Climate clippings 77

Climate clippings_175

1. Antarctic ice melt studies

A recent study by Abram et al showed that the ice on the Antarctic peninsula was melting about 10 times faster than it was 600 years ago, concluding that further melting was particularly sensitive to temperature increases. The headline and the text of this story perhaps gave the impression that the whole continent was ready to go.

A more sober assessment was found at The Carbon Brief where the study was linked with another study by Steig et al that finds recent changes in the West Antarctica ice sheet “cannot be distinguished from decadal variability that originates in the tropics.”

Nevertheless Antarctica overall is losing mass (see also here). Antarctica contributed strongly to sea level rise during the Eemian and the Andrill study showed that “the West Antarctic ice sheet has collapsed and regrown over 60 times in the past few million years”. Any complacency would be misplaced.

2. New review of ice sheet studies

The Carbon Brief has also posted on a new major review of the latest research on ice sheets. The last IPCC report (AR4) relied on about 10 years worth of reliable sea level data, from 1993 and 2003. Greenland and Antarctica together were found to be raising sea levels by about 0.42 mm per year. That has now doubled to about 0.82mm per year.

So while we are still dealing with short time periods, a clear acceleration is in evidence.

3. Skeptical bloopers

The Carbon Brief reckons that once about every six months David Rose runs an article saying global warming has stopped. Here’s their post of October 2012. Then they lined up six top rebuttals of the week, and a reader contributed a seventh by Tamino.

It’s a tired canard and I didn’t bother reading them all. It did introduce me to the Met Office News Blog which has, for example, a very clear post on tornadoes.

Elsewhere in case you missed it Andrew Glikson debunks the notion that CFCs are responsible for global warming.

4. Garnaut recommends 17% target

Dr Jenny Riesz of the University of NSW reports on Garnaut’s recommendation to the Climate Change Authority which is currently deliberating on the Caps and Targets Review. He favours a 17% target by 2020 to put us in line with the US, Canada and other major economies.

At the Cancun United Nations negotiations in 2010, President Obama committed the USA to an emissions reduction target of -17% by 2020 (below 2005 levels). This has been somewhat ignored in Australia’s carbon targets debate, because policy to implement a national carbon pricing scheme to achieve this target was filibustered by the US Senate.

However, the USA remains committed to this target, both in spirit, and in writing with the UNFCCC.

Canada has promised to match the USA.

He suggests that the EU has found it much easier to meet their targets than originally anticipated, which is a typical experience. This, he says, is in part why their carbon price has collapsed.

Garnaut points out that:

the biggest change of all is coming from China, in terms of quantity of emissions reduction from business as usual. They have set truly ambitious targets, and are meeting them through a wide range of activities, including substantial structural change in the Chinese economy. These actions are driven by a wide range of objectives, including environmental drivers, desire for expansion of the role of services in the economy, and desire for more equitable income distribution.

5. Carbon trading schemes

In the last CC thread Jumpy linked to a Parliamentary Library paper Countries trading greenhouse gas emissions.

Over the last three years, the global carbon market has more than doubled in volume but almost halved in value. In that time a further eight countries, states or cities have adopted a carbon market as their primary means for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Yet the price for one tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent has dropped by as much as 100 per cent in some markets.

That last sentence looks like an oops! A 100% drop gives you nothing!

The paper is the most recent of 25 on climate change in the past few years. In fact their blog Flagpost looks a valuable resource.

6. Floods in Central Europe

Dramatic floods have spread over central Europe.

The New Scientist reports caution about a link with climate change:

While it is premature to pin the heavy rainfall on climate change, it could be partly to blame, says Stéphane Isoard of the European Environment Agency in Copenhagen, Denmark. But he says bad land management is just as important.

Nevertheless wetter weather is predicted by climate change, making more floods inevitable.

Deutsche Welle goes into more detail, saying that while individual events can’t necessarily be linked to climate change, they’ve had once in a century floods now in the 1990s, in 2002 and now in 2013. We’ll have to expect more and prepare accordingly.

They make reference to Stefan Rahmstorf’s blog (which is auf Deutsch), but this paper is in English. On a quick look I think he’s saying they have found a mechanism linking floods, droughts and heat waves to climate change and if they are right expect more. And, yes they need money for research of the kind expended on the Higgs boson.

