The shining climate crisis

Excerpted from Climate catastrophe? Follow the money ($),
by Amy Brooke in The Spectator of 1 April.

Because of the importance of the claim that CO2 has the potential to cause considerable damage to the planet we all share, it is little wonder that the media, knowing that peddling disaster sells newspapers, constantly invoke doomsday scenarios. But what happens when the mainstream media have become so corrupt that they want no debate at all about whether such claims are actually true?

Continue Reading →

Visits: 118

Climate Fudge Factor Finally F**ked

— by Barry Brill, Chairman, NZ Climate Science Coalition

In a 2018 article “Human influence” is unquantifiable, I analysed the evidence offered by the IPCC for the most important conclusion of its AR5:

It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. – (WGI 10.3–10.6, 10.9)

This seminal opinion turned out to be based upon three justifications in Section 10.3.1.1.3, all of which turned out on inspection to be based on circular reasoning: Continue Reading →

Visits: 460

National’s incompetence, identity politics, faulty buildings

John Scarry, a structural engineer and member of the Free New Zealand think tank, wrote this today as a contribution to a discussion of the political philosophy through which Labour views the country and its problems. It seemed good enough to me to publish, and John was good enough to let me. It’s being published here because the Free NZ website is under construction.

Identity politics

Collapse of Hard Rock Hotel, New Orleans, in October, 2019 (click to enlarge).

1. I am completely opposed to identity politics, and it is, in large part, National’s wilting before and partial surrender to identity and woke politics that has got them into their current bad polling position and is keeping them there.

2. There may be many factors (including indoctrination at school and through the media) that have so many people in awe of the likes of Ardern and Shaw, but the main factor is that these people have never been properly exposed to sound, rational and consistent counter-arguments.

3. Ardern is pathetic under pressure, but she is never subjected to real pressure. She is given a complete pass on every artificial crisis she creates for her own political benefit and to enable her to implement her dystopian plan or, more correctly, the dystopian plan that she supports. The most disappointing current example of this is Chris Bishop as the National spokesman on COVID-19. If nothing else, masks do not work – that is the undisputed science, from multiple studies over many years. Yet Ardern is allowed to impose them in order to “keep up the scare” and to enforce obedience, unopposed. Continue Reading →

Visits: 885

Chaos

Chaos. (Click to enlarge)

 

David Wojick of CFact just posted this essay on a newsgroup I frequent. It’s accessible, compelling and deserves wide distribution. It exposes a fatal flaw in the dangerous anthropogenic global warming hypothesis, namely: weather is chaotic and impossible to predict.

I used to lecture on the role of chaos theory in science. It does not get the attention it deserves in the climate debate. In fact climate change may be nothing more than simple chaos, in which case nothing controls it. Here is a brief explanation. Continue Reading →

Visits: 530

Climate crisis shattered: doubt no more

What a delight it is to republish this story from CFACT by David Wojick. As he says, “burning fossil fuels can have no further impact on global warming.” Can we believe this? One huge clue is the fact that so far “three major physics journals have refused to publish it. The reviews have been defensive and antagonistic.” They only do that when the paper damages their cause. I’ve skimmed the paper and look forward to comments from people who can follow it. One conclusion fascinates me: “One greenhouse gas interferes with, and diminishes, the forcings of all others. But the self-interference of a greenhouse gas with itself, or saturation, is a much larger effect than interference between different gases.”

Study suggests no more CO2 warming

By October 26th, 2020

Precision research by physicists William Happer and William van Wijngaarden has determined that the present levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and water vapor are almost completely saturated. In radiation physics the technical term “saturated” implies that adding more molecules will not cause more warming.

In plain language this means that from now on our emissions from burning fossil fuels could have little or no further impact on global warming. There would be no climate emergency.  No threat at all. We could emit as much CO2 as we like; with no effect. Continue Reading →

Visits: 174

Fight for climate evidence goes on … and on

Our good friend Bryan Leyland wrote this hard-hitting article describing correspondence he had with the newly-formed NZ Climate Change Commission. [Download the correspondence file here (pdf, 536 KB).] He’s been engaged on a dogged search for evidence that human activity dangerously heats the earth. Everyone says the evidence is “overwhelming” but when you ask them nobody actually has any, which strikes us as a confidence trick. He offers us the article in hopes of the widest possible distribution, because everyone’s asking: “What is the evidence?”

NOTE ON THE COMING ELECTION: If you think setting up this commission and hiking the ETS carbon price is bad, wait for the next three years of government by these backward-looking, anti-farming, communist wreckers.

The Climate Commission has no clothes

— by Bryan Leyland, Consulting Engineer
Member, NZ Climate Science Coalition

The Climate Commission claims, “We provide independent, evidence-based advice to Government to help Aotearoa New Zealand transition to a low-emissions and climate-resilient economy.”

Spending huge amounts of money on a low-emissions economy is only justified if proof exists that man-made greenhouse gases cause dangerous global warming. If there’s no evidence there’s no need for the transition. Continue Reading →

Visits: 48

Climate change nutters expose their real aim

By Mike Hosking, 22 April, 2020. Reposted with gratitude.

Mike — common sense for all.

About the most futile of all the futile nonsense that has gone on during this mess is the seemingly never-ending and yet ultimately wasteful attempt by the climate change obsessives to convince us this is all good.

