Climate & Climate Change
Peer Review Falters at the Altar of Conviction
IT is perhaps easier to build the Great Wall of China than to convince a global warming devotee to reconsider their mistaken faith.
A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point. So wrote, American social psychologist Leon Festinger in 1956.
The human brain often struggles to discern fact from fiction, and even the cleverest scientist is susceptible to their own convictions. So if modern climate science is to provide a better understanding of how the dynamic, real-world forces that create weather and climate operate, rather than simply supporting the popular theory of dangerous global warming, then some discipline will be required.
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How Abbott Must Recast Coalition Climate Policy
KEVIN Rudd took over as Australian Prime Minister replacing Julia Gillard on June 26, 2013. Since then, with the announcement by Mr Rudd that he now intends to bring forward the transition from a strict carbon tax to an emissions trading scheme, the politics of climate change and carbon taxing have changed dramatically. If the Opposition, led by Tony Abbott, is to stay competitive, and become relevant, it urgently needs a proper alternative plan to address climate change.
The answer is to introduce a new climate policy based upon preparation for, and adaptation to, all weather and climate related events whether they be of natural or of potentially human causation. Such a policy could be practical, cost-effective and efficacious, which is why it has been recommended by so many independent commentators and expert scientists over the last five years. This adaptive policy is well summarized in the last chapter of Bob Carter’s new book, ‘Taxing Air: Facts and Fallacies About Climate Change’ [1]. 
Yes, Professor Carter, like Mr Rudd does believe in climate change and the need for a national climate policy.
The advantage of Carter’s plan, however, over anything that Mr Rudd is currently proposing is that it is open to the possibility of global cooling, as well as global warming.
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Chinese Academy of Science Open to Skepticism
IN Australia and other so-called developed Western nations there is very little tolerance of contrary opinion when it comes to one of the biggest contested scientific issues of our time – climate change. Indeed the mainstream research community is closed to skeptics and skepticism. 
Not so in China, however, where on Saturday June 15, 2013 an International Workshop was held in Beijing to launch the publication of a Chinese edition of Climate Change Reconsidered. This is an abridged version of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change’s (NIPCC) 2009 and 2011 reports.
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Taxing Air: Facts & Fallacies about Climate Change
IT’S focused on Australia, popular misconceptions about the environment, history, climate and there is more, it’s chock full of cartoons! I’m referring to a new book by scientist Bob Carter [1] and cartoonist John Spooner entitled Taxing Air: Facts & Fallacies about Climate Change.
Some of the big issues address:
Just 8,000 years ago, there was virtually no summer sea-ice in the Arctic Ocean.
Sea-level rise is natural, and declining in rate.
Australian rainfall has not decreased over the last 100 years.
A previous Australian drought lasted 69 years.
By catchment management, the Murray-Darling Basin now contains almost 3 times as much water as it held naturally.
Global air temperature has not increased for the last 16 years, despite an 8% increase in CO2.
Global ocean temperature is also steady or cooling slightly.
Australian territory absorbs up to 20 times the amount of CO2 that we emit.
If you order your copy this week it will be a signed copy.
For more information visit http://www.taxingair.com
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[1] Bob Carter is the author of more than 100 peer-reviewed research papers in professional scientific journals. The great majority of these concern interpretations of ancient environments, including paleo-climatic studies. Link to full of list of publications here… http://members.iinet.net.au/~glrmc/new_page_4.htm
Guessing versus Calculating a Global Mean Temperature
“THE greatest difficulty facing the promoters of the theory that human emissions of carbon dioxide cause dangerous global warming is the inconvenient truth that it is impossible to measure the average temperature of the earth’s surface by any known technology. Without this information it is not possible to claim global warming” writes Vincent Gray in his most recent ‘Truth Newsletter’.
The newsletter continues with an explanation of how a mean global surface temperature anomaly was calculated, and then switches to compare output from General Circulation Models (GCMs) with an all together different method of calculating a global mean temperature using microwave sounders…
“In order to fake this claim the Mean Global Surface Temperature Anomaly Record
(MGSTAR) was fabricated from temperature measurements made at meteorological weather
stations.
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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.