Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Opinion

So Hot in Southern Australia, and In 1900

By

IT has been very hot in southern Australia.  I have been waiting to hear someone blame global warming and it came, but only today, and I’ve only heard it from Climate Change Minister Penny Wong: “The scorching weather across southern Australia proved the accuracy of warnings by climate change scientists.” [1]

Of course it’s been hot before in southern Australia.  Following is text published on January 1, 1900. [2] 

“THE oppressive heat was a major talking point of the vast and drought stricken country of Australia.

“While cyclonic winds have been lashing the coast off Townsville, the temperature today soared to 112 degrees Fahrenheit (44.4 C) in Adelaide and Broken Hill, and 104 (40C) in Melbourne.

[Read more…] about So Hot in Southern Australia, and In 1900

No Reporting of Slowing Greenland Glaciers: Shame on the MSM

By

SUCH has been the fear of Greenland’s melting glaciers that well known Australian science journalist Robyn Williams has claimed sea levels could rise by 100 metres within the next 100 years. [1]   Mr Williams, and other journalists, have been quick to report on what has become known as the “Greenland Ice Armageddon”. 

Last Friday there was an article in one of the most read science journals, Science, entitled “Galloping Glaciers of Greenland have Reined Themselves In” by Richard A. Kerr.  

Yes, as the title suggests, the article explains that a wide-ranging survey of glacier conditions across south eastern Greenland, indicates that glacier melt has slowed significantly and that it would be wrong to attribute the higher rates of melt prior to 2005 to global warming or to extrapolate the higher melt rates of a few years ago into the future.  [2]

Mr Kerr was reporting on a presentation by glaciologist Tavi Murray at the American Geophysical Union Conference in San Francisco last December. [3]   The paper by Dr Murray was co-authored by many other members of the group at Swansea University in the UK, a team often quoted by Al Gore and others.

When I read the article last Friday I wondered how Robyn “100 metres” Williams and other journalists in the mainstream media (MSM) might report the story.    To my amazement they have simply ignored it.  [4]

[Read more…] about No Reporting of Slowing Greenland Glaciers: Shame on the MSM

No Scientific Forecasts to Support Global Warming

By

YESTERDAY, a former chief at NASA, Dr John S. Theon, slammed the computer models used to determine future climate claiming they are not scientific in part because the modellers have “resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists”. [1]

Today, a founder of the International Journal of Forecasting, Journal of Forecasting, International Institute of Forecasters, and International Symposium on Forecasting, and the author of Long-range Forecasting (1978, 1985), the Principles of Forecasting Handbook, and over 70 papers on forecasting, Dr J. Scott Armstrong, tabled a statement declaring that the forecasting process used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) lacks a scientific basis. [2]

What these two authorities, Drs Theon and Armstrong, are independently and explicitly stating is that the computer models underpinning the work of many scientific institutions concerned with global warming, including Australia’s CSIRO, are fundamentally flawed. 

[Read more…] about No Scientific Forecasts to Support Global Warming

The Climate Change Safari Park: A Note from Bjorn Lomborg

By

BARACK Obama in his inaugural speech promised to “roll back the spectre of a warming planet.” In this context, it is worth contemplating a passage from his book ‘Dreams from My Father’. It reveals a lot about the way we view the world’s problems.

Obama is in Kenya and wants to go on a safari. His Kenyan sister Auma chides him for behaving like a neo-colonialist. “Why should all that land be set aside for tourists when it could be used for farming? These wazungu care more about one dead elephant than they do for a hundred black children.” Although he ends up going on safari, Obama has no answer to her question. That anecdote has parallels with the current preoccupation with global warming. Many people — including America’s new President — believe that global warming is the pre-eminent issue of our time, and that cutting CO2 emissions is one of the most virtuous things we can do.

To stretch the metaphor a little, this seems like building ever-larger safari parks instead of creating more farms to feed the hungry.

Make no mistake: global warming is real, and it is caused by manmade CO2 emissions. The problem is that even global, draconian, and hugely costly CO2 reductions will have virtually no impact on the temperature by mid-century. Instead of ineffective and costly cuts, we should focus much more of our good climate intentions on dramatic increases in R&D for zero-carbon energy, which would fix the climate towards mid-century at low cost. But, more importantly for most of the planet’s citizens, global warming simply exacerbates existing problems.

[Read more…] about The Climate Change Safari Park: A Note from Bjorn Lomborg

Is Antarctic Warming Real or “Mann”-Made? A Note from Fred Singer

By

THE recent report in the journal Nature of an unexpected Antarctic warming trend has created a certain amount of skepticism – even among supporters of AGW. [1]

But in an AP news story, two of its authors (one is ‘hockey-stick’ inventor Michael Mann from the Real Climate blog) argue that this refutes the skeptics and is “consistent with” greenhouse warming.  Of course, as Roger Pielke, Jr, points out, not long ago we learned from Real Climate that a cooling Antarctica was ‘consistent with’ greenhouse warming and thus the skeptics were wrong: “So a warming Antarctica and a cooling Antarctica are both ‘consistent with’ model projections of global warming. Our foray into the tortured logic of ‘consistent with’ in climate science raises the perennial question, what observations of the climate system would be inconsistent with the model predictions?”

The results are based on very few isolated data from weather stations, plus data from research satellites.  And here is the rub: these are not data from microwave sounding units (MSU), such as are regularly published by Christy and Spencer, but data from infrared sensors that are supposed to measure the temperature of the surface (rather than of the overlaying atmosphere, as weather stations do).

[Read more…] about Is Antarctic Warming Real or “Mann”-Made? A Note from Fred Singer