Here’s a great video from BBC’s “Horizon” – fascinating watch that puts Delingpole firmly in his place.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V89AeCLCtJQ?rel=0&w=560&h=349]
Horizon: Science Under Attack
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Monthly Archives: April 2011
The latest from the ‘Redneck-Wonderland’.
The following was recently posted by shock jock Andrew Bolt who has just been given his own TV program by Australia’s richest person, mining billionaire Gina Rinehart. For those overseas – Greg Combet is our Federal Minister for Climate Change. For those wondering why the reference to “Redneck Wonderland” go here and here.
Note that the ‘experts’ that he refers to are unqualified and unpublished in the peer-reviewed literature associated with the majority of expert areas behind their claims. Good choice Andrew – I guess they match your expertise on climate change and its impacts. Wouldn’t want to have a real expert disagree with you!
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Bob Carter, David Evans, Stewart Franks and Bill Kininmonth identify 10 errors in Climate Change Greg Combet’s big speech last week on his carbon dioxide tax.
Go here for their explanations, but these are the 10 falsehoods Combet uttered:
1. The evidence of atmospheric warming is very strong, and the potential for dangerous climate impacts is high. The scientific advice is that carbon (sic) pollution (sic) is the cause.
First-time Bleaching in Ningaloo, Western Australia
Bleaching in Ningaloo? I believe this is a first for high temperature-related coral bleaching. People have wondered why these reefs have not suffered from mass coral bleaching. Unfortunately, that is no longer true. Here is a report by coral biologist, Dr Tyrone Ridgway (Australian Institute of Marine Science)
SEE UPDATE here.
Coral bleaching has been reported on Ningaloo – a reef system that has not experienced widespread bleaching to date. Coral bleaching likelihood is largely determined by sea temperatures, and during the 2010/2011 summer, sea surface temperatures across Ningaloo were anomalously warm.
Coral bleaching events are usually caused by long periods (usually 4 to 8 weeks) of warmer than average summer sea surface temperatures (SSTs), and SST estimates from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Coral Reef Watch Program show that 2010/2011 summer SSTs around Ningaloo have been about 1°C to 3°C warmer than the long-term averages for the region. As a result, Ningaloo was on Bleaching Watch for much of the summer and reached 4 Degree Heating Weeks (DHW)1 in mid-January 2011 (Figure 1A). In situ temperature loggers (~ 6 m depth) at Bundegi in the Exmouth Gulf and 14-Mile Beach on Ningaloo (Figure 1B) confirmed that actual water temperatures had been above seasonal averages since mid October 2010.
Do the numbers: gas emits as much CO2 as coal.
Natural gas is widely advertised and promoted as a clean burning fuel that produces less greenhouse gas emissions than coal when burned. While it is true that less carbon dioxide is emitted from burning natural gas than from burning coal per unit of energy generated, the combustion emissions are only part of story and the comparison is quite misleading.
Anthony Watts, Richard Muller and the GOP three ring circus.
You just have to love them. Here is a fascinating insight from Paul Krugman in the Opinion pages of the New York Times. You have to admit, the GOP and their antics really do take the cake!
By PAUL KRUGMAN
So the joke begins like this: An economist, a lawyer and a professor of marketing walk into a room. What’s the punch line? They were three of the five “expert witnesses” Republicans called for last week’s Congressional hearing on climate science.
But the joke actually ended up being on the Republicans, when one of the two actual scientists they invited to testify went off script.
Prof. Richard Muller of Berkeley, a physicist who has gotten into the climate skeptic game, has been leading the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, an effort partially financed by none other than the Koch foundation. And climate deniers — who claim that researchers at NASA and other groups analyzing climate trends have massaged and distorted the data — had been hoping that the Berkeley project would conclude that global warming is a myth.
Mann in Court
Here is something I came across recently in the Courthouse News Service. After the abuse that this internationally recognized scientist has received from the anti-science movement, this seems (if anything) a little overdue!
VANCOUVER, B.C. (CN) – A Pennsylvania State University professor claims climate-change denier Timothy Ball defamed him in an interview published by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, a Winnipeg-based think tank.
Michael Mann, a professor in Penn State’s meteorology department and director of the university’s Earth Systems Science Center, claims that Ball defamed him when he said that Mann “should be in the State Pen, not Penn State,” for his alleged role in the so-called climate gate email tussle.
Mann says that Ball and the Centre refused to issue an apology and published the words with the “purpose of harming the plaintiff and exposing him to hatred, ridicule and contempt, lowering the plaintiff in the estimation of others, and causing him to be shunned and avoided.”
It’s not the first time Ball’s been sued by a climate scientist for defamation.
In February, Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria sued Ball over an article published by the Canada Free Press, in which Ball allegedly accused Weaver of cherry-picking scientific data in his work with the UN’s intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.Mann seeks punitive damages and wants the article removed from its electronic database. He is represented in B.C. Supreme Court by Roger McConchie.