Both major parties, as well as the public, have gone cold on climate change. Why?

The warmest 12 months in Australia since records began. Victoria’s warmest winter has followed Australia’s warmest summer.

‘‘Evidence,’‘ Tony Abbott told Barrie Cassidy on Sunday ‘‘of the variability in our weather.’‘ Mind you, he went on, ‘‘I think that climate change is real, humanity makes a contribution. It’s important to take strong and effective action against it, and that is what our direct action policy does.’‘

No, it doesn’t. Most analysts are telling us the direct action policy will prove to be a dud.. Kevin Rudd has retreated even further from confronting the ‘‘great moral challenge of our time’‘.

Six years ago, Rudd won government, at least in part, by portraying John Howard as yesterday’s man on climate change. Now neither party wants to mention the phrase, because voters have stopped caring.

What’s changed? A lot of things.

The weather. In 2007 we were still in the middle of one of the longest droughts in our recorded history. We were being told that the rains might never return. But they did.

Domestic politics. Abbott’s defeat of Malcolm Turnbull by a single vote signalled the end of political consensus on climate change. Many pundits, back then, thought Abbott’s opposition to an emissions trading scheme would make him unelectable. How wrong they were.

International politics. Just weeks after Abbott became Opposition Leader, the Copenhagen summit failed. If the rest of the world is doing little to combat climate change, he could ask, why should we?

The price of electricity…

And so Abbott was able to spend a large part of his speech to the National Press Club on Monday railing against the carbon tax (even though an emissions trading scheme isn’t a tax). How much, by 2050, it would have cost families, damaged our industries, undermined our way of life. But not a word about the potential cost of climate change itself – to tourism, to agriculture, to water security, to health, to beachside properties, to ports, to our way of life. Labor doesn’t talk about that stuff either, these days. We heard it all six years ago. Alarmism. Warmism. We’ve moved on…

And that scoffing has dominated the non-scientific conversation. Alan Jones, Andrew Bolt, Chris Smith, Jason Morrison, Piers Akerman, Nick Cater, Janet Albrechtsen, Paul Sheehan, Paul Kelly, Chris Kenny, Tim Blair, Miranda Devine, Howard Sattler, Gary Hardgrave, on and on, in print and on radio. For most of them, climate change is a political issue. Anyone who doesn’t scoff at the science is a left-wing dupe.

Where are the well-informed, cogent, passionate voices in the mainstream media pushing the arguments being put forward in the scientific literature? Where are the George Monbiots of Australia?

… Maybe the scientists are wrong. Maybe, in 20 years, people like me will be shamefacedly admitting we were duped by a conspiracy of greenies; or the scientists themselves will confess they followed the money and not the evidence.

But I doubt it. Far more likely, in 20 years’ time, it will be all too obvious that the science was right all along. Global temperatures and sea levels will be remorselessly rising, and it will by then be vastly more difficult and expensive to slow the process, let alone to reverse it.

Many of the sceptics will be well into their 80s by then. So will I. Will they tell their grandchildren they are sorry? Will we all admit that, yes, we were warned, but around 2010 we just lost interest?

..Dealing effectively with greenhouse gas emissions was too expensive, too uncertain, too inconvenient.

I wonder how good those excuses will seem.

Jonathan Holmes

http://www.theage.com.au/federal-politics/federal-election-2013/from-great-moral-challenge-to-indifference-20130903-2t355.html#ixzz2e4dSCFwX

I wish there were more Jonathon Holmeses in the meeja.

The Rev Dodgson said:

I wish there were more Jonathon Holmeses in the meeja.

the issue is that for the most part the electorate see very little difference in how an ETS and DA will work. To them both will have an equal effect but they see the ETS as a tax that is imposed in individuals.

So the solution is simple…

im reminded of the quick, effective and practically unilateral response to CFC emissions and the loss of the ozone layer..

That ‘bogy’ was verifiable, easy to understand, and the ramifications of not acting, clear..

Plus it didn’t result in doubling power prices every 5 years to deal with it ..

