Politics Climate Change Paradox (cont in part 2)

[Bazzar]

Forget about any perceived publisher bias behind any of this stuff, at this point in time, there really is nothing unique about the bush fire scenario so far.

If the same events ocurred in January & February, then it would have claims. Summer isn't over.

QLD fire season is over, even the ADF have pulled out, NSW will soon be on the downturn as fires have always peaked in December to be slowly contained in January. That just leaves Vic and SA.
So you're correct in waiting until the back end of Feb to make comparisons.

 

[Snake_Baker]

Look at you, playing political games.

1) EXPOSING media driven political bias. There's a difference. I am outing politics, not playing it.
2) I have never voted for the Liberal Party in my entire life.

 

[Bazzar]

Censorship rears it's ugly head again

SBS article claiming ‘fires not due to climate change’ mysteriously removed

When caught out SBS restored the article, but added a notice at the top of the piece,

SBS article claiming 'fires not due to climate change' mysteriously removed · Caldron Pool

Update: SBS restored the article, but added a notice at the top of the piece, stating: Speaking earlier this week, Mr Packham confirmed his position on what is causing the current severe bushfire conditions. Addressing the matter on Sky News, he said fuel loads remain the core issue. “The most...

caldronpool.com

 

[GetDimmaBack]

There's enough evidence to suggest there's some effects, but anything beyond that is pure speculation.

There's definitely a political agenda at play here for other purposes, but I can't work it out with any conviction. Perhaps it's a peak oil thing?

Yeah, I agree, Snake That's why I called it a furphy rather than a lie.

 

[Sir_Loin]

And you wonder why people put you on ignore or question what banned poster you are.

I dont really care tbh. If people cant handle facts when they’re pointed out to them all power to them. Must be nice to live in such ignorance. Better than facing the reality I guess.

 

[Ron The Bear]

Censorship rears it's ugly head again

SBS article claiming ‘fires not due to climate change’ mysteriously removed

When caught out SBS restored the article, but added a notice at the top of the piece,

SBS article claiming 'fires not due to climate change' mysteriously removed · Caldron Pool

Update: SBS restored the article, but added a notice at the top of the piece, stating: Speaking earlier this week, Mr Packham confirmed his position on what is causing the current severe bushfire conditions. Addressing the matter on Sky News, he said fuel loads remain the core issue. “The most...

caldronpool.com

You wonder whether the people affected will be given a voice by the media.

Meanwhile...

NASA: Area burned by global wildfires dropped by 25% since 2003

Climate activists often warn that global warming is stoking forest fires, but it turns out the amount of land burned by wildfires worldwide has plummeted by 25% since 2003, according to NASA.

Despite the increase in farming, the amount of forest area worldwide grew by 2.24 million square kilometers from 1982-2016, as a net loss in the tropics was "outweighed by a net gain in the extratropics", according to a November study in Nature.

 

[Fadge]

What actually is the consensus? I.e. what is it that all the scientists agree on?

That climate change exists? The cause(s)? The impacts and timelines? The most appropriate solution(s)? Etc.

Possibly a dumb question, but I hear/read a lot about there being a consensus but not what it actually entails.

I would love for someone to answer this question, but I'm not holding my breath...

 

[Father Jack]

Well that's WA off the holiday list.

For some reason I thought the Test started today. That's what holidays are for, losing track of time.

You can (possibly) put WA back on the list, I'm in Tasmania. I also was whingeing to someone today about how I thought the Sydney test started on the 3rd of the month and why wasn't it on yet, only to have someone point out that it's still only the 2nd. God this year is dragging

 

[Damp Squarie]

If their science was sound they'd be fine. If it wasn't they'd be in trouble, which is likely why it would dry up.

Yep...This story was in the Australian. At last we are beginning to find out the truth. Great Barrier Reef truth may be inconvenient but it is out there
PETER RIDD

We have no data of Great Barrier Reef coral growth rates for the past 15 years. Has growth collapsed as the Australian Institute of Marine Science claims?

