun, October 27, 2009

If they’re in that much danger, why are they worth so much?

MORE than 80,000 buildings on Victoria’s coast will be at risk from the ravages of rising sea levels and extreme weather. The Western Port region is especially vulnerable amid estimates that 18,000 properties valued at almost $2 billion are in the danger zone… The alarming forecasts emerged last night in a new report tabled in Federal Parliament by the all-party House of Representatives Climate Change, Environment, Water and the Arts Committee.

If the Government really wants to “do something” about this calamity, here’s a free-market way to reward the right-believers and punish the deniers: arrange for these properties to be sold to sceptics. For a modest discount, we’ll surely take these worthless properties off their trembling hands. In fact, I’d be delighted to help Greg Combet, Minister Assisting the Minister for Climate Change, get rid of the property he so foolishly bought only two years ago that now will be among the first to go:

High-profile Labor candidate Greg Combet has bought a beach front house in one of Newcastle’s most exclusive suburbs…

In other words, leave it to the market to assess the true risk. Don’t impose your warming beliefs.

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Palms grew in ice-free Arctic 50 million years ago: study October 26, 2009

Palm trees ‘flourished’ in Arctic – study

Via Courier Mail
October 26, 2009

PALMS flourished in the Arctic during a brief sweltering period about 50 million years ago, according to a study that hints at big gaps in scientific understanding of modern climate change.

The Arctic “would have looked very similar to the vegetation we now see in Florida,” Appy Sluijs of Utrecht University in the Netherlands said.

Evidence of palms has never been found so far north before.

The scientists, sampling sediments on a ridge on the seabed that was about 500km from the North Pole 53.5 million years ago, found pollens of ancient palms as well as of conifers, oaks, pecans and other trees.

“The presence of palm pollen implies that coldest month mean temperatures over the Arctic land masses were no less than 8C, the scientists, based in the Netherlands and Germany, wrote in the journal Nature Geoscience.

That contradicted computer model simulations – also used to predict future temperatures – that suggested winter temperatures were below freezing even in the unexplained hothouse period that lasted between 50,000 and 200,000 years in the Eocene epoch.

Palms are quickly killed by frost.

Mr Sluijs said that it was also striking that palms, which do not lose their leaves in winter, grew in an area where the sun does not shine for about five months.

Experiments with modern palms indicate that they can survive prolonged darkness.

The scientists said that presence of palms – it was not clear if they were trees or plants – hinted that the modern climate system could yield big surprises.

Temperatures are now rising because of man-made greenhouse gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels, according to the UN Climate Panel.

Arctic ice shrank in 2007 to its smallest size since satellite measurements began in the 1970s.

One possibility for the ancient spike in temperatures was an abrupt rise in carbon dioxide levels, to far beyond concentrations now.

That might have been caused by volcanic eruptions, or a melt of frozen methane trapped in the seabed.

“We cannot explain this with the current knowledge of the climate system,” Mr Sluijs said.

One possibility was that new types of clouds formed in the Arctic as it warmed, acting as a blanket that trapped ever more heat and accelerated warming.

“If the ocean was very warm it’s possible that these clouds form at a higher latitude than now,” he said.

Such effects caused by new cloud formation could be an unexpected tripwire in accelerating modern climate change.

More than 190 nations are due to meet in Copenhagen from December 7-18 to agree a new UN. climate treaty to replace the UN’s Kyoto Protocol.

Despite propaganda, 30% of Australians aren’t fooled October 24, 2009

Despite propaganda, 30% of Australians aren’t fooled

JoNova, October 24, 2009

The Question: Do increasing amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere pose an unacceptable risk of a catastrophic change in earth’s temperature in the future?

Of 1022 people polled, 55% agreed and 31% opposed (including the 19% who strongly opposed). Nearly half, or 45% are not convinced a catastrophe is on the way due to carbon dioxide. Source: OnlineOpinion

My sense is that the curve of opinion on this complex science is the inverse of what you would expect. Normally on a complex scientific topic, the most common answer would be neither agree nor disagree (or don’t know), and the strong opinions would taper off like a bell curve with few people being sure either way. Instead opinions are polarized. “Catastrophic” is strong language. One side here is passionately wrong.

With 3000 times as much funding supporting the side with professional PR teams, the endless repetition of the assumption that man-made carbon dioxide causes warming is becoming a liability in itself. The more the advocates for action whitewash, the more people grow suspicious. They more they bully, the more people get a gut feeling that things are not right. The harder the activists push, the stronger the opposition becomes. The only thing that would rescue the case for Cap N trade or an ETS is good scientific evidence. James Hansen and Al Gore can hardly claim they can’t get their message across in the media, so we wonder why they keep the evidence a secret?

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