Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Open Thread

By

“A pessimist sees the difficult in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” – Winston Churchill

Photograph of Jennifer Marohasy by Lyndon Mechielsen
Photograph of Jennifer Marohasy by Lyndon Mechielsen

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Jennifer Marohay says

    I will be posting information on temperatures for various location about Australian here…

    http://jennifermarohasy.com/temperatures/

    There is already a link to everything you might want to know about Rutherglen…

    http://jennifermarohasy.com/temperatures/rutherglen/

    Of course Ken Stewart’s blog is always a good place for understanding homogenisation… for example… http://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/2011/10/24/the-australian-temperature-record-part-10-bom’s-“explanations”/

  5. Johnathan Wilkes says

    Jen, Tom is alright even if of the soft left as so many of the wealthy socialists tend to be. That aspect of human behavior intrigued me for some time. Is it guilt?

  7. egg says

    Stenhouse et al did a survey on American Meteorological Society (AMS) members to see if they adhered to groupthink.

    ‘Climate science experts who publish mostly on climate change and climate scientists who publish mostly on other topics were the two groups most likely to be convinced that humans have contributed to global warming, with 93% of each group indicating their concurrence.

    ‘The two groups least likely to be convinced of this were the nonpublishing climate scientists and nonpublishing meteorologists/ atmospheric scientists, at 65% and 59%, respectively. In the middle were the two groups of publishing meteorologists/atmospheric scientists at 79% and 78%, respectively.’

  8. spangled drongo says

    Well put on 3AW, Jen.

    It’s a POV that is rarely heard on radio and there needs to be a lot more of the same.

    Jonathan, many of those once-wealthy socialists have now lost their jobs and hopefully their guilt may soon follow.

  10. Itz Me says

    If the co2 rate was going down instead of up or the earths temps were falling then we would really have something to worry about. It would mean extinction of all life in very little time.

  12. Neville says

    This new study finds that ice mass is stable or increasing over most of Antarctica and where there is some melt like the WAIS there is a presence of geo-thermal warming.

    http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com.au/2014/08/new-paper-shows-ice-mass-stable-to.html This is the opposite to what the models predicted and it was thought that Antarctica would lose ice mass because of AGW.

    http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com.au/2014/08/new-paper-shows-ice-mass-stable-to.html

  13. Itz Me says

    Why are religious cranks like the catastrophe obsessed climate clowns allowed take control of the world based on a manufactured crisis ?

  15. spangled drongo says

    For Mr Cole it is a simple matter of trusting the care and attention of his father. “Why should you change manually created records?” Mr Cole said. “At the moment they (BOM) are saying we have a warming climate but if the old figures are used we have a cooling climate.”

  16. Dr Ken Lynn says

    I am an ionospheric physicist which is not of immediate relevance to climate science though the CCM (versions 1 to now 4) shows an increasing ability to couple correctly the troposphere into the ionosphere. I see no problem with you producing a superior means of short range local scale forecasting based on comparisons between theory and experiment. However it is an enormous leap to jump from that scale to an assumption that global warming is a myth. I would suggest that there are far too many variables here which lie outside your area of expertise not to mention the mathematics involved. I guess I would like to be clear on where you stand on a few fundamentals.
    1. Do you agree that there are such a thing as green house gases. If you disagree here then there is no point in going on. This to me is fundamental physics which explains the ability of the atmosphere to stabilise the earths surface temperature and allow life as we know it.
    2. If CO2 is a significant green house gas then its increase will inevitably increase the amount of trapped solar energy. The only question then is where this energy is going and the consequences.
    3. You correctly point out the importance of cyclic phenomenon and I think you recognise that this has to be taken into account against the background co2 warming. However I am not so sure that you recognise that such cyclic phenomena require physical explanations not just acceptance.
    4. I would think that from the geological record many physicist and mathematicians would see the earths climate as intrinsically unstable over any time frame and that quite minor changes can have profound effects e.g the ice age cycle.
    5. Your work has pulled all the usual climate deniers out of the wood work and feeds the extreme bias of the Austra;ian newspaper for example. I don’t think this at all helpful.

