So much for Earth Hour – redux

A very brief post script this, since it’s just something I came across on The Age’s website while looking for something else.

Click for linky

As I said the other day, it might say something about real life priorities when a eco-friendly newspaper, in fact one whose publishers co-founded Dirt Hour, can’t make a big song and dance about it the next day. I think it probably says even more that when they poll their readers to see how many actually turned off the lights three quarters seem to have responded to Dirt Hour with a resounding ‘Meh’.

So much for Earth Hour

Click for linky

Usually around this time of year I’ll write something about what a pointless, time wasting, meaningless circle jerk Dirt Hour is, and how, while I won’t be turning on every light and then going out to drive round the neighbourhood for an hour to belch some extra carbon, I plan to mark it by not changing what I’m doing in any way at all. I’ll note how pointless Dirt Hour is as a meaningful reduction of emissions, yet how unnecessary it is for ‘raising awareness’ since it was invented after people had been droning on about warble gloaming for three decades and so everyone in the industrialised world has bloody heard by now. I’ll mention that I think Dirt Hour is really no more than a quasi-religious ritual, the eco-wibbly version of one of those once a year festivals that are typical of all the religions that actually admit they’re religions and something to keep those of the faithful who talk the talk at dinner parties but don’t walk the walk (possibly because they’re driving the Mercedes instead, which is justified because they have a Prius as well now, you know) from going over the side and altogether abandoning belief in salvation from the evil carbon fairy through windmill and solar panel worship.

And I’ll talk about how an hour of banging shins against furniture, or for some going out for a candlelit carbon emitting meal or using up some petrol driving to somewhere with a nice view of the lights going out (actually just some of the lights judging by that photo), on an evening that’s likely to be mild in many countries is an inadequate introduction to the changes the world really needs to make if man made warble gloaming theory is true, and how Earth Month in January or February when a lot of people will have the heating turned up while many of us in the southern hemisphere will be wanting our air conditioning on (not this year – the summer was too cool) would at least be practising what’s preached and enable me to believe that those wanting me to believe in warble gloaming too take it seriously themselves. I mean, come on. The Muslims fast during the day for a month during Ramadan, the Christians find something to go without 24/7 for about six weeks during Lent, and the eco-crowd expect me to take their version of the Apocraplypse seriously when all they can manage is to turn the lights off for a fucking hour? Give me a break. Taking part in Dirt Hour is like pissing yourself in dark trousers – you’ll experience a warm feeling but the world won’t notice.

So that’s what I normally have to say in the run up to Dirt Hour. But not this year, because despite looking out for this kind of thing so I can get all cross and ranty and blog it, this year I didn’t even notice it was on until this afternoon, some 15 hours or so after it was over. And where did I see it?

I didn't see it on the home page of The Australian at all

I don’t doubt that The Age, an organ of Fairfax Media, one of the co-founders of Dirt Hour, made mention of it more than once recently but if I missed it until now and if they rate this supposedly vital exercise as, judging by the other contents of the page, less important than a You Tube video, a couple of footy games, some ugly politicians’ kids being quite good looking, eating chocolate and kangaroo, some Australians on a disabled cruise ship, the death of an elderly and retired politician, the difficulties involved in catching killer sharks, China outdoing Australia on restrictive internet policies, and someone who said something wrong about asylum seekers more than ten years being on a forthcoming TV programme about asylum seekers, then I can only conclude that in many people’s heart of hearts they don’t think it’s a real biggie either. Some of those things are interesting and some of them may even be seen as important, but are all of them more important than Dirt Hour? Really?*

If by a man’s deeds, or by an eco-friendly newspaper’s website, you shall know him/it then perhaps this shows where the priorities of warble gloaming believers really lie: the ordinary trials and tribulations of daily life, just like everyone else.

* And I’d say yes, they are.

P.S. I see that someone had the decency to phone my fellow British expat and comrade in words Bill Sticker to remind him about Dirt Hour and ask if he was planning to turn off all his lights off.

“No. I’m just ignoring it.”

I I’m all for marking Dirt Hour by deliberately ignoring it but I’m not sure if my overlooking it entirely still counts.

Missing persons report

Although we’re getting say a 20 per cent decrease in rainfall in some areas of Australia, that’s translating to a 60 per cent decrease in the run-off into the dams and rivers. That’s because the soil is warmer because of global warming and the plants are under more stress and therefore using more moisture. So even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and our river systems, and that’s a real worry for the people in the bush.

Professor Tim Flannery, February 2007
(ABC Landline interview)

My house is under water here. Where the fuck is all this water coming from? Did someone say the dam’s full? Nah, can’t be. Can it?

(Probably) someone living downstream of the
Warragamba Dam in NSW, this weekend

The noted environmentalist and warble gloaming activist Professor Tim Flannery is currently presumed missing.