Dropbear said:

im reminded of the quick, effective and practically unilateral response to CFC emissions and the loss of the ozone layer..

That ‘bogy’ was verifiable, easy to understand, and the ramifications of not acting, clear..

Plus it didn’t result in doubling power prices every 5 years to deal with it ..

Much easier problem to solve. There were alternatives to CFCs that more or less did the same job.

Dropbear said:

im reminded of the quick, effective and practically unilateral response to CFC emissions and the loss of the ozone layer..

That ‘bogy’ was verifiable, easy to understand, and the ramifications of not acting, clear..

Plus it didn’t result in doubling power prices every 5 years to deal with it ..

sure, but all it required was for manufacturers to use a different gas in their fridges/freezers

it didn’t really require a change in the fundamental structure of the economy

party_pants said:

Dropbear said:

im reminded of the quick, effective and practically unilateral response to CFC emissions and the loss of the ozone layer..

That ‘bogy’ was verifiable, easy to understand, and the ramifications of not acting, clear..

Plus it didn’t result in doubling power prices every 5 years to deal with it ..

Much easier problem to solve. There were alternatives to CFCs that more or less did the same job.

exactly…

if you had a suitable alternative to the burning of fossil fuels that cost around about the same sorts of price, then we would be there already..

trying to make people swallow huge increases in cost of living to embrace inferior solutions when the results of not doing it can neither be defined, measured or reliably estimated is pissing into the wind IMO..

diddly-squat said:

Dropbear said:

im reminded of the quick, effective and practically unilateral response to CFC emissions and the loss of the ozone layer..

That ‘bogy’ was verifiable, easy to understand, and the ramifications of not acting, clear..

Plus it didn’t result in doubling power prices every 5 years to deal with it ..

sure, but all it required was for manufacturers to use a different gas in their fridges/freezers

it didn’t really require a change in the fundamental structure of the economy

quite ..

but the hippies still ask why we havn’t turned our economy on its head yet? as if doing so was completely and blatantly obvious to everyone

>>Six years ago, Rudd won government, at least in part, by portraying John Howard as yesterday’s man on climate change.
<<<

What do you people want?

Jonny stopped global warming during his first term in office & the effect took hold during the beginning of his second term in office.
.

.
.
.
Jonny, we salute you

>> if you had a suitable alternative to the burning of fossil fuels that cost around about the same sorts of price, then we would be there already..

There are all sorts of alternatives and Labor’s program, erratic as it is, has been a fairly good start.

>>trying to make people swallow huge increases in cost of living to embrace inferior solutions when the results of not doing it can neither be defined, measured or reliably estimated is pissing into the wind IMO..

Now you sound like TA.

Ian said:

>> if you had a suitable alternative to the burning of fossil fuels that cost around about the same sorts of price, then we would be there already..

There are all sorts of alternatives and Labor’s program, erratic as it is, has been a fairly good start.

>>trying to make people swallow huge increases in cost of living to embrace inferior solutions when the results of not doing it can neither be defined, measured or reliably estimated is pissing into the wind IMO..

Now you sound like TA.

and yet there you have it … the public is no longer engaged or interested ..

(didn’t take long for the ad-homenin attacks to start! well done ian)

>>(didn’t take long for the ad-homenin attacks to start! well done ian)

Where dat den

?

PRESS RELEASE – September 3rd, 2013
A major peer-reviewed paper by four senior researchers has exposed grave errors in an earlier paper in a new and unknown journal that had claimed a 97.1% scientific consensus that Man had caused at least half the 0.7 Cº global warming since 1950.
A tweet in President Obama’s name had assumed that the earlier, flawed paper, by John Cook and others, showed 97% endorsement of the notion that climate change is dangerous:
“Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.”

