Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Bob in Castlemaine; The Head of the Australian Conservation Foundation Kelly O’Shanassy delivered a solemn warning last Tuesday to a packed audience of journalists, claiming that if we continue to burn coal and breach the 1.5C IPCC climate limit, “100s of millions of people will die”.
Gloves off over climate policy: ACF chief
By REBECCA GREDLEY
AUSTRALIAN ASSOCIATED PRESS
2:44PM OCTOBER 30, 2018Kelly O’Shanassy has run out of time to be polite over climate policy.
The Australian Conservation Foundation CEO says recent warnings from scientists and two decades of climate inaction mean the gloves are off.
“If we continue to burn coal and gas for decades to come, we will kill the 1.5 degree target, we will not have a habitable planet and hundreds of millions of people will die,” she told the National Press Club in Canberra on Tuesday.
“When people are defending burning coal and gas, then that’s what they’re really talking about – those hundreds of millions of people whose lives will be at risk.”
…
Read more (paywalled): https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/latest-news/aust-climate-policy-under-the-microscope/news-story/d6a6ab7145c31456dc9f1457c9ce738f
According to Andrew Bolt, a well known conservative Australian climate skeptic, the most shocking thing about this speech is not one journalist in the audience challenged this ridiculous claim.
AND NOT ONE JOURNALIST CRIED: “THAT’S NUTS.”
Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun
November 1, 2018 10:02am…
Pardon?
“Hundreds of millions of people will die”? We will “not have a habitable planet”?
But get this: not a single journalist in the room said: “Are you nuts?” Not one asked: “What’s your evidence?”
To me, it’s mad, bad and dangerous that a room of journalists can hear a shiny-eyed speaker proclaim the end of the world — at least for humans — yet react without the slightest scepticism.
Have they no eyes to see or brains to think? Just look outside.
…
Even for green Australia this press silence in the face of such indefensible claims is shocking.
If the world breaches the 1.5C limit, nobody will die because of the breach. All that will happen is on average Summer might last a few days longer every year, or winters may be slightly milder. Given that cold weather is a far greater killer than warm weather, breaching the 1.5C limit would likely save lives.
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Wait a minute. Wasn’t this supposed to have happened between 1970 & 2000 when climate change of one form or another was to have led to widespread crop failures and the associated famines? The US population was to have shrunk to about 23 million by 1995, while Britain was predicted to cease to exist almost entirely. And even if this nonsense does materialize, won’t that be a good thing since the environmentalists are also always warning us about overpopulation?
Jesse Fell:
Nov. 1, 9:17 am
You wrote “The right question is not whether CO2 contributes to global warming, but how could it possibly not contribute”
When there is a large volcanic eruption, especially VEI5, or higher, there can be millions of tons of SO2 injected into the atmosphere, where it converts into the strongly dimming SO2 aerosol (fine droplets of H2SO4).
The NASA fact sheet on SO2 aerosols states “Stratospheric SO2 aerosols reflect sunlight, reducing the amount of energy reaching the lower atmosphere and the Earth’s surface, cooling them”.
Human-made sulfate aerosols “absorb no sunlight but they reflect it, thereby reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface’ (cooling it).
These dimming aerosols eventually settle out of the atmosphere, and temperatures rise to pre-eruption levels, or higher, simply because of the cleansed air.
The RIGHT question is not whether reduced anthropogenic SO2 aerosol emissions (due to global Clean Air efforts) contributes to global warming, but how could it possibly not contribute.
Nature confirms this mechanism after essentially every eruption. There has never been any similar confirmation of warming in the global atmosphere due to CO2, it is all a hypothesis. All of the observed warming has due to reductions in atmospheric SO2 aerosol levels.
And “The right question is not whether food contributes to obesity, but how could it possibly not contribute”
Ipso fact we must get rid of food or we’re all doomed to perish in our millions.
Ipso facto..
There is no question that reductions in SO2 emissions will have a warming effect. The aerosols of SO2 are reflective and so reduce the amount of solar energy that reaches the surface of the Earth.
But none the less, CO2 emissions have a powerful warming effect, and it is not true, as you maintain, that this effect has never been demonstrated. It has been demonstrated over and over again, in tests on the ground and through satellite spectography. We know WHY CO2 is a greenhouse gas — that is, how its molecular structure absorbs electromagnetic radiation in the infrared range and then re-emits it. This has been known and understood since John Tyndall published his pioneering papers on the subject in the 1840s.