Concerns for Professor Flannery, named Australian of the Year in 2007 and appointed head of Prime Minister Gingery Dullard’s Climate Change Commission, have arisen since he can normally be relied upon to talk very loudly about warble gloaming whenever the weather does anything. His failure to put in an appearance and speak at length on how the rain currently falling and filling the dams proves his point that even the rain that falls won’t fill the dams has been described as ‘deeply worrying’.

Many have suggested that heavy rainfall filling dams in fact disproves Flannery’s prediction and that this may be the real reason for his silence. Meanwhile meteorologists have said that just possibly a mammologist/palaeontologist, even one who’s written books about warble gloaming and has campaigned very publicly on the issue, should leave the weather predicting business to them.

In response a Commission spokeswoman said that Professor Flannery, who is reportedly paid $180,000 a year for a three day week role as the impartial Chairman of the absolutely neutral body set up to sell the need for a carbon tax to the Australian public, is currently in Germany. Whether this was a particular part of Germany with no access to phones or internet and thus leaving him unable to explain why the rain has been caused by the drought was not said. The recent series of cold European winters has been ruled out as a possible cause of being unable to communicate from Germany, allowing speculation as to Tim Flannery’s whereabouts to grow.

Okay, joking aside now. I have to be fair here and say that Flannery is no doubt very busy on something or other in Germany and anyway it is only just the one dam that’s fil… oh.

Yeah, that’s a bit more of a problem, especially as this is of course the second year in a row that parts of Australia have experienced the kind of flooding rains that we were told wouldn’t happen again because of the kind of droughts we were having instead. Perhaps we shouldn’t be listening quite so much to predictions of future doom without bearing in mind voices of past observers, such as one I’ve mentioned here once or twice before.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror –
The wide brown land for me!
…
Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When sick at heart, around us,
We see the cattle die-
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady, soaking rain.

Core of my Heart, aka My Country – Dorothea Mackellar, 1911

Obviously there’s a difference between careful scientific observation (a whole other argument which I’m happy leave to folks such as Anthony Watts) and poetry, but really it doesn’t sound as if in a country supposedly ravaged by warbly gloamed climate change things have actually changed much at all. Droughts, check. Flooding rains, check. Cattle dropping dead, check. Steady soaking rain, check. Mackellar’s words are as relevant a century on as they were when she wrote them, whereas Tim Flannery’s talk of what rain we are going to get being inadequate to fill the dams seems debatable after only five. It wasn’t a prediction involving a specific date but nonetheless I’m adding it to the list of warble gloaming dates for your diary.*

• Probably should have happened by now, or failing that should be possible to observe a very large change in that direction – New York’s West Side Highway impassable due to being underwater – Dr. James Hansen (1988/89 interview)
• Probably should have happened around 2005 ± 1 yr – British children will not know snow in their own country – Dr David Viner (Independent, Mar 2000)
• “Imminently” – loss of world’s coral reefs – David Attenborough in July 2009 (‘world’s tropical reefs face ‘imminent destruction’ unless CO2 levels are slashed’)
• By 2010 – 50 million refugees climate refugees (UN Environment Program – currently no link for UNEP site but Watts Up With That has details and evidence of claim)
• Between 2010 and 2015, probably earlier – ice free Arctic – Louis Fortier, director of ArcticNet, speaking to Canada.com in 2007
• British children “aren’t going to know what snow is” – article in The Independent written in March 2000 without the knowledge of the series of snowy winters that were less than a decade away
• Australian rainfall unable to fill dams – Tim Flannery in 2007, five years before flooding affects Queensland, New South Wales and northern Victoria for the second successive year
• 2012 – fields on fire and approximately two thirds of the entire planet’s population dead
• Late 2013 – ice free Arctic – Al Gore (North Pole will be ice free in five years’)
• 2014 – the whole world and everything fucked up beyond repair – WWF.
• Dec 2016 – the whole world and everything all fucked up beyond repair – the Prince of Wails and the 100 months mob
• Dec 2016 – loss of ‘the levers of control’ for the climate – the Prince of Fails… again.
• Late 2019 – ice free Arctic – Pen Hadow (ten years to Arctic ice loss)
• Late 2019 – the whole world and everything fucked up beyond repair – UK Met Office.
• Late 2029 – loss of Great Barrier Reef – marine scientist Charlie Veron (‘global warming will destroy the World Heritage site within just 20 years’)
• By approximately 2040 – ice free arctic yet again – NSIDC director Mark Serreze

It’s been a few months since this list was updated and in all fairness to Tim Flannery it must be said that with a claim that four or five billion people will be dead by the end of this year his prediction is actually one of the more sensible ones on there.

 

* This is actually a double update because I’ve just noticed that I haven’t got that one about British kids never seeing snow again.

The climate supergrass

No, not the Climategate 2.0 email release lat last year. Not the Himalayan glaciers, which even the Grauniad concedes are pretty much the same now as they were a decade ago (it’s still “a concern”, natch – it’ll always be a concern as long as someone’s being paid to be concerned about it). Not even the German environmentalist turned sceptic, Fritz Vahrenholt, who’s written a book describing how he’s stopped believing in warble gloaming and now think’s it guff (H/T WUWT).

In fact the climate supergrass isn’t that kind of grass at all. It’s a grassy type grass, but we’re told it’s super at longevity and is probably the oldest living thing on the planet.

Australian scientists sequenced the DNA of samples of the giant seagrass, Posidonia oceanic, from 40 underwater meadows in an area spanning more than 2,000 miles, from Spain to Cyprus.
The analysis, published in the journal PLos ONE, found the seagrass was between 12,000 and 200,000 years old and was most likely to be at least 100,000 years old. This is far older than the current known oldest species, a Tasmanian plant that is believed to be 43,000 years old.

Not this one *

Prof Carlos Duarte, from the University of Western Australia, said the seagrass has been able to reach such old age because it can reproduce asexually and generate clones of itself. Organisms that can only reproduce sexually are inevitably lost at each generation, he added.

In other words it’s not a 100,000 year old individual plant at all. It’s just been producing clones for that long. Never mind, that’s not the interesting bit anyway.

But Prof Duarte said that while the seagrass is one of the world’s most resilient organisms, it has begun to decline due to coastal development and global warming.
“If climate change continues, the outlook for this species is very bad,” he said.”The seagrass in the Mediterranean is already in clear decline due to shoreline construction and declining water quality and this decline has been exacerbated by climate change. As the water warms, the organisms move slowly to higher altitudes. The Mediterranean is locked to the north by the European continent.
“They cannot move. The outlook is very bad.”

If climate change continues? If? Carlos, climate change has been continuing throughout the whole time this grass has been around (and much longer) and yet it’s still here. I mean, here’s what Posidonia’s been putting up with in the last twelve thousand years, the lower end of the estimates of its age.

From joannenova.com.au - click for linky

And here, covering the time from the best estimate of 100,000 years to the upper limit of 200,000, is a temperature reconstruction for the last four thousand or so centuries. The horizontal dashed line show contemporary temperatures.

Vostok ice core temperature reconstruction via climate4you.com - click for linky

In other words it’s been putting up with worse than we can throw at it, assuming that we are in fact throwing anything at anything climate wise, for far far longer – possibly for about as long as our species has even existed. And not only has it survived but we’re given the impression for the talk of how resilient it is that it’s done really well up ’til now. But despite coping with temperatures a couple of degrees warmer at least once and possibly more in its history, and also despite the barely whispered admission that there’s been bugger all warming for fifteen years, we’re supposed to believe that Posidonia is suddenly in a lot of trouble?

Yeah, riiiiight. Look, if they’d just stuck at the bit about coastal development I’d buy it, but these days it seems impossible to resist working in the spectre of warble gloaming. Without really believing it I’ve made cynical remarks that if you don’t mention warble gloaming at least once in your paper you lose funding and struggle to get any more published, but when it crops up like this, when we’re told a species that’s survived greater extremes is under threat because it’s getting too warm or because of the even vaguer and non-specific threat of climate change – something that predates human industry by almost the entire history of the planet – you have to wonder if it really is that important to name drop it.

Not that it’s fooling people as well as it once did. From the comments at the Tele it seems people are starting to look out for this kind of thing.

Snakey_Pete
22 hours ago
What a load of bull-poo. Is it possible to get any funding at all without it being linked to AGW extremism? This thing has been around for hundreds of thousands of years; it’s going to be pretty immune from variations in climate, whatever the cause.

Almost as an afterthought coastal development and water quality is mentioned, but we don’t want to dwell on that. No point in tackling those issues until after we have learned how to control the climate.

alangsmith
1 day ago
Yet another ‘climate expert’ trying to get us to believe in the dreaded ‘climate change’. This plant, if it is 200,000 years old, has been around long enough to see off much more extreme changes in climate than have occurred of late. As my grandfather would say ‘pull the other one’!

erikbloodaxe
1 day ago
The thing’s lived through a 100,000 year full-blown ice age for Chrissakes! Also, the Holocene maximum and other periods warmer than now. You don’t get to 200,000 without being adaptable.

Dale Long
2 days ago
I am amazed that scientists are so accurate in determining the age of seagrass by narrowing it down to a 188,OOO year window and then claiming that “climate change” is killing it off. Shoot! We don’t even know how old Nancy Pelosi is. And yet, global warming hasn’t melted her face! God must be laughing at the inanity of our so-called intelligence.

Predictably enough they’re met with shouts of ‘denialist’, a word that isn’t even in the bloody dictionary, from the Telegraph comments sections’ relatively recently acquired horde of reliable lefties and believers, though I didn’t notice any of them actually tackle the point that this grass has seen bigger changes in the past.