  17. Moderator Ray says

    Dr Lynn, I am merely a layman, and I have trouble reconciling the BOM’s opinion that they, in the 21st Century, have a better idea of the true temperatures in the 20th Century then the people who were there on the ground at the time. For their own research purposes, I don’t care what the BOM does with the recorded temperature data, but I DO take exception with them later claiming to have produced a more accurate record of prior temperatures as a result of that research, & then expecting Australian government policy to be changed because of it. It is rubbish that they can claim recorded data is wrong simply because other locations hundred’s of kilometres away recorded different temperatures. I see it on the TV weather reports every night that locations only a few kilometres apart very rarely record the same temperatures. I know that BOM claims the trends are not altered by their changes, but if that were true, they would not need to make the changes in the first place.

  18. Dr Ken Lynn says

    Dear Moderator, To me you miss the point of the discussion entirely. To identify a nett effect over large geographic distances and times it is necessary to integrate the changes which is what the homogenising process is all about. That average will never match the record at a single location but that is not its intention.

  19. Robert says

    Dr Lynn, I was surprised when you used the potentially manipulative term “global warming” without clarification or qualification. Hijacked language is a bad way to start. I won’t try to untangle all that.

    I actually believe in global warming in the common English sense of those words. I also believe in some slight anthro influence on climate (why not?) and would like to see more reforestation etc to gobble up any extra CO2 that might be about. Use it or lose it! The Great White Elephants of the klimatariat are another matter.

    Tell me, as I emerge from the denialist woodwork, why this latest bump in holocene temps looks like yet another warming in a long concatenation of warmings and coolings in the last ten thousand years; why the most recent dribble of sea level rise (since the late 1700s) should not be expected; and why notoriously variable Arctic ice should suddenly go stable. I won’t exhaust everybody, including myself, by listing yet again all the climate extremes which have exceeded the doozies of recent decades. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about there – but let me know if you don’t!

    You could have walked from Melbourne to Tassie a very brief ten thousand years ago. I dunno, I just feel there must have been an awful lot of something going on in past eras which one might justly call radical climate change. (But that’s term’s been taken, it seems!) And I find it hard to believe that after a brief disturbance post-Younger Dryas the climate just went stable till we angered Gaia back around 1980.

    I don’t insult anyone’s intelligence by assuming they believe in the Hockeystick (any marque). But there is a disturbing tendency among those who should know better to see climate as new and anthropogenic on the flimsiest of evidence. The climate is old and wild. The Hockeystick is new and anthropogenic.

    If you find the bias of the Australian extreme, you’ve still got plenty of green-tinged Murdoch journalism elsewhere to echo the pottiness of Fairfax, the ABC and the Guardian. Really, Dr Lynn, this amount of MSM propping of your cause may be as good as it gets. How much do you need?

    As for the suggestion to Jen to effectively keep quiet…I don’t think she will. Take the tip. I just don’t think that’s going to happen.

  20. Avatar photojennifer says

    Dr Ken

    Any net change over a large geographic area should be the sum of the changes within that geographic area.

    I care about the detail, the temperature trends at individual locations. Its the detail.

    And who was it that said, “Anyone who doesn’t take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either.” An amateur physicist, I think.

    Oh. And one more of my favourite quotes: “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, its wrong,” Richard P. Feynman.

    Cheers,

  21. Robert says

    Maths alone won’t do it for me.

    When they’re skiing in Rutherglen and picking tokay grapes in Cabramurra I’ll feel a lot easier about homogenisation. Of course, they’ll still need to be skiing in Cabra and making tokay in Rutherglen.

  22. Neville says

    I’ve been playing around with the WFTs graphs and looking at Phil Jones warming trends mentioned in his 2010 BBC interview. If you look at 1860 to 1880, 1910 to 1940 and 1975 to 1998 you find similar trend lines. This is using HAD 3 and I’ve extended the middle trend from 1907 to 1947 because the trend remains the same for a period of 41 years.

    http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1860/to:1880/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1907/to:1947/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1975/to:1998/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1910/to:1940/trend

    But the middle trend lines are definitely higher than the early and latest trend. So how does that work? The trend from 1975 to 1998 isn’t as high as 1910 to 1940 and 1907 to 1947, yet it is after 1950 when more co2 emissions are supposed to have the most impact. This just doesn’t make sense.

    But using HAD 4 does make the trend appear to be similar to 1975 to 1998. That’s for 1907 to 1947. 1910 to 1940 in HAD 4 reduces the trend slightly.

    http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1860/to:1880/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1907/to:1947/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1975/to:1998/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1910/to:1940/trend

  23. ferd berple says

    Such claims are demonstrably false. Indeed that our ANNs (see Atmospheric Research
    138, 166-178) can generate skillful monthly rainfall forecast up to three months in advance, is evidence that we are not dealing with a chaotic system.
    ========================
    The ocean tides are chaotic, yet can be predicted with great accuracy using orbital mechanics.

