Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Climate & Climate Change

More Adjusting of Temperature Records

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Hi Jen,

For some time I’ve been popping in to your blog to relate my region’s monthly weather extremes, based on the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s own records. The highlight was always the mean monthly maximum, since every month had its hottest max between 1910 and 1919, with the exception of August, which was hottest in 1946. These are the records as they have stood for many years on the the Elders website under Kempsey climatology. http://www.eldersweather.com.au/nsw/mid-north-coast/kempsey

No more!

The hottest months by mean max have all been changed. Every single one. If you look at the fine print, you’ll find the explanation: the temp data is now from 1965 to 2010. No doubt the BOM can adduce good scientific reasons for this…and who reads fine print anyway?

So there you have it: our searing decade around WW1 has not been eliminated from memory by any Orwellian measures.

It’s just been taken off the page.

If a careless reader might think those were cooler times – his own fault!

To add to the perfectly legal distortion, our rainfall records extend from 1882 to 2010, so a careless reader might think the temp records also fall within that period. The only downside of this for the BOM: all our monthly records for drought were set between 1882 and 1957. I wonder when all that will be removed from the page, with a little fine print in explanation.

Thought this might interest.
Appreciate your work mightily.

Rob

Sceptic’s Computers Seized by Police

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“AN Englishman’s home is his castle they say. Not when six detectives from the Metropolitan Police, the Norfolk Constabulary and the Computer Crime division arrive on your doorstep with a warrant to search it though.

I waved the first three in and bid them head through to the sitting room, where there was less of an chill near the woodburner. Then they kept coming, being introduced by the lead detective from Norfolk as they trooped in. I thought I’d been chosen to host the secret policemen’s ball or something…”

Read more here: http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/

And some context follows from ianl8888…

“THE person who is dumping Climategate email tranches onto the net is known by the acronym FOIA (he chose this). The CG1 tranche appeared in November 2009, just before the Copenhagen Festival of Light; the CG2 tranche appeared in November 2011, just before the Durban Festival.

Tallbloke (whose machines were confiscated by the Norfolk police for a 90 day period) runs a climate blog. FOIA posted a comment with a download link on Tallbloke’s blog. The download link was for the CG2 (Climategate 2) email tranche. To my knowledge, 2 other blogs were also recipients of a comment + CG2 download link.

Norfolk police had a warrant to “search and seize” Tallboy’s machines. In the end, they took 2 laptops and a router for the 90 day period of the Warrant. The intention, according to the Police comment, is to clone the discs and then examine for service logs etc to try and trace FOIA (what on earth they thought his router would tell them is beyond me; perhaps it was charged with trafficking in stolen goods)

The problems with this are many and obvious, but the essential point of trying to trace FOIA this way has no hope because Tallboke’s blog runs off WordPress (common to blogs) so any real FOIA trace can only be found in WordPress’ server logs in the US. The FOIA comment + download link had as an email return a Russian server (as did the CG1 dump)

WordPress (US) had been requested by the US DoJ (Dept of Justice) to “freeze” all server logs covering the period when the CG2 comment + link was dropped. Again, these logs will only return the address of the Russian server – which has been known since Nov 2009.

Tallbloke (who has a daytime job at the University of Leeds) is not accused of, or charged with, anything. But the greenie gutter press (eg The Guardian) have smearily reported this as if he was. As one consequence of gutter press reporting, Tallbloke’s job is on the line.

Other concerns are that the police may “find” things on the discs, or when the discs are finally returned, Tallboy may “find” things on them.

Make of it what you will. This post is to put facts out there in an effort to avoid the usual arm-waving smears. My real comfort here is that such ham-fisted policing after 2 years, means that FOIA is still as far away from them as ever. But the concept of police search & seizure because someone else unknown to you drops a comment on your website is not a storm in a teacup. This could easily happen to Jennifer here.

Cohenite has made some comments elsewhere on what he sees as the legal situation here in Australia. Current, analagous situations are the Age dustup in Melbourne over leaked information from the ALP headquarters; and Wikileaks. My prediction here is that people will cherry-pick their “moral” stance according to their bias … eg. Assange is a hero, but Tallbloke deserves everything that happens to him.”

Thanks Ian.

And in my opinion this is a big deal, not so much that they have hassled Tallbloke, but what it signifies in particular that the US and British police can’t find my hero ‘FOIA’.