Funny that.

PS – one other comment bears repeating because it takes up another point with the article, or more likely The Telegraph’s reporting.

dalekdave
1 day ago
“As the water warms, the organisms move slowly
to higher altitudes”

Latitudes surely?

For the Tele these days that’s actually not all that bad, though less important than failing to ask about the changes Posidonia has already lived through.

* For those outside Oz, that’s Tasmanian Senator Bob Brown, leader of the Green Party. He is most definitely not 43,000 years old. Oh, or a plant.

Junket science

Dial up the euphoria and forget the failure of the last junket, er, meeting to agree anything because a major ‘climate deal’ has been done at Durban. So says the Graun, Age, Aunties Beeb and ABC, and all the rest. But forgive my scepticism when I read things like this:

A new global climate deal has been struck after being brought back from the brink of disaster by three powerful women politicians in a 20-minute “huddle to save the planet”.
[…]
… the 16-day talks were effectively over, with a commitment by all countries to accept binding emission cuts by 2020.

Or this:

Every single country in the world has committed to an agreement to take effect from 2020.

Or this:

Talks on a new legal deal covering all countries will begin next year and end by 2015, coming into effect by 2020.

Or this:

Federal Climate Change Minister Greg Combet says it is an “historic breakthrough”.
“The idea is that after 2015 countries would start ratifying the new agreement and it would take effect from 2020.”

So – and I’m looking at this as I would if I were a true warmista, convinced of the danger of catastrophic warble gloaming – after this dramatic twenty minute huddle, followed by that equally dramatic two hours of tense negotiation, all of which had been preceded by more than a bloody fortnight of presumably equally tense negotiation, everybody agreed to kick the fucking can down the road for another few years. And that’s supposed to be a result? Jesus, what do you guys do for an epic failure? No, don’t tell me… begins with a C, doesn’t it? Cancun? Copenhagen? Email me if I’m getting warm, heheh. Sorry, that was insensitive of me.

Forgive my cynicism but having failed, even by what I’d call pretty low standards, in Cancun and Copenhagen and having just had the embarrassment of Climategate 2.0, which looked a lot like it was timed to damage the Durban circle jerk, there needed to be something positive and preferably scene stealing to feed to the media’s headline writers. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the very first thing that was decided, very likely behind the scenes and quite possibly before the conference even officially began. And fucking hell if a unanimous agreement to put off any hard decisions until later and otherwise maintain the status quo isn’t good enough if spun right, even if it’d spin the whole world right off its axis if done much harder.

So in practical terms the great success achieved at Durban is that everything stays exactly the same as it was before all those thousands of delegates got on planes and carbon belched their way through the sky to get there, and everyone has agreed to agree on something more meaningful in four or five years to take effect four or five years after that. Well, it might be good news for the campaigners, researchers, climate change departments and ministers, renewable energy companies, greenwashery makers and all the other rent seekers, but otherwise it seems like a resounding ‘Meh’.

Frankly I’m tempted to get down on my knees and thank my lucky stars and any deity that has even the faintest possibility of existing that I’m a climate sceptic. Because if I was a catastrophist warble gloaming believer I’d be shitting myself.

Heh

There have been a couple of suggestions made about Climategate 2.0 and what quote will turn out to sum things up. My favourite so far was spotted by the Pedant General over at Devil’s Kitchen:

What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably […]

But “The Cause” comes up a lot too. Granted, it’s used without initial caps, but when it appears this many times does it really need them to get the message across? Some people from Minnesota don’t think so.

H/T WUWT.

The sky is angry

Or so says Britain’s Meteorological Office and The Graun. In fact they’re telling us it’s almost as angry as it’s ever been in the history of everything (since 1850, near the end of a period of unusual cold).

Is it me or do I detect a note of disappointment?

As spring bulbs burst into life in gardens around the UK, and plants break into a late second bloom, this autumn has seen balmy temperatures prevail across the UK and many parts of Europe.
Despite these unusual scenes, however, this year overall is not likely to be a global record-breaker.

Again, that slight sense that the Graun feel let down by this failure of Gaia to punish us more severely for our sins against her.

Figures from the Met Office published on Tuesday show that 2011 stands at 11th place in the list of warmest years ever, in global mean temperature records stretching back to 1850.

Ah, now did I imagine it or was 1998 declared the absolute hottest year it’s ever been in the history of everything ever (since 1850, near the end of a period of unusual cold)? Why, thanks to a handy table on the Graun’s article I can see that it was no figment of imagination and that the Met Office did say exactly that, and presumably stand by it if it’s still going into articles now.

Today’s data confirms the overall warming trend, however: of the 10 warmest years on records, nine occurred since 2000.

