Friday 19th of April 2024

at the back of bourke — or beyond the black stump...

pressing each others button...

There has been many spats between Tim Flannery and Andrew Bolt... One problem is that Bolt is a professional spruiker with a clever questioning tongue, while Tim is a scientist trying to be over-popularly alarmist on what he knows is a major problem for years to come. 

Tim tries to stir the possum because NOW is the time to act, considering when the shit hits the fan, it will be too late. He and Bolt would have long died before this incremental shitostrophe, but humanity's left-overs would rue the day Bolt had been born...

So in his enthusiastic prophetic doom, Tim gave some ammunitions to Bolt to be shot in the back with... Apparently, Robyn Williams of the Science Show fame also gave a similar gift to Andrew, who likes to collects contrary scientific scalps to adorn his red bunker (illustrated here in the toon by Gus)... Both Williams and Flannery may have been alarmist, but Bolt is no more than a cool ignorant denialist with the gift of the gab, with a few platforms to spruik falsities... Bolt's view of science seems to be exclusively coming from a small group of industrial scientists who are paid to voice favourable opinions about burning carbon. Thus we need to debunk Bolt for being more unscientific than a catholic priest. 

Sorry priests, I know. I know some catholic priests who are more versed in the planet sciences than Andrew Bolt. Andrew seems to collect as much as he can of denialist detritus lying by the side of the road — to mount his questioning arguments for which he is paid handsomely...

Because Andrew is street smart, he rarely states anything forcefully, but questions a lot, and one knows that if you question anything ad nauseam, you end up in a quagmire of unknowingness and doubt. That's Bolt's style: driving you into the ditch of doubt and since all science is about relative doubt in a sea of theorems that are plausible, scientists have difficulty in maintaining a footing, even if they are 99 per cent sure of themselves... That one per cent niggle will be used by Mr Bolt to destroy anything. 

So little can be done about Bolt, except firing more stuff at him, without the presumption of knowing the full gamut of the shitostrophe. 

So Bolty tells us:

How much of the warming in Australia was produced back at the lab?

SOME of Australia’s long-term temperature records may contain faults introduced by the Bureau of Meteorology’s computer modelling, according to a widely published expert.

blah blah blah

Dr Stockwell[’s] ...  published works include a peer-reviewed paper analysing faults in the bureau’s earlier High Quality Data temperature records that were subsequently replaced by the current ACORN-SAT.

Dr Stockwell has called for a full audit of ACORN-SAT homogenisation after analysing records from Deniliquin in the Riverina region of NSW where homogenisation of raw data for minimum temperatures had turned a 0.7C cooling trend into a warming trend of 1C over a century.

blah blah blah

There is a huge risk of confirmation bias in this process. 

http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php


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The blah blah blah in the lines above is to shorten the pieces which is quite repetitive and quite slanted...


Yes, Mr Bolt... I referred to this Deniliquin conundrum as the "Bourke box" in another article to show my disdain for David Stockwell... I might have accidentally referred to him as a woman — possibly the journalist reporting on Stockwell's questioning of the data... I did not make a big mistake.  This was quasi-deliberately sarcastic to show my contempt of the whole silly saga.

 

Should our mate Bolt be aware of scientific data and of statistical observations, he would know that not everything seems to be what it is and yet the sum total of it works wonder, not to prove anything but to give solid data that will show something is on its way to hit you in the muzzle. 


He would know for example that with digital information some bits could be missing but the various equation used to transmit and receive the data will restore the missing bits to a fair extend. The image is clear as a bell on your TV screen, yet only 60 per cent of data has been received. Magic of derivatives and extrapolation.


I know of some serious scientists who wrote equations on the back of a napkin in a restaurant while having a brain-wave and a sauerkraut — then discovered the Higgs boson on the back of this work... Statistics are a bummer and this is why I always urge caution when making dire predictions. 


But according to very serious mathematical formulas of physics, the simple minimum reality is that by end of this century the world temperature will have climbed 3 degrees Celsius and the sea level risen by 45 centimetres minimum... MINIMUM. That is the bottom scale of the scientific data as it stands in conservatively restrained scientific analysis. 


