HOUSEHOLDS will have to pay up to $6.5 billion extra from 2012 to replace their electric hot water systems under a Labor plan to impose an effective ban on the appliances as part of its strategy to cut greenhouse emissions.
Under the ban, up to half of all Australian households will have to switch to expensive solar hot water systems when their old electric tanks fail.
Each solar hot water system will cost about $2800 more than a standard electric system replacement.
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Friday, August 17, 2007
Beautiful Cape Otway
Ahh, Cape Otway. Such a beautiful place, and the cape otway lighthouse, the most significant lighthouse in Australia, is home to our next piece of analysis:
Maximum temperatures have shown a significant increase in temperature since records first begun here in 1910, despite no real increase since the 60s. Minimum temperatures do not show a significant increase, although they do when analysing from world war 2 onwards. The last decade have been seen constantly warmer minimums.
Unfortunately our time based data is not fantastic, with Midnight, 3am, 6am, Noon, 6pm and 9pm all having limited data. But 9am times actually show a significant decrease. On observation of the graph this is largely due to very hot temperatures (and somewhat dubious) pre 1920. Since then no real pattern has emerged. Given the large increase in maximum temperatures, we would expect 3pm temperatures to also increase, but this was not so.
So is there much we can talk about this wonderful place? Well yes, despite a small sample size, when looking at minimum temperature anomalies vs 3am and 6am, we see that minimum anomalies are up to half a degree warmer, which once again indicates that the minimum temperature is warming up at a greater rate than overnight temperatures. Once again indicating that the minimum is a poor measure of overnight climate.
Major new Theory to explain global warming
If there was any doubt that fear-mongering has long been cherished by the media, the above headline should put the question to bed. But that 80-year old news story also illustrates two of the great problems for the global warming theory -- its inability to explain sudden climate shifts in the Earth's past, and to explain why the Northern and Southern Hemispheres are so unequally affected by warming.
A team of mathematicians have come forth with a startling new theory that solves both these problems. Led by Dr. Anastasios Tsonis, their model says the known cycles of the Earth's oceans -- the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, El Nino (Southern Oscillation) and the North Pacific Oscillation -- all tend to try to synchronize with each other.
The theory is based on a branch of mathematics known as Sychronized Chaos. The math predicts the degree of coupling to increase over time, causing the solution to "bifurcate," or split. Then, the synchronization vanishes. The result is a climate shift. Eventually the cycles begin to sync up again, causing a repeating pattern of warming and cooling, along with sudden changes in the frequency and strength of El Nino events.
Better yet, their theory has predictive power. The model predicts past shifts in the year 1913 (explaining the strong warming of the 20s and 30s), 1942 (resolving the post-WW2 cooling trend) and 1978 (covering our current warming). The model predicts another shift to occur around the year 2033.
Most shocking of all is their prediction for the year 2100 to be slightly cooler than present day, despite the assumption of a doubling of atmospheric CO2 levels. Eye-popping indeed. Is carbon-dioxide really so ineffective at warming? A new study by Belgium's Royal Meteorological Institute seems to think so. Its conclusion is that, while CO2 does have some effect, that "it can never play the decisive role attributed to it" in global warming, and that its effects have been grossly overstated.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
We're doomed. Doomed I say. Oh, wait...
As reported by Kerplunk:
How funny is the news that a 1922 edition of The Washington Post contained...shock, horror...a headline that would look right at home in the here and now...
D.C. resident John Lockwood was conducting research at the Library of Congress and came across an intriguing Page 2 headline in the Nov. 2, 1922 edition of The Washington Post: "Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt."
No doubt the article didn't list CO2 emissions as the cause. I haven't seen the full article anywhere. If anyone finds it then send it to me.
The 1922 article, obtained by Inside the Beltway, goes on to mention "great masses of ice have now been replaced by moraines of earth and stones," and "at many points well-known glaciers have entirely disappeared."
And they came back again subsequently in order to disappear once again so that the Climate Faithful can blame things on man made CO2...
"This was one of several such articles I have found at the Library of Congress for the 1920s and 1930s," says Mr. Lockwood. "I had read of the just-released NASA estimates, that four of the 10 hottest years in the U.S. were actually in the 1930s, with 1934 the hottest of all."
That's right. After four of the hottest years being in the 1930s the world entered a cooling phase lasting from 1940 to the mid-1970s. Solar activity clearly shows that we're going to get a little bit warmer before entering into a cool phase probably akin to the Little Ice Age.
