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Category: Science (Page 3 of 17)

Climate Establishment – Lying, Or Just Stupid?

July 19, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Lying:

Two reports came out recently making wildly inaccurate claims about sea level.

The first claimed that sea level was going to rise 12 inches in California over the next twenty years. Yet satellites show that sea level has been falling in California for the past twenty years.

US Sea Level Records 1992 -2012

Stupid:

A paper published today in the Journal of Geophysical Research finds that current global climate models make “very large” errors in determining solar radiation at the surface of the Earth “due to ignoring the effects of clouds.” According to the authors, these very large errors can exceed 800 Watts per meter squared, which by comparison is about 216 times more than the alleged effect of doubling CO2 concentrations (3.7 Watts per square metre).

In other words, those wild scary claims by IPCC scientists about runaway positive feedback causing catastrophic climate change were based entirely on not having a clue what they were talking about.

A Pill To Reduce HIV Infection

July 18, 2012 / / 0 Comments

A pill to reduce the risk of HIV infection in members of at risk groups sounds good, but I would put money on HIV infection rates increasing, rather than decreasing, where this drug is made available. Labor and the Greens will press for its early introduction.

But a genetically modified bacterium designed to destroy malarial parasites before they can infect anyone bitten by a parasite-carrying mosquito could save hundreds of thousands of lives every year. Wait for the Greens to start protesting about the use of GM organisms.

Two Thousand years Of Global Cooling

July 11, 2012 / / 0 Comments

By Andrew Bostom in American Thinker, and worth quoting in full:

Notwithstanding the latest hysterical claims from the sadly politicized climate scientologists of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), insisting 2011 was somehow “a year of extreme weather,” serious investigators at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz have just published a sobering analysis in Nature Climate Change  which reconstructs 2000 years of climate within northern Europe.   Utilizing tree-ring density measurements from sub-fossil pine trees in northern Scandinavia, the investigators created a sequence dating back to 138 BC. The density measurements are closely correlated with the summer temperatures in a targeted region on the edge of the Nordic taiga, enabling them to create a temperature reconstruction of unprecedented quality. Their high-resolution representation confirmed temperature patterns in the Roman and Medieval Warm periods, but also demonstrated the cold phases that occurred during the Migration Period and the later Little Ice Age. (See image, below)

2,000 Years of Not Much Really

In addition to depicting these cold and warm phases which were not influenced at all by anthropogenic warming, but rather “by solar output and (grouped) volcanic activity changes” – the new climate reconstruction curve also reveals a striking if unexpected phenomenon. Professor Dr. Jan Esper of the investigative team provided this apt summary assessment of the main findings:

We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low. Such findings are also significant with regard to climate policy, as they will influence the way today’s climate changes are seen in context of historical warm periods.

What we really need to be concerned about is the possibility that we are drawing near to the end of the current interglacial. Deliberately increasing the volume of CO2 in the atmosphere may help delay this, even if only a little. More importantly, it will result in higher crop outputs. Carbon taxes and emission targets are the opposite of what the world needs.

Models Checked Against Reality

June 27, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Reality wins.

From The Register:

Twenty-year-old models which have suggested serious ice loss in the eastern Antarctic have been compared with reality for the first time – and found to be wrong, so much so that it now appears that no ice is being lost at all.

“Previous ocean models … have predicted temperatures and melt rates that are too high, suggesting a significant mass loss in this region that is actually not taking place,” says Tore Hattermann of the Norwegian Polar Institute, member of a team which has obtained two years’ worth of direct measurements below the massive Fimbul Ice Shelf in eastern Antarctica – the first ever to be taken.

According to a statement from the American Geophysical Union, announcing the new research:
It turns out that past studies, which were based on computer models without any direct data for comparison or guidance, overestimate the water temperatures and extent of melting beneath the Fimbul Ice Shelf. This has led to the misconception, Hattermann said, that the ice shelf is losing mass at a faster rate than it is gaining mass, leading to an overall loss of mass.

The team’s results show that water temperatures are far lower than computer models predicted …

Twenty year old computer models compared with reality for the first time? Scientists looking at the world rather than their computers? Whatever next?

Global Warming Causes Everything

June 26, 2012 / / 0 Comments

If you haven’t visited it lately, Dr John Brignell’s numberwatch site has a great list of everything so far blamed on global warming. Over six hundred links listing everything from AIDS to haggis to lampreys to feminised turtles to women cheating on vacation.

