Climate change - the POLITICAL debate. Vol 2

[Jasandjules]

Mr GrimNasty said:

But who is researching the benefits, have any grants ever been allocated to research the benefits?

I believe the Minister for Bul**t and Tax Generation was asked this question and replied that there were no funds to research this, only the "dangers" of Global Warming...

[dickymint]

You only need to ask any large scale tomato grower to find out the benefits of tax gas!

[turbobloke]

Obama Ignored US Embassy’s Warnings On Climate Change Speech

Barack Obama defied the advice of his embassy in Canberra to deliver a stinging attack on the Abbott government’s climate policies in Brisbane last weekend. The US embassy, under the leadership of ambassador John Berry, advised the President, through his senior staff, not to couch his climate change comments in a way that would be seen as disobliging to the Abbott government, sources have revealed. Historians of the US-Australia relationship are unable to nominate a case of a visiting president making such a hostile speech for the host government.

The United States embassy in Canberra advised President Barack Obama not to make the provocative, anti-Abbott speech on climate change which he made at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. That the President acted against the advice of his own embassy reveals a deeply divided and in part dysfunctional Obama administration, unable to reconcile its foreign policy objectives and its domestic imperatives. Obama’s self-indulgent folly was in striking contrast to the masterful performances of China’s President Xi Jinping and India’s new Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Xi and Modi have both achieved almost everything they wanted from Asia’s season of summits. Obama has achieved almost nothing.

Greg Sheridan, The Australian, 22 November 2014

[Otispunkmeyer]

Is this true?
http://www.iflscience.com/environment/epa-barred-g...

[Blib]

Otispunkmeyer said:

Is this true?
http://www.iflscience.com/environment/epa-barred-g...

Is what true? That the EPA is a Green shill that needs a reality check? Yes, probably.

[Crush]

turbobloke said:

Obama Ignored US Embassy’s Warnings On Climate Change Speech

Barack Obama defied the advice of his embassy in Canberra to deliver a stinging attack on the Abbott government’s climate policies in Brisbane last weekend. The US embassy, under the leadership of ambassador John Berry, advised the President, through his senior staff, not to couch his climate change comments in a way that would be seen as disobliging to the Abbott government, sources have revealed. Historians of the US-Australia relationship are unable to nominate a case of a visiting president making such a hostile speech for the host government.

The United States embassy in Canberra advised President Barack Obama not to make the provocative, anti-Abbott speech on climate change which he made at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. That the President acted against the advice of his own embassy reveals a deeply divided and in part dysfunctional Obama administration, unable to reconcile its foreign policy objectives and its domestic imperatives. Obama’s self-indulgent folly was in striking contrast to the masterful performances of China’s President Xi Jinping and India’s new Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Xi and Modi have both achieved almost everything they wanted from Asia’s season of summits. Obama has achieved almost nothing.

Greg Sheridan, The Australian, 22 November 2014

Imagine the media uproar if Bush had done the same?

I like the comment

"Obama’s self-indulgent folly was in striking contrast to the masterful performances of China’s President Xi Jinping and India’s new Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Xi and Modi have both achieved almost everything they wanted from Asia’s season of summits. Obama has achieved almost nothing."

[LongQ]

Blib said:

Otispunkmeyer said:

Is this true?
http://www.iflscience.com/environment/epa-barred-g...

Is what true? That the EPA is a Green shill that needs a reality check? Yes, probably.

Reads like a Red Top headline article short on considered logic.

How much of it is based on facts I don't know but the EPA, as the article points out, has been a political football since it was set up.

I note:

" Of the 51 members of the SAB, three come from the industries the EPA is regulating. Stewart wants more, saying, "All we're asking is that there be some balance to those experts…We're losing valuable insight and valuable guidance because we don't include them in the process."

51 members, 3 of whom represent the industries the EPA regulates. Forgetting the political battles over numbers of representatives of each side of a "2 party system" 3 out of 51 dos not seem very balanced.

Moreover the headline used for the piece, "EPA Barred From Getting Advice From Scientists" looks extremely misleading in that context.

Irrespective of ones views of Big Science and Big Business I can't see that 48 to 3 balance being adjusted by a few seats can be seen as a " Bar From Getting Advice From Scientists".

Given some of the decisions the EPA has made in recent years and some of the regulatory positions it has assumed for itself one might anyway question the quality and objectivity of the "Scientists" involved.

