Climate Change/Global Warming

Good news about Climate Change

My name is Dr John McLean.  Some of you might know me from a landmark study into the main temperature data used by the IPCC.  The report, which was published in October, revealed more than 70 problem areas in that data. 

Since then I’ve been looking at other climate data and I have some good tidings and great joy for your Christmas or Holiday Season …

Climate change is nowhere near as bad as some people have predicted or claimed.

The amount of warming is tiny, regardless of what caused it, sea level isn’t rising fast, Arctic ice still exists all year and food production is increasing rather than decreasing.  Details can be found at http://mclean.ch/climate/Xmas2018/ but here’s a short summary:

1.      According to the most accurate temperature data, since 1979 (that’s almost 40 years ago) average global temperatures have risen about 0.4 Celsius (0.72 Fahrenheit).  Most people wouldn’t notice this temperature change if it occurred over 30 seconds, so over 40 years it’s nothing.

2.      The same temperature data shows that since 1998 there’s been very little warming, this despite more than 1/3^rd of the CO2 emitted by man since 1958 occurring in the last 20 years.  If we ignore the temperature spike in 2016, caused by a strong El Nino, the rate of warming is a tiny 0.4°C/100 years.

3.      Temperature predictions from climate models far exceed the temperatures reported by observations. This means the models are not accurate and we should ignore their predictions and their estimates of the amount of man-made warming. 

4.      Sea level is NOT rising faster than it did 30 or more years ago.  According to tidal gauges the average rise is just under 2mm/year. Unless you have very small hands, it will take almost 100 years to rise the distance from the tips of your fingers to the other end of your hand.  In the 1990s we were told that Kiribati, Tuvalu and Maldive islands would all soon shrink and disappear.  Not only are they all still with us but many islands in the Pacific are increasing in size.

5.      Several years ago, we were told that Arctic would be free of sea ice during summers very soon.  Arctic ice conditions have been fairly stable for the last seven years and there’s still ice there in summer. 

6.      We've often been told that higher temperatures will mean less food.  The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FOA) shows instead that annual production of four major food types - wheat, rice, coarse grains (all other cereals except wheat and rice, i.e. maize, barley, sorghum etc.) and meat – have all increased since 2001, and that’s through some supposedly warm years.

Data shows that the dire predictions about man-made warming are not happening.  If there is any man-made warming at all then it’s very small, and its impacts are tiny too

Why Is It So Cool To Be Gloomy?

Matt Ridley: Why Is It So Cool To Be Gloomy?
The Wall Street Journal, 17 November 2018

The world is in better shape than most people think, but we’re more inclined to focus on bad news than good. Psychology can help explain why.



Has the percentage of the world population that lives in extreme poverty almost doubled, almost halved or stayed the same over the past 20 years? When the Swedish statistician and public health expert Hans Rosling began asking people that question in 2013, he was astounded by their responses. Only 5% of 1,005 Americans got the right answer: Extreme poverty has been cut almost in half. A chimpanzee would do much better, he pointed out mischievously, by picking an answer at random. So people are worse than ignorant: They believe they know many dire things about the world that are, in fact, untrue.

Before his untimely death last year, Rosling (with his son and daughter-in-law as co-authors) published a magnificent book arguing against such reflexive pessimism. Its title says it all: “Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.” As the author of a book called “The Rational Optimist,” I’m happy to include myself in their platoon, which also includes writers such as Steven Pinker, Bjorn Lomborg, Michael Shermer and Gregg Easterbrook.

For us New Optimists, however, it’s an uphill battle. No matter how persuasive our evidence, we routinely encounter disbelief and even hostility, as if accentuating the positive was callous. People cling to pessimism about the state of the world. John Stuart Mill neatly summarized this tendency as far back as 1828: “I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.” It’s cool to be gloomy.