Of course, global warming hasn’t caused any of these things, because the world hasn’t warmed at all for the last fourteen years, and the total global increase in temperature over the last one hundred and fifty years (including ‘adjustments’) has been 0.8 degrees; nothing at all out of the ordinary, and a difference a normal person cannot even feel.

For more see Daren Jonescu in the American Thinker.

Localised Warming Devastates Bird Populations

June 25, 2012 / / 0 Comments

From the frequently amusing People’s Cube:

Man-Made Warming Blamed for Disappearing Bird Populations

A research team working on a two-million-dollar government grant just made a shocking discovery: intense man-made heat waves are decimating bird populations throughout the globe, including birds that were recently thriving in local neighborhoods.

According to the researchers, anthropogenic warming-related activities are directly responsible. Steady temperature increases, especially when confined to small areas, target inactive birds that can no longer fly away to avoid the consequences. As technologically induced heat waves are being absorbed across the skin, the affected birds begin to turn brown.

“These incidents illustrate a need for an increase in government spending on further research in order to predict with accuracy the impact of more government spending on raising public awareness about an increase in government spending to study the effect of man-made warming events and activities on biodiversity and lifestyle,” stated the report released last Tuesday by Moon Batts, a professor of biology and Paul Choom, a professor of natural studies.

The scientists indicated that the next step would be to calculate the exact avian mortality rates caused by man-made warming events and the role played in it by the condiment industrial complex as enablers and facilitators of such activities.

Photographic Evidence of the Impact of Human Induced Warming on Bird Populations

Climate Models Worse than Random Guesses

June 19, 2012 / / 0 Comments

From statistics guru Ross McKitrick:

A few years ago a biologist I know looked at how climate change might affect the spread of a particular invasive insect species. He obtained climate-model projections for North America under standard greenhouse-gas scenarios from two modelling labs, and then tried to characterize how the insect habitat might change. To his surprise, he found very different results depending on which model was used. Even though both models were using the same input data, they made opposite predictions about regional climate patterns in North America.

 This reminded me of a presentation I’d seen years earlier about predicted changes in U.S. rainfall patterns under global warming. The two models being used for a government report again made diametrically opposite predictions. In region after region, if one model predicted a tendency toward more flooding, the other tended to predict drying.

 Just how good are climate models at predicting regional patterns of climate change? I had occasion to survey this literature as part of a recently completed research project on the subject. The simple summary is that, with few exceptions, climate models not only fail to do better than random numbers, in some cases they are actually worse.

That is just the summary. Read the whole thing.

The point is that the models simply do not work when it comes to predicting changes in global (or even regional) climate. But it is predictions based on these same models which have been used to justify crippling legislation like the carbon dioxide tax, and spending billions of dollars to solve a problem which doesn’t exist.

Factless Climate Propaganda in SA’s Sunday Mail

March 18, 2012 / / 1 Comment

OK, on one hand I am not surprised. The Sunday Mail is a paper I only ever read when it is being given away free.

The conversation in the shop this morning was

“Would you like a free paper, Peter?”

“What, the Sunday Mail?”

“Yes.”

“No thanks.”

“But it’s free.”

“Hmm…” (remembering I can use it as padding in parcels I send, and to start my fire in Winter) “OK then.”

Once I had it I could not resist leafing through it. Mostly just the usual empty-headed waffle that passes for journalism amongst the educated. A photo of Ian Thorpe emerging from a pool with a bit of mucous hanging from his nose, with the headline “Snot a good look.” That sort of thing.

On page 26 is an article by Lainie Anderson. It is available online.

Lainie seems a nice enough young lady. She has all the currently popular opinions. But she suffers from that curious left-wing journalist’s affliction of being unable to think.

This is the (very small) headline: Doesn’t it make sense to invest now in renewable technology – like the windfarms Denmark has established – and have something else to offer the world when the coal runs out?

Surely before writing that, or after for that matter, a journalist would stop to ask two key questions:

1. Are fossil energy sources running out?

2. Do wind-farms and other renewable energy technologies actually save any fossil fuel over their lifetimes?

The answer to both questions is no. Neither question seems to occur to Lainie.

A really good journalist might go on to consider the relationship between the price of energy and employment rates, and between the price of energy and poverty levels, and write about the possible development of a long term energy policy which would encourage economic growth, noting that this will be better for the planet, because wealthier societies have more liberty to be concerned about conservation.

But this is the Sunday Mail. So we have to read about Ian Thorpe and snot instead.

Lainie says that climate sceptics are just confusing people. They should stop it, because “we’ve got around 97 per cent of the world’s climate scientists telling us that human behaviour is warming the planet.”

Really?

Actually, no.

That figure is passed around like a hanky in a party game. It is based on a single study, Doran, P. T., and M. Kendall Zimmerman (2009), Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change, Eos Trans. AGU, 90(3).

Doran and Zimmerman sent two questions to some 10,000 scientists. About 30% responded. According to Doran and Zimmerman, only 5% of respondents were climate scientists. Climate scientists are people who were authors for the IPCC, or other climate alarmist bodies. The answers given by this carefully selected group were used to arrive at the 97% figure quoted by Ms Anderson. According to the study, 76 of 79 answered ‘Yes’ to question 1, and 75 of 77 answered ‘Yes’ to question 2. That’s about 97%.

Already this is so dubious it smells like five day old road-kill. But what were the questions?

1. When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?

2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?

Virtually every ‘sceptic’ I know would answer ‘Yes’ to question one. The world has been warming at a pretty constant rate since about 1850. If CO2 is a factor in this increase, it can only have been a factor since about 1940. But there has been no change in the average rate of temperature increase since then.

Question 2 is simply badly written. What counts as significant? If there is a human influence on global climate change, it is so small compared with natural change that it is barely discernible. But that small amount may still be significant in some contexts.

So out of a group of 3,000 scientists, 97% of a very small and carefully selected sub group answered ‘Yes’ to two ambiguous questions, at least one of which would get a yes from almost every sceptical scientist. This is not proof of anything except a depressingly poor level of study design.

Lainie’s other ‘gotcha’ claims are that the world has been getting warmer for a while now, and that sea levels are rising. Both of these claims are true. No one disagrees. We have been coming out of a little Ice Age. Thank God it is getting warmer. Sea levels have been rising for the past 10,000 years, and if anything, the rate of rise is slowing.

No one denies that global climate is changing. It always has and always will.

The real question is, is there any evidence of damaging human influence on global climate? To answer that with a yes, there would have to be a clear correlation between human activity and global climate change. There is no correlation.

Climate alarmism may still sell a few papers. But it is damaging and dishonest. Just stop it.

Warming? What Warming?

December 31, 2011 / / 0 Comments

It certainly isn’t getting any warmer here, with the coolest start to Summer in Australia for the last fifty years. But according to the alarmists, that’s just weather.

Ed Caryl suggests that most of the land based warming recorded in the USA over the last 60 years can be traced to the influence of nearby heated buildings, with measuring stations more than 100 metres away from a heated building showing cooling rather than warming over the same period.

As can be seen on the plot, town population made almost no difference to the trend. The dots are nearly completely random with respect to population. On the other hand, the distance from a heated dwelling made a much larger difference. The two coolest sites were more than 100 meters from the nearest building. Within the population limits of this study, the Urban Warming Influence is simply the distance to the nearest heated building, not the size of the city.

This phenomenon is the reason for much of the Arctic warming. Urban Warming in the Arctic, and indeed in the Antarctic, is an occupied-building-to-temperature-sensor distance problem. In the polar regions, the temperature differential between occupied buildings and the outdoor temperature sensors is much greater than in the temperate mid-west U. S., so the distance must be greater to avoid the UWI problem. But man doesn’t like digging long cable trenches in ice or permafrost (it’s like concrete!), or walking long distances in –40° weather, so the measurements are not done properly.

It is clear to this author that measured “Global Warming” is simply due to increasing nearby energy use and the temperature sensor proximity to the resulting heat.

In other words, as Ed himself points out, if you heat up your thermometers, you will find warming.

Let That Be A Lesson To You!

December 8, 2011 / / 1 Comment

It seem unlikely Australian political leaders (those allied with the Greens, anyway) will take any notice of this story, which is yet another reason to dump them at the next Federal election.

From Canada’s National Post:

We have long argued that the Ontario government’s headlong rush to convert Canada’s industrial heartland to “green” energy would turn out to be nothing but a colossal waste of money. Since most alternative energies remain commercially impractical (that’s why they’re still alternative and not mainstream), the blind rush by Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government to substitute wind, solar and bio energy for coal and oil was never likely to produce much new energy, just higher power rates for residential and industrial consumers. But even we underestimated the extent to which the Ontario Liberals’ 2009 Green Energy Act had failed in just over two-year’s time.