    Chaotic systems cannot be predicted from first principles, because all futures diverge numerically. Errors accumulate instead of offsetting, and quickly overwhelm the result. However, this does not prevent prediction by other methods.

  25. Dr Ken Lynn says

    Jennifer, I take it from your non-reply that you accept that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. After all you are a scientist. You talk about detail. Physicists are interested in the big picture. The non-scientists in your blog equate “natural” to “inexplicable”. It is the job of science to turn the inexplicable into the explicable and yes we have a long way to go. But anyone who thinks that releasing the carbon sequestered over millions of years back into the atmosphere in a few centuries is just not thinking clearly. Remember the human race is part of nature and can and does influence it. The population explosion of the human race is having an effect on the earth reminiscent of the introduction of rabbits into Australia. Controls are necessary.

    I wish you well with your efforts to improve weather prediction but I hope your efforts on global warming are not just an ego trip.

  26. Robert says

    Ken, where do you expect to find people who don’t know CO2 is a GHG? Why would anyone respond to such aimless patronising? Still, since we know little about the deep hydrosphere and next to nothing about the hot ball we live on (aka almost all the Earth), I can understand why it’s easier to just extrapolate from Arrhenius’ experiments. A glass receptacle and some modelling: so much less fatiguing, and one can keep a clear focus for advocacy and activism, all the sexy stuff.

    And Ken, your talk about humans and rabbits, and controls being necessary. Creepy. Wrong, but more importantly, creepy.

  27. Neville says

    Dr Ken I think you should take your protest to the non OECD if CO2 emissions are worrying you that much. See the numbers here for 2010 to 2040 projections.

    http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/ieo/table21.cfm But please tell us how the OECD countries can change anything because they will be almost flat-lining until 2040?
    And please tell us the reduction in temp you would expect if OZ reduced our emissions by 5% by 2020?

  28. Robert says

    Note where Ken invents characters to argue against:
    ‘The non-scientists in your blog equate “natural” to “inexplicable”.’

    Who is the non-scientist on this blog who says that or thinks that? Anybody? (Actually, I think Ken just felt like patronising.)

    What would be wonderful would be to see the climate billions (trillions?) going into actual science and research. A new IGY would be fantastic. The trouble is that any such grand initiative would be over-run by flim-flammers and dogmatists like Flannery and Turney. The Publish-or-Perish culture would drain away a lot of the necessary patience and curiosity. Maybe we dream.

    Meanwhile, we remain in underfunded ignorance of deep oceans, inner earth etc. What a tragedy this mad green frenzy has been, for everybody, including for conservation. Especially for conservation.

  29. egg says

    Green Energy Reject

    ‘The India Today article goes on to describe how Bihar citizens “want asli bijli (real electricity) from the government” and that village youngsters were carrying placards demanding “real source of energy“, and “not the fake solar powered” one.’

    – See more at: http://notrickszone.com/2014/08/28/worlds-poor-reject-half-modern-half-primitive-green-life-demand-real-electricity-not-fake-greenpeace-solar/#sthash.8nQj8EZ5.dpuf

  32. Larry Fields says

    Dr Ken Lynn August 31, 2014 at 9:50 am #
    “The population explosion of the human race is having an effect on the earth reminiscent of the introduction of rabbits into Australia. Controls are necessary.”

    The basics of human population dynamics are an essential part of Scientific Literacy 101. Your 19th Century understanding is deeply flawed.

    Moreover there’s a moral angle: Young adult population alarmists, who truly believe their slogans, should all get spayed or neutered as soon as possible, unlike the popular Canadian TV presenter, misanthrope and hypocrite, David Suzuki, who fathered five children!

    You can read about the Demographic Transition at wikipedia. Or you can just google on the subject, and take potluck. Here’s a link to a long, boring population article that I wrote and posted at HubPages.