How many stories have we had of how the air quality has improved? As if to show or tell us what? If you do nothing, if you lock everyone away and close an economy you can improve the environment? Do you suspect anyone above the age of six could not have worked that out? Is having a pollution disappear because we are all indoors really a victory? Continue Reading →

Visits: 23

Downunder wind and solar power increasingly unreliable

• Guest post •

— by Bryan Leyland
Consulting Engineer • Member, NZ Climate Science Coalition

Once upon a time New Zealand and Australia had some of the lowest electricity prices in the world. Unfortunately, imposing ill-conceived electricity “markets”, combined with the modern mania for renewable energy, has greatly increased prices in both countries. Newspaper stories on the steadily deteriorating situation in Australia abound. Continue Reading →

Visits: 108

A power of electricity eaten by wind turbines

This (lightly edited) article reveals sensational facts about the “clean, renewable, inexpensive” wind generation being forced on us by dreaming greenies and spineless politicians. With solid, pragmatic engineering expertise it destroys the grounds cited by our Minister for Climate Change, James Shaw, and the bureaucrats of the Ministry for the Environment who would transform our economy to “zero carbon,” a ridiculous (and undefined) policy which could be recommended only when labouring under zero knowledge of the climate (but of course: “zero carbon” = zero knowledge). Knowing the facts set out below, there’s no defence for a national policy of “decarbonisation”, since there’s categorically no reliable replacement for fossil fuel-powered electricity generation to be found in windmills. The article was originally posted under the title “Electricity consumption in wind turbines” in about 2004 by Eric Rosenbloom, a science editor and writer (then) living in Vermont. There’s more information at his website and in his post A Problem With Wind Power (scroll to the bottom for lots of links). — h/t Susan Goodman for a comment at WUWT

— RT

Energy consumption in wind facilities

Large wind turbines require a large amount of energy to operate. Other electricity plants generally use their own electricity and the difference between the amount they generate and the amount delivered to the grid is readily determined. Wind plants, however, use electricity from the grid which does not appear to be accounted for in their output figures. At the facility in Searsburg, Vermont, for example, it is apparently not even metered and is completely unknown*. The manufacturers of large turbines — for example, Vestas, GE and NEG Micon — do not include electricity consumption in the specifications they provide. Continue Reading →

Visits: 240

Polar bears not endangered but dangerous

From a blog by Dr Susan Crockford, a zoologist for over 35 years who fearlessly corrects failed predictions of global warming destroying polar bear populations. But you’ll not read this in the pages of mainstream newspapers nor hear of it in the six o’clock news.

Newspapers

This is an adopted article.

The STATE OF THE POLAR BEAR REPORT 2018, published yesterday (pdf, 3.7 MB) by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, confirms that polar bears are continuing to thrive, despite recent reductions in sea ice levels. This finding contradicts claims by environmentalists and some scientists that falls in sea ice would wipe out bear populations. Continue Reading →

Visits: 654

Marohasy says BoM ‘illogical’ but I say ‘just like NIWA’

“Daddy, do NIWA fiddle our national temperature records to create warming?”

“Great question, my boy, but what makes you ask?” I said.

Aunty Jenny says the BoM just increased the rate of warming at Darwin by lowering the early temperatures, and they’ve done it before! Remember when NIWA overhauled our temp records a few years ago, and the BoM gave it respectability by writing that laughable one-page “peer review”? NIWA kept the details secret and the BoM let them get away with it. Now the BoM are fiddling their own figures. They’re both in it together.”

“Yeah, I think you’re probably right. And do you remember that Kiwi paper a few years ago? NIWA’s review claimed we warmed about a degree in 100 years, but the Kiwi paper says it was nowhere near that. NIWA are strangers to the truth, my son.

Changes to Darwin’s Climate History are Not Logical

February 23, 2019

– by Jennifer Marohasy

Newspapers

This is an adopted article.

Continue Reading →

Visits: 218

New Zealand small, world large

Ministry for the Environment: Please explain why our portion of the ocean is not mentioned as a sink in our emissions inventory.

Raised from a comment to a post, this mathematical exposé of our ruling coalition’s wilful blindness to New Zealand’s puny emissions could tickle your fancy, or you may think it cheeky; let me know. – RT

— by Don Graham

As an avid “man-driven CO2 is going to cook us all” denier, I have explored as a matter of interest New Zealand’s effect on the atmospheric level of CO2 and wrote this article several years back. I emailed it to someone in NIWA and surprisingly did not receive a reply—well, unsurprisingly!
– DG

The problem

New Zealand’s Exclusive Economic Zone (within the red lines) is the world’s fourth-largest.

New Zealand maintains the right to explore and exploit the seabed and water column within its exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and I cannot see why we should not be allowed to exploit its carbon-sequestering ability, especially since New Zealand is practically unique in having a large EEC and a small population. This is a natural CO2 sink, and we should take economic advantage of it as a CO2 mitigating component. Continue Reading →

Visits: 740

The war on meat

“the anti-meat message risks destroying the very environment it claims to be protecting”

• Guest post •

— by Barry Brill, Chairman of the NZ Climate Science Coalition

Meat — farming animals for food is undeniably good for the environment (click to enlarge; DROOL).

For most of this century, we have been bombarded by news articles preaching that vegetarians now have a corner on ‘food morality’ and that meat-eating is to be banished in a more environmentally-conscious future.  The notion is that God never intended the human race to be omnivores and that our ancestors just took a wrong turning back there on the savannah. Continue Reading →

Visits: 398

UN soaked in corruption

Someone sent an article from The Australian that’s worth distributing. It appeared two days ago under the headline Corrupted UN must never be allowed to lecture us. I agree that fundamental principles of the United Nations pose dangers to human society, prosperity and happiness and sully the good and proper work of portions of that expensive organisation. Destroying the UN wouldn’t mean losing the good, in fact good work is done more efficiently by free nations acting in concert—ironically, just what it was set up for—but Mr Newman gives a few solid reasons to get rid of the UN. – RT

US President Donald Trump addresses the United Nations General Assembly last month. Red oval – the UN’s wisest decision: putting New Zealand on top of the world. [click to enlarge]

• By Maurice Newman
• 25 October, 2018

If the leaders of some nation states were citizens living in a civilised society, they would be in jail for perpetrating or being accessories to murder, torture, theft and corruption.

Yet they and their representatives shamelessly take their places in the hallowed chamber of the UN General Assembly as arbiters of how the rest of the world should behave. Continue Reading →

Visits: 255

Govt playing chicken with NZ power supply

Bryan Leyland, Consulting Engineer, warns of blackouts

Electricity wholesale prices on the spot market have averaged 25 cents/kWh (four times the normal 7 cents) for the last three weeks because the New Zealand power system is in an appalling state, with severe shortages of water, gas, coal and generating plant. Continue Reading →

Visits: 504

IPCC achieves Net Zero … credibility

A member of the NZ Climate Science Coalition discusses major problems with the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C (known as SR15, 1190 pp) published on 8 October. It’s officially just a draft that you can download here (only one chapter at a time and, unhelpfully, every page includes the words “Do Not Cite, Quote or Distribute”—which I ignore), but they have actually published the Executive Summary here.

So many flaws. We must wash our hands of increasingly expensive, disruptive policies demanded by the United Nations in meeting the two-degree temperature target—which was blatantly fabricated by UN scientists in defiance of science.

Any confidence we might have had in SR15 is poisoned by its use of unreliable “pre-industrial” temperature data and seriously flawed climate models, together with the over-arching belief that saturates the IPCC that, never mind the science, human activity IS responsible for global warming.

The sensational claims of this report are nonsense. Tell your MP. — RT

Continue Reading →

Visits: 636

Beware — the death of fossil fuels will kill everything

Forging the base ring for a giant wind turbine in a Spanish foundry. That’s a giant ingot of tool steel. Memo to Greens: The manufacturing required to produce your wind turbines cannot be done with wind turbines. It needs mining, drilling, smelting and milling, all of which depend on coal, oil and gas, but if we stop looking for that stuff it will run out.

Dr John Constable, Energy Editor of the Global Warming Policy Forum, took part in a debate at the Financial Times Energy Transitions Summit, opposing the motion that “Fossil Fuels are Doomed”. He did not succeed, but nevertheless gave an extraordinary new view of the symbiotic relationship between the fossil fuels our society now depends on and the renewable fuels we aspire to. He urges caution in mandating a too-rapid renunciation of fossil fuels, going as far as to argue that they actually create the renewable forms of energy — and proves it. Here’s his full speech, from the GWPF. – RT

Energy transitions are intrinsically slow and the incoming energy system is necessarily and unavoidably created by the previous one.

Think of the history. The transition from the organically fuelled economy of the late Medieval period to the mineral based economy of the twentieth century took something like five hundred years in Europe and North America, and even today has not yet reached the whole world. Continue Reading →

Visits: 537

Christchurch property values lost in climate fear

Christchurch, mountains and sea. Earthquakes have caused great loss in reality. But stupendous imaginary sea level rise is causing great loss through insanity.

• Guest post •

— by Andy Scrase, member, Christchurch Coastal Residents United (CCRU)

Coastal residents’ nightmare drags on

We’ve written before about the serious climate problem destroying the property values of tens of thousands of Christchurch home owners. It’s an escalating tragedy. Continue Reading →

Visits: 1127

Climate game over?

— By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

Judge Alsup, in the California global warming trial, has accepted the amicus curiae brief from my eight distinguished colleagues and me. The brief now becomes an official part of the court documents. The judge may yet ask all parties to respond to it. Continue Reading →

Visits: 1058

The elementary error of physics that caused the global warming scare

They said the science was settled. Well, it wasn’t.

— By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

This will be a long posting, but it will not be found uninteresting.

Global warming on trial: Global warming goes on trial at 8.00 am this Wednesday, 21 March 2018, in Court 8 on the 19th floor of the Federal Building at 450 Golden Gate Avenue, San Francisco. Court 8 is the largest of the courtrooms in the Federal District Court of Northern California. They’re clearly expecting a crowd. The 8 am start, rather than the usual 10 am, is because the judge in the case is an early bird. Continue Reading →

Visits: 1123

Red/Blue teams to battle on climate

Or will they?

• Guest post •

— by Gary Kerkin

Not long after the Trump administration appointed Scott Pruitt to head the EPA, Pruitt suggested a Red Team/Blue Team debate on climate science—a format in which two teams debate the pros and cons of a proposition. The Blue Team would be composed of scientists supporting the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis; the Red Team would be made up of scientists who skeptical of the hypothesis. Continue Reading →

Visits: 810

TVNZ, you are telling porkies

• Guest post •

— by John McLean

Beyond a joke — this must stop!

It’s Tuesday evening and TV One isn’t improving. This time it claims that climate refugees will be leaving Kiribati due to rising seas, caused by man-made climate change, and heading to New Zealand where, surprisingly, the new government is preparing to issue ‘climate refugee’ visas. Continue Reading →

Visits: 316

TV One says climate change, facts say otherwise

• Guest post •

— by John McLean

Vunidogoloa, Fiji

TV One is emphasising climate change this week and demonstrating just how bad the media can be.  It’s not clear if it’s incompetent journalists or incompetent climate advisors but it makes a mockery of the idea that TV One tells the whole story accurately and honestly. Continue Reading →

Visits: 386

What the media aren’t telling you about climate change

From our friends at Daily Media Review comes this revealing story of how the IPCC itself announced that we can expect no dangerous warming from our CO2 emissions. – RT

By Daily Media Review
24/06/15

The mainstream media love to lecture us daily about the coming apocalypse as a result of catastrophic climate change, but are we being told the complete story?

There is little dispute amongst the scientific community about the warming effect of CO2. Both those who accept and those who reject the climate change hypothesis agree on this—they even agree as to how much warming CO2 is capable of causing. But according to the International Panel on Climate Change, CO2 only accounts for half of the expected warming in the computer models. Continue Reading →

Visits: 222

Fossil fuels are greening the Earth

That’s science, so don’t argue

caption

Matt Ridley. One smart Viscount.

Did you know that the Earth is getting greener, quite literally? Satellites are confirming that the amount of green vegetation on the planet has been increasing for three decades. This will be news to those accustomed to alarming tales about deforestation, over-development and ecosystem destruction. Continue Reading →

Visits: 119

The profiteers of doom are at it again

by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

Christopher Monckton puts together a riposte to the rather weak-kneed criticism by Wratt, Reisinger and Renwick of the Dominion Post article by Bob Carter and Bryan Leyland in which they make a case for open climate discussion. – RT

When climate scientists unfairly give only one side of the story, as Professor Wratt et al. did earlier this week (Opinion, Dominion Post, February 10), taxpayers should keep a tight grip on their wallets. Continue Reading →

Visits: 103

Analysis of Renowden’s analysis of our reanalysis

• Guest post •

— by Bob Dedekind

Introduction

I chuckled at Gareth Renowden’s attempt to rebut our paper, for two reasons: he makes many mistakes and whoever is feeding him bits of information seems to let him down.

I printed out and highlighted his mistakes so I could deal with them individually. However, when I had finished the whole article was one big highlighted blob, so I’ll focus just on the most glaring mistakes. Continue Reading →

Visits: 260

Egos on ice

If you have been following the story of the Akademik Shokalskiy, you’ll know it’s a global warming boat stuck in an Antarctic ice pack. What piqued my curiosity was that the expedition is called ‘Australasian’. Now, I don’t mind when Aussies make absolute fools of themselves, but when Kiwis are involved in the foolishness, I get brassed off. More so when the stupidity is funded by my taxes. Continue Reading →

Visits: 162

Anthropogenic ocean heating Part 1

Skeptical Science offside

Introduction

Anthropogenic attribution to sea level rise and ocean heat accumulation relies on there being a verified mechanism or process by which rising anthropogenic greenhouse gas (aGHG) emissions impute heat to the ocean. John Cook’s Skeptical Science has been promoting one such posited mechanism in particular as explaining the accumulation of heat in the ocean over the last 40 years or so, the most prominent example being How Increasing Carbon Dioxide Heats The Ocean, posted in 2011 by Rob Painting. That post adapts a 2006 Real Climate article by Professor Peter Minnett, Why greenhouse gases heat the ocean, where an enhanced ocean surface insulation effect was posited.

Go to full article

…with attractive formatting and with all the references provided as working links.

NOTE: to easily get back here to comment, press the Back button or first load the article in a new tab and swap between them.

You can read the whole article here, but it lacks most of the formatting (which aids understanding) and all of the links (which are provided to assist understanding and to justify what is said). I apologise for any inconvenience this causes, but it takes a long time to convert the word document into the particular html format required by WordPress and to copy each link. So I haven’t done it yet. I’ve converted it to a “standalone” html page so you have access to the links. – RT

UPDATE 21 March 2021

This series destroys the IPCC narrative on ocean warming—there’s no reason to think that human emissions warm the oceans at all, and certainly not dangerously. I notice Richard Cumming’s full Part 1 article includes links to his Part 2 and Part 3, but they should be here, too, so here are all of them together:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

– RT.

Continue Reading →

Visits: 158

No evidence no reason for complacency

Chris de Freitas is a proper scientist with a wonderful sense of humour — just wait until you see his conclusion! His articles are easy to read and I always read them.


Regrettably, the Herald has turned comments off, but that’s why blogs exist — leave your comments here where influential people will see them!


Newspapers

This is an adopted article.

Chris de Freitas: Science proves alarmist global warming claims nothing but hot air

Several aspects of Jim Salinger’s op-ed “Climate hurtling towards a hothouse Earth” Herald 24/5/13 are quite misleading. It is true most climate scientists would agree that rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to fossil fuel use could affect global climate. The basic physics is there to support this view. But there is no evidence that the putative change would be large or damaging. Output from computer models is not evidence unless model performance has been validated. So far, it has not. Continue Reading →

Visits: 127

Emotional knowledge

Chris Hedges

   Chris Hedges

The other day I was listening to an interview on C-Span of one Chris Hedges, an American journalist and author specialising in American politics and society. It was a very interesting interview about the signs of collapse of the American Empire. Hedges is remarkable for his ability to easily quote and cite many sources as he outlines his reasons for predicting the fall of the Empire. He is eloquent, well-versed in historical examples and, in a quiet and calm way, very provocative.

He talks about the mainstream media’s lack of investigation into contentious government policies and social issues. Continue Reading →

Visits: 84

How the IPCC writes its own ticket

Published at Quadrant Online on March 12, 2013

The end of this week (March 15) marks the cut-off for scientific papers if they are to be cited in the Working Group I contribution to the forthcoming IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, due in 2014. Unless the papers are published or accepted for publication the report cannot refer to them. The final expert review of the draft document ended on November 31, 2012, some 15 weeks ago. But according to IPCC procedures, the draft document can still be modified to accommodate new papers.

Newspapers

This is an adopted article.

You might reasonably wonder what’s going on, especially when the IPCC claims that its report is comprehensively reviewed by experts. To borrow the catch phrase beloved of ads for “miracle” knives and so much of the other schlock merchandise sold on late-night TV: but wait, there’s more! Continue Reading →

Visits: 46

Give us the bodies

Habeas Corpus – late Middle English: Latin, literally ‘you shall have the body (in court)’ (oxforddictionaries.com)

Raveena Aulakh

A heart-string-tugging humanitarian piece was published in the Toronto Star last weekend. It concerns the plight of some 250 million climate change refugees expected worldwide by 2050 and was entitled Climate change forcing thousands in Bangladesh into slums of Dhaka.

Rising sea levels could flood 17 per cent of Bangladesh and create between 20 million and 30 million refugees, experts say. The Star’s environment reporter Raveena Aulakh recently travelled to the country to look at how climate change is affecting one of the world’s most densely populated countries and its people. Continue Reading →

Visits: 356

Death of Kyoto – a Scottish view

Dear fellow followers of the Climate debate,

As a result of finding out that the Kyoto commitments technically comes to an end on the 31st December, the Scottish Climate & Energy Forum have been investigating the likely consequences of this both in terms of what is likely to happen to the protocol and the wide implications when (as it seems) the protocol effectively ends operation on the 31st December.

We have written this up as a report. The main intention of this report has been to try to find the actual facts and having sorted the chaff from the wheat, ascertain what this might mean (with particular emphasis on Scotland). Continue Reading →

Visits: 406

Herald shows what to avoid in climate debate

Here’s an agreeably restrained response to Brian Rudman’s repellent, unsophisticated bluster against the Coalition. The Herald declined to publish this, but we’re delighted to present it in their stead. If Rudman has the sense I think he has, or the slightest genuine interest in climate change, he’ll pay close attention to Tom’s analysis. – Richard Treadgold

Columnist sets bad example in attack on Climate Science Coalition

The September 12th column by Brian Rudman of the New Zealand Herald, “One small word, one giant setback for denial”, exemplifies how much of the climate debate has descended into a sort of murky underworld where logical fallacies, personal attacks and made up “facts” all too often replace rational discourse. While Herald editors are to be congratulated for allowing the publication of my letter to the editor correcting some of Rudman’s more obvious mistakes, his piece is worth analyzing as a sample of what other journalists must avoid if a civilized discussion about this vitally important topic is to be possible.

Rudman’s repeated references to “climate change deniers” is a particularly nasty and nonsensical phrase frequently employed by those who want to silence debate about the causes of climate change. Continue Reading →

Visits: 449

Aussie analysis of High Court decision

From Australian fellow sceptics – the NO CARBON TAX Climate Sceptics Party (NCTCS)

A court challenge to the validity of the New Zealand temperature record [NZTR] has concluded. The Judgement refused all three parts of the challenge to the NZTR.

The challenge had been initiated by a group of climate researchers called The New Zealand Climate Science Education Trust [the Trust] against the government funded scientific body which prepared the NZTR, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research LTD [NIWA].

The Trust issued a Statement of Claim [SOC] seeking:

A declaration that the New Zealand Temperature Record is not a full
and accurate record of changes in the average surface temperatures
recorded in New Zealand since 1900.

Continue Reading →

Visits: 402

Court no substitute for science

Professor de Freitas from time to time advises the NZ Climate Science Coalition, but he does not speak for it. Nevertheless, this op-ed in today’s Herald gives such a clear view of the issues touching our court case that it deserves a hearing here.

One assumes scientific analysis is objective, so it may come as a surprise that this was challenged in a New Zealand High Court case, the results of which were released last week.

The New Zealand Climate Science Education Trust (NZCSET) contested the claim by the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa) that New Zealand air temperatures had climbed by 0.9°C over the past century. The trust maintains that objective analysis of the data shows a trend closer to 0.3°C per 100 years. Continue Reading →

Visits: 474

Are 1800 Kapiti homes really threatened by sea level rise?

Seemingly sloppy science seems to have sullied our coastal planning process. Dr de Lange describes, in the polite, scholarly way of his, a scientific blunder in a Kapiti Coast erosion report that anyone less courteous than him would call a dereliction or worse. Why? Because the wrong formula was used to calculate the amount of foreshore vulnerable to damage from sea level rise, and many hundreds of properties are now apparently at risk. The report explains correctly why a certain formula should not be used, but then, in a stupefying about-turn, goes ahead and uses it anyway. Prices for those properties will plunge, yet the new risks just aren’t justified.

The author (or principal author) of the Kapiti Coast Erosion Hazard Assessment 2012 update is Dr Roger Shand, of Coastal Systems Ltd. He said the report was peer-reviewed by “Coastal Scientist Dr Mike Shepherd” – who effectively works for Dr Shand. Why didn’t they admit that they’re colleagues? This isn’t a peer review, it’s a pal review, and if values plummet, land owners will descend on the High Court demanding compensation. Does the District Council realise its exposure?  – Richard Treadgold

Recent news stories have highlighted the redefinition of coastal hazard zones along the Kapiti Coast. The populated region is concentrated on a coastal landform known as a cuspate foreland, which has formed due to enhanced accretion of sediment in the lee of Kapiti Island over the last 7500 years. Examination of the coastal landforms in this region indicates that there has been long-term accretion over the Holocene disrupted by storm-induced erosion associated with large waves from either the southwest or northwest.

Kapiti Island

So has that pattern changed recently? Continue Reading →

Visits: 1342

Reflections on a changing climate

Was Villach the start of global warming?

Among the many climate science meetings I have attended, the most significant, at least as far as climate change is concerned, was my involvement in the UN-sponsored international conference held in the beautiful Austrian town of Villach in October 1985.

One hundred experts from 30 countries attended the meeting (in contrast to ten to twenty thousand who now attend such meetings), and I was privileged to be the only New Zealander invited. We were all there as experts – not representing our respective organisations – in various fields of science, endeavouring to do the best we could in looking at the complexities of climate science.

One of the principal findings of this conference was that

“while other factors, such as aerosol concentration, changes in solar energy input, and changes in vegetation, may also influence climate, the greenhouse gases are likely to be the most important cause of climate change over the next century.”

Continue Reading →

Visits: 162

Models of reality

NZCSC chairman Barry Brill has suggested to Environment Waikato that its Regional Policy Statement (RPS) should not be influenced by the climate change ‘Guidance Manuals’ (here and here) issued by the Ministry for the Environment in early 2008. Like the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (4AR), their recommendations have been overtaken by recent scientific papers and data. His submission notes that modelled projections of 21st century warming rely upon two components – emission volumes and climate sensitivity. Here is his comment regarding Climate Sensitivity.

CLIMATE SENSITIVITY (Model Uncertainties)

1: THE IPCC REPORT

The 17 models used for the 4AR produced a 2100 temperature range of 1.8°C – 4.4°C. Note at page 122 of the Manual, “this arises from taking the best estimate temperature change, and subtracting 40% to get the low end, and adding 60% to get the high end of the range”. The “most likely” temperature trend is 2.7C per century. Continue Reading →

Visits: 90

Local bodies deserve better than an outdated guess

coastal erosion

NZCSC chairman Barry Brill has suggested to Environment Waikato that its Regional Policy Statement (RPS) should not be influenced by the climate change ‘Guidance Manuals’ (here and here) issued by the Ministry for the Environment in early 2008. Like the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (4AR), their recommendations have been overtaken by recent scientific papers and data. His submission notes that modelled projections of 21st century warming rely upon two components – emission volumes and climate sensitivity. Here is his comment regarding future CO2-e tonnages – or, in other words, emission volumes.

1. The IPCC Report (2007)

In 1998, the IPCC commissioned consultants – economists, futurists, statisticians, demographers, etc. – to establish story-lines of how the world might develop over the following century. This group eventually brought out a detailed book, the “Special Report on Emissions Scenarios” (“SRES”) of 40 diverse story-lines, any of which might conceivably capture the emissions profile of the 21st century.

Trenberth says the IPCC itself has no view as to the correctness of the Scenarios: “They are intended to cover a range of possible self consistent “story lines” that then provide decision makers with information about which paths might be more desirable… There is no estimate, even probabilistically, as to the likelihood of any emissions scenario and no best guess.” Continue Reading →

Visits: 67

Insensitive climate

Barry Brill points out the warmists don’t seem pleased at the recent good news about climate sensitivity (a new paper says it’s not going to warm catastrophically). Could it be because the warmists cry only crocodile tears about the forecast disaster and they’re actually looking forward to it? (It lets them control us.) – Richard Treadgold

Whether the future level of Anthropogenic Global Warming is dangerous or catastrophic or merely interesting turns entirely on how “sensitive” the climate is to carbon dioxide emissions.

The key sensitivity measure is the increase in temperature resulting from a doubling of the CO2 atmospheric concentration of 280ppm that is said to have existed in pre-industrial times.

Laboratory experiments have shown that sensitivity should be about 1°C before feedbacks – but the net impact of positive and negative feedbacks is the subject of incessant debate. Sceptics generally say negatives (especially clouds) are dominant so that the final outcome falls back to about 0.4°C. The majority view is that positives (especially water vapour) drive the outcome up to 3-4°C, while some catastrophists see runaway warming up to 6°C or above.

There is no consensus.

The science is not settled. The debate is not over. Continue Reading →

Visits: 50

In a climate of listening

The Editor
NZ Listener

Dear Sir,

I was not going to bother to respond to your editorial (Listener Dec 17) forewarning us of the impending catastrophe of man-induced dangerous global warming; in any case there was no time — I have been like everyone else caught up in that state of human-induced seasonal silliness.

Today is different. All the shopping is done, all the last-minute reports completed. I am at home now in relative peace on Christmas Eve. I reach for my weekly palliative dose of intellectual fare — my Listener (dated Dec 31) has arrived. It contains two long letters beating the the same dangerous human-induced global warming drum. We are all doomed! We are destroying planet earth!!!! Spare me, I thought, it’s Christmas.

So, in the spirit of the festive season, I offer your readers the following facts:

1) There has been no global warming for 13 years despite increasing emissions of carbon dioxide.
2) The earth was warmer during the medieval warm period than it is today, long before man discovered oil!
3) The earth’s climate has always changed, both up and down, relative to the present and long before man appeared on the scene — maybe something else apart from carbon dioxide drives the earth’s temperature?
3) The only evidence now for the theory of dangerous carbon dioxide-induced global warming is the IPCC models, which assume, incorrectly it now appears, that clouds exacerbate the warming due to carbon dioxide.
4) NIWA tells us that NZ has warmed by about 0.9 °C in the last 100-odd years but they have been unable to put forward the crucial supporting evidence.

So my New Year wish to all is: relax, enjoy life, be glad and proud of what mankind has achieved. Mother nature will continue to do what she has always done, both good and bad. All we need to do is what all life on earth has done for eons: to continue to adapt and evolve. Go well.

Dr D. C. Edmeades
Managing Director
AgKnowledge Ltd
www.agknowledge.co.nz

Finalist Agribusiness Person of the Year 2011

“The only antidote to pseudo-science is science itself”
Carl Sagan

Visits: 88

Laking, liking words, lacking in science

It’s not possible even to keep track of the alarmist stories about climate, far less to refute them all. But when one is personally cited close to home and statements are wrongfully attributed to one, one ought to address them. This Laking/Herald howler is a case in point. Laking has taken his information from the Hot Topic side of the tracks without verification, not knowing the distortions of Renowden and friends (no matter how often corrected) and must now suffer the consequences; the formerly revered Herald similarly. My good friend Barry Brill here humorously draws our attention to the doctor’s faux pas. Regular readers will know that Richard C and Andy already mentioned the Herald article in comments on our Brash post. Thanks, guys. Apologies – one is only just getting around to it – but a refuting post will follow this. – RT

The NZ Herald runs climate alarm propaganda in every shape and size, and from every imaginable point of view. But it was scraping the barrel with its recent patronising but content-free sermon from a certain George Laking – presented on its weather page under the heading of “Epsom and climate change”.

Laking is apparently an oncologist. He transparently knows nothing whatever of meteorology, and even less about economics – and therefore relies upon a quote from an IEA economist to define the state of the science. He then buttresses his scientific bombast with other strongly-held opinions from non-scientists – the World Bank, UK Ministry of Defence, the Medical Association, and the World Health Organisation.

Each one of his sources has heard a real scientist say something, somewhere, about climate science. And they are almost sure they can remember part of what was said. But, says George, global warming isn’t about science anyhow, it’s about MORALITY!

If you want to know how morality works, ask a cancer doctor. George has seen what tobacco sellers got up to and he wouldn’t be a bit surprised if climate sellers weren’t just as bad.

And it turns out George’s medical training also left him well-versed in the need to manipulate raw data to get the result you are after. He says:

“If you take the raw temperature recordings alone (like ACT or… Richard Treadgold did), you won’t see a temperature rise. But that is because the readings have to be corrected for changes in site location, exposure, and instrumentation. Treadgold overlooked this and so ACT constructed a whole court case on the most abysmal scientific howler.”

Hmm. George obviously doesn’t read very much in pursuit of his climate hobby. He certainly doesn’t express any methodological preferences as between Salinger (1981) and RS93; or even NIWA’s 2010 review versus the audit published by the NZ Climate Science Coalition. He doesn’t even differentiate between the old 7SS and the NZT7.

Poor George seems to think Richard Treadgold is helping ACT to sue somebody in Epsom. Perhaps the teacup taper?

Does the Herald read these Op-Eds before publication, or is a burning zeal to hurl abuse at non-believers seen to be a sufficient qualification?

Visits: 32

NZ shale gas – will we get lucky?

A member of the NZ Climate Science Coalition asked about shale gas exploration in New Zealand. He received the following reply. — RT

I can advise that several petroleum exploration companies are actively looking at shale gas potential in NZ.

At present almost all of the onshore eastern North Island (the “East Coast Basin”, east of the main North Island ranges) is covered by petroleum exploration permits, or by applications for permits. Operators of these permits are investigating shale gas potential as well as more conventional (sandstone) reservoir targets.