Is the Great Barrier Reef being affected by climate change, the acidification of the ocean, and the pesticides, sediment and fertiliser from farms? One way to tell is to measure the coral growth rates. Our science institutions claim that coral growth rates collapsed between 1990 and 2005 due to stress from human pollution. Remarkably, despite having data of coral growth rates for the last few centuries, there is no data for the last 15 years. We don’t know how the GBR has fared since 2005.

Corals have yearly growth rings similar to tree rings. By drilling cores from large corals, scientists can measure the growth rates over the life of the coral.

The yearly rings are roughly 10 millimetres thick so a coral many metres across can be hundreds of years old. In a landmark study, AIMS took cores from more than 300 corals on the GBR and concluded that for the past 300 years coral growth was stable, but in 1990 there was an unprecedented and dramatic collapse of 15 per cent.

With Thomas Stieglitz and Eduardo da Silva, I reanalysed the AIMS data and, in our opinion, AIMS made two significant mistakes.

The first was incorrect measurement of the near-surface coral growth rings on most of the corals that were giving data from 1990 to 2005. After years of argument AIMS has begrudgingly agreed that it made this mistake. The other problem is that it used much smaller and younger corals for the 1990-2005 data compared with the mostly very large and old corals of the pre-1990 data — it changed its methodology and this is what caused the apparent drop at 1990. When we corrected this problem, the fall in growth rate disappeared.

AIMS continues to dispute this second error and still claims there was a worrying reduction in growth rate from 1990 to 2005. This disputed work is quoted in influential government documents such as last year’s reef outlook report. I am not cherrypicking a minor problem. It is a fundamental problem with a keystone piece of GBR science.

We thus have a situation that arguably the most important data that tells us about the health of the GBR is highly questionable from 1990 to 2005.

What is far worse is that we have no data since 2005.

The science institutions have not only failed to investigate probable major errors in their work, they have also failed to update measurement of this fundamental parameter while claiming, in increasingly shrill tones, that the GBR is in peril.

But ironically, this failure provides a fantastic opportunity. The coral challenge.

For the past 15 years we don’t know what growth rates have been. It is easy to fill in the missing data, and check the previous data, by taking more cores from the reef. AIMS has effectively stated that coral growth is falling at 1 per cent a year.

According to the AIMS curve, growth should now be 30 per cent lower than it was in 1990 — which would be a disastrous fall. I predict it has stayed the same. Either way, it would be nice to know what has happened — is the reef really in danger or not?

But a second and almost equally valuable outcome of measuring the missing data is that it will be an acid test of the trustworthiness of our major science institutions. AIMS has dug in its heels and denied it made a major methodological mistake. Let’s do the experiment and see if it is right, or untrustworthy.

Same for me. If this measurement is done, and done properly, and it shows there has been a major reduction in coral growth rates, I will accept I was wrong and that there is a disaster happening on the reef.

The coral challenge is a measurement that will have to be done sooner or later. The longer it is neglected the worse it will look to the public. Farmers accused of killing the reef are especially interested.

We need to make sure these new measurements are done properly and without any questions about reliability. They must be supervised by a group of scientists that are acceptable to both sides of the agricultural debate on the reef to ensure the methodology and its execution are impeccable.

Peter Ridd is an independent scientist who was unlawfully dismissed from James Cook University in Townsville.


At last. AIMS is a nest of left-leaning parasites who have a vested interest in predicting dire conseqences for the GBR - because by doing so they ask for more and more funds to extend their 'research'. More funds = more departments and more underlings who must have university degrees in sciencewaffle.

 

[Werewolf]

Did you listen to all the fire experts that explicitly linked this fire season to climate change? Or just the ones the support your existing world view?

These bushfires have been caused by poor land management - lack of back burning. Both state and federal governments have let us down. Australia being one degree colder would not have prevented this disaster. Our summers have always been hot and dry aside from the odd rainy day.

 

[Father Jack]

What actually is the consensus? I.e. what is it that all the scientists agree on?

That climate change exists? The cause(s)? The impacts and timelines? The most appropriate solution(s)? Etc.

