Jo Nova link

Tim Flannery: We predicted everything. There is no “pause in global warming.

TIM FLANNERY, CHIEF CLIMATE COMMISSIONER 7-30 Report ABC: “…everything we’re seeing is consistent with what the climate scientists have been telling us now for decades…”
Leigh Sales, ABC PRESENTER : “… … …(no comment)…”
Steve Hunter Cartoonist:

…

Thanks to Steve Hunter. See more of his cartoons at Andys rant.

What are the odds?

Tim Flannery makes out that they have used maths to arrive at their conclusion. Let’s be clear, if you have a 499 in 500 chance of winning at poker, that’s not the same as the odds of us being able to predict a normal climate, and be able to spot an “artificial” one. Yet Tim would like you to think that’s the same bet.

7:30 Report excerpts

LEIGH SALES: How do you know that the new climatic conditions are responsible for the extreme whether events? How do you know that it’s just not some combination of meteorological circumstances?

TIM FLANNERY: Sure. Look, the studies suggest it’s a 1/500 chance that this sorta stuff is just normal. This is way outside the range of anything we’ve experienced before. It is really an extraordinary summer….

What studies Tim? Name them.
(What would Dorothy Mackellar have said?)

Extraordinary? In what sense of the word?

The three main Archaean cratons of Australia formed the greater Australian land mass around 2 billion B.C. We started recording the temperature about 1,999,999,850 years later (give or take a few hundred million years). At best, we have 150 years of temperature records. Most of our thermometers have only been recording for 50 years (many for less). The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) dominates our climate and one cycle of the PDO is about 60 years long. What part of that suggests we have the data to pronounce that events are extraordinary and outside of “normal”? Which part suggests we can calculate the odds to 2 decimal places? Who is kidding who here?
What’s the standard error on our flood record?

A new trend? Yes in failed predictions. There are more of them than ever …

TIM FLANNERY: ” … we’re not talking about one event here, we’re talking about an emerging trend. And we can see that that trend is entirely consistent with what the climate scientists have been saying for years. It’s taking us into new climatic territory here in Australia as we break more records. Blizzards: look, we don’t know. Is that due to cold conditions or not? Sometimes when you’ve got very warm oceans, you get a lot of evaporation and you get more snowfall. So I think just to jump to the conclusion that you’re seeing a blizzard somewhere, it’s not telling you anything, that single event, about the climatic trend.”

This is not a trend in climate warming, not a trend in storms, but a trend in disparate events. How do we do the regression stats on that? What? — Add three floods to one-a-half cyclones, a late monsoon, a drought that isn’t, and the eye of a newt, and voila! Plot the linear trend, and call yourself a witchdoctor.
How many cat-3 cyclones equals a 150 year record temperature which lasted for a half hour in Sydney?

The IPCC got all the trends-that-matter wrong

The trends that count are the decadal warming trend for the globe, and right now it is so close to zero, even IPCC chief Pachauri admits there has been no significant warming for 17 years. Those climate scientists didn’t predict a global pause, they told us there would be 0.2C degrees of warming each decade at a minimum for the next few decades. They predicted a tropospheric hot spot and there wasn’t, and still isn’t, and they can’t explain it. The models didn’t predict the climate on a local, regional, or continental scale either. This focus on wild weekend weather is exactly what they told us was “unscientific” not so long ago, but now, it’s all they have.

Look who’s denying the data now?

Leigh Sales is very specific here. She wants a statement about the last “15 years”. She also wonders how today’s extreme events are due to a global temperature that is the same as 15 years ago. Good question.

Sales: We know that, say, if you look back over the past 50 years there’s clear evidence of global warming. You know, the figures go like that. But there were figured released I think late last year that showed that there’d been a plateau for about the past 15 or so years, you know, so it was flatter. So if there’s been a plateau in recent years, how come this summer’s extreme weather events are due to climate change? Wouldn’t you have been seeing those same sorts of events all the way back those 15 years?

Flannery misleadingly denies what the data shows [my thoughts interjected in italics]:

TIM FLANNERY: Look, in a sense what you’re saying is correct, Leigh, but there has been no plateau. [Jo wonders how a graph with a flat trend is not a plateau, and how Australians are being reliably informed with this statement that implies there is no flattening in the last 15 years.] If you look at the temperature of the Earth, we have to measure the oceans, the air and the land. And there, we see a continually strong rise in temperature. 90 per cent of the heat that is trapped by the greenhouse gases goes into the ocean, and you look at the whole of the Earth, we’re seeing a very strong warming trend. [Tim must be obliquely referring to the deep oceans here. Why doesn't he just say, the greenhouse gases up at the height that planes fly are heating the water a kilometer under the surface? I can't think... - Jo] The atmosphere, you know, it’s a very volatile organ of the planet. Sometimes we get cooler average temperatures, sometimes warmer, it bounces around a little bit on the graph. And you can pick any period in that to show anything you want. But if you look at the whole Earth system, you can see that strong warming trend. And indeed, if you look at the atmospheric record for a long enough period, you see exactly the same trend.

Flannery didn’t mention that even if some heat (and it’s not enough) is hidden in the deep abyss, it is tricky to explain how it affects storms on the surface. Storms like Sandy which travelled on a water surface that isn’t any different to past normal storms?

What are Australian’s paying Flannery for?

”The Climate Commission was established to provide all Australians with an independent and reliable source of information about the science of climate change, the international action being taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and the economics of a carbon price.”

It’s not Independent. It’s not reliable. It’s not science.

What are Australian’s paying Flannery for?