7. Interest grows in the Arctic

Now that the Arctic is increasingly becoming trafficable during the summer many countries are becoming interested. The politics of who sits where at the Arctic Council is complex, but China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, India and Italy have now been admitted as permanent observers.

According to the New Scientist China is the one to watch. They’re interested in the Arctic as a shipping route, but also in fish and oil.

“It’s fair to say China will drive development of Arctic resources,” says Malte Humpert of the Arctic Institute in Washington DC.

The Arctic is fragile so we hope they take care.

8. US and China agree to cooperate on phasing out HFCs

From the White House brief:

For the first time, the United States and China will work together and with other countries to use the expertise and institutions of the Montreal Protocol to phase down the consumption and production of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), among other forms of multilateral cooperation. A global phase down of HFCs could potentially reduce some 90 gigatons of CO2 equivalent by 2050, equal to roughly two years worth of current global greenhouse gas emissions.

William S. Becker explains that China had always wanted to consider the issue in the context of the current round of climate talks, which would delay action, whereas the Montreal Protocol already exists. HFCs were introduced as an alternative to chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) which were destroying the ozone layer. Unfortunately HFCs have a greenhouse effect like CO2.

Climate Progress has more detail and the AFP places this topic in context of the whole meeting agenda.

To provide further context HFCs amount to about 2% of GHG emissions, as shown on this wondrous flowchart.

50 thoughts on “Climate clippings 77”

  1. I was looking through Judith Curry’s web site, Climate Etc. Very depressing.

    http://judithcurry.com/2013/06/01/what-exactly-are-we-debating/

    She seems to be a denialist aligned with Lord Lawson, and a huge egotist to boot. Read an earlier comment where she says that rather than sustainability we should just toughen up.

    The only thing to do is draw a line under that sort of thinking.
    _____________________________________________________________

    I’ve put up this link earlier but I am going to repeat it

    http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/05/volkswagen-xl1-driven/#slideid-58024

    Solar panels on your roof, solar water heating, log fire (where suitable), and an efficient hybrid car with plug in capability is as far as the average person can go in CO2 emission control for the time being.

    The next phase is to make that all work more efficiently and reduce household costs. Using all of the solar panel electricity output within the house rather than “store” it in the grid is the best medium to long term solution and that requires intelligent appliances that are not yet available, so it will take time to get to the optimum higher standard of living that Renewable Energy systems offer.

    Apart from its extreme fuel efficiency I like the XL1 for its battery size. At 5.5 kwhrs it is large enough to power this light vehicle useful distances while being small enough to not break the budget when the battery needs replacing. And even then the battery will still be good for 4.4 kwhrs for use in the household system. Minimal waste.

    Another thing that I like about this car is that it uses carbon based materials extensively. This is our future as metals resources become less available. Carbon fiber can be made in a variety of ways and the carbon feed stock can be of coal oil or biological origin. (long term consideration).

    I just found a useful car evaluation website called www dot nextgreencar dot com which has a very good green evaluation layout.

  2. Judith Curry is a university climate academic. I’m not sure she produces much research. I initially thought of her as a contrarian, who compulsively took a different view. When you read that she says climate sensitivity is settled and the number is 1.1C you have to categorise her as a denialist.

  3. The loss of ice from the Antarctic has been recorded for over 60 years. This global phenomena included similar observations in the northern hemisphere where ice-loss was greater.

    All this was known before the Keeling curve was published.

    See, for example the article by Phillip Law, Director, Antarctic Division, Department of External Affairs: Aust. J. Science, 21(9), p289b.

    Every kg of ice melt diverts at least 334 kjoules (latent heat of fusion), which otherwise would have warmed the planet elsewhere.

    Incoming solar energy is around 80 kjoules per sq. metre per minute.
    [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_constant]

    Once most of the ice is gone, global warming will be seriously aggravated.

    You can blame the captains of business and their captive economists.

  4. There’s such a long way to go: I recently read Bill McKibben’s compelling article in The Monthly about why Australian coal has to stay in the ground, and then come across this new CSIRO report about our resources and really it’s just about exploitation, not much mention of why coal can’t be exploited.

    McKibben: http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2013/june/1370181600/bill-mckibben/how-australian-coal-causing-global-damage

    CSIRO: http://apo.org.au/research/advantage-australia-resource-governance-and-innovation-asian-century

  5. Maybe it will be the arts that changes people’s minds, more than the sciences …

    Being a Barbara Kingsolver fan I was glad to see her write a ‘greenhouse’ novel, and was pleased to hear her talk about it.