Possibly a dumb question, but I hear/read a lot about there being a consensus but not what it actually entails.

some good places to start having a look:

https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/

I still maintain that NASA know what they're talking about

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climate_change

There are plenty of links on that wikipedia article for further reading too.

 

[Roylion]

I would love for someone to answer this question, but I'm not holding my breath...

A consensus is a generally accepted opinion or decision among a group of people.

According to NASA multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals show that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities. In addition, most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position.

"The number of papers rejecting AGW [Anthropogenic, or human-caused, Global Warming] is a miniscule proportion of the published research, with the percentage slightly decreasing over time. Among papers expressing a position on AGW, an overwhelming percentage (97.2% based on self-ratings, 97.1% based on abstract ratings) endorses the scientific consensus on AGW.” J. Cook, et al, "Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming," Environmental Research Letters Vol. 11 No. 4, (13 April 2016); DOI:10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048002. (page 6)

 

[Bazzar]

A consensus is a generally accepted opinion or decision among a group of people.

According to NASA multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals show that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities. In addition, most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position.

"The number of papers rejecting AGW [Anthropogenic, or human-caused, Global Warming] is a miniscule proportion of the published research, with the percentage slightly decreasing over time. Among papers expressing a position on AGW, an overwhelming percentage (97.2% based on self-ratings, 97.1% based on abstract ratings) endorses the scientific consensus on AGW.” J. Cook, et al, "Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming," Environmental Research Letters Vol. 11 No. 4, (13 April 2016); DOI:10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048002. (page 6)

NASA cheif climate scientist James Hansen, suppliments his income as an activist at an estimated 1.5 million US . It's not an honorable or professional thing to do, he also agreed to follow NASAs directive under the Bush administration to alter climate data to come in line with the governments policy. It was only when they were being investigated he got on the front foot and went public.
And some automatically assume you can trust an organisation like NASA and other clinate scientists without question.

 

[Father Jack]

You wonder whether the people affected will be given a voice by the media.

Meanwhile...

NASA: Area burned by global wildfires dropped by 25% since 2003

NASA Goddard Space Flight scientist Niels Andela attributed the decline to increased farming in areas of the Global South and the use of machines instead of prescribed burns to clear crops.

Even as the acreage consumed by wildfires declined, James Randerson, University of California Irvine earth sciences professor, said climate change has played a role by making wildfires more intense.

So a bit more of a nuanced story, good on one hand, bad on the other

 

[Father Jack]

NASA cheif climate scientist James Hansen, suppliments his income as an activist at an estimated 1.5 million US . It's not an honorable or professional thing to do, he also agreed to follow NASAs directive under the Bush administration to alter climate data to come in line with the governments policy. It was only when they were being investigated he got on the front foot and went public.
And some automatically assume you can trust an organisation like NASA and other clinate scientists without question.

Do you have any links for that?

 

[Fadge]

“I’m an environmental journalist, but I never write about overpopulation. Here’s why.”

Since you asked (many times).

www.vox.com

'I'm a climate change journalist but I never mention population growth because, well, it's just too hard...'

Sounds reasonable.

 

[JackOutback]

These bushfires have been caused by poor land management - lack of back burning. Both state and federal governments have let us down. Australia being one degree colder would not have prevented this disaster. Our summers have always been hot and dry aside from the odd rainy day.

The lack of prescribed burns is largely down to insufficient safe days in which to hold them. The danger of them getting out of control is a significant factor in all calculations. Australia being one degree cooler would actually make more days available in which to hold controlled burns. That doesn’t preclude some mismanagement. But the idea that the Greens have somehow foiled controlled burns from outside any position of power is a fantasy and deflection.

 

[Fadge]

A consensus is a generally accepted opinion or decision among a group of people.

According to NASA multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals show that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities. In addition, most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position.

