Climate Control Freakery: a disturbed academic in Australia has his sights on the children

Writing on the Wall, or just the zealotry of someone disturbed out of all proportion by the talk of climate catastrophe?  It is shocking to note that this man is a lecturer in a university.  Here is what he has in mind for children:

5. Children

Hundreds of millions of children are already the victims of the worsening climate crisis and it is estimated that 6 billion under-5 year old infants will die avoidably this century due to unaddressed climate change. All children are acutely threatened by man-made climate change. Some ideas for climate action re children:

5.1 Carefully-designed, ethical, science-informed (e.g. Climate Commission-informed), clear summaries of the climate crisis and solutions should be provided to all primary school children as a booklet, book mark, and refrigerator magnet.

5.2 Carefully-designed, ethical, science-informed, clear summaries of the climate crisis and solutions should be provided to all secondary school children as a booklet, book mark, and refrigerator magnet.

5.3 Green apparel as a badge of environmental concern (children can declare themselves for their future; make every day St Patrick’s Day).

5.4 Carefully-designed, ethical, science-informed, clear summaries of the climate crisis and solutions should be provided to all parents, school teachers, clergy, sports coaches, music teachers and indeed all those involved with children activities.

5.5 Smart ways of explaining to children that we have just One Planet and that any species extinction is unacceptable.

5.6 Awards to children (from badges to books) for good works for the Biosphere.

5.7. Local, state, national and global awards for outstanding environmentalism by children.

5.8 Children must be ethically encouraged to boycott ecocidal and terracidal products and services.

5.9 Children should be ethically encouraged to ask what their elders are doing in the War on the Planet. and instructed about the terms intergenerational equity, intergenerational justice, intergenerational inequity and intergenerational injustice.

5.10 Climate activists must educate and mobilize children who have the time and energy to help save their world.

5.11 Children and young people in general instructed about intergenerational equity, intergenerational justice, intergenerational inequity and intergenerational injustice.

5.12 Just as a children were ethically instructed about the consequences of nuclear war in “When the wind blows” by Raymond Briggs (1982), so they should be similarly made aware of the consequences of climate change inaction


Perhaps if someone pointed out to him that there is no sign of a 'climate crisis' anywhere, let alone of 'the worsening climate crisis', it might help him understand that the crisis projected as a possibility by such as the IPCC is not due to arrive for many more decades.  Their alarm is based upon crude and inadequate computer models which have enjoyed a dismal track record to date, and which show little sign of real improvement despite the billions of dollars thrown at and around them for the past 20 years or more.

So far, this century and last, the climate has done nothing extraordinary.   But we have seen some extraordinary actions proposed for the control and manipulation of society.  Such as the above.

Hat-tip: Greenie Watch: http://antigreen.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/dotty-warmist-aiming-for-minds-of.html#links

PS It would make a good exercise for senior pupils to Fisk or otherwise comment on the implications of each point.

Learning about CO2 and climate? Here's a handy graphic to show how just how low the current levels of this vital gas are.

Source: http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/GeoCO2.png

For many more very smartly presented charts, with occasional other items such as press releases to add some context. click rightwards from here: http://s90.photobucket.com/user/dhm1353/media/Byrd0.png.html

Hat-tip: Tom Nelson

Satellite graphics show the Earth's surface cooling during the years 1982 to 2006

"The amazing finding of the present study is that we do not observe global warming in the period 1982-2006, but significant cooling."

Source: Andries Rosema, Steven Foppes, Joost van der Woerd

Surface temperature as in 'temperature of the surface' is not what is routinely measured or referred to in meteorology.  Surface temperature in meteorological observations usually refers to air temperature close to the ground, usually around 5 feet (1.25 to 2.0 metres) above the surface - the height at which weather stations are meant to take this measurement.

But what of the actual surface temperature?  This is tricky to measure given the wide variety of surfaces, and the lack of any convention as to depth.  But a geostationary satellite can take a broad view, in the case of Meteosat this mainly has a 5km resolution for temperature estimates.  Looking down from above, that level of coarseness will help reduce the variation that would be expected at finer scales.

In their study published this year in the journal Energy & Environment, the three authors report how they took 25 years worth of satellite imagery from Meteosat from noon and midnight each day, and extracted estimates of surface temperatures from them.  They used infra-red wavelengths for which the atmosphere is largely transparent in cloudless skies.  But of course, there is always cloud to be seen in any hemisphere image.  Their method to reduce the effect of clouds was to look at successive time periods (of 10, 20, and 30 days) and choose the highest temperature found (the 'brightest pixel') within each period.  The hope is that that is likely to be from a relatively cloud-free day since cloud tops are much cooler than the surface.
There are other adjustment and computations to be made as described in the paper, but the authors seem reasonably confident that their results are sensible.  They provide subsets of their data plotted as time-series for typical and atypical locations, and find the results plausible in each case.

There are no equivalent ground-based measurements to provide a cross-check for these results, but perhaps it may be possible to construct estimates of what they might be for simpler locations, e.g. sea areas.