    Newsradio broadcast the first half of the BBC program then stupidly switched to local programming – thank God for the internet:

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0196ln8

    Possibly the way Kingsolver puts things will resonate more with people, stuff like: we have to remember that every breath we breathe in is a breath blown out by a tree.

  6. Thanks Brian. Wonder what world coastlines will look like at +12Metres?

    BilB @ 1
    We need a complete rethink on personal transport rather than tinkering at the edges of the motor car and the bitumen surfaced highway.

  7. That was a very astute observation DI. I hadn’t made that connection. Sea level rise, roading, public transport, infrastructure,…they’re all connected.

    My personal future plan involves a boat (floating relocatable alternative accommodation), a very compact yet fully featured bicycle, and a very special amphibious three seat aircraft that parks in the space of a mini minor (more or less). It is all very achievable (the bike is half way there). This combination gives me all of agility, connection, sustainability and separation. And it can all be done for less than the cost of one of the units being built near central station in Sydney.

    The exercise is one in demonstrating that there are very livable alternatives which are sustainable and more in harmony with nature.

  8. Sorry Brian of topic comment
    Bilb
    Many exceptionally affordable and sturdy sea going vessels available right now.
    From Tasmanian cray boats ( huge back deck) to east coast or gulf trawlers for around $1500 per foot , even less if major remodelling is the plan.
    Old timber, steel, glass or ( if your lucky ) aluminium or stainless.
    It’s a buyers market at the moment.

    Again, sorry, please carry on.

  9. The “no warming in 16 years” thing is a really desperate rhetorical tactic, and anyone with statistical knowledge would be choosing not to deploy it. For starters, their “non-significant” warming trend has a p value of close to 0.06, so even one unusually hot year will tip the trend to significant. Perversely, this will become more likely once 1998 disappears from the 16 year record, since that is an outlier that drags the earlier period of the trendline up, reducing its slope. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if once 1998 drops out of the record (which will be 2015?), their 16 years of “no warming” will become a significant warming trend again. Then they will be in the strange position of arguing that there was no significant warming over 17 years, but there was over 16. It shows off the mendacity of the tactic. Furthermore, if the alternative hypothesis is true they are not going to be able to extend their 16 years to 17 and so on, because as the number of observations in their record increases the trendline will become significant. So they’re going to have to continually argue “no sig warming for 16 years,” which is going to get people thinking. Also, the whole argument will be blasted out of the water with the next el nino, and the problem with crowing over “no warming in 16 years” as the smoking gun is that it can be reversed on them when the p value tips back below 0.05. If they have any sense, the denialists will stop promoting that idea – definitely before the next el nino but probably by next year.

    I have a suspicion that we are going to see a few high profile denialist bloggers retire in the next couple of years. I wouldn’t elevate it to the level of a prediction, but I wonder if maybe Watts and McIntyre will retire sometime soon after this year’s arctic ice melt? They have both said on their sites that they are thinking about it and are exhausted, and they are getting more desperate and strident as the evidence stacks up against them. You can already see the tone at WUWT getting increasingly frantic, and the posts becoming ever more contradictory. By the time the next el nino comes around they will be having to explain a nearly ice-free arctic, massive and perennial flooding in the northern hemisphere, and continuing planetary warming. I think the major denialists are just self-conscious enough to know that they need to time their exit before then.

    Also their readership is declining, and they’re having less and less effect on public debate. So, rather than holding contests to determine when the arctic will become ice-free, I think warmists should hold a contest to guess when the internet will become denialist-free.

  10. Hang on, how come a 15 year ‘warming’ trend 1983-1998 was a splendid reason to waste billions of dollars on green boondoggles, and a 16 year ‘no warming trend’ plateau is (according to AGW cultists anyway) no reason to stop spending billions on green boondoggles?

    Why, it’s almost as if it’s all about the money!

    Oh, and as ‘there’s a consensus’ (as if science was ever about that) was reason to spend money on teh cli-fi con, according to your beliefs, you cli-fi believers now have to stop. After all, there’s a consensus among Australian taxpayers that AGW’s a load of tosh. Or is that greensqueal also ‘different’ when the boot is on the other foot?

    Funny, that’s about the money, too….

