Andrew Bolt of the Herald Sun digs up another issue with non peer reviewed World Wildlife Fund reports in the IPCC AR4. It turns out a new paper in GRL handily disputes the cause of the drought.
He writes:
Melbourne University alarmist David Karoly once claimed a rise in the Murray Darling Basin’s temperatures was “likely due to the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from human acitivity” and:
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd grabbed the scare and exploited it:
BRENDAN Nelson was yesterday accused of being “blissfully immune” to the effects of climate change after he said the crisis in the Murray-Darling Basin was not linked to global warming…
In parliament yesterday, Kevin Rudd attacked Dr Nelson, accusing him of ignoring scientific facts.
“You need to get with the science on this,” the Prime Minister said. “Look at the technical report put together by the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology.”
But the latest evidence shows that Rudd and Karoly were wrong. In fact, there’s no evidence in the Murray Darling drought of man-made warming, says a new study in Geophysical Research Letters, this new study:
Previous studies of the recent drought in the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) have noted that low rainfall totals have been accompanied by anomalously high air temperatures. Subsequent studies have interpreted an identified trend in the residual timeseries of non-rainfall related temperature variability as a signal of anthropogenic change, further speculating that increased air temperature has exacerbated the drought through increasing evapotranspiration rates. In this study, we explore an alternative explanation of the recent increases in air temperature. This study demonstrates that significant misunderstanding of known processes of land surface – atmosphere interactions has led to the incorrect attribution of the causes of the anomalous temperatures, as well as significant misunderstanding of their impact on evaporation within the Murray-Darling Basin…
However, to accept the correlation [between temperature and rainfall] as the sole basis for the attribution of cause to human emissions is to implicitly assume that the correlation represents an entirely correct model of the sole driver of maximum air temperature. This is clearly not the case.
What’s causing the evaporation and temperatures is not (man-made) warming. It’s kind of the other way around: more sunshine, through lack of cloud cover, and lack of rain and therefore evaporation is causing higher temperatures.
And guess which scandal-ridden and alarmist IPCC report relied on Karoly’s claims? Reader Baa Humbug:
Karoly was cited very extensively in the AR4 WG1 paper.e.g. Chapter 9 9.4.2.3 Studies Based on Indices of Temperature Change and Temperature-Precipitation Relationships.”Studies based on indices of temperature change support the robust detection of human influence on continental-scale land areas. Observed trends in indices of North American continental scale temperature change, (including the regional mean, the mean land-ocean temperature contrast and the annual cycle) were found by Karoly et al. (2003) to be generally consistent with simulated trends under historical forcing from greenhouse gases and sulphate aerosols during the second half of the 20th century. In contrast, they find only a small likelihood of agreement with trends driven by natural forcing only during this period.
Snowfall increase in coastal East Antarctica linked with southwest Western Australian drought
Tas D. van Ommen1 & Vin Morgan, 2010
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/ngeo761.html
@ur momisugly Marchesarosa:
Let’s not forget that the Climategate story (the presence of the CRU emails etc on a public server) was given first to the BBC – who sat on it for three weeks, iirc.
Now we know what we do about the pension fund, that decison seems less extraordinary – I wonder who really made it! Maybe it wasn’t just a failure of journalistic antenna
My reference to psychiatry was not fully in jest.
It is a given that some people do acquire obsessive/compulsive behaviour, OCB, sometimes shown by physical actions like repeated hand-washing or ball-washing between rounds of golf; or sometimes by trains of thought that are rather different to the mainstream to a degree that warrants professional investigation. An example of the latter would be a religious belief so strong that the believer uses suicide bombs on the body.
Completely avoiding the individual case and referring only to the general case, there is no measurement or test to show that an individual in a particular situation or occupation is immune from OCB. It is an illness that can strike at random and sometimes without the patient knowing he/she is ill. It can, in one sub-form, be a group event such as hysteria reported particularly among groups of teenage girls, which might be initiated by one person then taken up by others who witness the start of the action.
Even on statistical probability, there is a chance that one or more climate scientists is affected. There is also a finite probability that bloggers here are affected, perchance me. If a condition is found, it can be ignored or it can be teated with whatever success is possible. Succeess or failure apart, it is important that the suspect group or person be identified so that bystanders can choose to be affected or not.
One, but one, of the characteristics of OCB can be that the sick person tries to do too much too soon, like the Mad Hare of Lewis Carroll. In financial business, some individuals get very rich very quickly through frantic effort. Many of them collapse soon after. In the academic world, I view with suspicion those people who publish early and often on disputable topics.
The trouble starts when one has to distinguish between real skill in science and real OCB in science. I’m not expert to do this except in a few specialist fields of experience, but that does not stop me harbouring suspicions.