The new paper by the leading climatologist Dr David Legates and his colleagues, published in the respected Science and Education journal, now in its 21st year of publication, reveals that Cook had not considered whether scientists and their published papers had said climate change was “dangerous”.
The consensus Cook considered was the standard definition: that Man had caused most post-1950 warming. Even on this weaker definition the true consensus among published scientific papers is now demonstrated to be not 97.1%, as Cook had claimed, but only 0.3%.
Only 41 out of the 11,944 published climate papers Cook examined explicitly stated that Man caused most of the warming since 1950. Cook himself had flagged just 64 papers as explicitly supporting that consensus, but 23 of the 64 had not in fact supported it.

Dr Legates said: “It is astonishing that any journal could have published a paper claiming a 97% climate consensus when on the authors’ own analysis the true consensus was well below 1%.
“It is still more astonishing that the IPCC should claim 95% certainty about the climate consensus when so small a fraction of published papers explicitly endorse the consensus as the IPCC defines it.”

Dr William Briggs said: “In any survey such as Cook’s, it is essential to define the survey question very clearly. Yet Cook used three distinct definitions of climate consensus interchangeably. Also, he arbitrarily excluded about 8000 of the 12,000 papers in his sample on the unacceptable ground that they had expressed no opinion on the climate consensus. These artifices let him reach the unjustifiable conclusion that there was a 97.1% consensus when there was not.
“In fact, Cook’s paper provides the clearest available statistical evidence that there is scarcely any explicit support among scientists for the consensus that the IPCC, politicians, bureaucrats, academics and the media have so long and so falsely proclaimed. That was not the outcome Cook had hoped for, and it was not the outcome he had stated in his paper, but it was the outcome he had really found.”

Dropbear said:

and yet there you have it … the public is no longer engaged or interested ..

Some people are, some aren’t, and some never were.

There is no “public” with a uniform set of interests.

The_observer said:

PRESS RELEASE – September 3rd, 2013
A major peer-reviewed paper by four senior researchers has exposed grave errors in an earlier paper in a new and unknown journal that had claimed a 97.1% scientific consensus that Man had caused at least half the 0.7 Cº global warming since 1950.
A tweet in President Obama’s name had assumed that the earlier, flawed paper, by John Cook and others, showed 97% endorsement of the notion that climate change is dangerous:
“Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.”

The new paper by the leading climatologist Dr David Legates and his colleagues, published in the respected Science and Education journal, now in its 21st year of publication, reveals that Cook had not considered whether scientists and their published papers had said climate change was “dangerous”.
The consensus Cook considered was the standard definition: that Man had caused most post-1950 warming. Even on this weaker definition the true consensus among published scientific papers is now demonstrated to be not 97.1%, as Cook had claimed, but only 0.3%.
Only 41 out of the 11,944 published climate papers Cook examined explicitly stated that Man caused most of the warming since 1950. Cook himself had flagged just 64 papers as explicitly supporting that consensus, but 23 of the 64 had not in fact supported it.

Dr Legates said: “It is astonishing that any journal could have published a paper claiming a 97% climate consensus when on the authors’ own analysis the true consensus was well below 1%.
“It is still more astonishing that the IPCC should claim 95% certainty about the climate consensus when so small a fraction of published papers explicitly endorse the consensus as the IPCC defines it.”

Dr William Briggs said: “In any survey such as Cook’s, it is essential to define the survey question very clearly. Yet Cook used three distinct definitions of climate consensus interchangeably. Also, he arbitrarily excluded about 8000 of the 12,000 papers in his sample on the unacceptable ground that they had expressed no opinion on the climate consensus. These artifices let him reach the unjustifiable conclusion that there was a 97.1% consensus when there was not.
“In fact, Cook’s paper provides the clearest available statistical evidence that there is scarcely any explicit support among scientists for the consensus that the IPCC, politicians, bureaucrats, academics and the media have so long and so falsely proclaimed. That was not the outcome Cook had hoped for, and it was not the outcome he had stated in his paper, but it was the outcome he had really found.”

That’s such obvious un-sceptical crap propaganda that I’m even surprised that you would quote it.