  11. For you, MK50, it seems to be about money. For everyone else it’s about having a livable planet for our children to grow old in, and for their children. Your whole approach suggests that you only care for yourself in the here and now?

  12. CMMC, how about this?

    As well as health and landscape concerns, members of the Crookwell Landscape Guardians at the meeting were concerned that “electro magnetic electricity” could be transferred from windfarms through the air and the ground, possibly causing failures of farm machinery and the danger of electric shocks from farm bores.

    I believe that stuff doesn’t happen in Denmark and Germany. Must be something about the southern hemisphere!

  13. faustusnotes@11, very well put in your first paragraph. However even if the denialists were right about atmospheric warming, their case still collapses once we remember that global warming is about the increase in the energy in the climate system as a whole, in which the atmosphere is not the most important single sink of the additional energy.

  14. Paul Norton, this particular piece of propaganda really annoys me because it is so entirely wrong, and such a butchered interpretation of statistics, and it depends entirely on the fact that nuanced debate about science is impossible. Throw out any claim, and even if it is technically wrong, the detailed response required to rebut it means that it will never be properly contested.

    Though I guess we could turn it around and look for other examples of the same logic. For example, there was no economic growth during the Howard years: 11 years of continued growth is not statistically significant, therefore it didn’t happen.

  15. hang on, Bilb.

    You said “The connection between climate change and more tornadoes explained.”

    NOAA data says tornado numbers (and that’s their data on severe tornadoes) are not increasing – there are not ‘more tornadoes’.

    Therefore any model predicting that the modelled event causes more tornadoes/more severe tornadoes has been falsified by the empirical data.

    The model is wrong.

    We see the same with hurricane predictions: AGW models predicted more and more severe hurricanes. The measured data shows fewer and less severe hurricanes (in fact a ‘hurricane drought’).

    The models are wrong, their predictions falsified.

    The AGW models all predicted a troposphere ‘hot spot’. 21,000,000 weather balloon measurements prove it does not exist. The models were wrong, their predictions falsified.

    I could go on but you get the point. AGW types make extraordinary claims – therefore they require extraordinary proof, empirical proof. Not the unsupported word of an interested party making money from professing the AGW faith like a certain Indian railway engineer and soft-porn bodice-ripper author, or a certain paleontologist.

    Show me the proof, the measured data, and due to the fact that some raw data has been deliberately tampered with to support AGW models (Darwin zero!) the clean raw data, please.

    Is this position unreasonable?

  16. Oops. Too many paras. Hang on, Bilb, you said “The connection between climate change and more tornadoes explained.” NOAA data says tornado numbers (and that’s their data on severe tornadoes) are not increasing – there are not ‘more tornadoes’. Therefore any model predicting that the modelled event causes more tornadoes/more severe tornadoes has been falsified by the empirical data.

    The model is wrong. We see the same with hurricane predictions: AGW models predicted more and more severe hurricanes. The measured data shows fewer and less severe hurricanes (in fact a ‘hurricane drought’). The models are wrong, their predictions falsified. The AGW models all predicted a troposphere ‘hot spot’. 21,000,000 weather balloon measurements prove it does not exist. The models were wrong, their predictions falsified.

    I could go on but you get the point. AGW types make extraordinary claims – therefore they require extraordinary proof, empirical proof. Not the unsupported word of an interested party making money from professing the AGW faith like a certain Indian railway engineer and soft-porn bodice-ripper author, or a certain paleontologist. Show me the proof, the measured data, and due to the fact that some raw data has been deliberately tampered with to support AGW models (Darwin zero!) the clean raw data, please. Is this position unreasonable?

  17. The AGW models all predicted a troposphere ‘hot spot’. 21,000,000 weather balloon measurements prove it does not exist. The models were wrong, their predictions falsified.

    where did you get that from, MK50?

  18. Based on those figures from 1950 forward that does blow a hole in my theory (my theory not climate sciences theory), especially considering our ability to more accurately record their occurrence in the present day. The total number of hurricanes from the 50’s to the 00’s is roughly the same, as indeed climate scientist have said, but there was a very significant surge in numbers from 1967 to 1987 while the number of extreme tornadoes has declined by 30 a year from the fifties to the 00’s. So the effect of climate change on tornado events is different to how I would have thought it to be.

    My earlier post was really about the huge outflow of air from the Arctic and its effect on powerful tornado events. Perhaps the story here is really about tornadoes and their prevalence with regard to their latitudinal prevalence. When testing your numbers I see a long history of tornadoes in Connecticut of all places. So now I have to have a look at how that is developing over time.