    Larry’s Take on the Population Disinformation Bomb
    http://larryfields.hubpages.com/hub/Putting-Population-into-Perspective

  33. Dr Ken Lynn says

    Jennifers reply disappointed me. I lived through the rabbit plague and saw its effect on the Australian landscape before Myxomatosis. This is recent history apparently unknown to her. She never replied to my specific points because they are facts. Her main problem is she is young, naive and lacks science depth. On the plus side she will live long enough for these matters to be resolved by the remorseless development of the climate science she now doubts I hope she will have the scientific integrity to accept what she will see. As to climate change we will just have to adapt. I will leave it at that since long experience has taught me the futility of arguing with believers of almost anything. As Einstein said “there are only two things which are infinite, human stupidity and the universe and I am not so sure about the latter”

  34. Robert says

    “Jennifers reply disappointed me. I lived through the rabbit plague and saw its effect on the Australian landscape before Myxomatosis. This is recent history apparently unknown to her.”

    Ken, do you realise that, apart from its emotive and talk-down value (you do like to patronise!), your comment is completely senseless?

  35. Neville says

    Robert I have to agree with your summary of Ken’s latest post. It certainly doesn’t make a lot of sense does it? I notice once again we have someone who comes here but can’t answer any of our questions. But he’s right about using adaptation as our best strategy and he should understand that the so called mitigation of AGW is complete con and fraud.

    He should read the 2014 RS and NAS report and then he will find that there is zero we can do about co2 emissions or the climate for thousands of years anyway.
    https://royalsociety.org/policy/projects/climate-evidence-causes/question-20/

    BTW here is a transcript from Bolt’s interview today with Dick Warburton about the crazy RET scheme. We’ve already wasted 9 bn $ on this idiocy and unless it’s stopped we’ll waste another 22bn $ in the future. All for zero change to co2 emissions for thousands of years.

    http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/the_bolt_report_today_august_31/

  36. egg says

    ‘Do you agree that there are such a thing as green house gases. If you disagree here then there is no point in going on. This to me is fundamental physics which explains the ability of the atmosphere to stabilise the earths surface temperature and allow life as we know it.’

    The lull in temperatures over the past 17 years indicates that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas. The fundamental physics worked well in the models, but observation suggests the AGW theory is badly flawed.

    ‘If CO2 is a significant green house gas then its increase will inevitably increase the amount of trapped solar energy. The only question then is where this energy is going and the consequences.’

    It hasn’t gone into the oceans if that is what you are getting at. Carbon dioxide is a harmless trace gas, beneficial for all life on earth. The idea of trapped solar energy is pie in the sky, but I have no objection to discussing black body radiation if it makes you happy.

    ‘You correctly point out the importance of cyclic phenomenon and I think you recognise that this has to be taken into account against the background co2 warming. However I am not so sure that you recognise that such cyclic phenomena require physical explanations not just acceptance.’

    It may seem hard to believe in your fairytale world, but the sun actually plays an important part in the climate cycles on this planet. There is a lag and global cooling is about to king hit you and your profession.

    ‘I would think that from the geological record many physicist and mathematicians would see the earths climate as intrinsically unstable over any time frame and that quite minor changes can have profound effects e.g the ice age cycle.’

    You are wrong there, minor changes have little impact. Imagine the oscillations are switches which are periodically turned off by that bright shiny orb, its not intrinsically unstable but highly predictable. I can tell you what is coming and its not global warming.

    ‘Your work has pulled all the usual climate deniers out of the wood work and feeds the extreme bias of the Austra;ian newspaper for example. I don’t think this at all helpful.’

    This debate is certainly not helpful in paying off your mortgage, but if you are associated with a fraudulent scam then that is the end result. I think you should consider your future.

  37. Neville says

    Egg I still think co2 is a greenhouse gas but I think the feedbacks are negative and it will not be problem anyway. Also the co2 effect acts logarithmically, so this acts against their fears as well. IOW each new molecule of co2 added to the atmosphere has less ongoing impact as a GHG.

    BTW this graph of the PDO over the last 114 years seems to show a reasonable correlation to temp. Here it is from the other thread.

    Neville August 31, 2014 at 8:44 am #

    Just another look at the PDO index and temp trends from 1910 to 1940 , 1940 to 1975 and 1975 to 1998. Here’s HAD 4——

    http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1900/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1910/to:1940/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1975/to:1998/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1940/to:1975/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1998/to:2013/trend

    Here’s HAD 3——–

    http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1900/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:1940/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1975/to:1998/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1940/to:1975/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998/to:2013/trend

    But it couldn’t be this simple could it? Roy Spencer had a post on this many years ago and it still looks interesting.