But this is not where el problemo shall stop, because we've added enough extra energy into the atmospheric system — by burning carbon — to make temperature climb for another 5000 years, possibly more than 15 degrees Celsius, considering we do nothing much about our emissions of CO2 by 2050... Not only the temperature will carry on climbing, other side effects WILL come into play like "unstoppable" rising of sea levels due to increase heat and melting of ice worldwide. 


It is not inconceivable that sea level to rise about one metre per year as mentioned by Robyn Williams. This has been a reasonably scientific estimate in the middle of the last big melt, when the oceans rose more than 100 metres in about 2000 years. of course these rise and temperature gradients are not linear, but Lagrangian due to the complications of varied spacial entities of the planet, of climatic banding and of continents' position... 


In the end, after the wettest 20 days that I can remember in Sydney during August and September, my carrots are telling me that we're in for a scorcher soon. El Nino is knocking on the door and preventing lows moving eastward at the "normal" rate (about every three days in, three days out, in my previous estimations)... But once El Nino wins the "battle"of the Pacific, severe droughts and a few northerly cyclones will follow with the mercury going sky high in many places... I could be wrong, because as you know, stats have a certain amount of error and unpredictability. In this case, I could be wrong by about 2 per cent... More wrong than placing a bet on Lotto... Thus I could be 98 per cent right.


A company like Glencore, possibly the biggest coal digger in the world that does not pay much tax in Australia, still edges its bets and "cannot afford not look at the climate change scientific data" and is moving some cash towards the science of sequestration of CO2...


Trust me. We're in for hiding. When? After the warmest year on record in 2013 for the Australian continent, the summer of 2014-15 and that of 2019-20 will tell us...

 

what's a few extra degrees between friends...?...

a lot of incompetent scientists coming your way...

There is a website that boasts a shit-load of scientists signing a petition against global warming... Possibly started by the end of the 1990s, they have gathered a massive 31,487 signatures in the US alone, from scientists of which a massive 9,029 have a PhD and if my recollection is correct about three climatologists. 


Of course should you have learnt political "science" or economic "science" you still counted as a scientist. We all know that politics and economics are ART FORMS, not sciences. As well, there are, in the US, an enormous amount of religious studies that is passed as sciences of religion...

Meanwhile several millions of real proper scientists are studying with boring data crunching, the changing state of the planet. 

What is fascinating as well here is the second paragraph. After poopooping the science that analyses global warming and demanding it stops making unsubstantiated dire predictions, the cads make the statement that: "Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plants and animal environment of the Earth." Whoa...

Fan-bloody-tastic. All the animals on the way out towards extinction, please do not turn off the lights... Should they have chosen the words beneficial to our crop and cattle, I could have coped with the statement for a profitable couple of years. But NATURAL plants and animal environments? We're destroying them at a rate of knots anyway, or taking them to grow crops that there won't be much to look at by 2050.

But in the end, the relationship between carbon dioxide and rising temperature is to be accepted. The geological record clearly demonstrates this strong relationship, whether we think temperature rise first. With more than 400 ppms of CO2, of which nearly half has been added in the atmosphere by humans burning carbon since the industrial revolution, there is no two ways that climate is going to change to the warmer. It is changing to the warmer.  This is called global warming, which is also observed through the melting of glaciers, the rise of oceans and the warming of the atmosphere and the seas. 

That 31,487 scientists decided to be moronic is their own choice to show they don't deserve the appellation...

 

 

hot champagne summers...

France will become warmer and rainy by the end of the century, with more extreme weather events, concludes a report to the Minister for Ecology Segolene Royal, Saturday, Sept. 6, who announced on this occasion measures energy savings in public buildings and social housing. 

Commissioned by the Department in 2010, the report on climate change in France by 2100 appears just before the presentation to Parliament of legislation on energy transition, which should be a landmark legislation of the quinquennium. 

 

UP TO 5 ° C TEMPERATURE RISE 

 

According to the team of experts led by climatologist Jean Jouzel, 2050, France will show an increase in average temperatures metropolis of 0.6 ° to 1.3 ° C compared to the years 1976-2005. In summer, this would increase to 2 ° C in the southeast. Then, over the period 2071-2100, this trend will worsen with an average temperature rise of 2.6 ° C to 5.3 ° C and "could be well over 5 ° C in summer" in the southeast. 

