Doomed Planet

Heartland in Sydney: Part 2

[Heartland in Sydney: Part 1 is here]

At the Heartland Climate Conference in Sydney, David Evans and Jo Nova blasted the ‘cheating culture’ which permeates the field of climate science world-wide. 

David Evans denounced instances of blatant deception by Government scientists responsible for temperature records. 

Official thermometers sit near refrigeration and air-conditioning outlets, walls, effluent grates, jet exhausts, etc. 89% of USA sites breach NOAA standards, and are too close to an artificial heating source. NOAA has an annual budget of over $4 billion. 

Despite the bias and flaws, there is no long-term warming trend. All of the USA warming during 1930-2000 is created by adjustments to the recorded data. 

The 6,000 sites formerly used globally have been reduced to only 1079, and the discards were predominantly in cooler latitudes. Half those remaining are near airport tarmacs, and over 80% are in urban areas. 

Urbanisation effects on temperature are non-linear, but a city of 1 million people is 1-3°C warmer on average. The record keepers designate some stations as “rural” and correct all others downwards by a constant 0.2°C. This is within a precision system where changes of hundredths of a degree have massive world-wide policy implications. 

Reliable data on all-important ocean temperatures were unavailable until the Argos programme commenced in 2003. For 5 years, readings from 3,000 oceanic areas showed a steady cooling trend. But all data has been embargoed since January 2008. 

  • Why don’t agencies like NOAA and BOM correct their flawed sources?
  • Why are there no auditors and no competition and no regulators?
  • Why won’t Government scientists use the satellite temperature records?
  • Why isn’t Argo ocean data available on a public website?
  • Why is there no media coverage of these scandals? 

Global temperatures have been on a long term gradually-rising trend since the Little Ice Age bottomed just before 1700 AD. 

In a landmark BBC interview, Phil Jones confirmed that there have been three warming periods in the last 150 years, and the warming rate was the same in all cases. But 85% of all fossil fuel emissions have occurred since 1945; and 25% of the total has occurred since 1998 – during a period of zero warming. 

Nobody is alarmed by the trivial amount of global warming which could be caused by greenhouse gases. 70-90% of the warming in IPCC scenarios comes from ‘feedbacks’. These are assumed to exist in climate models, but are not supported by either theory or empirical observations. There are strong reasons to disbelieve they exist: 

  1. There is no ‘hotspot’ in the tropical troposphere (shown in all the models);
  2. They are inconsistent with the instrumental temperature record of the past 150 years, which fall within the limits of ‘natural variation’.
  3. Experimental work (especially by Lindzen and Spencer) supports the view that net feedbacks are slightly negative. 

The global warming hysteria has always been driven by Europe, where believers captured the funding bodies in the early 1990s. Outside of Europe, there are only four countries in Annex B of the Kyoto Protocol. In China, it has been openly called the “Low Carbon Plot” –aimed at preventing economic catch-up by developing countries. 

If the science was sound, they wouldn’t need to cheat. 

Jo Nova took up the cheating theme, related it to power sex and money, and called for a “Shame Campaign”. 

It’s not about the environment. Nor is it about logic or reason or balance. Paid publicists abound throughout the blogosphere, operated by major PR firms, with attack dogs vilifying any voice raised in opposition. Pressure goes on news editors, publishers, and advertisers. 

Big Green has hundreds of millions to spend each year. The US Government has spent $79 billion on climate change since enacting the Global Change Research Act in 1990. 

Carbon trading, which reached $126 billion in 2008, is projected to be a multi-trillion-dollar market in “the world’s largest traded commodity”. The multinational banks have open cheque books for lobbying politicians and bureaucrats – a strategic outlay now for massive brokerage returns in future. 

The slogan is “consensus”. But science is not democracy. Who votes for gravity? The petty world of human opinion is steeped in bias and conflicts of interest, and beset with personality and political issues, not to mention the corrupting influence of money. Science has succeeded historically only because it has surged out of this cesspool of complexity, demanding hard evidence and strict standards of proof. 

The gross over-statements and speculative hype of climate scientists are the new versions of prospectors who salted their mining claims. While cheating in science has become rife, supervision remains derisory. If Climate Change was my company, would the Stock Exchange accept my assurance that it was audited by two anonymous friends? 

Since time immemorial, witchdoctors have been asking for tribute to change the weather. Now, it is refined into research grants and certification for carbon credits. Sub-prime carbon is coming! 

Barry Brill: I had the opportunity to outline the proceedings initiated by the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition seeking High Court orders:

  • that the current NZ Temperature Record (NZTR) is invalid;
  • that NIWA replace it, using the best available data and methodology. 

The NZTR is based on averages of temperature measurements taken throughout the 20th century at seven geographically-spread weather stations. Although the original data shows no significant trend, a series of 34 in-house adjustments made by NIWA moved the early data downwards, creating a warming trend of 1.0°C. 

After following a lengthy obstacle course ranging from requests under the Official Information Act to myriads of parliamentary questions, the Coalition found that the flaws in the adjustments were legion, and the process was execrable. [More detail can be found at Quadrant Online here and here]. 

NIWA has advised the Court that a major review of the “Seven-station Series” (7SS) has now been completed – the result of five scientists working on the project for over 6 months. To bullet-proof their replacement version, NIWA has requested a full peer review by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) which is underway at present. 

NIWA’s admission that the current temperature record needs to be replaced delivers a virtual TKO to the Coalition. The previous adjustments to the 7SS will be repudiated and replaced, which meets the objectives of the litigation. BUT – it remains to be seen whether the replacement adjustments agreed upon between NIWA and BOM will comprise a major improvement! 

This antipodean rewrite of a national temperature record provides an interesting prologue to the global rewrite being undertaken by the UK Met Office. I expect Hadley-CRU will have been given every opportunity to offer suggestions regarding methodology. 

This litigation ties in nicely with the ‘cheating’ theme raised at the Heartland conference. NIWA has not agreed to replace the NZ temperature record because it has recently discovered some unsuspected errors. The current NZTR is just one more example of the deceptively-packaged over-sold hype which characterises climate science everywhere. 

These three presentations draw together a theme which is becoming ever more prevalent in the wake of Climategate, the Hockey Stick, the IPCC shenanigans, the Royal Society backdown, and countless other climate embarrassments. Despite the protective shield thrown up by the mainstream media, the pervasive culture of deception is beginning to seep into the public consciousness. In a recent US Pew survey, almost 70% of respondents felt that the warming threat had been exaggerated by scientists.

The debate is close to a ‘tipping point’, so beloved of catastrophists. Thomas Kuhn told us that scientific evidence gradually accumulates to a point where it overthrows the existing paradigm. Perhaps this revolution will be different and the paradigm will shift when scientists can no longer tolerate the stench of accumulated cheating. 

Heartland in Sydney: Part 1 is here

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