Posts tagged…Climate
Volcanic explosion in Alaska
Fri, Mar 27 2009The thousands of tonnes of ash, dust and gasses that volcanos spew into the atmosphere are often a cause of short-run global cooling. The explosive eruption of Mt Redoubt, a large volcano in Alaska, in the past 24 hours seems bound to affect the northern hemisphere climate. The image (click) shows the ash plume shooting into the upper atmosphere.
Cap-and-trade to fund Obama’s tax cuts
Thu, Mar 26 2009This seems to be a plan to make the workers pay for the proposed tax cuts for the middle-class.
"The White House planned to finance the tax cuts with revenues from its proposed cap-and-trade scheme to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, but neither the House nor Senate budget committees are planning to include those measures in their legislation.
In his press conference on Tuesday evening, Mr Obama…
Read more…58 years of Victorian temperatures
Mon, Mar 23 2009
A small experiment with the Bureau of Met's record of mean temperature anomalies for Victoria using Hadley Wickham's 'ggplot' library for R. There are 696 observations of monthly means between 1950 and 2008. The Bureau provides 'anomalies' from the monthly 1961-1990 means. How are these anomalies distributed? Are they skewed toward the upper 'tail' of the distribution, pointing to an alarming…
Australia not at ‘most risk’ of warming
Wed, Mar 18 2009
The Financial Times carries a story on the politics of the Australian emissions trading scheme legislation that makes the usual genuflections to alarmism but manages also to be dead wrong in the second paragraph. It quotes John Connor, head of the Climate Institute, which describes itself as "an independent research group in Sydney" (merely fashionable thinkers however):
"‘We are the developed…
Deceptive climate headline
Sat, Mar 14 2009You may have seen the headlines in stories like this from the Sydney Morning Herald, that cites "Alarm at Weak Greeenhouse Targets" coming out of this week's conference on climate in Copenhagen. Most of the stories are based on the same media briefing that underlies the exaggerated account in the Nature Magazine weblog
"Climate experts who met this week in Denmark have warned that the overall…
Feb 09 Temperature in Victoria
Thu, Mar 12 2009
About 1 degree above the average 1960-1991 February temperature, but only the fourth hottest February this decade (despite the cruel record temperatures of 'Black Saturday'). Well below the records in the mid-1950s, the mid-1960s and the early 1980s.
Effect of a market ‘fix’...
Mon, Feb 23 2009Contrary to the spin, emissions-trading discourages conservation:
"But the fact is once emissions trading comes in, every tonne of emissions saved by households simply frees up an extra permit that will allow big polluters to increase their emissions. This is because emissions trading relies on a fixed number of pollution permits being in circulation at any point in time. While most people…
Climate ‘tipping’ points fall down
Thu, Feb 19 2009If you're alarmed by claims—sometimes from official sources—about CO2 from thawing permafrost or cataclysms caused by a slowing or reversal of the "Meridional Overturning Circulation", then relax!
It looks like neither one nor the other of these exotic risks stands up to scientific scrutiny.
The evidence on cap-and-trade
Wed, Feb 18 2009"The problem in Australia is not that the wrong policy won in the battle of ideas. The problem is that the battle never took place. We need to have this debate. If the Government is determined to introduce further climate change policy, there are plenty of reasons a carbon tax may be better than a trading system." Op Ed by John Humpreys in The Australian
Exactly!
Naive forecasts outperform IPCC
Tue, Feb 17 2009![Mean and maximum errors in a naive forecast of temperature 1850-2008 [Green et. al.]](http://www.inquit.com/images/uploads/NaiveForecast.gif)
In a straightforward but important paper, Green, Armstrong and Soon demonstrate that there is no reason to develop elaborate 'forecasts' of temperature. The forecasts of the CGM models, they predict, will be no better over policy-relevant periods of 20, 50 or even 100 years than a naive forecast that assumes future temperatures will be the same as today's.
"Global mean temperatures were found…
Staticulation on rainfall from the BOM
Tue, Feb 17 2009Dr David Jones, head of the Bureau of Meteorology's (BOM) National Climate Center, if accurately reported, relies on staticulation rather than evidence in remarks about drought and climate change:
"While climate scientists warn a single event such as Victoria's deadly bushfires cannot be blamed on climate change alone, Dr Jones said the conditions were 'totally typical of climate change at the…
Obama’s science advisor hates science
Tue, Feb 17 2009
Second update: I have to revise my assessment—made after reviewing his publication history—that Dr John Holdren is 'something of a crackpot' (now over the fold).
This transcript shows that Holdren is a publicist for fashionable apocalypses with little sense of proportion or respect for evidence that might get in the way of his hyperbole. He could reasonably ask, of course, to be excused for…