 

The weather extremes - heat waves, droughts, heavy rains - will be stronger: by 2100, heat waves of summer may exceed 20 days in the southeast, or 40 days in the worst case scenario. We must also expect more droughts in the south, an additional 2 to 8 days, sometimes affecting the whole country. 

 

MOST POWERFUL TROPICAL CYCLONE 

 

However, the cold waves of winter are becoming scarce, with 6-10 cold days and less, especially in the north. France should see a slight increase in rainfall in summer and winter, between 0 and 0.42 mm / day on average. Extreme precipitation will they, increase in the second half of the century a large part of the metropolitan area, an increase of more than 5% up to 10% in the northeast.

 

read more: http://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2014/09/06/la-france-va-devenir-plus-chaude-et-la-meteo-plus-extreme_4483222_3244.html

record high emissions...

Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached a record high in 2013, propelled by surging levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), according to a new United Nations report.

The UN's World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) annual report also found that oceans, which absorb the emissions, have become more acidic than ever.

"We know without any doubt that our climate is changing and our weather is becoming more extreme due to human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels," said the head of the WMO Michel Jarraud.

"We must reverse this trend by cutting emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases across the board.

"We are running out of time."

Concentrations of CO2, methane and nitrous oxide all broke fresh records in 2013, the report said.

Global concentrations of CO2, the main culprit in global warming, soared to 396 parts per million last year, or 142 per cent of pre-industrial levels - defined as before 1750.

That marked a hike of 2.9 parts per million between 2012 and 2013 alone - the largest annual increase in 30 years, according to the Greenhouse Gas Bulletin.

The report also showed that so-called radiative forcing, or the warming effect on our climate attributed to greenhouse gases like CO2, increased 34 per cent from 1990 to 2013.

A quarter of emissions are absorbed by the oceans, while another quarter are sucked into the biosphere, naturally limiting rates of warming gases in the atmosphere.

But CO2 remains in the atmosphere for hundreds of years and in the oceans for even longer.

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-09/greenhouse-gas-levels-in-atmosphere-hit-high-in-2013/5731716

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The level of CO2 announced here (396 ppm) is the average around the globe including places where the concentration is lower (or should be), such as polar regions. I often state more than 400 ppm, which the Hawaii observation in the stream of industrialised nations emissions but in the middle of the Pacific.

The natural pay-back of our addition of extra CO2 is not going to be pretty.

the fraudulent right wing spruikers...

 

Australia is without a science minister for the first time in decades and some scientists now refer to the missing minister as "our invisible friend". The absent minister symbolises the current ambivalence of the Australian political right to science.

That ambivalence turns to open hostility when it comes to climate science. Five years ago Tony Abbott dismissed the science of climate change as "absolute crap" and that statement still resonates. Now, we are seeing more worrying developments.

Scientists hiding and manipulating data? Mysterious time travelling forces? Easily debunked myths being repeated as facts? Plucky amateurs and bloggers saving us from professional scientists?

Such notions are traits of pseudoscience and would be mocked if being promoted by crystal healers. Unfortunately we are hearing such nonsense being repeated by right wing media, government advisors and MPs.

Over the past few weeks there has been a concerted attack on the Bureau of Meteorology's temperature data. That data, taken with dozens of weather stations, shows temperatures increasing across Australia over the past century.

The warming trend is clear from both raw data and processed "homogenised" data. The homogenised data accounts for changes in data quality, including artificial jumps in temperature produced by relocating weather stations. For example, in rural towns many weather stations were moved from post offices to airports.

The Australian newspaper is publishing attacks on the Bureau's temperature record and the homogenisation process. These attacks are not based on published scientific studies, but instead rely heavily on the claims of former Institute of Public Affairs fellow, biologist and blogger Jennifer Marohasy.