>>>That’s such obvious un-sceptical crap propaganda that I’m even surprised that you would quote it.
<<<

:)))))

UPDATE: While this paper (a rebuttal) has been accepted, another paper by Cook and Nuccitelli has been flat out rejected by the journal Earth System Dynamics. See update below.

UPDATE: – Cook and Nuccitelli paper rejected:

The Benestad (Cook, Nuccitelli) et al paper on “agnotology”, a bizarre concoction that tried to refute just about every sceptic paper ever written has been rejected by Earth System Dynamics

Based on the reviews and my own reading of the original and revised paper, I am rejecting the paper in its current form. The submission is laudable in its stated goals and in making the R source code available, but little else about the paper works as a scientific contribution to ESD. While I think as an ESDD publication at least a discussion was had and the existence of the R routines has been brought to the attention of the various interested communities, the manuscript itself is not a good fit for this journal and would need substantial further revisions before being ready (if ever) for this journal.

Statistical proof of ‘the pause’ – Overestimated global warming over the past 20 years

Commentary from Nature Climate Change, by John C. Fyfe, Nathan P. Gillett, & Francis W. Zwiers
August 2013-09-06

Recent observed global warming is significantly less than that simulated by climate models. This difference might be explained by some combination of errors in external forcing, model response and internal climate variability.

Global mean surface temperature over the past 20 years (1993–2012) rose at a rate of 0.14 ± 0.06 °C per decade (95% confidence interval). This rate of warming is significantly slower than that simulated by the climate models participating in Phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). To illustrate this, we considered trends in global mean surface temperature computed from 117 simulations of the climate by 37 CMIP5 models .

Figure .1| Trends in global mean surface temperature. a, 1993–2012. . . . b, 1998–2012.
Histograms of observed trends (red hatching) are from 100 reconstructions of the HadCRUT4 dataset1.
Histograms of model trends (grey bars) are based on 117 simulations of the models, and black curves are smoothed versions of the model trends.
The ranges of observed trends reflect observational uncertainty, whereas the ranges of model trends reflect forcing uncertainty, as well as differences in individual model responses to external forcings and uncertainty arising from internal climate variability.

That’s good if there’s been a slow down over that 20 year period.

But the ocean has been acting as a big heat sink in recent years to slow atmospheric warming.

Climate is something that is measured over longer intervals and involves more parameters.

Ian said:

That’s good if there’s been a slow down over that 20 year period.

But the ocean has been acting as a big heat sink in recent years to slow atmospheric warming.

Climate is something that is measured over longer intervals and involves more parameters.

The existence of cycles in historical temperature records over the last 10 millennia is well known. The causes are less well known, though ocean circulation has been suggested as the cause at least 20 years ago.

http://www.climate.unibe.ch/~stocker/papers/stocker92cc.pdf

The current slow down in the warming trend fits in very well with simple empirical models that incorporate these well known cyclic variations without seeking to explain them. The thing that I find surprising is that they seem to have been ignored by modellers until they needed to be invoked to explain the present hiatus: Oh, its the oceans! Gee whiz.

morrie said:

Ian said:

That’s good if there’s been a slow down over that 20 year period.

But the ocean has been acting as a big heat sink in recent years to slow atmospheric warming.

Climate is something that is measured over longer intervals and involves more parameters.

The existence of cycles in historical temperature records over the last 10 millennia is well known. The causes are less well known, though ocean circulation has been suggested as the cause at least 20 years ago.

http://www.climate.unibe.ch/~stocker/papers/stocker92cc.pdf

The current slow down in the warming trend fits in very well with simple empirical models that incorporate these well known cyclic variations without seeking to explain them. The thing that I find surprising is that they seem to have been ignored by modellers until they needed to be invoked to explain the present hiatus: Oh, its the oceans! Gee whiz.

Not historical records. To be precise, proxy records.

I’m not saying there is no natural variability going on… of course there is.

It’s just that humans pushing CO2 from 280 ppm in pre-industrial times to 400 ppm is generally agreed to be starting to have a major impact on the climate and is something we should be seeking to reverse… even if only to satisfy the precautionary principle.

