Tag: Bob Carter

Heaven is a place on earth

Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science

The Australian twin to Wishart’s Air Con is Professor Ian Plimer’s Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science, published last month. According to Bob Carter (in all his oleaginous glory here) on Leighton Smith’s Newstalk ZB programme recently it’s “an excellent book”. Carter assures Smith that “the authoritative science is in Ian Plimer’s book”. Fortunately, to save Hot Topic the chore of wading through Plimer’s prose, The Australian (noted for a tendency to push crank arguments) has published a most interesting review of Plimer’s opus by Michael Ashley, a professor of astrophysics at the University of New South Wales. What does he make of Plimer’s “authoritative science”?

Perhaps we will find a stitch-by-stitch demolition of climate science in his book, as promised? No such luck. The arguments that Plimer advances in the 503 pages and 2311 footnotes in Heaven and Earth are nonsense. The book is largely a collection of contrarian ideas and conspiracy theories that are rife in the blogosphere. The writing is rambling and repetitive; the arguments flawed and illogical.

Just like Wishart then.

Plimer has done an enormous disservice to science, and the dedicated scientists who are trying to understand climate and the influence of humans, by publishing this book. It is not “merely” atmospheric scientists that would have to be wrong for Plimer to be right. It would require a rewriting of biology, geology, physics, oceanography, astronomy and statistics. Plimer’s book deserves to languish on the shelves along with similar pseudo-science such as the writings of Immanuel Velikovsky and Erich von Daniken.

[Hat tip: Deltoid]
See also; Prof Barry Brooke’s review of Plimer’s book.
[Belinda Carlisle]

Unreliable witness

NZETS.jpgDuring my appearance before the ETS Review committee earlier this month I was asked by committee chairperson Peter Dunne to comment on the evidence presented by the submitters who appeared immediately before me — McCabe Environmental Services, being one Bruce McCabe and Kathleen Ryan-McCabe. ACT member John Boscawen was clearly wondering how two sets of evidence could present such diametrically opposed interpretations of the basic facts.

The committee secretariat were kind enough to provide me with a recording of the McCabe’s oral evidence, as well as their written submission. My comments on the MEC submission were delivered to the committee on April 22nd, and are now available on the parliamentary web site here (direct link to PDF). The McCabe’s evidence is here. Not to put too fine a point on it, the MEC evidence is wrong in just about every material respect, choosing as they did to rely on Fred Singer’s Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change booklet as their primary source. You’ll find chapter and verse in my evidence, but I also took the opportunity to provide the committee with a quick list of arguments that signal the presence of cranks arguing for inaction:

  • Cooling since 1998, 2001, 2005, etc
  • There is no correlation between CO2 and temperature…
  • Climate models cannot forecast the future/are unvalidated…
  • Future warming from CO2 will be tiny/the greenhouse effect doesn’t work the way the IPCC thinks it does.
  • The hockey stick is broken.
  • The sun/sunspots/cosmic rays are the real cause.
  • “There is no consensus” or “The science is not settled”.
  • Any mention of Al Gore.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to see how Bob Carter’s evidence (given today) stacks up against that list…

[PS: At the recent European Geophysical Union meeting Fred Singer’ announced his NIPCC is not yet dead. Apparently there’s an 800 page report due this year. Must be costing Heartland a fortune…]

Hows about telling a story

NZETS.jpgPeter Dunne’s assurance that the ETS Review process won’t turn into a re-examination of climate science is set to run into a few problems. Looking through the full list of submitters who will make oral presentations to the committee (below the fold), I count no fewer than eleven (plus one “possible”) who will or have already argued the crank position — and remarkably, that includes two Hungarian scientists (Miklos Zagoni and Ferenc Miskolczi) who assert that the greenhouse effect doesn’t work the way we think it does, and that global warming is therefore not a problem — even though their views, and “calculations” have been extensively debunked. M&Z are effectively on the furthest reaches of the climate crank fringe, and yet they’ve been invited to give “evidence” to the ETS Review. I wonder who wangled that little feat, and if the chairman realises what he’s got in store?

You can watch Miskolczi and Zagoni in action in Heartland’s 2008 crankfest “proceedings“. Rabett Run and others comprehensively rebutted the Miskolczi paper last year, and even the ever-welcoming Heartland didn’t ask M&Z for a repeat performance this year. So why are they turning up in New Zealand? It appears that Zagoni is in Australia visiting relatives, so perhaps he’s just arranged a holiday for himself and his friend Ferenc to coincide with his submission date (set for May 4th). What a lucky coincidence! I wonder if they have had any help with their airfares? That would seem like a fair question for someone on the committee to ask, if they want to get to the Heart of why their valuable time is being so egregiously wasted.