Some of these suspicions have been expressed on a blog that needs more mention in the context of this thread, namely the excellent series of articles by Dr David Stockwell on Niche Modeling, about the CSIRO “Drought Exceptional Circumstances report”
http://landshape.org/enm/decr-review-reviewer-1/
Highly recommended for David’s analysis and publications such as
International Journal of Modern Physics B, Volume 23, … David R.B. Stockwell, Anthony Cox … (International Journal of Forecasting, doi:10.1016, May 2009).
Patrick Davis (18:58:06) :
Heck, we have farms in Australia bigger than Texas.
Luke:
Ruse 3 – pretend AGW science doesn’t know/care about natural variability
No argument about that item: AGW science knew about natural variability and obviously “cared” enough to try to erase the MWP, which in 1995 the ipcc itself had admitted as existent and at least as warm as present, given the course of temp from 1995 on.
Ron Broberg (19:44:42) :
Article published on line 7th Feb 2010, fast work in referencing it. Thanks!
If my coords and Google Earth are about right, there is some 3,200 km between Law Dome Antarctica and the wheatfields of West Australia. That’s 2,000 miles. It seems a long way to make a cause-effect connection, especially when there are competing explanations such as Dr Caroline Ummenhofer and Professor Matthew England in GRL referenced above.
Dugetit (10:23:50)
D. King (11:33:13)
I didn’t mind when they called me a denier or a stooge for anti American activists. But what I read behind the lines in this post
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=5086
from climaterealists is that the Obama Administration has set up a site to act as thought police on climate change to counter the posts that are undermining AGW. What conspiracy? This could be because Hansen has lost credibility as the result of supporting IPCC which is falling from the sky like Icarus when he flew too close to the sun. This will protect the administration from being caught when IPCC is totally discredited and will provide a source for fighting against climate change with more half truths. Hey Mr. Orwell, where are you?
Patrick Davis (18:58:06) :
Heck, we have farms in Australia bigger than Texas.
and you oughta see our grasshoppers!
Luke (13:22:01) :
Homeless now Luke?
Please tell me this is just a brief visit to WUWT.
>>Professor Phil Jones from the University of East
>> Anglia’s Climate Research Unit – the expert at
>>the centre of the Climategate scandal – said he
>>had considered suicide
Yes, but only to get the sympathy vote from liberals.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7018484.ece
.
Now that super funds manipulation has been revealed it must surely be time for SNOUTS-IN-THE-TROUGH-GATE
Perhaps this outfit is needed because they fear that Gavin’s work during business hours at RC can no longer continue.
” Gets even worse for denialists. Lockart et al will be comprehensively rebutted in an upcoming GRL.”
Says this Luke character..now how would eh know this if he is on on the inside to something
That seems to be inferring that they have stiched up the Peer Review process and have something in the pipe line to correct some stuff they dont like in the Lockart paper, a la the CRU emails revelations
Wouldnt be too surprising if that is the case
To what does the renowned climate scientist, Andrew Bolt, attribute the lack of cloud cover, higher temperatures, deficiency of rainfall and the lessening of evaporation from the therefore drier land, which together describe the big drought in south eastern Australia?
And is there any reference available for the paper in Geophysical Research Letters? If not, could someone provide the names of the authors?
Scientist for Truth
“There is a MASSIVE conflict of interest in the UK. If you knew that your pension was being invested in enterprises that would be practically worthless if the AGW scam was exposed, do you think you would be willing to run news or articles that would expose the scam?”
Any pension fund can sell its investments in a particular company and re-invest the money elsewhere. Fund managers do this all the time, so where the BBC happens to have its pension money invested isn’t a huge problem.
However you are right to identify that there is a problem and that is the vested interest of Peter Dunscombe. As long as he is so closely allied with certain green projects, and also the pensions manager of the BBC, there is a temptation for those on the BBC who either know or care where their pensions are invested, to try to influence the profile of green issues and thus inflate the value of their investments. I’m trying to work out whether that would be illegal under any Financial Services legislation, or just a rather dubious temptation.
Supposing I held shares in a pharma company. If I were to spread the word via various media that one of its drugs was the greatest cure for cancer that money can buy, and it wasn’t, in order to inflate the value of my shares… erm… would that be legal in any way?
Yawn – hardly Rastus – denialist errors are simply errors. Oh dear – another beatup and try-on dispensed with.
Sou (03:00:39) :
Andrew Bolt is a well known newspaper columnist and commentator for a major Australian newspaper. He is very careful with attributions and references. He seldom pulls a personal opinion out of the air, unsupported.
Irrespective of content, his conduct is correct.
In particular, he does not attempt to silence those with opposing views as you appear to be attempting here.
This is a blog about science. If you have scientific evidence that material is suspect, your preferred action is to provide the material that supports your doubt.