More recently there have been applications for new petroleum exploration permits in the onshore Canterbury basin, as well as in Marlborough and Southland, specifically targeting shale gas. It is unlikely that the offshore basins are prospective for shale gas at present, but as the technology develops, it may happen. Across the Tasman, there is also great interest in exploration for shale gas. Continue Reading →

Visits: 81

What’s this shale gas gig?

shale rock

Shale gas will save us. It has no nasty emissions like coal does, its modest wellheads sit in our landscapes much gentler than great, ugly, noisy wind turbines, it’s more abundant than oil, it’s easy to extract (with a clever new technique), it’s far cheaper than any “renewable” energy, including nuclear, it could last the world for 250 years and it beats wind and solar handsomely when the wind stops and the sun sets. What’s not to like? Here I’ve somewhat shortened Ridley’s superb summary, but his laconic style is available in full at The Rational Optimist. H/T Bob Carter.

Which would you rather have in the view from your house? A thing about the size of a domestic garage, or eight towers twice the height of Nelson’s column with blades noisily thrumming the air. Over ten years, eight wind turbines of 2.5 megawatts (working at roughly 25% capacity) roughly equal the output of an average Pennsylvania shale gas well (converted to electricity at 50% efficiency).

Let’s make the choice easier. The gas well can be hidden behind a hedge. The eight wind turbines must be on hilltops, where the wind blows. New pylons are needed; the gas well is connected by an underground pipe.

Newspapers

This is an adopted article.

Unpersuaded? Wind turbines kill thousands of birds of prey every year. And bats: the pressure wave from the passing blade just implodes the little creatures’ lungs. You and I can go to jail for harming bats or eagles; wind companies are immune.

Still can’t make up your mind? The wind farm requires eight tonnes of an element called neodymium, which is produced only in Inner Mongolia, by boiling ores in acid leaving lakes of radioactive tailings so toxic no creature goes near them. Continue Reading →

Visits: 186

One man’s mission

Will NIWA ever be free of Jim Salinger? What will it take to rid the organisation of his pervasive influence? He was fired long ago for his maverick media mouth, but his spirit never leaves, and the bright ideas of his younger self, not good enough to attract other scientists, still torment NIWA’s management as they strive to defend them. Salinger’s youthful enthusiasm for the then-radical crisis of man-made global warming, hatched by his mates in his old stamping ground at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, has crippled New Zealand with a “scientific” temperature “record” that shows remarkable warming — a feature we now know is entirely reliant on fiction, not on fact. – RT

Jim Salinger

When young geographer James Salinger was at Otago University in 1974, he noticed that a number of the glaciers in the Southern Alps were retreating. So he wrote an article for the journal Nature, contending that New Zealand was warming up.

This made him a noted sceptic, as the scientific consensus then was that the world was rapidly cooling. The news media worldwide were running horror stories, demanding that governments “do something” about the impending ice age. Continue Reading →

Visits: 110

Ocean acidification and then what?

shellfish

The School of Chemical Sciences at the University of Auckland hosted a lecture by Assoc-Prof. Mary A. Sewell, of the School of Biological Sciences, on “Ocean Acidification: Integrating chemistry and marine biology and what it means for you.
 
Our friend Roger Dewhurst, engineering geologist and founding member of the NZ Climate Science Coalition, went along and paid close attention. Then he sent Mary Sewell the following entertaining and informative letter, which he kindly shares with us to provoke conversation.

Past is key to future; CO2 ruined nothing before; there’s no evidence of ruin to come; alarming climate predictions are inconsistent and unconvincing.
Roger Dewhurst writes:

Thanks for an interesting seminar.

Demonstrating that the appendages of a larval echinoderm tend to be stunted when the little beastie is grown in soda water is one thing. To extrapolate that to an absence of oysters, mussels and scallops on the dinner table next year is, in my view, stretching things a little too far. I was reminded of Al Gore’s polar bear on an iceberg!

When I was at Victoria University in the 1960s science was divorced from politics, and zoology, botany and geology were separate subjects. Now zoology and botany are lumped together as biology, and geology has been lumped in with geography as earth science and includes — would you believe it — a strand called ‘feminist geography’. I suppose that feminist mathematics is next in the pipeline. Sic transit gloria [“thus fades the glory of the world” – RT].

I suspect, on the basis of opinions from two universities, that no science student will get a decent degree now without paying obeisance to anthropogenic global warming and its apostles, ‘Piltdown’ Mann and his gang who, I presume, you know as ‘The Team’. This is not science as I know it but the ‘science’ of Lysenko. Continue Reading →

Visits: 147

Forget global warming — Kyoto is about trade

handshake

When the Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1997, the base year for calculating emissions was back-dated to 1990. They knew then that the ratification process would take many years (it was actually completed in 2005), so why did it hark back to the distant past?

EU

Two big European events occurred in 1991. As a result of the Soviet collapse, heavy industry had closed down in droves throughout the East. And North Sea gas came ashore in the West with a “dash to gas” displacing coal power in the UK, Netherlands, Germany and Denmark.

At the time of the Berlin COP in 1995, EU countries collectively had enough past credits from the 1991-94 period to cover all the obligations they later accepted under the Protocol. It was a no-brainer for them to demand that other developed countries match the EU misfortunes during “the First Commitment Period.” Continue Reading →

Visits: 108

Confidence in climate scientists plummets

public confidence survey

In the latest Rasmussen national telephone survey of American adults, 69% say it’s likely that some scientists have falsified research data in order to support their own theories and beliefs. Only 6% say it is not at all likely. Continue Reading →

Visits: 85