These results will hopefully be subjected to considerable scrutiny and review, but I report them here at this stage simply as an illustration of 'unsettled science'.  We have here results which on the face of it contradict the claims of relentless warming pushed by such as James Hansen in the late 1980s, including at the infamous hearing of 1988 in Washington.  So many people have subsequently picked up on such claims and treated them as gospel that we are today in a very unsatisfactory position of having zealots for alarm poisoning discourse in this area, be it political or be it scientific discourse.  Good teaching should help pupils step back from this unedifying spectacle, and form calmer and more considered opinions of what is going on.

Hat-tip: Greenie Watch which provides a link to this article on the above paper.

Note added a few hours after posting  Some recent comments on this paper can be found here: http://objectivistindividualist.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/earth-surface-cooled-from-1982-to-2006.html
Note added 09 August 2013  Project for the reader.  The site CO2 Science provides a temperature plotter which can be used to look at temperatures attributed to zones 5deg (lat, long) on the side.  It might be interesting to see how these computed mean surface air temperatures plots compare with those for specific locations provided in the paper over the same time periods.

Ten-minute trainer: a case against the establishment case for alarm over CO2

For teachers with 30 minutes to spare, and a suitable class (perhaps one whose important exams in this area have been completed successfully), here is a brief YouTube clip which does a cool, calm, and collected job of undermining the case for alarm over CO2 - a case which may be taken for granted in your curricula.  He is particularly critical of the 'positive feedbacks' which are a crucial part of the case for alarm:


This is a short video of about 13 minutes (no 10-minute trainer takes exactly 10 minutes!) linked to at the NoTricksZone which notes it was linked to in a tweet by Tallbloke.

The video is the work of David Evans in Australia. More details of his case can be found here:

http://joannenova.com.au/2012/01/dr-david-evans-the-skeptics-case/

and he has also produced some very good, but longer videos here: http://joannenova.com.au/2012/04/david-evans-explains-the-skeptics-case-youtube/

Some minor points. 

(1)   The claim that positive water-vapour driven feedback is ‘assumed’ in the models is not quite correct.  What they assume is that global relative humidity stays constant as temperature rises.  This necessarily means water vapour levels will increase in the models, and this is what is believed to lead to the positive feedback that appears in them.  In practice, there is some evidence that relative humidity has been decreasing in recent decades. 

 Source: http://www.climate4you.com/ 

(2)    The first graphic in the short video shows ‘observed temperature increase’ as the output of models.  If it was in fact the observed temperature increase, then the models would be doing a perfect job on them.  Actually the output of models is ‘expected temperatures’, or 'predicted temperatures'.  When these are compared with observed temperatures, the discrepancies are obvious.

Towards a Calmer Curriculum on Climate: some human impact possible on global warming, but too small to identify with assurance

"My overall view of the influence of humans on climate is that we probably are having some influence, but it is impossible to know with any level of certainty how much influence. The difficulty in determining the human influence on climate arises from several sources: 

(1) weather and climate vary naturally, and by amounts that are not currently being exceeded;

(2) global warming theory is just that – based upon theory; and

(3) there is no unique fingerprint of human caused global warming.

 My belief that some portion of recent warming is due to humans is based upon my faith in at least some portion of the theory: that the human contribution to atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations has resulted in an estimated 1% reduction in the Earth’s ability to cool to outer space, and so some level of warming can be expected to occur from that change

Exactly how much warming will occur, however, depends upon something we call “climate sensitivity” (Spencer & Braswell, 2010; 2011), and relatively few researchers in the world – probably not much more than a dozen – have researched how sensitive today’s climate system is based upon actual measurements. This is why popular surveys of climate scientists and their beliefs regarding global warming have little meaning: very few of them have actually worked on the details involved in determining exactly how much warming might result from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

Our most recent peer-reviewed paper on this subject, Spencer & Braswell (2013), has arrived at a climate sensitivity of only 1.3 deg. C for a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide, based upon a variety of global measurements, including warming of the global oceans since the 1950s. This level of warming is below the lower limit of 1.5 deg. C minimum predicted in the last (AR4) IPCC report. It is also in line with (an admitted minority of) other estimates of low climate sensitivity published in the peer review literature.

It should also be noted that the fact that I believe at least some of recent warming is human-caused places me in the 97% of researchers recently claimed to support the global warming consensus (actually, it’s 97% of the published papers, Cook et al., 2013). The 97% statement is therefore rather innocuous, since it probably includes all of the global warming “skeptics” I know of who are actively working in the field. Skeptics generally are skeptical of the view that recent warming is all human-caused, and/or that it is of a sufficient magnitude to warrant immediate action given the cost of energy policies to the poor. They do not claim humans have no impact on climate whatsoever."

Extract from the testimony made by Roy W. Spencer on 18th July 2013 to the Environment and Public Works Committee of the US Senate.  

His statement includes this description of his relevant background: "I have been performing U.S. government-sponsored research for the last twentyeight years, publishing peer reviewed papers on global temperature monitoring with satellites, on the amount of warming we might expect from greenhouse gas emissions, how to monitor hurricane strength from satellites, and quantitatively explaining ocean heat content changes. 

 Prior to my current position as a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, I was Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. I am also the U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-E flying on NASA’s Earth-observation satellite Aqua. I am a recipient of NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement."