Saturday, November 28, 2009

Headlines Saturday 28th November 2009


Crowds have welcomed two new Panda bears to Australia who are here as part of a new joint research program, with Wang Wang and Funi even receiving a police escort to their new home

Rudd hoses down early election talk

PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd has hosed down speculation he will call an early federal election. - Rudd is used to lying. He might wish to see the fallout of the discovery that global warming is a con, but probably he wanted an election yesterday. ALP leaders are unanimous in being clever by calling surprise early elections - ed.


Watch the new chant dominating schoolies week (warning: adult content), plus hear what some schoolies think of the celebrations.

Australia braced for early election
VOTERS could go to the polls early next year after legislation was foiled in the Senate.

Man charged with murder of father, sister
A FUGITIVE was last night charged with the murders of his father and his sister.

Brennan's hostage hell a year too long
THE Australian Government cost photojournalist Nigel Brennan about a year in captivity.

Flu epidemic 'escaped from lab'
A REPORT suggests swine flu may have developed because of a lab error in making vaccines.

Too many drunks at hospitals
DRUNKS are overburdening the state's hospital emergency rooms, researchers have found. Each year about 3000 people die because of alcohol abuse.

Polanski to stay in jail
ROMAN Polanski will spend one more weekend in jail, because no bond had been received.

Philippine massacre suspect charged
A PHILIPPINE politician was charged with mass murder today after authorities accused him of ordering soldiers, police and other gunmen to kill at least 57 defenceless people in an organised slaughter.

Minister quits over Afghan air strike
GERMAN Labour Minister Franz Josef Jung has resigned over a deadly air strike in Afghanistan in September, when he was defence minister.


Transcripts show air traffic controllers asked Northwest pilots who overflew Minneapolis what happened — the response: 'cockpit distractions' were the issue.

Left Vows to 'Spank' Obama On Afghan Troop Decision
Obama may face battle within own party if he commits tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan

Stocks Slump on Dubai Debt News
U.S. markets, after being closed for Thanksgiving, fall on fears that problems will affect wider financial system

Lawyer: White House Cleared Crashers
White House denies attorney's claim that socialites who crashed state dinner were 'cleared' to attend - Obama understands how difficult it is for posers and social climbers. -ed.
=== Comments ===
AL’S RIDE
Tim Blair
A “peace and justice movement” apparently sworn to every cause on earth – the group includes 9/11 Truthers, new world order theorists, eugenics freakers and anti-warmers – confronts Al Gore at a Chicago book signing, leading to this caption:
Protester from the We Are Change group shout after chasing Al Gore’s SUV down State Street in the Chicago Loop on Tuesday.
Where are those sky bears when we need them?
===
BETTER TO DIE ON YOUR FEET
Tim Blair
Dense urban electorates remain in Malcolm Turnbull’s carbon corner:
Newspoll shows that 63 per cent of Coalition voters in the cities believe the government’s bill should be passed, while only 28 per cent think it should be opposed.

If one in 10 of those voters changed sides because of a Coalition decision to block action on climate change, it would cost the Liberal Party the 20 metropolitan seats that it holds with margins of less than 6.5 per cent.
Just a theory, but perhaps the fault for this lies with Liberal reluctance to attack emissions policies and expose the costs involved. Tony Abbott admitted yesterday:
On Wednesday, for instance, the opposition felt constrained not to question the government over newspaper headlines about the estimated $1100 a year extra costs for families because that was now its policy. It’s almost impossible to hold a government to account if you’ve just negotiated with it line-by-line to create the policy in contention.
Good point. Back to the poll story:
These findings are consistent with the Liberal Party’s internal research in marginal seats, which shows that between 75 and 80 per cent of swinging voters favour action on climate change.

Senior party officials say the research shows a triumph by climate change sceptics would be “the death of the party”.
Instead, the Liberal party is covering for the government and helping guide families towards a pointless $1100-per-year existence tax. As it stands, the party is already dead.
===
SNACK TIME
Tim Blair
There’s a whole hulk of tenderloin hidden inside Bingley’s intricate bacon weave:

Click for cooking instructions. As Bingley emails, this RareCowPig dish is “the perfect companion to your oyster steak.” Indeed, it’s possibly even better than a carpetbag. I’m currently working on a new steak design myself, featuring a three-beast accompaniment I call climate justice salad. Stay tuned.
===
CONCERNS HEEDED
Tim Blair
Connie turns against Turnbull and his ETS-lovin’ ways:
NSW senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells quit as parliamentary secretary for immigration, saying she was breaking ranks to vote against an ETS.

“This has been a very difficult time for the Liberal Party,” she said in a statement.

“I acknowledge the avalanche of correspondence and feedback conveyed to me from a wide cross-section of the community, most especially after the decision of the Joint Party Room to amend and support the legislation.

“It is also especially clear from the Liberal base in NSW that the mood is strongly against that decision. In all my years of involvement in the Party, I have never seen such an extraordinary reaction.

“As a person who owes much to the Liberal Party and to that grassroots base, as well as to the people of NSW who elected me, I feel compelled to heed their concerns.”
Australia’s anti-Copenhagenists will not be denied. As was mentioned several weeks ago: “Privately, a lot of people in the Liberal Party are a lot more sceptical than Mr Hockey would let on.” Now we’re discovering just how many – and also the potential electoral force of conservative opposition to emissions trading.
===
The Svengali of the Liberal revolt speaks
Andrew Bolt

The ABC’s PM, a player in the global warming debate, accuses me of being a player. We then start arguing when the interviewer shows no interest in the central fact which best explains this revolt by the Liberal sceptics - the failure of the world to actually warm. Listen here. Transcript here.

Actually, I kind of think Mark Colvin is blaming you, dear readers, for Turnbull’s fall. I think he feels you’ve caused this panic.

PS: Some other ABC broadcasters are players, too, of course, but their kind of playing is perfectly legitimate, for some reason..

Example: Jon Faine refuses to even discuss leaked emails revealing how leading global warming scientists conspired to rig results, censor sceptics and destroy data on the grounds that “it suits the conspiracy theorists beautifully”.

In fact, which ABC player endorsed and actually recorded TV ads for a political party?

UPDATE

Actually, which two ABC personalities recorded ads for a political party - and which even ran as a candidate:

===
SIGN OF THE TIMES
Tim Blair
Canada’s national broadcaster receives some viewer input:

===
ETERNAL MELTING
Tim Blair
From the New York Times, 128 years of looming polar doom:

• 1881: “This past Winter, both inside and outside the Arctic circle, appears to have been unusually mild. The ice is very light and rapidly melting …”

• 1932: “NEXT GREAT DELUGE FORECAST BY SCIENCE; Melting Polar Ice Caps to Raise the Level of Seas and Flood the Continents”

• 1934: “New Evidence Supports Geology’s View That the Arctic Is Growing Warmer”

• 1937: “Continued warm weather at the Pole, melting snow and ice.”

• 1954: “The particular point of inquiry concerns whether the ice is melting at such a rate as to imperil low-lying coastal areas through raising the level of the sea in the near future.”

• 1957: “U.S. Arctic Station Melting”

• 1958: “At present, the Arctic ice pack is melting away fast. Some estimates say that it is 40 per cent thinner and 12 per cent smaller than it was fifteen years [ago].”

• 1959: “Will the Arctic Ocean soon be free of ice?”

• 1971: “STUDY SAYS MAN ALTERS CLIMATE; U.N. Report Links Melting of Polar Ice to His Activities”

• 1979: “A puzzling haze over the Arctic ice packs has been identified as a byproduct of air pollution, a finding that may support predictions of a disastrous melting of the earth’s ice caps.”