We are pumping milliions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. It doesn’t wash out of the atmosphere they way SO2 does. It persists — for a long time — to that our additions of CO2 to the atmosphere are cumulative.
I don’t understand some people’s need to deny this basic science. We should be arguing about the best way to deal with the problem, whether through government regulation of emissions, or incentives to conserve energy, or through a Manhattan project to develop alternate sources of energy (my favorite idea).
Nobody here is denying basic science. Just the hyped up supercalifragilistic political séance and the histrionics that goes hand in hand with it. Not to mention how with each failed prediction the doomsday cult has morphed from catastrophic warming to climate change to extreme weather, inundating seas, mass extinctions, coral bleaching, yada, yada and whatever comes into their heads. Their list beggars belief for all but the delusional-
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/globalwarming2.html
and as the popular belief fades with self evident reality the hysterics of the true believers rises exponentially in a mockery of their false hockey stick that began it all and their ongoing GIGO computer models. They’ve become like a dotty old relative that the family makes allowances for and rolls their eyes that they’re off their medication again and what can be done with them.
Yet, on Mars, where CO2 is the dominant gas, it’s quite cold. It’s not just a distance from the Sun thing. If CO2 was in fact a “greenhouse” gas as the panickers were led to believe it is, this distance from the Sun should be canceled and overwhelmed by the percentage of gas in the atmosphere.
In reality, CO2 is a nothing gas, in terms of warming planet. They just concocted the idea to get morons frothing at the mouth. Well, that and a reason to tax the population. If you’re seriously factoring CO2 into scientific thought or calculations, you’ve been scammed.
But if you’re really worried about CO2, maybe we should tax the population to build a mechanism to move the Earth further from the Sun. How would that be? What else could we possibly do with trillions of dollars siphoned from the public?
We will not have a habitable planet if the ACF gets their way.
Frank, your problem is that you are trying to extrapolate instrument error to affect sampling error. There does not exist an “instrument” capable of measuring the GAST. GAST is measured using statistical methods, which makes all of your experience and your “paper” on instrument error moot. Since there is no single “instrument” to measure GAST, your instrument error analysis is meaningless. Nothing you’ve said nor done has impacted the actual theory/execution of using a statistical estimator to measure GAST
Not correct, Remy.
The GAST is calculated as the average of instrumental measurements. Every measurement has a systematic error associated with it.
When an average is taken, the systematic errors combine as their root-mean-square.
You wrote that, “GAST is measured using statistical methods….” Wrong again.
Nothing is measured using statistical methods. Statistics is mathematics, and incorporates no measurement methods at all.
Magnitudes are measured using physical instruments. Averages are taken of magnitudes measured using physical instruments.
Statistics is used for computations, not for measurements.
You wrote, “Since there is no single “instrument” to measure GAST, your instrument error analysis is meaningless.” Instrumental error propagates into any average of measurements.
Your comments make it appear as though you have never actually measured anything, or evaluated actual physical error and its meaning, or worked through a measurement average±uncertainty.
In other words, you’re fit to be a climate scientist.
You wrote, “ Nothing you’ve said nor done has impacted the actual theory/execution of using a statistical estimator to measure GAST”
At last you’re correct about something. Nothing I’ve written has been different from the way the GAST should be calculated.
You, however, have been mistaken in every single critical instance.
Jesse Fell:
You state that CO2 doesn’t wash out of the air like SO2 does.
Yes, SO2 will wash out of the air from an INTERMITTENT source, but essentially all anthropogenic sources, such as power plants, factories, foundries, home heating units, shipping, etc., etc. are continuous sources, so that anything that is washed out is immediately replaced, giving most anthropogenic SO2 aerosols an essentially infinite lifetime.
You also say that “I don’t understand some people’s need to deny this basic science”
As Karl Popper wrote, Scientific theories must be falsifiable (that is, empirically testable), and that prediction was the gold standard for their validation”.
The greenhouse gas hypothesis fails on both counts: it is not empirically testable, and it cannot make accurate temperature predictions. As such, it cannot be called “basic science”, just sheer speculation.
On the other hand, temperature changes due to changing levels of SO2 aerosol emissions has been empirically tested, and validated, and temperature changes resulting from different levels of SO2 aerosol emissions can be predicted: .02 deg. C. of change for each net Megaton of change in global SO2 aerosol emissions, either volcanic or anthropogenic.
Since when did the abortionists.. excuse me.. climate reality deniers care about people dying?