But looking at that table I can see that it can be put another way: that 13 years after the hottest year ever (since 1850) it’s now the 11th hottest year ever (since 1850). There may be a warming trend, though of course arguments still rage over the reliability of measurements, especially when 2010 is listed as almost as big a scorcher as 1998 despite a bitter northern hemisphere winter which the warmists either forgot to mention or didn’t see coming (not for the first time), but there’s no getting away from the fact that the warmists themselves say that the hottest year was just over a decade and this year is ranked only 11. More interestingly every year of the last decade apart from 2008 was warmer than this year.

Naughty Gaia. People won’t be nearly frightened enough by this. My God, er, Gaia, they might even start to think temperatures have peaked. This just won’t do. I don’t know, you just can’t get the Earth Mother figures these days. Look, just move over and leave it to someone who gets paid for this.

Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, said that[…]

Basic problem is that all models are wrong, not got enough middle and low level clouds.

No, Phil, don’t tell them that. You’re not supposed to let people know of uncertainties. Oh, look, now you’ll have to reassure everyone that all the research into warble gloaming is open and honest and transparent and that there’s nothing going on.

I wasted a part of a day deleting numerous emails and exchanges with almost all the skeptics. So I have virtually nothing. I even deleted the email that I inadvertently sent.
[…]
I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process.

Oh dear, this isn’t good at all. Even if Gaia carries on as she/it has for the last 4.5 billion years the Graun will be very sad if the whole warble gloaming narrative goes into a decline. Never mind – you can always ask Phil to hide it.

Where’s this money coming from?

Click for linky

Of course we know exactly where it’s coming from. There are just shy of thirty million individual taxpayers in Britain, and of those about 6 million are public sector employees whose pre-tax salaries are paid out of other people’s taxes anyway, leaving 24 million people. This governmental generosity is funded by them to the tune of £42 each – and think how you’d feel if someone just shoved you up against a wall and nicked your wallet with forty quid in – unless they go for the alternative of adding it to the nation’s debt to be paid by future taxpayers. This latter choice is increasingly popular because it means the government does not have to shove you up against a wall and take your wallet, thus making you and everyone else much less likely to balk at what it’s being spent on, but since the government has no money or income of its own it’s a lot like going to an expensive restaurant where you can’t possibly afford to eat and then running up a massive tab by shouting for all in the bar and ordering the best stuff on the menu while hoping like hell that you’ll be joined by people with money before the coffee and liqueurs come.*

So what are you getting for your money? Well, not a damn thing, obviously, but what are the Africans getting for it?

Among the projects to be funded will be schemes to help African farmers insure their crops against flooding and drought while other projects include installing solar power in rural villages and building slurry pits that can produce gas to power generators.

In themselves these don’t seem like terribly bad ideas, not least because they don’t seem to be about appeasing the angry sky gods so much as acknowledging the fact that things don’t always stay the same and adapting to it. Oh, and the very worthy goal of getting power to people who don’t have it, or not much of it, at the moment. But…

The move, however, is expected to attract intense criticism at a time when the UK economy is struggling to recover from recession.

Indeed, and every other thing I blog at the moment seems to be about Britain’s government spending money it hasn’t got as fast as or faster than even its recklessly profligate predecessor. And I hadn’t even got round to Cleggy’s latest brain fart about jobs for da yoof paid for by, you guessed it, the taxpayer. Maybe later, or maybe I’ll be too despondent to blog it at all, but for now it’s enough to state that that’s yet another billion pounds. Now back to Huhne-hoon and his bounteous munificence with your money.

One of the countries which will receive money is South Africa, the most economically advanced in the continent. Last year its economy grew by 2.8 per cent, while Britain’s economy rose by 1.8%.

A little misrepresentative, this. By just about any metric, GDP nominal or PPP and absolute or per capita, the UK is much wealthier than the RSA. But then the UK has run up far greater debts than the South Africans have, again in both absolute and relative terms, and how much wealthier Britain really is after allowing for the phantom wealth that’s come from living beyond its means for so long is tricky to say. On top of all that Britain’s likely to go back into recession soon, which makes all these billion here and billion there stories more than a little worrying. So why… ?

The timing of the announcement, however, is being seen as a cynical attempt to “bribe” African nations into signing up to international deals being backed by the British Government at the climate change negotiations in Durban.

Ah, now it’s becoming clear. The UK government, like that of many western nations, has caught the religious warble gloaming zeal and is determined to show its faith by righteously fucking its own economy hard in the arse until its well and truly buggered, but hasn’t become quite so insane that it thinks its own citizens won’t go nuts if they don’t see developing nations – the ones that turn out to be causing more of the problem that we don’t really know is a problem – making sacrifices too.

Oh well, I suppose the government bribing other people with your money is at least a change from bribing you with it.

* But no cigars of course. The restaurant’s long since been forced to go all non-smoking.