    The real issue here is not your right I’m wrong, it is attempting to predict what our Climate Change vulnerabilities are, and how to prevent them or, what is now our probable only course of action, adapt to them.

    So, M50, you can continue to live in your “nothings going on” fools paradise as you appear certain to do, but I am not.

    Anyone with any knowledge of dynamic system control will tell you that once a large system builds up momentum the effort required to arrest that energy is huge, and the time to begin that arresting process is well before the system reaches its maximum allowable limits.

    Anyone concerned about Global Warming would be thrilled for their concerns proven wrong in due course, because the cost of being right is more than our global economy and our civilisation will withstand.

    So rather than sit on the side line taking pot shots, you might care to demonstrate that you actually have some substance and describe how you see the next 100 years of history, global economics and human events playing out based on your perceptions of Global Environment stability.

  19. faustus:

    Start with the following:

    Douglass, D.H., J.R. Christy, B.D. Pearson, and S.F. Singer. (2007). A comparison of tropical temperature trends with model predictions. International Journal of Climatology, Volume 28, Issue 13, pp. 1693-1701, December 2007

    Karl et al (2006), Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) 2006 Report, Chapter 1, 1958-1999. Synthesis and Assessment Report 1.1, 2006, CCSP, Chapter 1, p 25, based on Santer et al. 2000

    McKitrick, R., McIntyre, S., and Herman, C. (2011) Corrigendum to Panel and multivariate methods for tests of trend equivalence in climate data series, Atmospheric Science Letters, Vol. 11, Issue 4, 270–277.

    Note: Notable for sophisticated statistical analysis and use of all available balloon and satellite measurements which illustrate that AGW theoretical model predictions are four times bigger and outside the error bars of the observed and collected data.

    Christy J.R., Herman, B., Pielke, Sr., R, 3, Klotzbach, P., McNide, R.T., Hnilo J.J., Spencer R.W., Chase, T. and Douglass, D: (2010) What Do Observational Datasets Say about Modeled Tropospheric Temperature Trends since 1979? Remote Sensing 2010, 2, 2148-2169; doi:10.3390/rs2092148

    Note: This one is particularly interesting as they develop a scaling ratio (ratio of atmospheric trend to surface trend) which removes El Nino variations. A most elegant piece of work.

    These four are a good start. Please note that they clearly demonstrate that the core assumptions of the IPCC models are simply not supported by empirical measurement, in other words, empirical measurement has falsified the models which the IPCC touted as a valid basis for public policy decisions.

  20. Mk50,

    What you are overlooking is the moisture content of the atmosphere. Atmospheric temperature rise is mitigated by increased moisture holding capacity. The energy is in the moisture not the peak air temperature. It is the average air temperature ie the period for which temperature maintains at a particular level that determines the increased energy holding capacity of the air, and this needs to include the energy in the moisture content to be accurate.

    https://www-pls.llnl.gov/?url=science_and_technology-earth_sciences-moisture

    This paper determines that

    “The atmosphere’s water vapor content has increased by about 0.41 kilograms per square meter (kg/m²) per decade since 1988, and natural variability in climate just can’t explain this moisture change”

    This then equates to about .6 kwhr of latent energy per square meter extra in the air available to drive extreme weather events.

    If you can prove, Mk50, that the oceans are not increasing in temperature, the oceans are not becoming more acidic, the atmosphere does not carry more moisture, the average atmospheric temperature is not increasing, the poles are not losing ice mass, the glaciers are beginning to rebuild, and the Arctic Tundra is not thawing, and get the global science body to sign off on your proof, then I will breathe a sigh of relief and stop blogging.

    One thing that I will not do, though, is cancel my rooftop solar electric and water heating systems order or remove a VW XL1 from my wish list, and these make inescapable standard of living increasing good sense for any and everybody, Global Warming or not.

  21. Bilb
    Interesting how we have moved from debunking your simple claim that ‘climate change has caused more tornadoes’ to this list of demands of yours: “If you can prove, Mk50, that the oceans are not increasing in temperature, the oceans are not becoming more acidic, the atmosphere does not carry more moisture, the average atmospheric temperature is not increasing, the poles are not losing ice mass, the glaciers are beginning to rebuild, and the Arctic Tundra is not thawing, and get the global science body to sign off on your proof,” – my, you are insecure on this matter!