Studies consistently find that people in developed societies tend to be pessimistic about their country and the world but optimistic about their own lives. They expect to earn more and to stay married longer than they generally do. The Eurobarometer survey finds that Europeans are almost twice as likely to expect their own economic prospects to get better in the coming year as to get worse, while at the same time being more likely to expect their countries’ prospects to get worse than to improve. The psychologist Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania suggests a reason for this: We think we are in control of our own fortunes but not those of the wider society.

There are certainly many causes for concern in the world today, from terrorism to obesity to environmental problems, but the persistence of pessimism about the planet requires some explanation beyond the facts themselves. Herewith a few suggestions:

Bad news is more sudden than good news, which is usually gradual. Therefore bad news is more newsworthy. Battles, bombings, accidents, murders, storms, floods, scandals and disasters of all kinds tend to dominate the news. “If it bleeds, it leads,” as they used to say in the newspaper business. By contrast, the gradual reduction in poverty in the world rarely makes a sudden splash. As Rosling put it, “In the media the ‘newsworthy’ events exaggerate the unusual and put the focus on swift changes.”

Plane crashes have been getting steadily scarcer, but each one now receives vastly more coverage.

This is part of what psychologists call the “availability bias,” a quirk of human cognition first noticed by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in the 1970s. People vastly overestimate the frequency of crime, because crime disproportionately dominates the news. But random violence makes the news because it is rare, whereas routine kindness doesn’t make the news because it is so common.

Bad news usually matters; good news may not. In the prehistoric past, it made more sense to worry about risks—it might help you avoid getting killed by a lion—than to celebrate success. Perhaps this is why people have a “negativity bias.” In a 2014 paper, researchers at McGill University examined which news stories their subjects chose to read for what they thought was an eye-tracking experiment. It turns out that even when people say they want more good news, they are more interested in bad news: “Regardless of what participants say, they exhibit a preference for negative news content,” concluded the authors Mark Trussler and Stuart Soroka.

People think in relative not absolute terms. What matters is how well you are doing relative to other people, because that’s what determined success in the competition for resources (and mates) in the stone age. Being told that others are doing well is therefore a form of bad news. When circumstances get better, people take those improvements for granted and reset their expectations.

Such relativizing behavior affects even our most intimate relationships. An ingenious 2016 study by David Buss and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin found that “participants lower in mate value than their partners were generally satisfied regardless of the pool of potential mates; participants higher in mate value than their partners became increasingly dissatisfied with their relationships as better alternative partners became available.” Ouch.

As the world improves, people expand their definition of bad news. This recent finding by the Harvard psychologists David Levari and Daniel Gilbert, known as “prevalence-induced concept change,” suggests that the rarer something gets, the more broadly we redefine the concept. They found in an experiment that the rarer they made blue dots, the more likely people were to call purple dots “blue,” and the rarer they made threatening faces, the more likely people were to describe a face as threatening. “From low-level perception of color to higher-level judgments of ethics,” they write, “there is a robust tendency for perceptual and judgmental standards to ‘creep’ when they ought not to.”

Consider air travel: Plane crashes have been getting steadily scarcer—2017 was the first year with no commercial passenger plane crashes at all, despite four billion people in the air—but each one now receives vastly more coverage. Many people still consider planes a risky mode of transport.

We’re even capable of fretting about the bounty of prosperity, as “Weird Al” Yankovic highlights in his clever song, “First World Problems”: “The thread count on these cotton sheets has got me itching/My house is so big, I can’t get Wi-Fi in the kitchen.” Sheena Iyengar of Columbia Business School became a TED star for her research on the debilitating modern illness known as the “choice overload problem”—that is, being paralyzed by having to choose from among, say, the dozens of types of olive oil or jam on offer at the grocery store. North Koreans, Syrians, Congolese and Haitians generally have more important things to worry about.

Profound Comment from Angus Taylor -7th November,2018

"We also need a strong supply of affordable electricity when customers flick the switch. Electricity runs everything. Affordable electricity must be available on demand and not just when the wind blows and sun shines."