Quoted Quote of the Day

More from Climategate II: The Chinny Reckoning. At the Devils’s Kitchen the Pedant General has spotted an absolute gem:

The hunt is now on for the snippet that crystallises the whole thing, the “Hide the decline” moment if you will. My favourite so far:

<1682> Wils:
[2007] What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural
fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably […]

Earlier I repeated Deep Throat’s advice to follow the money, but I’ve mentioned before when talking about Big Eco that there are several reasons to keep it going. Protecting a reputation that’s been nailed irrevocably to a particular mast is also a very strong incentive to keep holding that mast up no matter what.

Inconvenient untruth

Anyone who watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth will remember the claim that the snowcap on Mount Kilimanjaro is melting due to warble gloaming, though people who’ve done much reading of sceptical blogs and publications will have long been aware that this was complete nonsense. In fact even people who just watch news even from pro-warmist sources like the BBC should already have been aware that that particular claim was constructed on sand, as the reporting of this court case makes clear:

Mr Gore’s assertion that the disappearance of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro in East Africa was expressly attributable to global warming – the court heard the scientific consensus was that it cannot be established the snow recession is mainly attributable to human-induced climate change.

And from Son of Climategate we found that certain others were aware of it too.

5315.txt

date: Sat Sep 18 08:48:09 2004
from: Phil Jones

subject: Re: kilimanjaro
to: “Jenkins, Geoff”

Geoff,
The data that are used for the grid box should be within the grid box. They will be low
elevation sites though, and this may be part of the reason. It might be worth seeing if
there is anything in the U/A data – but I reckon there won’t be much in that region.
I’ve heard Lonnie Thompson talk about the Kilimanjaro core and he got some local temperatures – that we don’t have access to, and there was little warming in them. The same situation applies for Quelccaya in Peru and also some of his Tibet sites. Lonnie thinks they are disappearing because of sublimation, but he can’t pin anything down. They are going though.

Lonnie’s email is “Lonnie G. Thompson”
You could try emailing Ellen as well both might be in the field.
Ellen Mosley-Thompson 
I’m off much of the next 6 weeks at meetings.
I hear you’re retiring soon – hope all goes well ! I’m sure you’ll still be in the field somewhere.
Cheers
Phil
At 10:32 16/09/2004, you wrote:

phil
<>
we have been concerned that people often use the melting glacier on kilimanjaro as an
example of impacts of man-made warming. you may have seen some stories countering this on the sceptics websites.

I got philip brohan to look at temps there (see attached) and there isnt any convincing consistent recent warming in the station data. but your gridded CRUtem2V does show a recent warming. presumably that is because (as philip suggests) the gridded stuff has influences from quite a large radius, and hence may reflect warming at stations a long way from kilimanjaro?

would you agree that there is no convincing evidence for kilimanjaro glacier melt being due to recent warming (let alone man-made warming)?
be grateful for your help
cheers
geoff
Dr Geoff Jenkins
Head, Climate Prediction Programme
Hadley Centre
Met Office
FitzRoy Road, EXETER, EX1 3PB, UK
tel: +44 (0) 1392 xxxxxx
mobile: 0787 966 1136
[1]www.hadleycentre.xxxx.xx

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@uea.ac.uk
NR4 7TJ
UK

WUWT also points out that it’s interesting that Dr Lonnie Thompson’s opinion, as reported in emails, on the cause for ice loss on Kilimanjaro seems to have been quite different from that given in more public fora, such as a PR right before a big climate meeting in one of Europe’s most beautiful cities.

Big Eco getting caught out again?

And in more ways than one. I’ve been blogging on other things so I’ve not mentioned the BBC as brought up by Bishop Hill here. And here, and here, here and here. Do go and have a read, though you might not be terribly surprised at what Auntie’s been up to. However, that looks like being overshadowed by what’s already being called Climategate II. Yep, more stuff that the R&D department of Big Eco would rather not have had out in the open has emerged and is being gone over by sceptical bloggers everywhere. Very early still, but Bishop Hill’s initial take is here, Jo Nova here, Watts Up With That here and here but mostly here, and in the MSM James Delingpole here. I’ll leave you with Delingpole’s summary and a few of his preferred quotes as I’ve got popcorn to make. Do go read the rest.

Breaking news: two years after the Climategate, a further batch of emails has been leaked onto the internet by a person – or persons – unknown. And as before, they show the “scientists” at the heart of the Man-Made Global Warming industry in a most unflattering light. Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Ben Santer, Tom Wigley, Kevin Trenberth, Keith Briffa – all your favourite Climategate characters are here, once again caught red-handed in a series of emails exaggerating the extent of Anthropogenic Global Warming, while privately admitting to one another that the evidence is nowhere near as a strong as they’d like it to be.
[…]

<1939> Thorne/MetO:
Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical
troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a
wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the
uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these
further if necessary […]
<3066> Thorne:
I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it
which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.
[…]
<2884> Wigley:
Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive […] there have been a number of
dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC […]

P.S. a thought’s occurred, and I doubt I’m the first one it’s occurred to. The last time this happened as around this time last year, shortly before the COP15 climate junket/meeting in Copenhagen (will these fuckers lecturing us all about emissions from travel ever teleconference one of these things?) and here we have it all happening again just a few days before COP17 in Durban. Interesting timing. Does Big Eco’s R&D section have it’s own Deep Throat, unhappy at something going on there and carefully choosing content and times to leak for maximum effect? I can only speculate, but the advice of the original Deep Throat still applies: follow the money. How many of the people sending, receiving or CC’d in on these emails would be out of a job if man made catastrophic warble gloaming turns out to be nonsense? And that’s just the R&D parts of Big Eco – the same applies to those involved in marketing, admin and production. Hell, if my career and future income depended on everyone believing the sky was going to burn I’d be saying it too.

Quote of the Day

Yes, another one, and again it comes from the pen/keyboard of the Carbon Sense Coalition’s Viv Forbes and via the Real World Libertarian. My bold:

Since July, temperatures in Australia have soared by over six degrees centigrade. If current trends continue, we can expect another three degrees of warming by Christmas.

This rapid warming has caused massive environmental disruption – alpine snow has melted, birds are migrating, there is an epidemic of weeds and we can expect more storms, cyclones, floods, mosquitoes and solar radiation burns.

This is far more serious than the UN’s forecast of a piddling 1-2 degrees of warming over the next hundred years or so.

What caused this dangerous new global warming?

The old people called it “summer”.

On taxing the sixth element

Or rather one of its oxides. Via the Real World Libertarian and quoted en bloc, a post by Viv Forbes of the Carbon Sense Coalition.

Back to the Dark Ages

The passage of the carbon tax bills today is no reason for celebration. It is a step back towards the dark ages.

Just a few generations ago, humans lived in a “green” world. There was no coal, oil or gas providing light, heat, transport and traction power.

In this green utopia, wood provided heat for cooking fires and forests were felled for charcoal for primitive metallurgy; farmers used wooden ploughs and harvested grain with sickles and flails; the nights were lit using candles and whale oil; rich people used wind and water power to grind cereals; horses and bullocks moved coaches, wagons and troops; there was no refrigeration and salt was the only preservative for meat.

Towns were tiny as the whole family was needed to work the farm. For most people, the daylight hours were filled with heavy labour to produce, preserve and transport food. There was no surplus to support opera, bureaucracy or academia.

Humanity was relieved from this life of unrelenting toil by carbon energy – steam engines and electricity, machines, tractors, cars, ships and planes.

Today the pagan green religion celebrates the first step in their long campaign to destroy industrial society and reduce population.

They should be careful what they wish for.

For example, just a few more bitter winters in Britain will see their wind powered lights going out.

A British observer once said of the Whitlam government: “Any fool can bugger up Britain, but it takes real genius to bugger up Australia”.

The Gillard-Green Government is showing the sort of genius needed to dim the lights in the lucky country.

I would say that this should serve as a warning to those outside Australia to do their damnedest to prevent their governments joining this madness, but as I mentioned at the weekend it seems that no other governments are all that keen anyway.

Great work, Jules. Really fucking outstanding.

Big Eco advertising your forthcoming death… again

Via Watts Up With That.

Okay, this is not as bad as the 1010 mob’s gleeful explosive execution of anyone expressing ambivalence toward warble gloaming or that aborted video with hundreds and hundreds of airliners zooming towards a New York with smoke curling up from the World Trade Centre, but it’s still pretty nasty. “You, you evil sceptics,” goes the message, “You’ll get it first.” Not quite sure how that works – how can the climate tell who believed and us Untermenschen who weren’t convinced? Maybe it’s the same kind of magic by which the climate can tell difference between the evil CO₂ emitted by a power station or your breath and the benign and harmless CO₂ that’s puffed out from the blowholes of whales and dolphins to feed their dear friends, the trees. Or maybe the climate is relying on the warble gloaming believers to muck and help with a set of matches. I’ve no idea, but somehow or other we’re first in line for death despite the usual exhortations to cut down on our selfish energy use because poor people in developing nations are first in line for death. Consistency? Meh.

And so at this point I want to bring up my intermittently maintained list of warble gloaming dates for your diary, because a few weeks ago I noticed an addition spotted by The Filthy Engineer, who notes that in two-thirds of the spirit of reduce, reuse, recycle this has been reused and recycled since 2007.

Runaway Global Warming promises to literally burn-up agricultural areas into dust worldwide by 2012, causing global famine, anarchy, diseases, and war on a global scale as military powers including the U.S., Russia, and China, fight for control of the Earth’s remaining resources.
Over 4.5 billion people could die from Global Warming related causes by 2012, as planet Earth accelarates into a greed-driven horrific catastrophe.