    Your response is a standard and quite banal AGW cultist tactic: shift ground and make a large list of requirements and demands. All it indicates is that your belief in AGW is religious, and based on emotion, so you respond emotionally to any challenge to the dogma the cult has provided, hence the old ‘shift and expand’ tactic. Of course, most of the demands you quote as religious dogma are ones debunked years ago in the appropriate journals. The ‘warming oceans’ one is a good example, it has been debunked by (ironically) a big science project instigated by warmies, Project Argo, which has yielded truly magnificent data, just not the specific one the warmies really wanted (the Argo data indicates that the oceans are cooling slightly, not warming rapidly as claimed). I am also afraid that you have indicated profound lack of understanding about basic scientific matters. Example: ‘the oceans are not becoming more acidic’. Oh, my. A decrease in alkalinity is not acidification, and we have no idea what the natural ocean chemistry cycles are (in a century or so we will). The oceans are naturally alkaline and the buffering is truly enormous, as the oceanic basins are floored with calcium carbonate rich muds up to several kilometers thick. The oceans cannot possibly ‘acidify’, as one would need thousands of cubic kilometers of high purity acid to do this. If the vast geological events known as the Deccan Traps and the Siberian Traps could not significantly dent the ocean’s natural alkalinity, nothing human beings can do could possibly do so.

    So, have a read of the four papers referenced and get back to me. If you can read and understand what they say, I am more than happy to continue the conversation on a rational, scientific basis. I am uninterested in your cultic beliefs system, however. Should you want to observe more than a few actual Australian research scientists discussing climate science in a ‘safe and readily comprehensible mode’ you can easily do so. The comments at Jo Nova’s site have many such. If you will NOT go there and lurk because ‘Jo Nova is a [insert cultic reference here – ‘denier’ is the cult standard]’ then this merely indicates that you are not willing to learn about the hard science even by anonymous observation, and that your belief system is religious/emotional. That’s OK, only 5% of the population is actually scientifically literate.

  22. i thought the jury was still out on climate change & tornado severity, but that its more or less agreed they will start to occur in conditions of less wind shear & warmer moister air. -a.v.

  23. Oh I see, Mk50, you read head lines but not the text. Argo confirms long term warming, and data is being further evaluated. Not debunked. Ocean acidification occurs at the surface where plankton, krill, corals and algae reside, due carbon scrubbing at the surface forming carbonic acid and raising acidity from long term average 8.2 to 8.1 today (and rising).

    You don’t want to address melting ice caps and glaciers, thawing tundra, tropical zone expansion, ………

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_global_warming

    ….and I’m no convinced about tornadoes. There is something going on there, I just have to figure out what it is.

  24. On tornadoes, as I understand it av @ 34 is right. The thinking is that there may be less wind shear and more turbidity of moist worm air. No-one knows what the net impact will be.

    We looked at tornadoes recently here. The best link coming out of the thread was probably Dr Jeff Masters’ WunderBlog.

    Unfortunately, tornadoes and severe thunderstorms are the extreme weather phenomena we have the least understanding on with respect to climate change. We don’t have a good enough database to determine how tornadoes may have changed in recent decades, and our computer models are currently not able to tell us if tornadoes are more likely to increase or decrease in a future warmer climate.

    Tornadoes of all strengths may have increased, but there are extreme problems in counting and in the scales used.

    This post at the blog of the Union of Concerned Scientists is also relevant. See the second image.

    The strongest links between historic extreme weather and climate change are for heat waves, coastal flooding, and changes in precipitation. Links to tornadoes and hurricanes are much less clear.

    MK50, your linking to a single graph is what we expect from a cherry-picking denier.

  25. MK50, Jo Nova came up with this graph to show the effect of CO2. I saw it first in a lecture given by Bob Carter. I thought, if that’s right, then it’s game over, the denialists are right.

    This is the explanation given by Roger Jones, climate scientist.

    Jo Nova created a famous Skeptics Handbook. Now have a read at Desmogblog.

    The papers you list @31, contain the names of many easily recognised ‘usual suspects’.

    There’s research that suggests that scientific literacy doesn’t make it more likely that they will change their minds in the face of scientific evidence. We looked at that in Climate clipping 75, item 4.

    Yep, that could apply to us too. You’re clearly wasting your time here. Best deposit your pearls somewhere else.