Our future climate was decided well in advance of pumping CO2, NH4, O3 or anything else into the atmosphere but to those with the enviro-religion called global warming that doesn't matter.
How funny is the news that a 1922 edition of The Washington Post contained...shock, horror...a headline that would look right at home in the here and now...
D.C. resident John Lockwood was conducting research at the Library of Congress and came across an intriguing Page 2 headline in the Nov. 2, 1922 edition of The Washington Post: "Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt."
No doubt the article didn't list CO2 emissions as the cause. I haven't seen the full article anywhere. If anyone finds it then send it to me.
The 1922 article, obtained by Inside the Beltway, goes on to mention "great masses of ice have now been replaced by moraines of earth and stones," and "at many points well-known glaciers have entirely disappeared."
And they came back again subsequently in order to disappear once again so that the Climate Faithful can blame things on man made CO2...
"This was one of several such articles I have found at the Library of Congress for the 1920s and 1930s," says Mr. Lockwood. "I had read of the just-released NASA estimates, that four of the 10 hottest years in the U.S. were actually in the 1930s, with 1934 the hottest of all."
That's right. After four of the hottest years being in the 1930s the world entered a cooling phase lasting from 1940 to the mid-1970s. Solar activity clearly shows that we're going to get a little bit warmer before entering into a cool phase probably akin to the Little Ice Age.
Our future climate was decided well in advance of pumping CO2, NH4, O3 or anything else into the atmosphere but to those with the enviro-religion called global warming that doesn't matter.
Immature Science and immature alarmists
It's amazing, when doing a simple search of a newspaper publication how one can come up with new research in the area of climate science. Here, just mentioned today, is new research of scientists who have discovered a new current that drives Australia's and the worlds temperatures:
AUSTRALIAN scientists have discovered a giant underwater current that is one of the last missing links of a system that connects the world's oceans and helps govern global climate.
New research shows that a current sweeping past Australia's southern island of Tasmania toward the South Atlantic is a previously undetected part of the world climate system's engine-room, said scientist Ken Ridgway.
Such new research and findings every day is of obvious indication that climate science is a very immature science. We simply don't know much about the area. In fact, I can count on one hand how many Australian's have achieved a PhD in climate science.
It's great that we are finding out all these new things about our global weather pattern, and we are starting to understand more and more about how it works. It is no surprise therefore that the IPCC's long term weather forecasts have gone down every single release.
Let me give you a football analogy here. You see if I knew a lot about the the Richmond football club, but little about the rest of the teams, and Richmond had just won 3 games in a row, it would be too easy for me to conclude that Richmond are a great team and are going to do really well. But with more knowledge, I would have known that the teams they played in those 3 games were weak teams with lots of injuries, and are not good measures of Richmond's form.
When we know little about something, it's easy to project with gusto about future outcomes, but with more knowledge about how something works, we can make a more rounded prediction.
It's no surprise that the IPCC have lowered their predictions of recent years, and the reason is because of new studies like that mentioned above. New research as such is happening and being discovered all the time.
Thus indicating a very immature science. Not that that's a bad thing, it's great we are finding new discoveries. But climate science has not been around for long, and with such an immature science it would be ludicrous to jump to conclusions without knowing the full scale of the problem and full or good knowledge of its mechanisms.
Unfortunately, it would seem that the science is not the only thing that is immature. With scientists, politicians and alarmists alike, jumping up and down saying that carbon dioxide is the answer to everything. They could well be correct, just as I could have been correct that Richmond are a great football club. But until we find out more and increase our knowledge in the area, the alarmists, politicians and selected scientists are simply showing that the are at the same stage of the science in which they preach; Immature.
AUSTRALIAN scientists have discovered a giant underwater current that is one of the last missing links of a system that connects the world's oceans and helps govern global climate.
New research shows that a current sweeping past Australia's southern island of Tasmania toward the South Atlantic is a previously undetected part of the world climate system's engine-room, said scientist Ken Ridgway.
Such new research and findings every day is of obvious indication that climate science is a very immature science. We simply don't know much about the area. In fact, I can count on one hand how many Australian's have achieved a PhD in climate science.
It's great that we are finding out all these new things about our global weather pattern, and we are starting to understand more and more about how it works. It is no surprise therefore that the IPCC's long term weather forecasts have gone down every single release.