• 1982: “Because of global heating attributed to an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide from fuel burning, about 20,000 cubic miles of polar ice has melted in the past 40 years, apparently contributing to a rise in sea levels …”

• 1999: “Evidence continues to accumulate that the frozen world of the Arctic and sub-Arctic is thawing.”

• 2000: “The North Pole is melting. The thick ice that has for ages covered the Arctic Ocean at the pole has turned to water, recent visitors there reported yesterday.”

• 2002: “The melting of Greenland glaciers and Arctic Ocean sea ice this past summer reached levels not seen in decades, scientists reported today.”

• 2004: “There is an awful lot of Arctic and glacial ice melting.”

• 2005: “Another melancholy gathering of climate scientists presented evidence this month that the Antarctic ice shelf is melting - a prospect difficult to imagine a decade ago.”
===
THICK ATMOSPHERE
Tim Blair
Climate researcher and IPCC co-author Eduardo Zorita calls for Warmergate plumbers Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Stefan Rahmstorf to be barred from the IPCC process and muses on the “very troubling professional behavior” evident in those leaked emails:
I may confirm what has been written in other places: research in some areas of climate science has been and is full of machination, conspiracies, and collusion, as any reader can interpret from the CRU-files …

I am also aware that in this thick atmosphere – and I am not speaking of greenhouse gases now – editors, reviewers and authors of alternative studies, analysis, interpretations, even based on the same data we have at our disposal, have been bullied and subtly blackmailed. In this atmosphere, Ph D students are often tempted to tweak their data so as to fit the ‘politically correct picture’.
Zorita is prepared for the consequences:
By writing these lines I will just probably achieve that a few of my future studies will, again, not see the light of publication.
If so, he’ll be a victim of climate tribalism, as identified by the University of East Anglia’s Professor Mike Hulme:
It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.
Iowahawk has more on that “social organization”.

UPDATE. Ahead of a possible congressional investigation, Senator James Inhofe warns scientists to “retain [related] documents.”
===
IPCC too “politicised” to survive
Andrew Bolt
Green journalists may ignore them, but scientists cannot. In fact, even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change itself is threatened by the Climategate emails.

Professor Mike Hulme is of the University of East Anglia from which the emails were leaked, and is named by ScienceWatch as “the 10th most cited author in the world in the field of climate change, between 1999 and 2009”. The leaked emails of IPCC authors show an organisation corrupted by a clique of warmist evangelists, and even Hume now says the IPCC may have run its course:
(The UN’s Copenhagen summit) is about raw politics, not about the politics of science… It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.

It is also possible that the institutional innovation that has been the I.P.C.C. has run its course. Yes, there will be an AR5 (fifth report) but for what purpose? The I.P.C.C. itself, through its structural tendency to politicize climate change science, has perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production – just at a time when a globalizing and wired cosmopolitan culture is demanding of science something much more open and inclusive.
UPDATE

Climate researcher and IPCC co-author Eduardo Zorita calls for Climategate scientists Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Stefan Rahmstorf to be barred from the IPCC processes:
I may confirm what has been written in other places: research in some areas of climate science has been and is full of machination, conspiracies, and collusion, as any reader can interpret from the CRU-files …

I am also aware that in this thick atmosphere – and I am not speaking of greenhouse gases now – editors, reviewers and authors of alternative studies, analysis, interpretations, even based on the same data we have at our disposal, have been bullied and subtly blackmailed. In this atmosphere, Ph D students are often tempted to tweak their data so as to fit the ‘politically correct picture’.
And what does it say about the disgraceful politicisation of climate science that Zorita warns:
By writing these lines I will just probably achieve that a few of my future studies will, again, not see the light of publication.
UPDATE 2

Peer review at the Climatic Research Unit:

===
The SMH can’t even see the column, let alone the scandal
Andrew Bolt
British warming crusader George Monbiot has written two recent columns on denialism.

The first, three weeks ago, castigated the alleged denialism of sceptics:
There is no point in denying it: we’re losing. Climate change denial is spreading like a contagious disease. It exists in a sphere which cannot be reached by evidence or reasoned argument; any attempt to draw attention to scientific findings is greeted with furious invective. This sphere is expanding with astonishing speed.
The second, just three days ago, castigated the alleged denialism of Monbiot’s fellow warmists:
I have seldom felt so alone. Confronted with crisis, most of the environmentalists I know have gone into denial. The emails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, they say, are a storm in a tea cup, no big deal, exaggerated out of all recognition. It is true that climate change deniers have made wild claims which the material can’t possibly support (the end of global warming, the death of climate science). But it is also true that the emails are very damaging.
So which of those two columns do you think the Sydney Morning Herald chose to run today - the dated one attacking sceptics (again) or the new one attacking the warmists now refusing to confront the greatest scientific scandal of their faith?

This is not just denial but deceit. Monbiot is made to seem as if he’s reacting to the revolt of the Liberal sceptics against their warmist leader, when in fact that revolt was driven in (small) part by the very scandal that he accepts is genuine.

UPDATE

The mainstream media - with a handful of (conservative) exceptions - do not know what terrible damage they are doing to their credibility by ignoring or drastically downplaying the Climategate scandal. The story is out, a couple of million times over, on the Internet.

What do you think the people reading of this scandal there conclude when they then turn to, say, The Age or the ABC, and find there barely a word of coverage?

I’ll tell you: they’ll conclude that the media cannot be trusted to tell even the news, let alone the truth, when it conflicts with their agenda. Hear that from the ABC’s Melbourne talkback host Jon Faine himself when he explained why he would not even discuss the emails:
That was my assessment of whether this was actually of any significance or not, and I decided that it wasn’t and we wouldn’t spend time on it. It suits the conspiracy theorists beautifully…
The other thing these readers will conclude is that for news involving certain ideologies, they must of necessity turn to the Internet, and in particular to certain blogs they trust to speak freely. For all those in the ABC and Age who deplore the influence of my blog, my sincere thanks for your part this week in making it more essential reading than ever.

Fools. You cut your own throats.

(A PS for media monitoring services and self-Googlers who most need to read and reflect on the above: attention Mark Scott, Paul Ramadge, Angelo Frangopoulos, Jeremy Millar and David Koch.)
===
David Jones runs both hot and cold
Andrew Bolt
David Jones is the warmist preacher who heads the National Climate Centre at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.

Is all his work riddled with such contradictions?

Anthony - due to professional reasons - I am unable to comment on Bolt’s column. But as with most of his material it is rubbish.
===
New Zealand’s man-made warming
Andrew Bolt
New Zealand sceptics this week asked how New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research fiddled the data to create this iconic warming graph:

When in fact the raw data showed no such warming spike:

The spike was produced by adjustments made by an IPCC co-author who once worked with the Climatic Research Unit now at the centre of the Climategate scandal.

NIWA has responded saying those adjustments were made to account for changes in the siting of the measuring stations, but has released the reasoning for only one of those station adjustments.

Even that one defence (release the rest!) is now being picked apart in Investigate:
(NIWA’s) David Wratt told Investigate earlier there was international agreement on how to make temperature adjustments, and in the news release tonight he elaborates on that:

“Thus, if one measurement station is closed (or data missing for a period), it is acceptable to replace it with another nearby site provided an adjustment is made to the average temperature difference between the sites.”
Except, except, it all hinges on the quality of the reasoning that goes into making that adjustment. If it were me, I would have slung up a temperature station in the disused location (at Thorndon, where temperatures for Wellington were calculated until 1927) again and worked out over a year the average offset between Thorndon and Kelburn (a higher location from where they’ve been calculated since). It’s not perfect, after all we are talking about a switch in 1928, but it would be something. But NIWA didn’t do that.

Instead, as their news release records, they simply guessed that the readings taken at Wellington Airport would be similar to Thorndon, simply because both sites are only a few metres above sea level.