  41. egg says

    ‘I think the feedbacks are negative and it will not be problem anyway. Also the co2 effect acts logarithmically…’

    OK I’ll have a closer look.

  42. John Robertson says

    I accept the original research by Nobel Laureate Arrhenius showing that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and that if it increases global temperature will rise – other things being equal. Given the habitual inequality of other things the actual change may be more, less or even the opposite of theory.

    In 1905 Arrhenius looked to a doubling of CO2 from the then .03% to .06% in the future. He calculated the temperature rise as 1.6 Celsius. (That would hold for any doubling of CO2 irrespective of the starting point.) Given that Earth is currently in an inter-glacial period he saw the rise as a prudent ‘insurance’ against potential cooling. It is cold which harms Earth and its creatures, not warmth. Why should anyone be fearful of a temperature rise less than that you can experience permanently by moving from, say, Sydney to Brisbane?

    There was a scientific and general consensus for 70 years that Arrhenius was right. There would be a modest temperature rise with rising CO2 and that this would be all to the good. Why did that consensus suddenly stand on it head in 1975? Why do the climate zealots now contend that this modest benefit actually portends Armageddon?

    The first is financial and it bears upon everyone who is employed in or heads any organisation calling itself “Climate ….”. These “scientists” have garnered multi-billion $s to themselves and their organisations by purporting to ‘save the Planet’ from a computer-generated and non-existent danger.

    When it is evident that there is no cause for alarm those “climate scientists” position, pay and possibility of preferment will fall in a heap. No wonder that they show a 99% (or whatever) consensus that the World is in peril from CO2! They have a massive vested financial interest in creating and maintaining public alarm. That financial interest should be declared with every “climate expert’s” pronouncement.

    The second is quite different. It is the deep desire of many to find something to blame for the age-old vagaries of the weather which cause storms, floods and such. In times past this was attributed to the ‘Wrath of the Gods’. Sacrifices were made to appease them. Needless to say, the vagaries continued.

    Today’s climate zealots are prepared to sacrifice the well-being of billions of the World’s poorest by depriving them of the energy, especially the electricity, which they could have from burning fossil fuels. This they try to do by imposing a quite unjustified ‘price on carbon’. They induce the World Bank, IMF and like bodies to refuse loans to those countries to build, for example, coal-fired power stations. It is a shameful act!

    Since the year 1900 CO2 in the atmosphere has risen 35% – from just under .03% to just over .04% now. At the same time World population has risen from 1.6 billion then to 7 billion now and World average life expectancy at birth from about 31 years in 1900 to 67 years now. What’s to dislike about more CO2? Why will a further rise suddenly reverse course and cause universal misery? It won’t!

    Each tonne of wheat grain requires 1.1 tonnes of atmospheric CO2 to enable it to grow. No CO2, no wheat! And that does not allow for the CO2 needed to grow the straw which supports the grain. The corresponding figures for corn and rice grains are 1.2 tonnes and 1.3 tonnes respectively. It follows, for example, that burning 550 litres of diesel will give enough atmospheric CO2 to grow 1 tonne of wheat grain. It will also do a big amount of wealth-generating work, e.g. fuel a medium sized diesel car for over 10,000 km. The World needs some 700,000,000 tonnes of wheat grain each year and similar amounts of rice and corn. That needs lots of CO2!

  43. Itz Me says

    Dr Lynn , with all your profound wisdom perhaps you could tell us where would we all be today if from 1860 till now the earths temperature had cooled 0.7deg c instead of warmed 0.7deg c and the atmospheric CO2 rate had dropped 100ppmv instead of increased 100ppmv ?
    Let me tell you , none of us would most likely be here. What did you say you were a doctor in ?

  44. Dr Ken Lynn says

    Egg , Robert and some others between them have managed to raise practically ever scientific untruth trotted out in this kind of blog so perhaps a reply is worth while.

    Neville August 31, 2014 at 11:13 am # “But please tell us how the OECD countries can change anything because they will be almost flat-lining until 2040?”. That’s why I said that we will just have to adapt. You don’t seem to realise that we are in the early stages of a new industrial revolution with the best scientific and engineering brains now working on reducing/removing our dependence on coal/gas/oil but will it occur in time?

    Larry Fields August 31, 2014 at 4:24 pm # “The basics of human population dynamics are an essential part of Scientific Literacy 101. “ what part of an exponential increase don’t you understand? With luck the population will eventually stabilise but not in time for our environment.