  26. Bilb, the path you have followed here is fascinating. The reason I engage AGW cultists has nothing to do with AGW and everything to do with their worldview, and how they process data. My job involves understanding the worldview of certain people (not the sort you take home to meet mum). Their worldviews are irreal, but as people they are luckily uncommon, but irreal worldviews are not. The AGW cultist’s really are fantastic, they talk endlessly, are easy to engage, and their cult is in collapse, meaning that they are in strong denial and warping all the data they can. Think Jim Jones on a mass scale and with a little less virulence. I mean no offence to you or your cult’s dogma, I am merely observing processes. In a previous (now long over) career, the insights gained by all those involved in looking at how people function in response to an irreal worldview enabled a lot of very bad people to be eliminated from play, so it was a most worthwhile endeavor I had the honour to be a small part of. These days the targets are much less ‘bad’ than they were, and the work more intricate and fine-grained.

    Here, you have noted that ‘climate change causes more tornadoes’. NOAA data said ‘no more tornadoes now than there were in 1950’. You are now the point of requesting that a private individual personally prove all AGW hypotheses false, then get the people who are making oceans of money from the scare to sign off on that; for then and only then will you accept that your irreal worldview is, in fact, false. (In fact you won’t, even at such a stage.) This is absolutely fascinating, for the depth of your emotional committment to the cult’s dogma is illustrated – it will not be shaken by any board discussion, and any contrary data is being ignored, denied or re-interpreted on the basis of cherrypicked sections. That’s the classic pattern one observes in ‘911 Truthers’, for example. A second interesting example is seen in referring in a reduction of alkalinity from 8.2 to 8.1 as ‘acidification’. You’ve clearly illustrated why, for your purposes,, it’s a nice term as it can be laden with emotive memes and various portents of doom to “Get ‘em skeered and keep the skeer on ‘em.” At least Forrest’s intentions (while horrid) were more honest than those of your cult’s priestly caste.

    Sorry to ignore your standard tactic of expanding and diffusing the argument, I’ve been in this game for many decades and I understand trite and well-worn tactics like that. I note that the main point I made here, that the warmy cult’s computer models have been falsified by empirical data, remains unchallenged. This is normal, hence the efforts to broaden and diffuse to protect your core cultic beliefs.

  27. My job involves understanding the worldview of certain people (not the sort you take home to meet mum).

    So that’s why you read and comment at Catallaxy.

  28. Well now I am interested Mk50

    “In a previous (now long over) career, the insights gained by all those involved in looking at how people function in response to an irreal worldview enabled a lot of very bad people to be eliminated from play, so it was a most worthwhile endeavor I had the honour to be a small part of”

    Would care to share with us what this was all about, being long ago it might be an interesting part of our history. Tell us all about it.

  29. Ocean Acidification

    These are not scary words, they are observations and research.

    http://www.unoceans.org/Documents/Turley%20Durban%20Ocean%20acidification%20UN%20Oceans%20side%20event%20UN-OCEAN2.pdf

    This is a printable piece on the subject for you to add into your “less” bad person scrap book.

    Mk50

    If I am wrong about tornadoes, I am wrong. I don’t have a problem with that. The things that I say about climate are entirely my own thoughts based on my observations and research in my personal attempt to verify how and when our environment will alter. It is part of the scientific process to propose a theory and then test it against what is observable, neasurable, and correlatable against the broad body of knowledge.

    One cannot determine that one is in the country side from the observation of a blade of grass. The broad field of view must be considered, the acres of paddocks the stands of trees, vision to the horizon without houses. This all confirms that the location is not suburban.

    So it is also with Global Warming. It is not that the Arctic is losing ice, or that Glaciers are retreating, or that the ph level of the oceans is changing, or that the Artic Tundra is thawing to spew huge volumes of methane gas into the atmosphere, or that the tropical band is expanding or that atmospheric moisture content is increasing or that the surface layers of the oceans are increasing temperature, or that climate events are becoming more extreme, or that sea levels are rising, or that global atmospheric air circulation is changing (my observation, no one elses), or that atmospheric CO2 levels are rising rapidly……………….it is the fact that all of these things are happening at the same time, and occuring in a very short period of time. This is what gives rise to the view that the biosphere is heating up and at a dangerous rate.