> Both major parties, as well as the public, have gone cold on climate change. Why?

Because “climate change” has been over-hyped to hell.

mollwollfumble said:

> Both major parties, as well as the public, have gone cold on climate change. Why?

Because “climate change” has been over-hyped to hell.

Why do you think that?

vote1

the whingey mongrel alliance party

Ian said:

I’m not saying there is no natural variability going on… of course there is.

It’s just that humans pushing CO2 from 280 ppm in pre-industrial times to 400 ppm is generally agreed to be starting to have a major impact on the climate and is something we should be seeking to reverse… even if only to satisfy the precautionary principle.

Nothing that I said is in disagreement with this principle. I am simply pointing out how the regular, cyclic variations in things like the ice core temperature records (the natural variability of which you speak) appear to have been ignored by the mechanistic climate modellers until quite recently.

The Rev Dodgson said:

mollwollfumble said:

> Both major parties, as well as the public, have gone cold on climate change. Why?

Because “climate change” has been over-hyped to hell.

Why do you think that?

It has. Global warming is better than global cooling.

mollwollfumble said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

mollwollfumble said:

> Both major parties, as well as the public, have gone cold on climate change. Why?

Because “climate change” has been over-hyped to hell.

Why do you think that?

It has. Global warming is better than global cooling.

if global cooling makes it difficult for americans to be heard how is that a bad thing?

mollwollfumble said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

mollwollfumble said:

> Both major parties, as well as the public, have gone cold on climate change. Why?

Because “climate change” has been over-hyped to hell.

Why do you think that?

It has. Global warming is better than global cooling.

Is that all you got?

Ian said:

Is that all you got?

No. I’ve done scientific research into the current climates of Australia, the UAE and Sweden. The most immediate result was that we really have very little idea what the current climate actually is. Weather records have to be taken over a very long period of time to get any reliable handle on the moments of the statistical distributions. Although mean values were well defined, standard deviations were less well defined, and extreme weather events such as supercells, tropical cyclones and tornadoes have nowhere near a long enough reliable dataset to determine occurrence frequencies for current or past climate conditions.

I’m also generally familiar with the software algorithms used in climate prediction models. I have delved into the source code of one of these developed by the then CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research. There is no way that these models are accurate predictors of the effect of CO2 rise on cloud cover fraction. A consequence is that future predictions have greater uncertainty, and this numerical uncertainty is grossly misquoted by climate change proponents as an increase in the probability of extreme events.

Sea level rise due to anthropogenic climate change is currently barely measurable, and for many locations such as Britain and some South Sea Islands is of exactly the same order of magnitude as the vertical geological movement. You don’t see people complaining that rate of vertical geological movement is too large (well, not recently, close to a hundred years ago there were complaints of this sort and proposals to fix the problem).

There have been major local changes in climate unconnected to anthropogenic climate change. These aren’t necessarily the older ones associated with the ice ages. The northward expansion of the northern edge of the Sahara due to increasing dryness has occurred rapidly in historical times, since 1400 BC. This expansion is still happening, a survey just this year of biodiversity throughout the Alps has shown that the southern Alps are getting dryer and it is this increase in dryness, not anthropogenic climate change in the form of increasing temperatures, that is the main threat to flora and fauna of southern Europe.

etc. etc. Coral reefs rise much faster than sea levels can. River deltas ditto. Polar bears are just blonde grizzlies. CO2 uptake by the oceans would increase if sea levels rose. Burning carbon returns carbon that was once in the biosphere, but had been lost, back into the biosphere. It replenishes the carbon lost from the biosphere as limestone. The carbon emission issue is confused by CO2 from forest fires. Greening of northern Canada and Russia. Carbon dioxide is one of the the safest chemicals there is, it is far safer than water. CO2 production is not “pollution” because pollution has an adverse effect on health.