In one of the most scathing indictments of government mismanagement we have ever witnessed, Ontario Auditor-General Jim McCarter reported Monday that Mr. McGuinty’s green dream has rapidly become an $8-billion nightmare for Ontario taxpayers and electricity users. Almost no new net power will be generated by all the green-energy projects hastily funded since the bill was passed, but the average residential consumer will see more than $400 a year added to his power bill for a decade to pay for all the bad contracts with and subsidies to eco-friendly power suppliers.

Update:

I was amused to see in this weekend’s Adelaide papers (which I never buy – the supermarket was giving them away), advertisements for rooftop solar panels, telling readers that with recent dramatic increases in domestic electricity costs, there had never been a better time to buy solar. Not a hint, not a sausage nor a whisper to indicate that the primary cause of the last two years of huge price rises has been government subsidies for the capital cost of rooftop solar installations, and the government’s forcing power companies to pay owners of rooftop installations a feed in tariff as much three times the retail price of electricity.

These schemes have been so ridiculously generous that I was briefly tempted to have solar panels installed. But I don’t approve of ripping off ordinary taxpayers despite the possibility of a temporary benefit. Welfare agencies (generally in favour of meaningless green schemes) have pointed out that the tax breaks and feed in tariffs are actually subsidising richer households who can afford solar panels, at the expense of poorer families who cannot.

Let’s see. Ugly, expensive, disadvantage the poor. Sounds like a perfect Labor Party programme.

Antarctic Ice Sheets Formed While CO2 Was 600 ppm

December 4, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Currently CO2 makes up about 390 parts per million of the atmosphere.

The assumption of the global warming alarmists has been that a doubling of CO2 from pre-industrial levels, from about 290 ppm to about 580 ppm, would drive the world over a ‘tipping point.’ So much heat would be captured, they claim, that the atmosphere would warm by as much as ten degrees, mass extinctions would occur, polar ice caps would melt, sea level would rise catastrophically, etc, etc.

These claims are made despite the fact that it is well established that the world has been through periods of very much higher CO2 than at present (over 1000 ppm) with no ill effects.

Now researchers Mark Pagani, Matthew Huber et al have shown that when the deep antarctic ice was formed some 34 milion years ago, atmospheric CO2 was about 600 ppm – well beyond the alarmists’ supposed polar ice melting tipping point:

By analysing ancient algae found in deep-sea core samples, Professor Matthew Huber and his colleagues determined that the mile-thick ice which now covers the south polar continent formed around 34 million years ago. At that stage the atmosphere held much more CO2 than it does now, some 600 parts per million (ppm) as opposed to today’s level of 390 ppm.

There is often concern that the Antarctic ice sheet might melt due to global warming (though in fact, despite much publicity over losses of ice from the Western peninsula, Antarctic ice has been steadily increasing in extent for the last 40 years). It would seem that this is highly unlikely given current and near-future levels of atmospheric CO2: at current rates of increase it will take a century at least to reach 600 ppm, the level at which the ice sheet formed itself, and higher levels would be needed to actually start it melting.

via The register.

Woolly Mammoths Within Five Years

December 4, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Scientists think they have found intact DNA which will enable them to create cloned mammoths within a few years.

Woolly mammoths were about the same size as modern African elephants, but hairier (obviously), perhaps more heavy set, and with smaller ears.

From the UK’s Daily Mail:

Scientists believe it may be possible to clone a woolly mammoth within five years after finding well-preserved bone marrow in a thigh bone recovered from permafrost soil in Siberia.

Teams from Russia’s Sakha Republic’s mammoth museum and Japan’s Kinki University will launch fully-fledged joint research next year aiming to recreate the giant mammal, Japan’s Kyodo News reported from Yakutsk, Russia.

By replacing the nuclei of egg cells from an elephant with those taken from the mammoth’s marrow cells, embryos with mammoth DNA can be produced, Kyodo said, citing the researchers.

Baby What a Big Surprise

December 1, 2011 / / 0 Comments

With apologies to Chicago.

But no surprises here:

The New South Wales government censored studies which show that the rate of sea level rise has not increased, and is nothing to worry about at all, really.

And then there’s this: $100 million worth of hot air.

The Federal government has spent so much money on illegal immigrants and pink batts and the internet that it has to cut back on education and support for families. But Julia manages to find $100 million to tell us what a wonderful thing the carbon tax is.

Idiots.

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