Let me give you a football analogy here. You see if I knew a lot about the the Richmond football club, but little about the rest of the teams, and Richmond had just won 3 games in a row, it would be too easy for me to conclude that Richmond are a great team and are going to do really well. But with more knowledge, I would have known that the teams they played in those 3 games were weak teams with lots of injuries, and are not good measures of Richmond's form.
When we know little about something, it's easy to project with gusto about future outcomes, but with more knowledge about how something works, we can make a more rounded prediction.
It's no surprise that the IPCC have lowered their predictions of recent years, and the reason is because of new studies like that mentioned above. New research as such is happening and being discovered all the time.
Thus indicating a very immature science. Not that that's a bad thing, it's great we are finding new discoveries. But climate science has not been around for long, and with such an immature science it would be ludicrous to jump to conclusions without knowing the full scale of the problem and full or good knowledge of its mechanisms.
Unfortunately, it would seem that the science is not the only thing that is immature. With scientists, politicians and alarmists alike, jumping up and down saying that carbon dioxide is the answer to everything. They could well be correct, just as I could have been correct that Richmond are a great football club. But until we find out more and increase our knowledge in the area, the alarmists, politicians and selected scientists are simply showing that the are at the same stage of the science in which they preach; Immature.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
You can't handle the truth!
Ever since Steve McIntyre found the huge error in the NASA data record that results in 25% drop in temperature of the more recent years, their website Climate Audit has been down. The reason is given as follows:
"CA has been knocked off the internet by a DDOS attack. We are going to move the CA domain to a temporary page while I move the CA files and databases to a new server behind a much better firewall. Its obvious that someone can't take constructive criticism. We should be back in a few days"
"CA has been knocked off the internet by a DDOS attack. We are going to move the CA domain to a temporary page while I move the CA files and databases to a new server behind a much better firewall. Its obvious that someone can't take constructive criticism. We should be back in a few days"
Friday, August 10, 2007
Minneapolis Bridge Collapse could be due to global warming
Thursday, August 09, 2007
A New Leaderboard at the U.S. Open
Oops. It turns out that 1998 wasn’t the hottest year on record for the US, after all.
Global warming must be working backwards, because NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, having fixed some calculating errors, has discovered that the hottest year was in fact 1934.
That’s not all, as Steve McIntyre explains:
Four of the top 10 are now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939, while only 3 of the top 10 are from the last 10 years (1998, 2006, 1999). Several years (2000, 2002, 2003, 2004) fell well down the leaderboard, behind even 1900.
These figures apply only to the US, and the corrections - says McIntyre - do “not make any real difference to the world rankings”, which generally put 1998 as the world’s hottest year since records were kept.
But two things should be noted.
First, that the most basic calculations behind the global warming hysteria can be screwed up, and stay undetected for years.
Second, that NASA quietly changed these figures without any of the press releases and alarmist reports that usually follow the discovery of some data that will feed the fear.
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
East Victoria still warmer only when the sun is shining
Using data from Omeo Comparison, Gabo Island Lighthouse and East Sale Airport, we have some good data on Eastern Victoria with the exception with temperatures at midnight.
But first things first, maximum temperatures show no significant increase in temperature since 1910, but it must be noted that the last 10 years have been average 0.5 degrees above the norm. Since the second world war, maximum temperatures have been drastically increasing. Minimum temperatures however do not show any major sign of trend, and statistical analysis suggests insignificance.
With midnight having limited data, other night time temperatures at 3am and 6am show no significant increase or decrease over time. Even 9am shows no significant trend, although it is actually approaching close to a significant decrease.
And whilst we are seeing some temperature dimming at night, when the sun makes its appearance, we see a completely different story. Temperatures at Noon, 3pm, 6pm and 9pm all show significant increases in temperature. The trend at 3pm and 6pm is most obvious. The temperature increase at 9pm is different to previous areas. In general we have seen increases at 9am and a steady temperature at 9pm, whilst here we see stable temperatures at 9am and increases at 9pm. Seems like the trend over the years has meant it is slow to heat up in the morning and slow to cool down after the sun sets.
With minimum temperatures not significantly increasing, it is no surprise that differences in temperature between 3am and 6am and the minimum show no major trend.
Similarly, temperature anomaly trends between 6am and 9am showed no significant difference (although very close to a significant decrease), but temperatures anomalies at Noon were significantly increasing compared to 9am and temperature anomalies at 3pm were significantly increasing with respect to Noon.
Also temperature anomalies at 9pm were significantly decreasing when compared to 6pm despite earlier proving an increasing temperature trend at 9pm. The trend in the above link is strong, obvious and highly significant.
