Wednesday 30 July 2008

If it wasn't so serious then it'd be funny

If the issue of climate change was not as serious as it is then the ongoing destruction of the Climate House Of Cards would be hilarious.

I have said for ages that climate models have not been accurate ever. Demetris Koutsoyiannis had previously shown this to be the case and goes into even more detail about how bad the models are in his new paper, which is well worth a read.

The summary of his paper is:
Geographically distributed predictions of future climate, obtained through climate models, are widely used in hydrology and many other disciplines, typically without assessing their reliability. Here we compare the output of various models to temperature and precipitation observations from eight stations with long (over 100 years) records from around the globe. The results show that models perform poorly, even at a climatic (30-year) scale. Thus local model projections cannot be credible, whereas a common argument that models can perform better at larger spatial scales is unsupported.
Given the paucity of data supporting the proposition that CO2 is the main driver of climate change and the models' complete inability to forecast accurately one would think that the issue would fade from public view.

Au contraire, mon ami.

There is one little problem with that conclusion.

Politics trumps science.

In the 1930s Stalin allowed the implementation of Trofim Lysenko's disastrous agricultural policies. In James Hansen the 21st century has its own Lysenko.

It should come as no surprise that politicians use science for their own ends and, in the event that the science is falsified or doesn't support the (typically) imposition of new taxes on the public at large, they simply do the three monkeys thing and ignore the inconvenience.

That's why we're in so much danger here in Australia. Both the Labor government and pissweak Coalition opposition favour the introduction of an emissions trading scheme.

For gawdsake - it snowed in Sydney the other day; the coldest Sydney day for over 40 years. Can't these politicians stick their head out the window for a brief moment to discover the truth. Are their minds so closed to scientific reality?

Apparently so.

The Australian population is yet to understand that the emissions trading scheme is simply another tax on them. Governments around the world are using business as a proxy for the collection of more tax dollars. Any cost increase to inputs to business simply get passed straight on to the consumer.

There is no difference to the average taxpayer between introducing an emissions trading scheme and increasing the GST from 10% to around 15% in the short term and 30%-40% in order to hit the targets outlined in the Garnaut Report.

By introducing the emissions trading scheme the government is telling Australian Working Families that it is prefers to support China's and India's economic growth and standard of living over our own.

Western apologists are putting the argument that India and China need the chance to 'catch up' in terms of economic development and that, after all, it was the West that created the problem. This is certainly the position being taken by those countries and other developing nations such as Brazil.

The problem with that logic is that these countries had the same opportunity to grow their economies since 1950 but chose instead to implement the Marxist economic policies that impoverished all but the fortunate few at the top.

India and China invested no money at all into the development of the technologies that they are now able to take advantage of with their new found wealth. The West paid the carbon price for that.

Why not charge them a 'catch up' amount that would be in the same order as, say, a carbon emissions scheme?

Perhaps Australia's Mandarin speaking Prime Mandarin doesn't want to get offside those people for whom he obviously has more regard than he does for Australian Working Families.

As I said, if it wasn't so serious then it'd be funny.

(Nothing Follows)

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

Snow in Sydney eh? Well, surely that one day of weather in one location entirely disproves global warming!!

Do you know the difference between Sydney and the whole world? And between weather and climate?

Jack Lacton said...

Fudgie,

The fact that Climate Liars like yourself have to keep dribbling on about the difference between weather and climate shows how desperate things must be on the good ship Climate Marx.

My point was that if the politicians would stop to take notice of what's going on around them - a conspicuous lack of warming over a 10 year period - then they should at least have a little look at the underpinning science.

Anonymous said...

Lack of warming over a ten year period? So how come 8 of the 10 hottest years in the instrumental record have occurred since 1998?

And yes, the difference between weather and climate is rather crucial. Obviously you don't get that. Are you not even slightly embarrassed by that?

Anonymous said...

8 out of 10? You have no idea what you are talking about.

5 of the top 10 hottest years were before WW II. The hottest was in the 30's.

And then there is the slight problem of the insecurity of the instrumental record. The record from a temp station that for years was in the middle of a farm field....but today is now an asphalt parking lot....should be suspect...doncha think?

You need to step away from the kool-aid vat, buddy.

--Krumhorn

Anonymous said...

