Author: Gareth

Exclusive: Flat Earth Society appeal to NZ climate sceptics – join us!

discworld.jpgAs New Zealand’s climate “science” coalition, in the guise of the NZ Climate Science Education Trust gets its day in court in its long running attempt to get the NZ temperature record declared invalid, a mole inside the Flat Earth Society has sent me the text of a letter being handed out to the CSET and its representatives outside the High Court in Auckland this morning. It is self-explanatory…

Updated 10-40am: By the miracle of modern technology, we have an image of the Flat Earthers in action, or perhaps inaction…

FESoc

An Open Letter and Appeal to Lords Terence Dunleavy and Bryan Leyland of the Climate Science Education Trust.

On this day 16 July in the year 2012 in the Northern Township of Auckland, Middle Earth.

On the Occasion of the Lords’ Good Endeavours to Strike Down the temperature muddlings of the Dark Lords of the National Institution of Water and Atmosphere in the High Court of our Land.

Hear Ye Honourable and Esteemed Lords of Middle Earth.

We of the Flat Earth Society would like to extend to you a hand of friendship and solidarity.

For too long charlatans have used the black magic of peer-reviewed science to hide truthes from the public. They have falsified moon landings, spread the lie of global warming, and most dastardly of all, they say the earth is round! We at the Flat Earth Society have had centuries of experience in dealing with such fabrications.

At last, we have found another, like-minded group of lonely souls such as the Climate Science Education Trust who are bravely fighting the wave of charlatan science.

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State of the climate 2011: extreme heat our fault

This year’s State of the Climate report [PDF], covering 2011, was published yesterday, and has made headline news around the world because of its focus on weather extremes. Can we blame some of the extremes of heat and heavy rain on continued warming? The answer — based on a new global effort to look at attribution of six of 2011’s extreme events — is yes. However, Dr Peter Dr Peter Stott, Head of Climate Monitoring and Attribution at the Met Office, and one of the lead authors of the extremes research said:

… we didn’t find evidence that climate change has affected the odds of all the extreme weather events we looked at, [but] we did see that some events were significantly more likely. Overall we’re seeing that human influence is having a marked impact on some types of extreme weather.

The UK Met Office summarised some of the key findings:

  • December 2010 was the second coldest and November 2011 the second warmest in the Central England temperature record dating back to 1659. The extreme warm average temperature in November 2011 is 60 times more likely to have occurred than in the 1960s. The change in odds of the extremely cold December was considerably less, however, being only about half as likely. Even without climate change, unusual circulation patterns can still bring very cold winter months.
  • In 2011, Texas had its hottest and driest summer in records dating back to 1895. While the heat wave was associated with La Nina conditions in the Pacific Ocean, the heat wave was 20 times more likely in such conditions than it would have been only 50 years ago.
  • There were some remarkable temperatures across Western Europe in 2011. Comparisons to the temperatures previously associated with the weather patterns seen in 2011 reveal the year was almost 1.5 deg C warmer than can be attributed to weather patterns alone.

The paper dealing with the attribution exercise, Explaining Extreme Events Of 2011 From A Climate Perspective, by Peterson et al (BAMS, July 2012, pdf here) is well worth a read.

Below the fold: the full abstract of the State Of The Climate 2011 report – an excellent short form overview of the year…

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Welcome to the rest of our lives

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Here’s an excellent new video from Peter Sinclair, contrasting the recent weather disasters in the USA with the “we’ll adapt” line recently run by ExxonMobil boss Rex Tillerson. It’s a powerful message, to which I would only add one thought: this is only the beginning.

Roughan’s ready theory

John Roughan has a theory. The New Zealand Herald‘s columnist and leader writer waxes lyrical this week about the discovery of the Higgs boson bringing excitement back to science — science having been made dull by being “dominated by environmentalism” for too long. Others may wish to make fun of Roughan’s somewhat incoherent take on particle physics:

The glimpse of the ‘Higgs boson’, or something like it, allows minds to boggle on the existence of “dark matter” and the possibility there really is a dimension to the world that is beyond human sensory perception.

Who knows where that knowledge will lead? Next they will work out how to control the particle, then they will remove it to enable things – people – to travel at the speed necessary to explore the galaxy.

But bring it on, I say. Let’s get the Roughan-Higgs drive patented. That’s a new technology that could really drive the economic transformation of New Zealand. Truly ground-breaking stuff from a political columnist.

Roughan’s real theory, sadly, is much more mundane, and amounts to little more than an extended and ill-educated rant against environmentalism.

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The truth is molten

Extreme weather events are where the climate change rubber hits the road, and if events over the last month are anything to go by, global warming is currently doing doughnuts and burnouts on tarmac right round the globe. Kevin Trenberth put it rather nicely in an interview with PBS Newshour in the US: “This is a view of the future, so watch out.” John Vidal in The Guardian sums up the situation rather well:

…how much more extreme weather does it take for governments and individuals to act, or for the oil companies to withdraw from the Arctic, or the media to link global warming with the events now being witnessed around the world? Must the sea boil, the Seine run dry, New York flood and the London Olympics be consumed by fire before countries are shocked into taking concerted action?

Damn good question.

Continue reading “The truth is molten”