Airport records temps about 0.79C above Kelburn on average, so NIWA simply said to themselves, “that’ll do” and made the Airport/Kelburn offset the official offset for Thorndon/Kelburn as well, even though no comparison study of the latter scenario has ever been done....

What’s interesting is that if you leave Kelburn out of the equation, Thorndon in 1910 is not far below Airport 2010. Perhaps that gave NIWA some confidence that the two locations were equivalent, but I’m betting Thorndon a hundred years ago was very different from an international airport now…

Now, it may be that there was a good and obvious reason to adjust Wellington temps. My question remains, however: is applying a temperature example from 15km away in a different climate zone a valid way of rearranging historical data?
But Anthony Watts, who has uncovered the astonishing siting of many US weather stations, wonders how much reliance can be placed on a warming trend detected by a station mounted next to air conditioners on the roof of the NIWA headquarters:

UPDATE

Sceptic Willis Eschenbach tells the extraordinary tale of how the CRU blocked all his attempts to check its data - even before he’d asked for it.
===
Turnbull’s scientists
Andrew Bolt
Thre times I’ve heard Malcolm Turnbull cite three authorities - and just these three - for his belief that global warming is a threat that we must fight with a great green tax.

Those authorites are the famous climate scientists Margaret Thatcher, John Howard and Rupert Murdoch.
===
Boat people praise Rudd
Andrew Bolt
Yet another asylum seeker in Indonesia says Kevin Rudd has inspired him to try his luck:
‘’We heard that Australia recognised Hazara,’’ he said. ‘’The government has changed now. It’s good for refugees there.’’
Add him to the others:
An Iraqi told the ABC: “Kevin Rudd - he’s changed everything about refugee. If I go to Australia now, different.”

An Afghan told The Australian: “I know Kevin Rudd is the new PM ... he has tried to get more immigrants. I have heard that if someone arrives it is easy.”
Red marks the spot on the Immigration Department graph when Rudd last weakened our boat people laws:

===
Not a warming world, but warming friendships
Andrew Bolt
Tom Arup was The Age’s national political reporter and is now the environment correspondent for both The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. Do you get the idea from his latest column that he’s a whole lot too close to one side of the debate?
The call comes early in the morning this time. ‘‘I’ve got something that will solve the climate change problem,’’ an excited voice says.

I prop myself up in bed.... my clock says its is 7.36 AM.... ‘‘How did you get my number,’’ I shoot back. But feeling bad, I ask what the miracle solution is…

I tell the press secretary for Greens Senator Christine Milne, a thin good humoured fellow name Tim, about (another “miracle solution")…

On the lawns of Parliament house there has been a small tent where a man is fasting for climate change… The faster’s marketing person has been hassling me about a story for two weeks....

I have decided to ignore the whole thing… But there is no escape. My housemate has a friend staying at my place who has come to Canberra to ‘‘show solidarity’’ with the faster… ‘‘What you need to understand...’’ he says, setting off on to an indescribable rant as I open a beer which promises to be 100 per cent carbon offset…

A group running for climate change is also in town. They want to meet. We do...
Sadly, in all this dealing with green cranks, drinking of green beer, joshing with Greens, and sifting through Green dreams, Arup has simply run out of any time to write about the greatest green scandal in his lifetime.

WHICH again for me raises the question: do personal loyalities make it difficult to be as dispassionate about such a morally loaded topic? An important example:
Janet Rice, the Greens candidate for Steve Bracks’ seat of Williamstown..., is married to CSIRO climate change researcher, Dr Penelope Whetton...
Whetton is not just some “climate change reseacher”, but CSIRO’s Climate Change Impact and Risk group leader and a lead author of the 2007 IPCC report.

How dispassionate is she? Well, she endorsed the science in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth:
I was really quite moved, and given that this film was about a topic I deal with every day, this says something about how powerfully it communicates its message. Its scientific basis is very sound.” 4.75 out of 5
That, when, as a British judge later found, the film had at least nine severe scientific flaws and exaggerations, and also featured the discredited “hockey stick” of Michael Mann, falsely claiming the world hadn’t been hotter in thousands of years.

