A MULTIMILLIONAIRE internet entrepreneur worried about climate change bankrolled the Greens’ federal election surge last year by making the largest single political donation in Australian history. Read more here.
Climate & Climate Change
Annual Climate Statement: Bureau of Meteorology
According to the annual climate statment from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology released on Wednesday, the Australian mean rainfall total for 2010 was 690 mm which is well above the long-term average of 465 mm. As a result, 2010 was Australia’s wettest year since 2000 and the third-wettest year on record (records commence in 1900).
The statement explains that 2010 began with El Niño conditions in the Pacific followed by a rapid transition into La Niña during autumn. From January to May rainfall was generally above average in most areas except the western half of Western Australia and southern Tasmania. By July, La Niña conditions were well established and most areas of Australia experienced very much above average rainfall. The second half of the year (July to December) was the wettest on record for Australia.”
The complete statement is here.
Now all the data is in for 2010 it is possible to construct timeseries graphs for the Murray Darling and Eastern Australia. The above graphs were constructed at the Bureau site here.
These charts suggest Australia could be entering a new wet cycle. Click on the individual charts for a better and larger view.
These charts show that that all the modelling by the CSIRO and others, and all the reports including by Ross Garnaut and Sir Nicolas Stern claiming declining rainfall, were wrong.
This really is good news.
Rhetoric from Climate Minister Disputed by Anthony Cox
MINISTER for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, Greg Combet, believes in anthropogenic global warming. Send him a request asking he justify this belief and the reply is likely to be long and full of appeals to authority:
“There is clear evidence that our climate is changing, largely due to anthropogenic greenhouse gases. The Fourth Assessment Report, produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007, states that global warming is ‘unequivocal’ and ‘most of the observed increase in globally-averaged temperatures since the mid-20th Century is very likely due to the observed increase in greenhouse gas concentrations’.
[Read more…] about Rhetoric from Climate Minister Disputed by Anthony Cox
Official Seasonal Forecasts Wrong Again
“Let’s hope Santa isn’t relying on weather forecasts from the U.K. Met Office. The British deep freeze of recent weeks (which has also immobilized much of continental Europe) is profoundly embarrassing for the official forecaster. Just two months ago it projected a milder than usual winter.
“This debacle is more than merely embarrassing. The Met Office is front and centre in rationalizing the British government’s commitment to fight catastrophic man-made global warming with more and bigger bureaucracy, so its conspicuous errors raise yet more questions about that “settled” science…
Meanwhile in Australia, the Bureau of Meteorology was forecasting below average rainfall for those parts of the Murray Darling Basin that were dumped on early September, with the worst flooding in 15 years. Last summer (2009-2010) the forecast was for more dry, and overall we have been led to believe it wouldn’t ever rain again like it used to, thus the investment in desalination etcetera.
And because the mainstream media, at least most journalists, are partial to Anthropogenic Global Warming theory, they don’t hold the Bureau accountable for any of their expensive and wrong seasonal forecasts.
Back to the UK, according to Peter Foster: “[T]he price tag on the country’s unpreparedness for this winter could reach $15-billion.”
And in Australia, never mind even trying to even get an estimate on what unpreparedness for the floods might be costing, we can’t even get the relevant water managers to agree that topping up a deluge with releases from a dam only 20 percent full has consequences…
Oh. And from Peter Forster in parting: “…The suggestion that forecasting the climate is easier than forecasting the weather comes into the same category as acknowledging that governments couldn’t run a lemonade stand, but then believing that they can “manage” an economy.”
Not too far from the Playboy Casino in Cancun…
Members of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are meeting with a lot of other people to save us from climate change…
“The Process works like this. A multitude of long, inspissate, obfuscatory, obnubilating, obscurantist draft agreements are circulated, always a day or two late for delegates to find out what they have actually agreed to. The daily timetables for the various ‘working’ sessions of the conference are never available until breakfast-time on the day, allowing no scope for planning the day. By these means, most delegates are kept permanently and completely in the dark.
“Here is a typical paragraph from one of these leaden documents:
‘The SBSTA welcomed the report (FCCC/SBSTA/2010/INF.10) on the second workshop of the work programme on revising the “Guidelines for the preparation of national communications by Parties included in Annex I to the Convention Part I: UNFCCC reporting guidelines on annual inventories” (hereinafter referred to as the UNFCCC Annex I reporting guidelines), held in Bonn, Germany, from 3 to 4 November 2010, which was organized by the secretariat as requested by the SBSTA at its thirtieth session.’
“Try to read several hundred pages of this stuff. It simply isn’t possible. And that, of course, is the idea. This is the Mushroom-Growers’ Management Method writ large: keep them in the dark and feed them plenty of sh*t.
“What these ramblings conceal is the remarkably rapid rate at which dozens – no, hundreds – of new bureaucracies are being created as The Process grinds on. As anyone at the Playboy Casino [in Cancun] will tell you, ‘somebody gotta pay for all those lights.’ And that somebody is you, gentle taxpayer. No one has yet managed to discover just how much these hundreds of new supranational climate-change bureaucracies are costing us. That is an international state secret – until Wikileaks gets hold of the figures, of course…
Read more here: http://sppiblog.org/news/from-nopenhagen-to-yes-we-cancun
WikiLeaks Reveal US Obsession with Securing Copenhagen
“The leaked US diplomatic cables reveal how the US seeks dirt on nations opposed to its approach to tackling global warming; how financial and other aid is used by countries to gain political backing; how distrust, broken promises and creative accounting dog negotiations; and how the US mounted a secret global diplomatic offensive to overwhelm opposition to the controversial “Copenhagen accord”, the unofficial document that emerged from the ruins of the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009.
“Perhaps the most audacious appeal for funds revealed in the cables is from Saudi Arabia, the world’s second biggest oil producer and one of the 25 richest countries in the world. A secret cable sent on 12 February records a meeting between US embassy officials and lead climate change negotiator Mohammad al-Sabban. “The kingdom will need time to diversify its economy away from petroleum, [Sabban] said, noting a US commitment to help Saudi Arabia with its economic diversification efforts would ‘take the pressure off climate change negotiations’.”
“US determination to seek allies against its most powerful adversaries – the rising economic giants of Brazil, South Africa, India, China (Basic) – is set out in another cable from Brussels on 17 February reporting a meeting between the deputy national security adviser, Michael Froman, Hedegaard and other EU officials.
“Froman said the EU needed to learn from Basic’s skill at impeding US and EU initiatives and playing them off against each in order “to better handle third country obstructionism and avoid future train wrecks on climate”.
Read more at the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/dec/03/wikileaks-us-manipulated-climate-accord
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.