"The number of papers rejecting AGW [Anthropogenic, or human-caused, Global Warming] is a miniscule proportion of the published research, with the percentage slightly decreasing over time. Among papers expressing a position on AGW, an overwhelming percentage (97.2% based on self-ratings, 97.1% based on abstract ratings) endorses the scientific consensus on AGW.” J. Cook, et al, "Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming," Environmental Research Letters Vol. 11 No. 4, (13 April 2016); DOI:10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048002. (page 6)

This response tells me nothing other than statistics relating to 'general consensus (about what specifically?) that have already been debunked multiple times in this thread.

Anyone else?

 

[This Is Anfield]

Some more from TPWG...

C02 vs Global Warming - Earth's history.
The research data you probably haven't seen. Correlation between C02 and Temperature? You be the judge of that.... Always handy for so called scientists and climate change bodies to use the last 2mm of these timelines which cherry picks the correlation of C02 and temp because it of course fits within the time pin prick of human existence .
If they used the rest of the data that just wouldn't add up now would it?
Purple = C02
Blue = Temperature
Ironically a moderately warming earth is a happy and stable earth for us to live. There are reasons why species became extinct during climate transformations. Global cooling can be far more detrimental to life than the tame chronological warming that we have say experienced over the last 2000 years.
The images of nuclear power plants with steam and smoke coming out of them as well as polar bears standing on melted caps of ice is mind exercise to trigger emotion. Polar bears don't want more ice, their food supplies reduce with more ice and less warmer waters to mix with the melted to start the food chain of the polar regions. Of course they need ice too but this isn't rocket science..
More ice isnt a good thing if we want our Earth to remain stable, just the right amount of fluctuating melting and growing is the key, and thats the reality, ice melts and grows over periods, it has to or the ocean cycles break down. The ice has never stayed the same in other words, exponential growing ice without melting through the seasons is bad news for us as a species....
Also an image you see plenty of in climate change C02 articles is the emissions coming out of nuclear power plant chimneys which is not C02 , you cant see C02, its actually water vapour (good for the environment) which is why the argument of nuclear power over coal often arises.
A solution to the byproduct waste is another area we should be focussed on. There are solutions but we arent ready to mass implement them. As nice as it would be, pure green energy just wont work with such a massive population and complex economy and social structure.
PROGRESS carefully and responsibly and we will get there, but shutting down every non renewable energy power station because of the last 2mm of this graph is not a smart move with the bigger picture is it?
If you spent the time to research what progress good men and women are doing in the energy and environmental tech fields you would see we are heading in the right direction. Most of the media would have you believe the opposite though, run out of time irreversible climate change we are all doomed.
Getting back to Earth's history - Looking closely at the chronological history here, there are periods where life probably ceased to exist, that is until it cooled from and example like the late Cretaceous and tertiary warm periods. The Eocene period was so warm that life would be hardly recognisable to humans but it also triggered the massive glacial period when the Sun was thought to have been undertaking massive magnetic energy shifts during the solar cycles. The sun's cycles we have been going through during human existence are nothing compared to its younger and more powerful self in years gone by.
The dinosaurs, if they existed in the ways we are taught (some very debatable theories here) then the late Mesozoic period on Earth would have been so hot that the deep sections of the oceans or extreme polar regions may have been the only place to flee. Imagine a Pilbara Summer where the minimum temp over night was about 50C ?
Helps to explain the survival of some ancient species of the oceans but land based, virtually nothing survived.
We are going to look at these periods in sections throughout our climate series.
PWG
Image courtesy of Dr C.R Scotese . Sourced from Biocab.org

 

[Deliverance]

Yes, the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the world, especially the tropics.

This caught the eye - "digging into the methodologies of old temperature records to determine the appropriate adjustments". There's a whole universe in those words. Those adjusted temperatures are then passed on to scientists...

OK. So let's go along with the line that most of the world's meteorologists and mathematicians are smoothing data to serve a narrative (for me personally, that seems a massive conspiracy that's really unlikely, but humans are fickle beings, so not impossible).
How about:
Retreating glaciers?
Changes in leafing out of plants?
Changes in migratory bird patterns?
Animal colonies shifting where they live?

There is just too much evidence to disbelieve climate change.