    Robert August 31, 2014 at 10:10 pm # My analogy between the effects of introducing the human species to a pristine environment and the effect of introducing rabbits to a semi-pristine Australia seems to be too deep for you. How quickly history is forgotten.

    Robert August 31, 2014 at 11:29 am # “A new IGY would be fantastic”; the trouble is you want to dictate what the results will be – science doesn’t work like that.

    Robert 1 “I can understand why it’s easier to just extrapolate from Arrhenius’ experiments. A glass receptacle and some modelling: so much less fatiguing”. Arrhenius first raised this question but he lived before the development of quantum physics and modern chemistry. This is now text book science as Jennifer knows.

    egg September 1, 2014 at 7:36 am #”The lull in temperatures over the past 17 years indicates that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas.” See above.

    It hasn’t gone into the oceans if that is what you are getting “ yes it has. About ¼ of the increase is now in the oceans and the acidification (ph) thus caused is readily measured and its effect on marine biology well attested. Jennifer should talk to the marine biologists of her own university (Marine Science/ School of Biological Sciences) and Prof Ove Hoegh-Guldberg in particular. Ocean acidification alone is enough to want CO2 emissions stopped. This is what I meant when I said that Jennifer lacks scientific depth.

    “I have no objection to discussing black body radiation if it makes you happy.” Yes it the basis of the interaction between the earth’s atmosphere and solar radiation. The trouble is you don’t understand it. See the many science internet sites which explain it. Fundamentally the sun radiates at a black body temperature of 5000 degrees and the earth re-radiates at less than 30 degrees. Add the atmospheric gases and a green house effect is the result.

    “It may seem hard to believe in your fairytale world, but the sun actually plays an important part in the climate cycles on this planet. There is a lag and global cooling is about to king hit you and your profession.” As part of my work I keep a close eye on the solar cycle. The change in solar cycle radiance is less than 1/1000 but it is still a considered factor. The minor change in solar power intercepted by the earth at the extremes of orbital ellipicity and tilt is clearly seen in the repetitive nature of the ice age (Milankovitch) cycle I was referring to. A very small change with drastic effects.

    Well I guess that’s it for me. This sort of twaddle described as a debate can go on forever. My biggest beef is that the people who trot out this rubbish seem to think scientists are as ignorant and as foolish about this subject as they are.

  45. egg says

    ‘Well I guess that’s it for me.’

    Don’t disappear, we need you.

    ‘A very small change with drastic effects.’

    How do you explain interstadials?

  46. Robert says

    Well, Ken, you’ve quoted me correctly. You do cut-and-paste well. The conclusions drawn from my comments were, of course, unconnected with my comments and just another opportunity to vent and to patronise.

    I’ve noticed that you never actually make points, just Guardian-style grabs, so we could indeed rabbit on forever about your rabbits. (By the way, your comments on human population just get creepier. Better stop that.)

    Scientists? Ken, if you represent science, it’s in the way that Christian Turney represents it. Not in the way that Mawson represents it.

    Now go tell the gang how you’ve put us in our place – but don’t forget to to play the victim as well as the superior man! You need to be both to be a hit with the luvvies.

  47. egg says

    Talking of Milankovitch ….

    ‘Milankovitch created a cycle of climate conditions that indicated a glaciation sequence in Alaska. Radiocarbon dating of trees for a region conflicted with his chronology. Since radiocarbon was ‘new’ and ‘more scientific’ it over rode Milankovitch.

    ‘Prior to 1950, his theory was generally accepted, but after that it was rejected. I recall conferences in the 1960s and 70s at which any reference of a cyclical trend to Milankovitch was automatically rejected.

    ‘His son, in a poignant article about his father’s lifework, claimed he died of a broken heart. It was not until the late 1980s that I heard a paper referencing Milankovitch, with no challenge.’

    Tim Ball (guest post at wuwt)

  49. egg says

    ‘Egg I still think co2 is a greenhouse gas but I think the feedbacks are negative and it will not be problem anyway.’

    It might be a problem if the negative feedbacks can be linked to global cooling or, heaven forbid, to warming. This from Anthony Watts on negative feedback.

    ‘One source of uncertainty in models is feedback from cloud cover. Sea ice can affect cloud cover, as melting sea ice and increased evaporation from the ocean surface can lead to more cloud formation. In the Arctic, clouds have an overall warming effect on the surface, so greater cloudiness in this region could lead to even more sea-ice melt.’