Oh dear oh dear, Krumhorn. You appear to be making the rather elementary mistake of confusing the United States with the entire planet. The hottest year in the 1930s was about 0.5°C cooler, globally, than the hottest year in the 2000s.

Jack Lacton said...

The rest of the world temperature record is beset with more errors than Hansen's fudged data.

The US record is the most reliable, which is why it's fair enough to use it as a proxy for the rest of the world.

Furthermore, Fudgie uses the term 'instrument record' which shortens things to the period post the inexplicable 1940-75 cooling so of course there'll be a warming.

Temperatures are still probably 2C below MWP.

Anonymous said...

Your idiocy gets ever more spectacular! No matter how good you think the US temperature record is, you can't tell anything about global temperatures from a measurement of the temperature in 2% of the globe. Surely you can grasp this.

Instrumental records go back hundreds of years in certain locations. There was not really any 'cooling' from 1940-75, just a plateau in temperatures, and it's certainly not inexplicable. What makes you think it is?

Do please give us the link to studies showing that temperatures today are 2°C lower than in mediaeval times.

Jack Lacton said...

Fudgie,

Only the hacks passing themselves off as climate scientists don't think that the MWP was around 2C warmer than now.

How are you going with the Tuvalu proof, by the way?

I also notice you're no longer defending the accuracy of climate models. It's like trying to defend cigarette companies from the claims of cancer, I suspect.

Anonymous said...

So where's the link to the studies showing this 2°C difference, fucky?

What Tuvalu proof?

I'm mocking your stupidity right now. I'm sure you'll post another pathetic bleat about how shit you think climate models are in due course, and when the time comes I'll duly show you yet again that you're talking out of your arse. And as always you'll show that you have nowhere near sufficient intellectual capacity to understand what I'm telling you.

Anonymous said...

Pretty crude fella. I notice that about libs. They can't form a single thought without using language for which their own mommas would bring out the soap bar. It's amazing how frequently the looselugnut libs resort to it.

You need to read Spencer's critique of the "instrument record". Why anyone would afford any credit for accuracy over the course of time to any figures within 10ths of a degree is a mystery to me. Were the thermometers regularly calibrated for that precision? Were the measurements taken regularly at the same time of day? Have local conditions changed over time?

But perhaps you'll find a revelation in this report from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center For Astrophysics in which they report their evaluation of over 200 climate studies and have determined that the 20th and 21st Centuries are, by far, not the warmest.... and cooler than the MWP.

The global warming myth has cracked open like a cheap camera, and you co-religionists of the GW gospel are the last of the acolytes left trying to sweep up the spare fragments of the communion wafers.

For the record, I don't know if there is or is not a man made warming phenomenon....but I can say with certainty that you cannot know nor prove that there is.

--Krumhorn

Anonymous said...

Oh...and here's the Loehle report on the 2000 year temperature record which shows, as Jack said, that the MWP was more than .2C higher than now.

This report excludes the tree ring data that Mann manipulated to ensure that the MWP was properly reduced to background noise in furtherance of his political objectives. And Loehle is an expert in tree ring data.

--Krumhorn

Anonymous said...

Ha ha ha! Fucky said it was it was 2°C warmer, and you 'prove' his point by showing a paper published in a joke journal that claims it was just 0.2°C higher. You people are hilarious.

Of course we can know and prove that there is an anthropogenic warming phenomenon. If I punched you in the face, you could know and prove that it was me. You would have seen the input - a punch - and you would have felt the effect - pain. The effect follows logically and obviously from the cause. And so it is with increasing concentrations of CO2 and rising temperatures. Or maybe you'd say "Well, I've felt pain many times before, and none of them were from someone punching me in the face"

Jack Lacton said...

Fudgie,

You really are thick.

I have a much greater understanding of matters scientific, which is why you can't get it into your head that you're wrong.

One simple proof that the MWP was at least 2C warmer than present is the existence of pre-fossilised trees at altitudes 200m and 300m above what those trees grow today.

I don't hear Climate Liars such as yourself explaining why that is, though.

Anonymous said...

That will be news to the Harvard-Smithsonian folks that they have published a "joke journal".

If you want a joke, prowl through the IPCC reports. I always love UN science. It has the same validity as their political science.

--Krumhorn

Anonymous said...

Fucky - a link to the study, please. It's not a trick question or a challenging request.