Once again, temperature anomalies are increasing more rapidly over the years when we get to the heat of the day, and decreasing over the years when going away from 3pm.
Is there anything else that can provide this apart from the sun? What else influences temperature with increasing trend to 3pm and decreasing after that, whilst not playing a part at night?
But first things first, maximum temperatures show no significant increase in temperature since 1910, but it must be noted that the last 10 years have been average 0.5 degrees above the norm. Since the second world war, maximum temperatures have been drastically increasing. Minimum temperatures however do not show any major sign of trend, and statistical analysis suggests insignificance.
With midnight having limited data, other night time temperatures at 3am and 6am show no significant increase or decrease over time. Even 9am shows no significant trend, although it is actually approaching close to a significant decrease.
And whilst we are seeing some temperature dimming at night, when the sun makes its appearance, we see a completely different story. Temperatures at Noon, 3pm, 6pm and 9pm all show significant increases in temperature. The trend at 3pm and 6pm is most obvious. The temperature increase at 9pm is different to previous areas. In general we have seen increases at 9am and a steady temperature at 9pm, whilst here we see stable temperatures at 9am and increases at 9pm. Seems like the trend over the years has meant it is slow to heat up in the morning and slow to cool down after the sun sets.
With minimum temperatures not significantly increasing, it is no surprise that differences in temperature between 3am and 6am and the minimum show no major trend.
Similarly, temperature anomaly trends between 6am and 9am showed no significant difference (although very close to a significant decrease), but temperatures anomalies at Noon were significantly increasing compared to 9am and temperature anomalies at 3pm were significantly increasing with respect to Noon.
Also temperature anomalies at 9pm were significantly decreasing when compared to 6pm despite earlier proving an increasing temperature trend at 9pm. The trend in the above link is strong, obvious and highly significant.
Once again, temperature anomalies are increasing more rapidly over the years when we get to the heat of the day, and decreasing over the years when going away from 3pm.
Is there anything else that can provide this apart from the sun? What else influences temperature with increasing trend to 3pm and decreasing after that, whilst not playing a part at night?
Saturday, August 04, 2007
New Science
- A team of U.S. scientists has used mathematics to assess the effect of natural solar variation on climate change.
Charles Camp and Ka Kit Tung of the University of Washington's department of applied mathematics said that to accurately assess effects from human sources on the planet's climate, scientists must first be able to quantify the contribution of natural variation in solar irradiance to temperature changes.
Camp and Tung said that while the existence of a long-term trend in solar output is controversial, its periodic change within an 11-year cycle has been measured by satellites."
and - CO2 is not the big bogeyman of climate change and global warming. This is the conclusion of a comprehensive scientific study done by the Royal Meteorological Institute, which will be published this summer.
The study does not state that CO2 plays no role in warming the earth. "But it can never play the decisive role that is currently attributed to it", climate scientist Luc Debontridder says.
"Not CO2, but water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas. It is responsible for at least 75 % of the greenhouse effect. This is a simple scientific fact, but Al Gore's movie has hyped CO2 so much that nobody seems to take note of it." said Luc Debontridder.
"Every change in weather conditions is blamed on CO2. But the warm winters of the last few years (in Belgium) are simply due to the 'North-Atlantic Oscillation'. And this has absolutely nothing to do with CO2
and finally - "In the mid-1970s, a climate shift cooled sea surface temperatures in the central Pacific Ocean and warmed the coast of western North America, bringing long-range changes to the northern hemisphere. Ads by Google Advertise on this site
After this climate shift waned, an era of frequent El Ninos and rising global temperatures began.
Understanding the mechanisms driving such climate variability is difficult because unraveling causal connections that lead to chaotic climate behavior is complicated.
To simplify this, Tsonis et al. investigate the collective behavior of known climate cycles such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, the El Nino/Southern Oscillation, and the North Pacific Oscillation.
By studying the last 100 years of these cycles' patterns, they find that the systems synchronized several times.
Further, in cases where the synchronous state was followed by an increase in the coupling strength among the cycles, the synchronous state was destroyed. Then. a new climate state emerged, associated with global temperature changes and El Nino/Southern Oscillation variability.
The authors show that this mechanism explains all global temperature tendency changes and El Nino variability in the 20th century.
Charles Camp and Ka Kit Tung of the University of Washington's department of applied mathematics said that to accurately assess effects from human sources on the planet's climate, scientists must first be able to quantify the contribution of natural variation in solar irradiance to temperature changes.
Camp and Tung said that while the existence of a long-term trend in solar output is controversial, its periodic change within an 11-year cycle has been measured by satellites."
and - CO2 is not the big bogeyman of climate change and global warming. This is the conclusion of a comprehensive scientific study done by the Royal Meteorological Institute, which will be published this summer.
The study does not state that CO2 plays no role in warming the earth. "But it can never play the decisive role that is currently attributed to it", climate scientist Luc Debontridder says.
"Not CO2, but water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas. It is responsible for at least 75 % of the greenhouse effect. This is a simple scientific fact, but Al Gore's movie has hyped CO2 so much that nobody seems to take note of it." said Luc Debontridder.
"Every change in weather conditions is blamed on CO2. But the warm winters of the last few years (in Belgium) are simply due to the 'North-Atlantic Oscillation'. And this has absolutely nothing to do with CO2
and finally - "In the mid-1970s, a climate shift cooled sea surface temperatures in the central Pacific Ocean and warmed the coast of western North America, bringing long-range changes to the northern hemisphere. Ads by Google Advertise on this site
After this climate shift waned, an era of frequent El Ninos and rising global temperatures began.
Understanding the mechanisms driving such climate variability is difficult because unraveling causal connections that lead to chaotic climate behavior is complicated.
To simplify this, Tsonis et al. investigate the collective behavior of known climate cycles such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, the El Nino/Southern Oscillation, and the North Pacific Oscillation.
By studying the last 100 years of these cycles' patterns, they find that the systems synchronized several times.
Further, in cases where the synchronous state was followed by an increase in the coupling strength among the cycles, the synchronous state was destroyed. Then. a new climate state emerged, associated with global temperature changes and El Nino/Southern Oscillation variability.
The authors show that this mechanism explains all global temperature tendency changes and El Nino variability in the 20th century.
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
Latest Scientific Studies Refute Fears of Greenland Melt
The July 27-29 2007 U.S. Senate trip to Greenland to investigate fears of a glacier meltdown revealed an Arctic land where current climatic conditions are neither alarming nor linked to a rise in man-made carbon dioxide emissions, according to many of the latest peer-reviewed scientific findings. Recent research has found that Greenland has been warming since the 1880’s, but since 1955, temperature averages at Greenland stations have been colder than the period between 1881-1955.
A recent study concluded Greenland was as warm or warmer in the 1930’s and 40’s and the rate of warming from 1920-1930 was about 50% higher than the warming from 1995-2005. One 2005 study found Greenland gaining ice in the interior higher elevations and thinning ice at the lower elevations. In addition, the often media promoted fears of Greenland’s ice completely melting and a subsequent catastrophic sea level rise are directly at odds with the latest scientific studies. These studies suggest that the biggest perceived threat to Greenland’s glaciers may be contained in unproven computer models predicting a future catastrophic melt.
A recent study concluded Greenland was as warm or warmer in the 1930’s and 40’s and the rate of warming from 1920-1930 was about 50% higher than the warming from 1995-2005. One 2005 study found Greenland gaining ice in the interior higher elevations and thinning ice at the lower elevations. In addition, the often media promoted fears of Greenland’s ice completely melting and a subsequent catastrophic sea level rise are directly at odds with the latest scientific studies. These studies suggest that the biggest perceived threat to Greenland’s glaciers may be contained in unproven computer models predicting a future catastrophic melt.
Consensus?
What Consensus?
The claim of “consensus” rests almost entirely on an inaccurate and now-outdated single-page comment in the journal Science entitled The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change (Oreskes, 2004). In this less than impressive “head-count” essay, Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science with no qualifications in climatology, defined the “consensus” in a very limited sense, quoting as follows from IPCC (2001) – “Human activities … are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents … that absorb or scatter radiant energy. … most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.”
...There is no scientific consensus on how much the world has warmed or will warm; how much of the warming is natural; how much impact greenhouse gases have had or will have on temperature; how sea level, storms, droughts, floods, flora, and fauna will respond to warmer temperature; what mitigative steps – if any – we should take; whether (if at all) such steps would have sufficient (or any) climatic effect; or even whether we should take any steps at all.
...According to Dr. Peiser, fewer than one-third of the papers analyzed by Oreskes either explicitly or implicitly endorsed the “consensus”, contrary to Oreskes’ assertion that the figure was 75%. In addition, 44 abstracts focused on the natural as opposed to anthropogenic causes of climate change, and did not include any direct or indirect link or reference to human actitivies, carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gas emissions, let alone anthropogenic forcing of recent climate change. More than half of the abstracts did not mention anthropogenic climate change at all and could not, therefore, reasonably be held to have commented either way upon the “consensus” as defined by Oreskes.