    Now, Mk50, if you can, with your elevated powers of persuasion, put forward a convincing broad field argument supported with solid science that all of these things are not happening, as I said, I will be the first to applaud and thank you, then get on with my CO2 emission intensive life with a clear conscious.

  30. Would care to share with us what this was all about, being long ago it might be an interesting part of our history. Tell us all about it.

    That would be telling.

    …I will be the first to applaud and thank you, then get on with my CO2 emission intensive life with a clear conscious.

    This is precisely what you should do. This is due to the fact that neither you, nor Australia, can do anything about increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere even if they were harmful – in fact they are entirely beneficial as Landsat vegetation studies show. If we are moving into a Maunder Minimum for a couple of centuries, the more CO2 in the atmosphere, the better.

    This is due to Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, the South-east Asian countries, Russia and India simply not buying in to the scam, except as a splendid opportunity to feed an artificial market with solar and wind systems. Therefore, the logical approach even if one believes in the AGW cult, is to press for adaptive measures. This, the cli-fi cult does not do, as the priestly caste cannot make nearly as much money from such measures. Could Al Gore have earned what, $300,000,000 by selling out his eco company to the Saudi oil ticks without the cli-fi scam? Of course not, he could never have built it in the first place. Because these nations giggle loudly at the stupidity of those governments taken in by the cli-fi scam, the current atmospheric CO2% of ~0.00040% is going to increase to ~0.00045% by the end of this century no matter what you believe, Bilb, and no matter what Australia does. So even if CO2 was a ‘climate rheostat’ as warmies claim, it can’t be stopped anyway, can it? You should avoid fretting, and do as you have done – which is just sensible natural disaster prep anyway, per the government-industry partnership of the TISN system (get the recommended ‘pantrylist’ here). Everyone should have 3 days of food, water and portable energy to hand.

  31. C’mon Mk50,

    “That would be telling”

    You don’t have to be absolutely definitive if you’re uncomfortable about it. Was it anything to do with Roswell, moon landings, ……Elvis?

  32. No discomfort involved. One does not do that sort of thing when you have given your word not to. That people might afterwards ask you (when next wandering by the court-house) to drop in and explain oneself to the beak in relation to various sections of a certain act of 1914 has nothing to do with it. When you give your word, you keep it: its dishonourable not to. Suffice to say a lot of good men have made sure you and yours can sleep safely in your beds, and years ago I helped them a little bit.

    Now I have to get back to considering a seriously important question. When I finish the 36, do I build a model of John Findlay’s little gem, Spindrift, or the Laeisz ‘Flying P’ Line’s magnificent Pitlochry? The former has the perfect Ship sail plan, the latter was the best four masted Barque ever built. Decisions, decisions….

  33. My passion is the Bristol Channel Cutter, and am committed to building a 37 footer in ferro cement (my favourite material), and I’m keen to see how close I can come to making this an all solar electric utilising the wonderful new flexible solar panels for the deckhouse and the sides of the mast. A 25 Kw electric motor generator on the propellor shaft powered from batteries or a diesel generator in an aft void for backup. But there is a huge amount of work to do before I get anywhere near those issues.

    I think the Spindrift looks like a classic sailing ship.

    http://www.theglasgowstory.com/image.php?inum=TGSE00182

  34. Hey, that’s seriously cool. The Bristol cutter is a superb seaboat for heavy weather, narrow entry, loads of bouyancy in the flare to raise the bow, and the massive deadwood aft to give extraordinary grip on the water. No skidding to leeward with a cutter hull’s underwater lines. You going to use Lyle Hess lines?

    Ferro-cement. it’s a good material, just watch the quality control like a hawk. You have to get it completely right every time or risk structural flaws in the hull (and the sea is always doing its best to kill you). I suspect that a lot of care will be needed to calculate weight distributions within the hull with ferro, given that the Bristol cutter was designed for timber. Might be a little tricky to get the same weight distribution and metacentric chracteristics with ferro as with timber, but getting a good naval architect to give it the once over will sort that out.

  35. This is depressing. The quote that captures its spirit:

    Federal Resources Minister Gary Gray says he acknowledges the need for clean energy, but says coal is still vital to the global economy.

    I didn’t think for a second that Gray would be an improvement on Marn Fersn.

  36. ” The boating side-discussion is lovely, but it belongs on Lazy Sunday. ”
    unless you’re planning on taking your boat through the north west passage. -a.v.

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