How could Whetton have endorsed anything so error-riddled? Is she as gullible in her work?

UPDATE

Reader soldier in comments today warns Climate Change Minister Penny Wong of an intimate connection she has, too:
Did you know that Penny Wong is 18% carbon? More importantly does Penny Wong know that she is 18% carbon and therefore she is loaded with what she insists is a pollutant?
UPDATE 2

Reader Ivory Tickler says The Age’s state political correspondent and former environment writer Melissa Fyfe also has more important journalistic work to be getting on with:

Fyfe is jogging in (Run For A Safe Climate) group and sending dispatches as she goes. Of course, while she was off running, Climeategate broke and she hasn’t written a word about it.

UPDATE 3

Green journalists, including the ABC’s Jon Faine, refuse to even discuss the emails which have prompted an official inquiry into what they say about the Climatic Research Unit and the warmist science:
Phil Willis MP said the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee - of which he is chair - had written to UEA asking for copies of the e-mails and an explanation. Depending on the response, the committee will decide whether to proceed further....

Details of a university inquiry ... are likely to be made public next week… One senior climate scientist told me that the chair would have to be a person accepted by both mainstream climate scientists and sceptics as a highly respected figure without strong connections to either group.
===
Hiding the European decline
Andrew Bolt
Did the Climatic Research Unit also “hide the decline” in Europe?

Phil Jones explains:
The global average temperature is calculated by climatologists at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. The temperature graph the CRU produces from its monthly averages is the main indicator of global temperature change used by the International Panel on Climate Change, and it shows a steady increase in global lower atmospheric temperature over the 20th century. Similar graphs for regions of the world, such as Europe and North America, show the same trend. This is consistent with increasing industrialization, growing use of fossil fuels, and rising atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide....

(C)ase closed: The Earth is warming. Except for one problem. CRU’s average temperature data doesn’t jive with that of Vincent Courtillot, a French geo-magneticist, director of the Institut de Physique du Globe in Paris, and a former scientific advisor to the French Cabinet. Last year he and three colleagues plotted an average temperature chart for Europe that shows a surprisingly different trend. Aside from a very cold spell in 1940, temperatures were flat for most of the 20th century, showing no warming while fossil fuel use grew. Then in 1987 they shot up by about 1 C and have not shown any warming since. This pattern cannot be explained by rising carbon dioxide concentrations, unless some critical threshold was reached in 1987; nor can it be explained by climate models.
Why the difference?
CRU, in contrast, calculates average temperatures by month — rather than daily — over individual grid boxes on the Earth’s surface that are 5 degrees of latitude by 5 degrees of longitude, from 1850 to the present. First it makes hundreds of adjustments to the raw data, which sometimes require educated guesses, to try to correct for such things as changes in the type and location of thermometers. It also combines air temperatures and water temperatures from the sea. It uses fancy statistical techniques to fill in gaps of missing data in grid boxes with few or no temperature measurements. CRU then adjusts the averages to show changes in temperature since 1961-1990.

CRU calls the 1961-1990 the “normal” period and the average temperature of this period it calls the “normal.” It subtracts the normal from each monthly average and calls these the monthly “anomalies.” A positive anomaly means a temperature was warmer than CRU’s normal period. Finally CRU averages the grid box anomalies over regions such as Europe or over the entire surface of the globe for each month to get the European or global monthly average anomaly. You see the result in the IPCC graph nearby, which shows rising temperatures.

The decision to consider the 1961-1990 period as ‘normal’ was CRUs. Had CRU chosen a different period under consideration, the IPCC graph would have shown less warming, as discussed in one of the Climategate emails, from David Parker of the UK meteorological office. In it, Parker advised Jones not to select a different period, saying “anomalies will seem less positive than before if we change to newer normals, so the impression of global warming will be muted.” That’s hardly a compelling scientific justification!

No comments: