Author: Gareth

The larrikin lord returns

[youtube]hl2lShU6zD0[/youtube]

To welcome the Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (TVMOB, as Joe Romm dubs him, or even His Immaculate and Beneficent Highness, Lord Chris of a Kentish Village) to Australia, here’s Peter Sinclair’s latest Climate Crock — a look at Monckton’s claims to have invented a cure for multiple sclerosis, AIDs and the common cold. Also worth watching for a reminder of James Delingpole’s inability to cope with rational argument.

Unless you’ve been under a rock for the last week or so, you’ll know that Monckton made the news recently for calling the Australian government’s climate adviser Ross Garnaut a Nazi. He subsequently apologised, telling the Telegraph:

I have written to Ross Garnaut to withdraw unreservedly and to apologise humbly. What I said about his opinions was unparliamentary and unstatesmanlike.

Amazing. To make “unparliamentary” comments you first have to be a parliamentarian. Monckton is not now, nor has he ever been a member of either house of the British parliament. And to be unstatesmanlike you first have to be a statesman. The man’s self-delusions are clearly powerful, almost as powerful as his panacea.

Expect more coverage as the good Lord makes his stately progress across the lucky continent, but for some background to the organisation of climate denial in Australia and the potty peer’s international denial network, take a look at Graham Readfearn’s latest piece at The Drum. And Aussie academics are not happy that the Notre Dame University in Fremantle should be providing the Laird of anti-science with a platform, AFP reports.

Catch a fire (worst year since 1816)

The extraordinary sequence of extreme weather events during the last 18 months is probably the worst run of natural disasters since 1816, when a huge volcanic eruption at Mt Tambora cooled the earth enough to cause the famous “year without a summer“, according to a powerful blog post by Weather Underground founder Jeff Masters. He runs through the list, giving details of each:

  • Earth’s hottest year on record
  • Most extreme winter Arctic atmospheric circulation on record
  • Arctic sea ice: lowest volume on record, 3rd lowest extent
  • Record melting in Greenland, and a massive calving event
  • Second most extreme shift from El Niño to La Niña
  • Second worst coral bleaching year
  • Wettest year over land
  • Amazon rainforest experiences its 2nd 100-year drought in 5 years
  • Global tropical cyclone activity lowest on record
  • A hyperactive Atlantic hurricane season: 3rd busiest on record
  • A rare tropical storm in the South Atlantic
  • Strongest storm in Southwestern U.S. history
  • Strongest non-coastal storm in U.S. history
  • Weakest and latest-ending East Asian monsoon on record
  • No monsoon depressions in India’s Southwest Monsoon for 2nd time in 134 years
  • The Pakistani flood: most expensive natural disaster in Pakistan’s history
  • The Russian heat wave and drought: deadliest heat wave in human history
  • Record rains trigger Australia’s most expensive natural disaster in history
  • Heaviest rains on record trigger Colombia’s worst flooding disaster in history
  • Tennessee’s 1-in-1000 year flood kills 30, does $2.4 billion in damage

Continue reading “Catch a fire (worst year since 1816)”

The state of the ocean (dire)

[youtube]sup3XxHmBoo[/youtube]

Alex Rogers, Professor of Conservation Biology at the Department of Zoology at Oxford, and scientific director of the International Programme on the State of the Ocean describes the main problems affecting the global ocean — and discusses some of the things we could do to address them in this new video. The IPSO has just launched the summary of its forthcoming report on the state of the oceans ((Rogers, A.D. & Laffoley, D.d’A. 2011. International Earth system expert workshop on ocean stresses and impacts. Summary report. IPSO Oxford, 18 pp)) — PDF here. The key findings make sobering reading:

  • Human actions have resulted in warming and acidification of the oceans and are now causing increased hypoxia.
  • The speeds of many negative changes to the ocean are near to or are tracking the worst case scenarios from IPCC and other predictions. Some are as predicted, but many are faster than anticipated, and many are still accelerating.
  • The magnitude of the cumulative impacts on the ocean is greater than previously understood.
  • Timelines for action are shrinking.
  • Resilience of the ocean to climate change impacts is severely compromised by other stressors from human activities, including fisheries, pollution and habitat destruction.
  • Ecosystem collapse is occurring as a result of both current and emerging stressors.
  • The extinction threat to marine species is rapidly increasing.

The bottom line is not pretty:

[…] we now face losing marine species and entire marine ecosystems, such as coral reefs, within a single generation. Unless action is taken now, the consequences of our activities are at a high risk of causing, through the combined effect of climate change, over exploitation, pollution and habitat loss, the next globally significant extinction event in the ocean.

The report recommends immediate action on reduction of CO2 emissions, calls for a long list of actions to restore and protect marine ecosystems, and the formation of a new Global Ocean Compliance Commission to establish rules and regulations for the protection of the “high seas” — the ocean beyond national jurisdictions.

This is a cri du coeur from the world’s ocean scientists. We ignore it at our peril…

[See also Climate Progress, and the NZ Herald. The IPSO site also has more videos from workshop participants, and a great ocean cycles graphic.]

A note on readership, and a challenge

What is it with so-called sceptics and dodgy statistics? Is comprehension failure a precondition for believing six impossible things before breakfast, or does wishful thinking trump all common sense? It can’t be an unwillingness to do research, because they find cherries in the most unlikely places. Recently Richard Treadgold put his finger into the world of web statistics and pulled out a plum:

Just a quick note to draw your attention to a new feature on the sidebar: scroll down one page and you should see it. There’s a little table showing the recent Alexa rankings for the Climate Conversation, SciBlogs and Hot Topic. At the moment we’re leading them by big margins.

[…] it’s humbling to see that this modest little blog is more popular and thousands more people visit it than other, brasher sites around the country that even get into the newspapers.

What should be humbling is the fact that Treadgold’s claim is almost certainly nonsense. To show this, I need to explain something about web statistics — and in particular the Alexa metric Treadgold has discovered. Apologies for this detour off the climate beat — normal service will be resumed shortly…

Continue reading “A note on readership, and a challenge”

Lazy old Garth

Some things you can rely on: death, taxes and Garth George. Yes, that wondrous old curmudgeon has published another piece that owes a heavy debt to the work of another. In the Otago Daily Times a couple of weeks ago he devoted an entire column to an espousal of a climate sceptic rant by Professor William Happer, recently published at a US right wing Christian web site. Let us not be too distracted by the fact that Happer’s opus is nonsense — that is what we expect of the wilder fringes of climate denial — but let’s look at the treatment Garth gives it: three short introductory sentences, then:

Prof Happer’s dissertation on greenhouse gasses and global warming runs to some 4500 words.

Here are some highlights.

His introduction is 153 words out of the 851 in the column (a mere 18%). The remainder is a thinly paraphrased or directly quoted lift from Happer’s article. Garth’s serial plagiarism of the work of others would be funny if it wasn’t being paid for by respected newspapers. We know that Garth is a fool, because we can read what he writes about climate change. But he is also making fools of some of the leading newspapers in this country. Who is the more foolish: the plagiarist or the people who pay him?