...Oreskes’ essay is now outdated. Since it was published, more than 8,000 further papers on climate change have been published in the learned journals. In these papers, there is a discernible and accelerating trend away from unanimity even on her limited definition of “consensus”. Schulte (2007: submitted) has brought Oreskes’ essay up to date by examining the 539 abstracts found using her search phrase “global climate change” between 2004 (her search had ended in 2003) and mid-February 2007. Even if Oreskes’ commentary in Science were true, the “consensus” has moved very considerably away from the unanimity she says she found. Dr. Schulte’s results show that about 1.5% of the papers (just 9 out of 539) explicitly endorse the “consensus”, even in the limited sense defined by Oreskes. Though Oreskes found that 75% of the papers she reviewed explicitly or implicitly endorsed the “consensus”, Dr. Schulte’s review of subsequent papers shows that fewer than half now give some degree of endorsement to the “consensus”.
...The outright scaremongers are led by James Hansen, a donor of thousands of dollars to the re-election campaigns of Al Gore and John Kerry. He showed Congress a graph in 1988 that set the trend for wildly-exaggerated projections of future global temperature. The graph presented three scenarios, the most extreme of which had no basis in the scientific literature or in previously-observed trends. Politicians at that time treated the graph with respect because it had been generated by a computer. Yet the model which generated the graph, still in use by Hansen and the UN today, continues to contain “flux adjustments” – i.e. fudge-factors – many times greater than the very small perturbations which the model is supposed to predicting.
The claim of “consensus” rests almost entirely on an inaccurate and now-outdated single-page comment in the journal Science entitled The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change (Oreskes, 2004). In this less than impressive “head-count” essay, Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science with no qualifications in climatology, defined the “consensus” in a very limited sense, quoting as follows from IPCC (2001) – “Human activities … are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents … that absorb or scatter radiant energy. … most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.”
...There is no scientific consensus on how much the world has warmed or will warm; how much of the warming is natural; how much impact greenhouse gases have had or will have on temperature; how sea level, storms, droughts, floods, flora, and fauna will respond to warmer temperature; what mitigative steps – if any – we should take; whether (if at all) such steps would have sufficient (or any) climatic effect; or even whether we should take any steps at all.
...According to Dr. Peiser, fewer than one-third of the papers analyzed by Oreskes either explicitly or implicitly endorsed the “consensus”, contrary to Oreskes’ assertion that the figure was 75%. In addition, 44 abstracts focused on the natural as opposed to anthropogenic causes of climate change, and did not include any direct or indirect link or reference to human actitivies, carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gas emissions, let alone anthropogenic forcing of recent climate change. More than half of the abstracts did not mention anthropogenic climate change at all and could not, therefore, reasonably be held to have commented either way upon the “consensus” as defined by Oreskes.
...Oreskes’ essay is now outdated. Since it was published, more than 8,000 further papers on climate change have been published in the learned journals. In these papers, there is a discernible and accelerating trend away from unanimity even on her limited definition of “consensus”. Schulte (2007: submitted) has brought Oreskes’ essay up to date by examining the 539 abstracts found using her search phrase “global climate change” between 2004 (her search had ended in 2003) and mid-February 2007. Even if Oreskes’ commentary in Science were true, the “consensus” has moved very considerably away from the unanimity she says she found. Dr. Schulte’s results show that about 1.5% of the papers (just 9 out of 539) explicitly endorse the “consensus”, even in the limited sense defined by Oreskes. Though Oreskes found that 75% of the papers she reviewed explicitly or implicitly endorsed the “consensus”, Dr. Schulte’s review of subsequent papers shows that fewer than half now give some degree of endorsement to the “consensus”.
...The outright scaremongers are led by James Hansen, a donor of thousands of dollars to the re-election campaigns of Al Gore and John Kerry. He showed Congress a graph in 1988 that set the trend for wildly-exaggerated projections of future global temperature. The graph presented three scenarios, the most extreme of which had no basis in the scientific literature or in previously-observed trends. Politicians at that time treated the graph with respect because it had been generated by a computer. Yet the model which generated the graph, still in use by Hansen and the UN today, continues to contain “flux adjustments” – i.e. fudge-factors – many times greater than the very small perturbations which the model is supposed to predicting.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)