Realistically the EPA seems to be just one more political battleground. The article title seems to be intent on playing in that arena.

[dickymint]

I missed this little gem back in July..............

http://toryaardvark.com/2014/07/21/uk-guardian-adm...

[turbobloke]

dickymint said:

I missed this little gem back in July..............

http://toryaardvark.com/2014/07/21/uk-guardian-adm...

You have to ask, what's left of The Guardian?!

[turbobloke]

Then you realise that the biggest spike on the left of the image is a naturally occurring El Nino event (same as for the second biggest peak in 2010) and it looks even worse for MMUGW.

Monckton said:

The possibility that the Pause is occurring because the computer models are simply wrong about the sensitivity of temperature to manmade greenhouse gases can no longer be dismissed.

Fair enough but still a NSS moment.

McKitrick's approach got to 19 years already.

[turbobloke]

Thicker than previously thought, and not just political greens.

An underwater robot has shown the ice is much thicker than previously thought, (new study in Nature Geoscience, 24 Nov), about twice as thick.

Climate models say sea ice should not be doing that. Naughty sea ice. Clearly the models are right and the sea ice is wrong.

[London424]

turbobloke said:

Thicker than previously thought, and not just political greens.

An underwater robot has shown the ice is much thicker than previously thought, (new study in Nature Geoscience, 24 Nov), about twice as thick.

Climate models say sea ice should not be doing that. Naughty sea ice. Clearly the models are right and the sea ice is wrong.

Here's a link

http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2014/11/remote-con...

[turbobloke]

Thanks for the link L424.

In other news, the LIA (as well as the MWP) was global.

A team of UK researchers has shed new light on the climate of the Little Ice Age, and rekindled debate over the role of the sun in climate change. The new study, which involved detailed scientific examination of a peat bog in southern South America, indicates that the most extreme climate episodes of the Little Ice Age were felt not just in Europe and North America, which is well known, but apparently globally. These extreme times coincide with periods when it is known that the sun was unusually quiet. In the late 17th to mid-18th centuries it had very few sunspots—fewer even than during the run of recent cold winters in Europe, which other UK scientists have linked to a relatively quiet sun.
University of Gloucestershire, 18 November 2014

The global nature of the MWP was already documented (by me) on PH with literature references covering sites across both hemispheres including t'sea surface and the poles. For those who can't remember back to 2009 and earlier:

MWP was global research. China: De'Er Zhang (1994); New Zealand: Cook et. al. (2002); South Africa: Tyson et. al. (2000), also Huffman (1996); N America: Arseneault and Payette (1997); South America: Cioccale (1999); Europe: Hiller et al. (2001), also Brooks and Birks (2001), and Filippi et al. (1999), plus Niggemann et al. (2003) [covering Russia, Norway, Scotland, Switzerland and Germany]; Arctic: Jennings and Weiner (1996); Antarctic: ice core from the eastern Bransfield Basin clearly identifies the MWP; SST: Keigwin (1996).

Now we have the LIA as well, this is checkmate and any remaining hockey stick splinters can be swept and binned.

[rovermorris999]

According to the World Bank, we're already doomed.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-284...

[turbobloke]

rovermorris999 said:

According to the World Bank, we're already doomed.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-284...

That'll be due to this here accelerating global warming we all know about and see around us.

Hang on a mo...

LitSearch Alert! 100% Consensus!! Read all about it!!! Scientists Say IPCC Is Wrong!!!! Shocker!!!!!

"We didn’t find a single paper on the topic that argued the rate of global warming has not slowed (or even stopped) in recent years” say scientists Patrick Michaels and Chip Knappenberger. "This is in direct opposition to the IPCC’s contention that global warming is accelerating,"

Tsk, schoolboy error there. The data don't matter. If computer climate models say scorchio then that's reality and real reality freezing is wrong, also a global warming slowdown to standstill really can be accelerating global warming at the same time - it makes perfect sense.



In other news, the IPCC will be doing stand-up this winter instead of their usual pantomime.

[Lotus 50]

turbobloke said:

Thicker than previously thought, and not just political greens.

An underwater robot has shown the ice is much thicker than previously thought, (new study in Nature Geoscience, 24 Nov), about twice as thick.