“Promises” does it? Then with less than two months ’til the start of 2012 we should see some signs of it already, shouldn’t we? And “literally burn-up”? Seriously? Actual fields actually on actual fire? 4.5 billion of the world’s 7 billion people dead (which still wouldn’t be enough to satisfy the most extreme eco-psychos, such as this fucktroon)? As much as I’m prepared to believe that many warble gloaming catastrophists do actually believe what they claim when someone comes out with ridiculously over the top scare claims like this I suspect that even they don’t believe it. It’s the old tactic suggested years ago by the late Dr Stephen Schneider of offering up scary scenarios to get attention even if they’re vanishingly unlikely. I’ve no idea whether to blame overzealous PR of the kind Dr Schneider once suggested or journalistic license, but I suspect there’s probably only one thing that’s literally going to burn up.

Being generous and giving them ’til the end of next year the updated list now looks like this:

• Probably should have happened by now, or failing that should be possible to observe a very large change in that direction – New York’s West Side Highway impassable due to being underwater – Dr. James Hansen (1988/89 interview)
• Probably should have happened around 2005 ± 1 yr – British children will not know snow in their own country – Dr David Viner (Independent, Mar 2000)
• “Imminently” – loss of world’s coral reefs – David Attenborough in July 2009 (‘world’s tropical reefs face ‘imminent destruction’ unless CO2 levels are slashed’)
• By 2010 – 50 million refugees climate refugees (UN Environment Program – currently no link for UNEP site but Watts Up With That has details and evidence of claim)
• Between 2010 and 2015, probably earlier – ice free Arctic – Louis Fortier, director of ArcticNet, speaking to Canada.com in 2007
• 2012 – fields on fire and approximately two thirds of the entire planet’s population dead
• Late 2013 – ice free Arctic – Al Gore (North Pole will be ice free in five years’)
• 2014 – the whole world and everything fucked up beyond repair – WWF.
• Dec 2016 – the whole world and everything all fucked up beyond repair – the Prince of Wails and the 100 months mob
• Dec 2016 – loss of ‘the levers of control’ for the climate – the Prince of Fails… again.
• Late 2019 – ice free Arctic – Pen Hadow (ten years to Arctic ice loss)
• Late 2019 – the whole world and everything fucked up beyond repair – UK Met Office.
• Late 2029 – loss of Great Barrier Reef – marine scientist Charlie Veron (‘global warming will destroy the World Heritage site within just 20 years’)
• By approximately 2040 – ice free arctic yet again – NSIDC director Mark Serreze

Warble gloaming – I refuse to use the term climate change when climate has always been changing since the planet’s ancient beginnings – warble gloaming might not need you to believe in it, but warble gloaming catastrophists very much do need you and everyone else to believe. Because they’re all out of a job otherwise.

By a man’s deeds shall you know him

And probably the same can be said of governments. If, naming no names, a hypothetical government was elected having promised to deal with a spiralling deficit and an eye-watering level of debt left it by its predecessors, and then it carried on largely as before you’d know that it wasn’t really all that serious about what it had said. It would have been talking the talk rather than walking the walk. Similarly if a government tries something and is universally praised by other governments, but those governments don;t show any interest in following suit, you have to wonder how much of that praise is meant honestly and how much is nothing but empty diplomacy. Our dear Madam Prime Minister, Gingery Dullard, ought to be asking herself that question about now (possible paywall).

JULIA Gillard’s introduction of a carbon tax has been praised at the latest economic summit for showing the way on climate change but Australia is being isolated within the G20 on carbon pricing as members retreat due to changing priorities and economic pressure.
[…]
While Australia is pursuing the most comprehensive carbon tax in the world to combat the effects of climate change, other G20 members are retreating from emissions trading schemes to cut greenhouse gas emissions, such as Canada, while others are giving greater emphasis to dealing with the immediate effects of climate change.
[…]
Senior fellow at the Canadian-based G20 watchdog, the Centre for International Governance Innovation, Daniel Schwanen, told The Weekend Australian the praise for carbon tax “would not play well at home”.

I should bloody coco. Even making the generous assumption that the warble gloaming catastrophists are actually right the whole idea that other nations will follow Australia’s lead, which was the only possible answer its supporters could offer when asked how it could possibly change anything given Australia’s meagre emissions, was part of the efforts to sell the carbon tax to us. If the response from the rest of the industrialised world is words to the effect of “Good on Australia for doing this, but don’t think for a moment that we’re going to do it too” then you have to wonder if the case for it was really that solid. If it was wouldn’t they be falling over themselves to join in?

Which should really have Jules wondering now whether it’s such a good idea after all. I don’t really think she’s daft and I’m sure she’s been wondering that for a while now, but being left by other countries to go it alone speaks far louder than the praise she’s had for doing it.