The Public Awakens

The latest British Social Attitudes Survey reveals that only around a quarter of the public has major concerns over the impacts of global warming and that only a third thinks that humans are the main cause of climate change. This is in sharp contrast to the BBC’s environmental journalists whose message of impending disaster is dominating its news coverage.

 

The BBC is not supposed to be a vehicle for its journalists’ prejudices. Unless it begins to reflect the views of the British public and the full spectrum of reasonable views on climate and energy the growing distrust of the BBC will only accelerate”.

A New Report From the IPCC-Here We Go Again!

Letter in The Australian, 4 October,2018

Climate mayhem ahead

Every year there is a meeting of the conference of the parties to the UN climate change convention. Every year, leading up to the COP meeting, we are softened up by media releases from so-called experts warning us of the ever-increasing danger from uncontrolled burning of fossil fuels as we supposedly are turning our planet into a living hell.

This year is no exception. Self-styled climate scientists and politicians are meeting in South Korea to finalise a report, to be released on Saturday that talks of “climate mayhem” and “a swift and complete transformation not just of the global economy, but of society, too” (“Less meat, coal key to cooler planet”, 2/10). And the solution proffered to avert this claimed human-caused catastrophe: the global economy must become “carbon neutral” by 2050.

Real climatologists become aware early in their careers that the oceans are the thermal and inertial flywheels of the climate system. The heat of the atmosphere is equivalent to that in the top 4m of the oceans and the mass of the atmosphere is equivalent to that of the top 10m. It is changes in ocean circulation, a factor not represented in climate models, that lead to changes in our climate.

Why am I reminded of the fabled King Canute, who is reputed to have taken his chair down to the shore and proclaimed, “Even I cannot stop the tide coming in”? Why can’t the UN and its acolytes take a leaf from Canute’s book and accept that no matter the extent of social engineering the climate will continue to change, as it has done in the past and will continue to do into the future?

William Kininmonth, Docklands, Vic

Global Warming and the NEG

With the Federal Government about to launch its latest energy policy,  anthropogenic climate change is again in the news.The key issue is whether human caused climate change, driven by carbon dioxide emissions and the like, is of such magnitude that strong action, such as that called for in the Paris agreement, is necessary.

What is clear is that electricity prices have exploded in recent years and will continue to increase, partly due to Government policies promoting the use of renewables (solar and wind) at the expense of coal fired power stations. At the present state of technology, the conflicts within policy that requires compromises between supplying electricity continually, at low cost and with low emissions, creates a real dilemma. The question needs to be addressed as to whether emissions are really a problem. If they are not, then generating low cost, reliable energy is a much less difficult challenge and has real economic benefits, particularly for the developing world.

The global warming hypothesis, based on extensive modelling, suggests that temperature increases, sea level rises and more extreme climatic events will be at alarming levels. There is considerable consistency between the models.

If we study the literature, seek the truth and adopt a rational scientific method approach, it would seem that there is substantial room for debate.

Whilst the models may be relatively consistent  between themselves, key elements (temperatures, sea levels and climatic events) are widely over stated when tested against observations, the central measure in applying the scientific method. Hypotheses that cannot be supported by real world observations are  invalid.

It could now be argued that those pushing the climate change hypothesis and ignoring observations, have replaced the "sceptics" as the true "deniers".

Murray Darling Basin Plan

The NSW Irrigator's Council submission to the SA Royal Commission should be compulsory reading for all those who attack the irrigation industry and the cotton and rice industries in particular. Whilst any submission from irrigators on water usage will always be subject to the "they would say that" syndrome, the submission is clearly expressed and loaded with defensible facts. I would particularly draw attention to 'Illegal Take' on page 5, 'Irrigated Crops' on page 7 and 'Darling River and Menindee Lakes' on page 8. Once again the ABC are shown to have done Australia a great disservice with biased reporting.
https://mdbrcsa.govcms.gov.au/sites/g/files/net3846/f/mdbrc-submission-mark-mckenzie-nsw-irrigators-council.pdf?v=1528333882