Climate models say sea ice should not be doing that. Naughty sea ice. Clearly the models are right and the sea ice is wrong.

If you actually read the blog/paper it just says that scientists have used a new system for measuring the thickness of the ice and it's thicker than they thought. It doesn't say anything about whether or not the ice has got thicker or thinner over time (i.e. it may well have been thicker all along).

"Most sea ice around Antarctica melts during the summer and refreezes in winter. Past research has suggested the ice is about a metre thick on average, reaching up to five metres in some places.

But the new research suggests those estimates might be on the low side, with more than 90 per cent of ice thicker than one metre, 40 per cent thicker than three metres, and almost 20 per cent thicker than five metres. The data suggests some areas of sea ice are as thick as 16 metres.

'A huge step forward'

The new data about ice thickness allows the scientists to better understand what's happening to sea ice around Antarctica.

Satellite records show the winter extent of sea ice is increasing in some regions of Antarctica, while decreasing in others. Overall, sea ice extent has been increasing by around 17,000 square kilometres per year since the late 1970s, though loss of Arctic sea ice at the North Pole is over three times greater.

But observations show the Southern Ocean that surrounds the Antarctic is warming faster than the other oceans.

Scientists think there could be several reasons that this is happening, though what exactly is going on is proving hard to pin down. These include refreezing of meltwater from ice shelves, changes in wind patterns caused by the hole in the ozone layer, and changes in ocean currents stopping warm water from rising to the surface.

Co-author Dr Guy Williams tells us that the research could help scientists understand what's going on:

"While we have not measured all Antarctic sea ice thickness and cannot state if it is getting thicker [or not], this study is a huge step towards the sort of expanded and more routine measurements we will need to do to truly answer these questions."

So it may be too soon to tell if Antarctic sea ice is getting thicker as well as covering a larger area as temperatures rise. But the new research is a taster of the information scientists will need to find out, and the technology that is helping them to get it."

Edited by Lotus 50 on Monday 24th November 19:01

[Diderot]

But I thought the science was settled and the debate was over. And that we only had 50 days/3 yrs/5yrs/7yrs (delete as the fancy takes you or should that be fantasy) to save the planet.

Climate science. Oxymoron.

[turbobloke]

Lotus 50 said:

turbobloke said:

Thicker than previously thought, and not just political greens.

An underwater robot has shown the ice is much thicker than previously thought, (new study in Nature Geoscience, 24 Nov), about twice as thick.

Climate models say sea ice should not be doing that. Naughty sea ice. Clearly the models are right and the sea ice is wrong.

If you actually read the blog/paper it just says that scientists have used a new system for measuring the thickness of the ice and it's thicker than they thought. It doesn't say anything about whether or not the ice has got thicker or thinner over time (i.e. it may well have been thicker all along).

And what I said was, the sea ice is thicker than previously thought. Now you're telling me that the sea ice is thicker than previously thought. Thanks.

As I posted the news in the first place I might just have read the available information, and where in my brief comment did I mention a trend over time?

Whatever the measure and trend may be there's no established causality to anthropogenic emissions in ice mass changes so this isn't evidence of manmadeup warming anywhichway.

[turbobloke]

Diderot said:

But I thought the science was settled and the debate was over. And that we only had 50 days/3 yrs/5yrs/7yrs (delete as the fancy takes you or should that be fantasy) to save the planet.

Climate science. Oxymoron.

Back in 1846 the Australian aborigines might well have thought they had less than 50 days/3 yrs/5yrs/7yrs left, and all because white guys aren't cool.



We're all still here, some more than others

[don4l]

turbobloke said:

Lotus 50 said:

turbobloke said:

Thicker than previously thought, and not just political greens.

An underwater robot has shown the ice is much thicker than previously thought, (new study in Nature Geoscience, 24 Nov), about twice as thick.

Climate models say sea ice should not be doing that. Naughty sea ice. Clearly the models are right and the sea ice is wrong.

If you actually read the blog/paper it just says that scientists have used a new system for measuring the thickness of the ice and it's thicker than they thought. It doesn't say anything about whether or not the ice has got thicker or thinner over time (i.e. it may well have been thicker all along).

And what I said was, the sea ice is thicker than previously thought. Now you're telling me that the sea ice is thicker than previously thought. Thanks.

I wonder if the problem is that some posters are thicker than previously thought??