A review and commentary on topical matters concerning the science, economics, and governance associated with climate change developments.

By Alan Moran,

1  September, 2016

How is the science travelling?

According to a study published in the Journal of Geophysical Letters Greenland is poised to return to the temporate climate that was promoted by those canny real estate marketers, the 12th Century Vikings.  Global warming on stilts but wait! According to a paper published in Nature earlier this year the warming in Greenland is localised due to “anomalously high geothermal flux” underneath its ice sheet. 

Undiscouraged by the failure of his forecast ice free Arctic by the middle of this decade, scientist Peter Wadhams has put the clock back and now says it will be another two years. Matt Ridley covers the issue noting that the annual sea ice loss is less than in record years, that 6,000 years ago the Arctic was ice free and that, confounding forecasts, the Antarctic ice coverage continues to grow.  And Pierre Gosselin shows Wadhams to be an ultra alarmist in forecasting ice levels that are vastly lower than those from 29 other authorities.

The Australian newspaper published a major article from The Times addressing the matter, and David Archibald introduces an incongruity showing the sea around Norway is actually cooling.

To counteract all those studies that suggest there could not have been enough of human induced emissions to affect climate prior to the 1960s, an Australian study has said humans have had an effect for 200 years. The study was published in Nature and makes use of tree rings made famous by the statistical artefact Michael Mann used to “hide the decline” of temperatures that is evident from the 12th to 19th centuries.

Mississippi rising

Actor Bill Nye “the science guy” attributed the New Orleans floods to climate change and warned worse was yet to come. Predictably, sharing his view was Al Gore and the Greens presidential candidate (we will see “yards of sea level rise” in 50 years). 

Michael Mann also got into the act spouting inaccurate statements about what constitutes likelihoods of one in 1000 year events; he was chided by Tallbloke for these.

Party spoilsport this time round was the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) which concluded “no evidence was found for changes in extreme precipitation attributable to climate change in the available observed record.”

Propaganda by the media

English celebrity scientist Brian Cox was brought to Australia to promote global warming.  He appeared with climate expert and newly elected senator Malcolm Roberts on the widely watched ABC program Q&A.  Among Cox’s comments was the canard that 97 per cent of scientists agree with global warming (a figure derived from Queensland University's John Cook and utterly discredited). Cox brought with him a chart purportedly showing how global warming was accelerating.  He tried to ridicule Roberts for contesting the numbers, and was widely praised by such climate luminaries as Eric Idle and J.K Rowling.

Actually the chart Cox produced used data that had been manipulated to depict earlier periods as cooler than the data actually recorded, thereby “confirming” global warming.  Jennifer Marohasy shows the amateurish if not deliberately misleading nature of Cox’s assertions and has demonstrated how the data in Australia has been modified to provide spurious evidence of warming.

And here from Tony Heller is the NASA data from 1999 “corrected” with the inconveniently warmer 19th century data omitted. 

Absent from Cox’s charts was this one showing the earth has not warmed very much during the 40 years for which we have good (satellite based) data.  In contrast to the climate models, the actual trend, labeled "real world" below, is in line with the theoretical 1.2°C warming from the doubling of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide that is the widely agreed effect without the controversial amplification due to water vapour.

All this manipulation, exaggeration and mysticism gives even greater credence to an excellent new book by Michael Hart Hubris: The Troubling Science, Economics, and Politics of Climate Change.  Hart argues the “official science, the alliance of governments and bogus science, is a form of immorality pretending to be virtue”.  He maintains, “the real issue is the hunger for power to change economic and political systems in order to achieve a wide-ranging agenda. In the words of former UNFCCC Secretary Christiana Figueres, the goal of ‘the whole climate change process is the complete transformation of the economic structure of the world’.”

The pestilence of cost impositions

Ross McKitrick writes that Ontario’s wholesale electricity price, thanks in large part to the shale gas revolution, has trended down to two to three cents per kwh.  But consumers also have to pay a green power levy that adds another 10 -11 cents.  He says, “Electricity is cheaper to make than it’s been for a generation, yet Ontarians are paying more than ever.”

Australian Energy and Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg confronts the same issues and addressed them on 28 August’s Viewpoint (see podcast at 16 minutes).  Acknowledging that wind requirements create much dearer electricity, he said that the Labor Opposition and state Labor governments have even more ambitious and costly goals.  Australia, he maintained, should offset this by producing more electricity from gas (a route State governments are preventing).

Shareholders of major Australian corporate moocher, Infigen, are seeing payoffs from the firm’s lobbying for subsidies.  Infigen’s 2016 reported profit increased by 44 per cent.  Most revenues came from renewable energy subsidies, the value of which increased 81 per cent last year, when wind’s subsidy averaged $70 per MWh, about tenfold its current EU equivalence. 

At least Australia now seems likely to cut one part of its scandalous renewable energy charity, the $1.2 billion ARENA funding vehicle.  But, as its former CEO (and prior to that BP CEO) Greg Bourne shows in this interview, the agency will not go quietly.

On Catallaxy Files I suggest the commitments made as part of December’s UN Paris agreement mean that Australia, under its current leadership, can only escape further costs if a Trump victory unravels the whole of the Paris Climate edifice.  Undermining one alternative to voting for Trump, the Libertarian Presidential candidate, Gary Johnson channelled his inner Julia Gillard and advocated a carbon tax, a position he has since reversed.

The US and China are reported to be about to ratify the Paris agreement. Jo Nova, pointing out that ratification presently covers countries producing only 1.1 per cent of emissions, quizzes the possibility of this when Obama has not introduced a treaty into Congress. Former adviser David Wirth takes the view that the Paris Agreement is not a treaty (it uses non-binding “should” rather than “shall” language) and a “ratification” would be constitutional and simply be pressure to make the agreement's unscrambling more difficult.  

Giving purpose to Obama’s objective, left wing “think tank” Demos (founded in 1993 by the former Marxism Today editor) produced a report claiming horrendous losses for the millennials from climate change unless we act now and comprehensively. “Without action on climate change, a 21-year-old earning a median income will lose $100,000 in lifetime income, and $142,000 in wealth.” Even warming alarmist Ronald Bailey finds these data a tad embellished and points out that on the database the Demos study uses, if comprehensive measures are taken to reduce emissions per capita, incomes of the millennials would be half of what they’d be in a version of business-as-usual.

New crises de jour 

Climate change is thought likely to lead to a doubling of hay fever sufferings. This is not perhaps as serious as the climate change induced anthrax plague allegedly sweeping Siberia, an attribution that is derided on WUWT.

But how cute? - an Australian study found zebra finches may be actually singing songs that help prepare their chicks so they are born and grow with more likelihood to survive in a warming climate.

And, just to illustrate how mankind is rectifying the damage from its carbon spewing activities, we are relocating some West Australian tortoises threatened by climate change.  

But no such luck for the Bramble Cay rodent which has become extinct supposedly due to climate change on the Great Barrier Reef, though at least one voice suggests its demise was due to other causes – loss of feed due to success of other species in its habitat.

There's an impending coffee catastrophe. Australia’s very own alarmist outfit, the Climate Institute reckons, “climate change is projected to cut the global area suitable for coffee production by as much as 50% by 2050”.  Great news for tea, cocoa and chicory producers!

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