No Climate Debt Owed to Developing Countries: International Climate Science Coalition

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Ottawa, Canada, December 11, 2011: “Developed nations are not guilty of causing the climate change that developing nations claim they are suffering,” said Tom Harris, executive director of ICSC which is headquartered in Ottawa, Canada. “Climate changes all the time—both warming and cooling—due to natural causes and there is nothing that we can do to stop it. However, to the degree possible, and considering our economic circumstances, developed nations still have a moral obligation to devote a proportion of their foreign aid to helping the world’s most vulnerable people adapt to natural climate events.”

[Read more…] about No Climate Debt Owed to Developing Countries: International Climate Science Coalition

Kyoto Crumbles

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THERE is only one global accord that specifies curbs in greenhouse gas emissions, The Kyoto Protocol. It’s named after a town in Japan and it was the culmination of a process launched with the Rio Summit in 1992.

The Kyoto Protocol was used to lambaste John Howard for not ratifying it when he was Australian Prime Minister and ratifying Kyoto made something of a hero of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

Now it appears Canada is on the verge of announcing its formal withdraw from Kyoto. This is a big symbolic deal. Canada would be the first country to abandon the agreement after ratifying it.

Under the agreement Canada agreed to reduce greenhouse emissions to 6 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012. Canada cannot meet this commitment with emissions having continued to rise. By officially withdrawing from Kyoto Canada can apparently avoid paying the associated penalty for failing in its quest.

Not surprisingly various activists including the head of the international climate strategy for WWF, Tasneem Essop, are crying foul. Canada may be lambasted, but they will be setting a good example, an example Australia should follow.

And the UN climate conference opened yesterday in Durban. When are they going to start doing these things by Skype?

Reform or Abandon the IPCC

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A leading environmental economist has called upon governments to either radically reform or abandon the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In his report ‘What is Wrong with the IPCC? Proposals for Radical Reform’ published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Professor Ross McKitrick (University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada) reviews the IPCC’s own procedures in detail and highlights a number of serious flaws and weaknesses.

McKitrick’s report shows that, under current procedures:

1. The IPCC’s managing bureau unilaterally selects Lead Authors, giving it direct influence on the content of reports;

2. IPCC Lead Authors are frequently asked to review their own work and that of their critics, placing them in a conflict of interest;

3. The IPCC peer review procedures allow Lead Authors to overrule reviewers, and to rewrite the text after the close of peer review, rendering it ineffective at preventing bias;

4. Government review and oversight through the plenary panel is cursory at best, with the vast majority of member governments failing to take any active role.

McKitrick presents a number of case studies that illustrate how these various procedural flaws have had material effects on key sections of past reports.

McKitrick proposes a set of rule changes that would aim to make IPCC editorial procedures as rigorous as those of a standard academic journal. Even this modest target would require substantial changes.

Read more here: http://www.thegwpf.org/images/stories/gwpf-reports/mckitrick-ipcc_reforms.pdf

Climategate II

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TWO years after Climategate – the scandal caused by the leaking of over one thousand emails detailing correspondence between leading climate scientists exposing conspiracy and collusion including how to stack review committees, exaggerate warming trends, and avoid the disclosure of sensitive information – another batch of emails have been leaked, again from the University of East Anglia and again from the infamous Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Ben Santer, Kevin Trenberth and the hapless Keith Briffa.

According to bloggers and columnists who’ve been up earlier than me and who have already start reading the file: what these emails confirm is that the great man-made global warming scare is not about science but about political activism.

The new leaked file of emails, dubbed FOIA 2011, is apparently introduced with comment from the Whistleblower:

“Over 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day. Every day nearly 16,000 children die from hunger and related causes. One dollar can save a life — the opposite must also be true. Poverty is a death sentence. Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize
greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels. Today’s decisions should be based on all the information we can get, not on
hiding the decline.”

James Delingpole, breaking new for the UK Telegraph, concurs:

“If you’re going to bomb the global economy back to the dark ages with environmental tax and regulation, if you’re going to favour costly, landscape-blighting, inefficient renewables over real, abundant, relatively cheap energy that works like shale gas and oil, if you’re going to cause food riots and starvation in the developing world by giving over farmland (and rainforests) to biofuel production, then at the very least you it owe to the world to base your policies on sound, transparent, evidence-based science rather than on the politicised, disingenuous junk churned out by the charlatans at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).”

Download the emails here:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ROCGBR37