  50. egg says

    ‘All these stations, ranging from western Greenland to Siberia, show essentially the same pattern, a warm period around 1940, comparable to now, and a much colder interlude in the 1960’s and 70’s. And, of course, these all closely follow the ups and downs of the AMO.

    ‘There seems little doubt that the Arctic will be in for another cold period during the next 30 years or so, and that, as Judith Curry indicates, we will see a long term recovery of Arctic ice extent.’

    Paul Homewood (wuwt)

  51. Neville says

    Ken I think we can agree on adaptation and certainly more R&D. But the hypocrisy from the Rudd and Gillard govts was almost too incredible to believe.

    They claimed to be concerned about increasing co2 emissions but Ferguson urged the Vic govt to even modify and export brown coal. He said it could be another Pilbara or Hunter valley.

    Of course that means that Vic would be exporting millions of tonnes of coal overseas every year, but they also wanted to restrict our coal use here in OZ. How does that make any sense?

    But could you describe the impact from co2 emissions after 1950 that proves AGW? There has been no statistically significant warming ( average of the databases) for the last 18 years.

  53. Robert says

    I think I allowed Ken to trip my sarcasm switch. Easily done with me. Maybe the bloke is sincere and maybe he knows interesting stuff about useful things. I’ll leave him be and let him go, since he wants to go.

    But re population. Humans just don’t die like they used to, and I can see how that alarms people whose thinking is mechanistic and who are always prone to extrapolate from numbers and perceived trends in numbers.

    As in most things, the numbers are overrated when it comes to population. What has increased population has been a desirable thing called survival. What has shrunk the birthrate in the developed world is expectation of survival and the expansion of options, especially for women.

    The greatest liberator in human history is the automatic washing machine. And nothing shrinks the birthrate like opportunity and choice, however unsettling or risky. I would be ashamed of the human race if I thought we would be generating electricity in a hundred years the same way we are doing it now. But for now we need to generate that electricity for ourselves and let others generate theirs by the most effective means available. And by “effective” I mean thrifty, efficient, organised and modern – not just cheap.

    Conservation should apply to fossil fuels as much as to wilderness or to oceans. Right now we are wasting coal in the name of replacing coal. That is an absurdity which must end.

  54. Larry Fields says

    Dr Ken Lynn September 1, 2014 at 1:40 pm #
    “Larry Fields August 31, 2014 at 4:24 pm # “The basics of human population dynamics are an essential part of Scientific Literacy 101. “ what part of an exponential increase don’t you understand? With luck the population will eventually stabilise but not in time for our environment.”

    What part of Demographic Transition are you failing to comprehend? Birth rates are well below replacement levels in some countries — particularly Japan and Germany. With the exceptions of theocratic and hopelessly corrupt goobermints, that’s the wave of the future. Birth rates are even starting to decrease in Mexico!

    “. . . but not in time for our environment?”

    As is the case with some of your other callow, broad-brush generalizations, I do not know what that means, because “our environment” is a MULTIDIMENSIONAL reality. I’m guessing that you’re talking about the biodiversity dimension. Fine. Some environmental extremists claim that we’re going through a massive planet-wide extinction event. And of course, we ‘evil’ humans are to blame. Yeah, right.

    A peer-reviewed paper by Loehl and Eschenbach shows a rather small number of DOCUMENTED extinctions OF MAMMALS AND BIRDS ON THE MAJOR CONTINENTS WITHIN THE LAST FEW CENTURIES. This is not to say that some other species — particularly amphibians — are not teetering on the brink. The study does show that MOST of the DOCUMENTED extinctions OF BIRDS AND MAMMALS WITHIN THE LAST FEW CENTURIES have been in Australia, and on various islands. So much for the Permian-level extinction BS.

    My impression thus far is that outside of your narrow bailiwick, you sir, are scientifically illiterate. When I was in graduate school (analytical chemistry, Oregon State University, M.S.) I met a couple of fellow grad students, like you. They had great memories, great pattern recognition skills, and good lab technique. But notwithstanding their abily to jump through socially-approved hoops, they couldn’t independently reason their way out of a wet paper syllogism.

    A good start on your personal environmental literacy program would be to become better informed. Don’t automatically dismiss everyone who has valid reasons for questioning your pet prejudices as a ‘denier’. Don’t automatically assume that the pious pontifications of your precious little opinion leaders are the word of God. Grow the hell up!