 

[Roylion]

NASA cheif climate scientist James Hansen, suppliments his income as an activist at an estimated 1.5 million US .

Hansen retired from NASA in April 2013.

It's not an honorable or professional thing to do, he also agreed to follow NASAs directive under the Bush administration to alter climate data to come in line with the governments policy.

Hansen accused the Bush administration of editing climate-related press releases reported by federal agencies to make global warming seem less threatening in 2006. Kevin Winters the agency’s inspector general concluded that such activities did occur between 2004-2006.

And some automatically assume you can trust an organisation like NASA and other clinate scientists without question.

No one organisation can be trusted completely. However most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing NASA's statement. While there is dissent, the scientific 'consensus' (in terms of climate science) appears to support Anthropogenic Global Warming.

 

[Roylion]

This response tells me nothing other than statistics relating to 'general consensus (about what specifically?)

What specifically? I quoted quite clearly that.. "The number of papers rejecting AGW [Anthropogenic, or human-caused, Global Warming] is a miniscule proportion of the published research, with the percentage slightly decreasing over time. Among papers expressing a position on AGW, an overwhelming percentage (97.2% based on self-ratings, 97.1% based on abstract ratings) endorses the scientific consensus on AGW.”

that have already been debunked multiple times in this thread.

Has it?

 

[Nuggs Bunny]

Has it?

It's been "debunked" by posters including thousands of research papers that didn't investigate the cause of climate change into the abstentions because they don't understand how research papers are written.

 

[Fadge]

Has it?

Yes, it has.

What specifically? I quoted quite clearly that.. "The number of papers rejecting AGW [Anthropogenic, or human-caused, Global Warming] is a miniscule proportion of the published research, with the percentage slightly decreasing over time. Among papers expressing a position on AGW, an overwhelming percentage (97.2% based on self-ratings, 97.1% based on abstract ratings) endorses the scientific consensus on AGW.”

Even if this was the case, what does it tell us?

The original question related to specifics - What? When? Is there not a consensus on this?

And if it is the case, why is population growth not front and centre in the discussion?

 

[Bazzar]

The Eastern Australia Bushfires 2019

A recent article in the Sydney Sunday Telegraph paints a despondent picture: horrible bushfires are “the new normal” because of climate change. The fire season, we learn, now extends to nearly 10 months of the year, and bushfires have become so intense that they cannot be stopped before immense damage is done. According to former NSW fire commissioner Greg Mullins (now a member of the Climate Council): “The price of inaction [on climate change] will increasingly be paid in lives lost and communities shattered”.

This echoes comments made in the wake of the bushfire that destroyed the town of Yarloop in Western Australia in 2016. The conditions were described by authorities as “unprecedented”. And following the 2018 Queensland bushfires, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk told reporters “If you want to know what caused those conditions, I’ll give you an answer – it’s called climate change”. Greens leader Richard de Natali and Greens MP Adam Brandt are both blaming the current fires in NSW on climate change.

Let’s assume for the moment that this is all correct. Put aside the views of most bushfire experts that the basic problem is a combination of drought and the failure to control forest fuels in the expectation of a bushfire. Droughts are an inevitable component of Australian climate. If you add high fuel levels the result is always uncontrollable bushfires. On the other hand, even under hot, dry conditions, fires in areas with low fuel levels are mostly easily controlled.

But just for the sake of argument, let’s accept that, thanks to climate change, the bushfire threat in Australia is now completely out of hand and deteriorating by the day. So what is to be done?

Simplifying things a little, there are broadly two options for responding to this “unprecedented” bushfire scourge.

The first is: “Fix the Climate”....

The second option is to “Fix Bushfire Management”....

Read more -

The Eastern States Bushfires 2019 - Bushfire Front

by Roger Underwood A recent article in the Sydney Sunday Telegraph paints a despondent picture: horrible bushfires are "the new normal" because of climate change. The fire season, we learn, now extends to nearly 10 months of the year, and bushfires have become so intense that they cannot be...

www.bushfirefront.org.au