The ETS Review crank list in full:
Bryan Leyland, Carbon Sense Coalition (Australia), Centre for Resource Management Studies (aka Owen McShane), Dr Ferenc Miskolczi, Dr Kesten Green, McCabe Environmental Consultants(*), Miklos Zagoni, NZ Centre for Political Research, NZ Climate Science Coalition, Dr R M Carter, Vincent Gray.

NZ attendees at Heartland conferences (2008 and/or 2009) underlined. Muriel Newman’s NZ CPR was one of this year’s “sponsors”, but she didn’t have to fork out any money for that privilege, just proselytize. (*) Not known. To see full list of submitters making oral presentations click on “now read on…”.

Continue reading “Hows about telling a story”

Bob’s big lie

homer.jpgTime to revisit events at crank central. In the course of researching the NIPCC (at the behest of Peter Dunne), I popped over to the International Climate Science Coalition site, and then on to their Australian spin-off. The Aussie crank collective is greatly enriched by the presence of Prof Bob Carter, known here as “the great communicator” because of his accomplished presentation skills and ability to make outrageous nonsense sound almost plausible. The ACSC points to Prof Bob’s latest article for Aussie magazine Quadrant, and so — noting that one R M Carter is due to give evidence to the ETS Review committee at some point — I thought I ought to catch up on the great man’s current thinking. Prepare yourself for a jaw/desk interface event:

Get this. First, there has been no recent global warming in the common meaning of the term, for world average temperature has cooled for the last ten years. Furthermore, since 1940 the earth has warmed for nineteen years and cooled for forty-nine, the overall result being that global average temperature is now about the same as it was in 1940.

Global average temperature is now “about the same” as it was 69 years ago? Obviously, the “cooling since 1998” lie no longer cuts the mustard. Bob has to bend the facts beyond breaking point to bolster his case. Here’s the NASA GISS graph:

GISS409.gif

And here’s the Hadley Centre version:

Hadley409.gif

It is quite clear that global temperature is only “about the same as 1940” for definitions of “about the same” that consider variations ±0.5ºC to be inconsequential. You might as well say that because the world hasn’t warmed by 10ºC then it hasn’t warmed at all. But if you do that, then you can’t also insist that the world has cooled since 1998…

And how on Earth (or off it), did Research Professor Robert Carter of the James Cook University (Queensland) and the University of Adelaide work out that the world has warmed for 19 years but cooled for 49 since 1940? He must have a sophisticated statistical analysis to bring to bear on the topic. Or perhaps he has been counting all the little ups and downs in the GISS graph… Great science, by a great… something or other.

Two tribes

Cheatin Heartland On the one hand, in New York, the Heartland Institute‘s climate crank talking shop, where scientists of the immense probity of Richard Lindzen were happy to share a stage with proven fabricators of data like Christopher Monckton, has drawn to a close. Terry Dunleavy, head honcho of NZ’s climate crank coalition has given his presentation, and no doubt Muriel Newman is happy that her NZ Centre for Policy Research sponsorship of the event has been fruitful. The crank blogosphere has loved the attention, and the great communicator himself (step forward Bob Carter) has been positively chortling about the event in his posts at Quadrant Online.

On the other hand, a proper conference, Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions is just getting under way in Copenhagen. Real scientists from all over the world, leaders in their fields, are gathering to present the latest research findings. The objective is to provide a comprehensive update to the findings of the IPCC’s 2007 report, so that policymakers can go into the final phase of negotiations for a post-Kyoto deal with a clear picture of what the science is telling us about the climate system. Conference organiser, Prof Katherine Richardson of the University of Copenhagen provides more background in this interview at Nature Reports: Climate Change.

I’ll be covering news from the conference as it emerges, but the big news from day one: expect sea level rise of at least a metre by the end of the century. BBC coverage here, plus TimesOnline, the Herald reprints an Observer preview, New Scientist, and the conference press release for day one.

Two other interesting stories from day one (which I will return to, at some point): the “tipping point” for complete loss of the Greenland ice sheet may be further off than thought, and a French researcher gave a dire warning about permafrost carbon emissions.

[Frankie]