Errors in IPCC climate science

In the hurly burly of the Craig Thomson (MP for Dobell) affair there are calls for the Australian Constitution to be amended so members of Parliament have some sort of “code of conduct” under which they must operate. I would say if they know so little that they need a code – then we should not elect them in the first place. At present Section 44 sets out the circumstances under which members can be disqualified.
I do not want to reprise the Craig Thomson affair here – anybody awake in Australia must have the gist.
There is a petition circulating in the electorate of Dobell calling for Thomson to resign his seat.
I just wanted to make the point here that it is the colossal failure by Labor to act on the Craig Thomson matter over YEARS – that is the cause of the black hole in which the Prime Minister finds herself.
Secondarily to Thomson of course and unrelated there is the Speaker of the House Peter Slipper who has stood aside while allegations are investigated.

Many people are concerned that huge policy changes are being made without due consideration of the realistic costs and benefits. So I asked www.cleanenergyfuture.gov.au to point out to me with the assessment of costs and benefits were set out – they sent me the following 4 URL’s.

At the first I found a reference – 1.4 Risks to economic prosperity – to sea level rise affecting property worth $226Bn over the next century – that was all.

I found nothing at the Climate Commission.

Sorry I missed whatever was at this page.

Then at the Garnaut page I clicked for an update;
Mentions costs benefits
and and downloaded the Update pdf paper 540KB. “Weighing the cost and benefits of climate change action” by Ross Garnaut,

- page 6 – The net present value of the market benefits of average outcomes this century fell just short of the net present value of the costs of mitigation policy. However, when non-market benefits plus the insurance value of avoiding unexpectedly severe outcomes, plus the avoidance of climate change costs beyond the twenty-first century were taken into account, the case for effective global action with Australia playing its proportionate part became compelling.
When Prof RG mentions “non-market benefits” he is talking about things like the Great Barrier Reef – and life in Murray Darling Basin country towns.

on page 10 RG says – “The benefits can be difficult to observe and some only
accrue far into the future.” Indeed Professor.

I liked the bit where Prof Ross Garnaut says –
bottom page 8 “…messy world…” – yes it is terrible when people just do not do what you say Prof.
page 11 – in the last clause of para – Type 1: Currently-measurable market benefits;
we learn – “Climate change also dampens demand for labour, causing real wages to be lower,…”. OKay – so if we are experiencing “climate change” – how come our employment sector is booming Professor ?
Sorry but I can only read so much of this stuff.

Timothy Curtin, “Applying Econometrics to the Carbon Dioxide “Control
Knob”,” The Scientific World Journal, vol. 2012, Article ID 761473, 12
pages, 2012. doi:10.1100/2012/761473.
Download a copy and lets have your views.

I was amazed to hear reports quoting UK MP Peter Lilley that the Climate Change Bill 2008 “….puts the Bill’s potential cost as up to £205bn, it says the maximum benefits of this massive expenditure is £110bn(out to 2050).” BBC article from Nov 2008.
I thought, surely no rational society would do something so harmful to itself.
In March 2009 the Labour Government drastically revised the costs & benefits which are now as in this screen-shot.

What a descent into fairyland – and of course the huge and utterly illusory benefits are pumped up by the benefits of UK emission reductions around the world (page 7 of the pdf).
Do readers have an idea where the UK Govt is with all this now in May 2012 ?

Chris Gilham has posted an item from the West Australian newspaper reporting the results of aerial thermal scans over Perth by a commercial firm Scantherma.
Of course this imagery can be used to prove the existence of the urban heat island (UHI) which magically never finds its way into IPCC temperature trends.
It is good to see this airborne technology used in Australia but airborne and satellite imagery has been detecting the UHI for decades. Here are several examples.
Read the rest of this entry »

News comes out on Federal Budget night – which we all know is a classic PR tactic to bury news that Govt preferred was not noticed. So when you want to go online and check your local forecast – that you have amply paid for with your taxes over the years – you might now be offered – who knows what desirable goods or services ? Time will tell.
Do we have any readers out there familiar with online adverising who could estimate some potential numbers for us and take a guess at the type of advertising we might be offered.
Note too that the BoM despite being the subject of at least two inquiries – garners another 40 staff at $120,000 each – $4.8million.
I have a letter from the Australian National Audit Office stating their – “…2011 Audit Work Program includes two potential audits on the Bureau of Meteorology.”
I see too that in Dec 1999 there was an audit of the BoM into Severe weather. Interesting to see no mention of “flash flooding” – yet flash flooding killed so many people near Toowoomba in early 2011. Despite flash flooding being noted around Toowoomba by various newspaper reports over the last 100 years.

Just noticed that the SWO sunspot number published by NOAA increased for April while the RI number published by the ROYAL OBSERVATORY OF BELGIUM decreased.

Just eyeballing the graph it looks to be a significant difference of opinion.
I notice the NOAA show the 10.7cm flux decreased too – which tends to go with a decrease in sunspots. Link to my earlier posts – there is a chain back to Dec 2006 when I first posted on diverging predictions for solar cycle 24. Then in March 2007 I posted David Archibald’s provocative article The Past and Future of Climate – where David correctly predicted a long solar minimum between cycles 23 & 24 and a weak cycle 24.

With the budget to be delivered tonight and the Carbon Tax about to slam into our hip pocket nerves – I thought that the assembling MP’s mostly from warmer climes might like knowing that the Canberra bleakness they had encountered was a 55 year old record. In 1957 there were 10 consecutive frosts from the 3rd to 12th May – and they were colder than this year – but the urban heat island was much less in 1957. May 2011 had a 54 year record for total frost days.

The Ed Thurstan files are zipped and can be downloaded;
www.warwickhughes.com/papers/etdata.zip – approx 27Mb
www.warwickhughes.com/papers/etodds.zip – other 2 under 500Kb each
www.warwickhughes.com/papers/etprogrampack.zip

On 23 March I started comparing CRUT4 with CRUT3 over Australia – these grid box anomaly maps shows large differences in 2007.
The newly released CRUT4 shows many warmer tweaks over the Australian region
More later.

We all remember the story that ran viral last June about death threats in emails to Australian National University staff. It even ran overseas – here is The Guardian masthead for 6 June last year.

Now it has taken near a year but Sydney blogger Simon Turnill has had a huge FOI win in discovering that the emails contained no such threats. Read his story.
Why are we sceptics not surprised at this eventual outcome – so basic facts got hopelessly exaggerated by IPCC supportive scientists at ANU – so!! – and what does it say about about the rigor of higher level management processes at ANU. What a shocker.
Andrew Bolt has picked up on the story too – saying the smear was as bogus as their theory. Right on target.
I see nothing today in the Fairfax owned Canberra Times, home of ANU – not keen to rock any boats eh. Note to read the story at The Australian – Google – Climate scientists’ claims of email death threats go up in smoke – then read full version.