  55. Neville says

    Dr Ken should watch Matt Ridley’s talk on Reason TV and perhaps he may become better informed. He disproves just about everything the extremists like to yap about.
    His fossil fuelled greening of the planet is correct and satellites have shown this for decades. His comments on so called species extinction starts at the end of part 1 and continues at part 2.

  56. Neville says

    Matt Ridley’s talk is very interesting and the use of fossil fuels to produce nitrogen fertiliser has reduced land use by TWO THIRDS since 1950.
    So because of human activity a much larger pop ( 7bn+) can live off a much smaller area of land and the area of the planet saved can be used for more conservation.
    I hope Larry has time to watch this video, parts 1 and 2.

  57. Neville says

    Ken may also like to read Ross McKitrick’s new study about the hiatus or pause in temp over the last 19 years.

    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/09/01/new-paper-on-the-pause-says-it-is-19-years-at-surface-and-16-26-years-at-the-lower-troposphere/

    He calculates the pause to be 19 years at the surface and 16 to 26 years in the lower troposphere. BTW there are hints that UAH will soon use a new method that will bring it closer to RSS measurements of temp. If true this will be another blow to the extremists.

  60. Larry Fields says

    Neville September 2, 2014 at 8:13 am #
    “Dr Ken should watch Matt Ridley’s talk on Reason TV and perhaps he may become better informed. He disproves just about everything the extremists like to yap about.”

    Excellent video, Neville. I did not see a link for Part 2. Apparently that is still in the works. Please let us know when it comes out.

    However you’ve been remiss on one point. You should have included a legal disclaimer:

    If you’re a radical Environmentalist, please do not watch this video. Your head might explode.

  61. Neville says

    Larry here is part 2 of Ridley’s talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1ymlD6UNEw And I’ll have to keep a look out for those exploding heads. If you’ve time could you please tell us what you think about the part on species extinction? It’s his speciality I understand, because I watched him explain something to Richard Dawkins in an interview on Youtube.

  63. egg says

    ‘Humans just don’t die like they used to’

    That is true and there are a couple of reasons for that, the great leap forward in medical science and the Modern Climate Optimum. The latter because populations increase in warm times, but we do have a problem which needs to be rectified.

    For over a hundred thousands years life for homo sapiens was not easy, survival was precarious, a feast or a famine. Which may go some way to explain why humans are unknowingly eating themselves to death.

  65. Larry Fields says

    Hi Neville,
    Thanks for the link to Part 2 of Ridley’s talk. I especially liked the success stories of Spitzbergen wildlife, and of Arctic wildlife in general; as well as the comparison of Haiti to the neighboring Dominican Republic.

    Coincidentally, (Green) Haiti is rated as the poorest country in the Americas region. It also has had a history of incredibly corrupt governments. Sometimes the USA will send a shipload of grain to help the starving Haitians. Then the potentially life-saving cargo rots in port, because their idiot goobermint can’t figure out a way to distribute it.

    Ridley’s comments about species extinction pretty much mirror the Loehle and Eschenbach study. And because I hear two respected sources saying the same thing, I have more confidence in their conclusions. All three of these gentlemen appear to be on the up-and-up.

    Not being a biologist, I’m not in a position to give a detailed critique of the extinction studies. When discussing this with friends, we should remember the caveats. Only *documented* extinctions of mammals and birds are discussed in the studies. The results apply to species, but not to subspecies. And the low extinction figures apply only to the larger continents. The main point is that we ‘evil’ humans are NOT causing a Permian-level mass extinction event, as the eco-loonies dishonestly claim.

    There’s always room for improvement, but for reasons that Ridley has pointed out, goobermint-mandated impoverishment in the developed countries may have unintended consequences for biodiversity. And shipping wood chips from the USA to England for Green energy is absolutely nuts!

  66. Neville says

    Robyn Williams and Oreskes try to better his 100 metres SLR by 2100 claim. This would now require about 3 feet feet 8 inches SLR per year by 2100 to fulfil his stupid forecast.

    http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/naomi_orekes_tells_robyn_100_metres_williams_an_even_taller_tale/

    You have to read this concocted garbage and understand just how idiotic and clueless Williams, Oreskes and their ABC really are. You wouldn’t expect this level of stupidity from a retarded 5 year old child. And this fool is the compere of their ABC’s science show?????? Unbelievable.