To put everything in a nutshell:
1) Climate is going to change whether we act to stop it or not. It’s going to be a very slow process. I like to say “To beat climate change walk faster than 1 centimetre per year”. We have to work with climate change. Relocate endangered species in better climate, build further from the water’s edge (essential anyway because of erosion and tsunamis).
2) The effect so far of anthropogenic climate change has been minuscule compared to other human activities over the same time period, such as agriculture.
3) Proponents of doom will always find something that they claim will destroy the world. “Climate change” is just the latest fad. Before that was “ozone hole”, “asteroid impact”, “nuclear winter”, “pollution”, “world war III”, “crown of thorns” etc, etc. The claim that anthropogenic climate change will destroy the world is one of the the least credible of these.
4) The coming oil crisis will relatively soon result in a global reduction in carbon dioxide emissions anyway.
5) Carbon dioxide production is a vital part of many industries.

mollwollfumble said:

Ian said:

Is that all you got?

No. I’ve done scientific research into the current climates of Australia, the UAE and Sweden. The most immediate result was that we really have very little idea what the current climate actually is. Weather records have to be taken over a very long period of time to get any reliable handle on the moments of the statistical distributions. Although mean values were well defined, standard deviations were less well defined, and extreme weather events such as supercells, tropical cyclones and tornadoes have nowhere near a long enough reliable dataset to determine occurrence frequencies for current or past climate conditions.

I’m also generally familiar with the software algorithms used in climate prediction models. I have delved into the source code of one of these developed by the then CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research. There is no way that these models are accurate predictors of the effect of CO2 rise on cloud cover fraction. A consequence is that future predictions have greater uncertainty, and this numerical uncertainty is grossly misquoted by climate change proponents as an increase in the probability of extreme events.

Sea level rise due to anthropogenic climate change is currently barely measurable, and for many locations such as Britain and some South Sea Islands is of exactly the same order of magnitude as the vertical geological movement. You don’t see people complaining that rate of vertical geological movement is too large (well, not recently, close to a hundred years ago there were complaints of this sort and proposals to fix the problem).

There have been major local changes in climate unconnected to anthropogenic climate change. These aren’t necessarily the older ones associated with the ice ages. The northward expansion of the northern edge of the Sahara due to increasing dryness has occurred rapidly in historical times, since 1400 BC. This expansion is still happening, a survey just this year of biodiversity throughout the Alps has shown that the southern Alps are getting dryer and it is this increase in dryness, not anthropogenic climate change in the form of increasing temperatures, that is the main threat to flora and fauna of southern Europe.

etc. etc. Coral reefs rise much faster than sea levels can. River deltas ditto. Polar bears are just blonde grizzlies. CO2 uptake by the oceans would increase if sea levels rose. Burning carbon returns carbon that was once in the biosphere, but had been lost, back into the biosphere. It replenishes the carbon lost from the biosphere as limestone. The carbon emission issue is confused by CO2 from forest fires. Greening of northern Canada and Russia. Carbon dioxide is one of the the safest chemicals there is, it is far safer than water. CO2 production is not “pollution” because pollution has an adverse effect on health.

To put everything in a nutshell:
1) Climate is going to change whether we act to stop it or not. It’s going to be a very slow process. I like to say “To beat climate change walk faster than 1 centimetre per year”. We have to work with climate change. Relocate endangered species in better climate, build further from the water’s edge (essential anyway because of erosion and tsunamis).
2) The effect so far of anthropogenic climate change has been minuscule compared to other human activities over the same time period, such as agriculture.
3) Proponents of doom will always find something that they claim will destroy the world. “Climate change” is just the latest fad. Before that was “ozone hole”, “asteroid impact”, “nuclear winter”, “pollution”, “world war III”, “crown of thorns” etc, etc. The claim that anthropogenic climate change will destroy the world is one of the the least credible of these.
4) The coming oil crisis will relatively soon result in a global reduction in carbon dioxide emissions anyway.
5) Carbon dioxide production is a vital part of many industries.

You absolutely no idea what you are talking about! You ignore all the evidence, make ridiculous assumptions and quote crap. I hope you live a very long time so you may enjoy your illusion.