The attacks use the pseudoscience tactic of selecting just a few towns where the homogenisation removes artificial cooling, while ignoring more towns where both the raw and homogenised data show warming. A few potential errors in the data have been highlighted, while ignoring the fact that warming across Australia is seen in both raw and homogenised data utilising millions of individual measurements.

These attacks on the Bureau of Meteorology have combined sloppiness with denigrating professional scientists. Is the Bureau really unwilling to provide 20th century data for town of Bourke? No, that data is freely available from the Bureau's website. Was the vital Stevenson Screen dumped from the Bourke weather station in 1996? No, the Bureau's catalogue has a photo of the Stevenson Screen at Bourke's current weather station. Is the Bureau hiding its methods? No, Blair Trewin details the Bureau's methods in a scientific paper.

Despite the attacks on Bureau of Meteorology having little basis in fact, they are gaining traction amongst right wing MPs and commentators. Backbench MP George Christensen tweeted "It's time for an official investigation of Bureau's handling of temperature records". Columnist Miranda Devine has claimed the Bureau's actions are "fraudulent".


Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/climate-change-deniers-raise-the-heat-on-the-bureau-of-meteorology-20140909-10eedk.html#ixzz3CrBErGYX

Unfortunately, the media and politicians are strongly influenced by right-wing spruikers. At best, these spruikers like Devine, Bolt and Jones don't know much about the subject of global warming. They only get their "information" from totally skewed sources that are easily debunked for being fraudulent or totally unscientific. These spruikers don't do it for accuracy of observation. They do it to suit a political agenda. Otherwise why would they do it? To warn us about the evil of the global warming theory?...
Either they have been told by their masters to push their unscientific crap or, out of their own bat, they decided to join the silly team — either for cash or for political views. They are wrong and can be proven so. But they make sure that they never are tackled on their platform from which they spruik. Never will they allow the true nature of scientific facts enter their sanctum. They are one sided extremists often using normal scientific doubt as a weapon against science. Silly. 

Pity, I still hope for the one day when Devine, Bolt and Jones would admit their "mistake".... But pigs would fly, the earth would be on fire, the tide would lap Sydney Town Hall way before these idiots recant — unless I am mistaken and this summer heat might burn their house down.
Global warming is real and accelerating (this can be  proven). From 2032, the flip-side of climate change will be horrid. From 2070, this acceleration will be devastating (this can be extrapolated with about 85 per cent accuracy). 

 

By the way, please read about the "impending ice age" and the dam between Norway and Greenland to stop it: prediction 1959: self-driving cars and fishy walls by 1984...

scientific disagreement...

scientific disagreement

 

read article above re incoming Ice Age... Dick Warburton and Maurice Newman are idiots. Tony Abbott is a deceitful idiot.

what did you expect from the little turd?...

Climate Summit: European Union surprised Tony Abbott will not attend high level climate talks



The European Union's climate chief says it is a pity Prime Minister Tony Abbott will not attend a major UN climate meeting in New York next week.

World leaders including US president Barack Obama and UK prime minister David Cameron will attend the UN secretary-general's Climate Summit.

Mr Abbott will not be attending, despite the fact that he is due to attend a UN Security Council meeting in New York the next day.

EU commissioner for climate action Connie Hedegaard said it came as a surprise.

"It is, of course, I think, a pity that not everyone is going," she said.

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-16/eu-climate-chief-surprised-by-australia27s-un-summit-snub/5745908

 

Surprised? Are they idiots who have not worked out yet that Tony is a turd opposed to the concept of global warming?

going troppo...

New research has linked tropical heat with higher rates of anxiety, stress and hostility, as well as fewer hours of sleep, reduced appetite and lower energy levels.

The study has been released as northern Australia enter the monsoonal build-up - the period of extreme weather tension known locally as "mango madness".

The research, which was conducted by Sue Coleman and Dr Mary Morris through Charles Darwin University, could have implications for occupational health and safety laws.

It found workers labouring under the Darwin sun typically had poorer mental health than their colleagues in air-conditioning.

Protective clothing often made the heat stress worse.

Sleep length, mood, appetite and energy levels decreased in the build-up relative to the dry season, according to the study.

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-10-07/mango-madness-mental-illness-tropical-wet-season-build-up/5795852