Tag: climate change

Jail beckons …

The first thing that crossed my mind when I saw this article was agent provocateur, it was a fake written to discredit the thermageddonites. But, folks, there is a Rochester Institute of Technology not far from the shores of Lake Ontario in New York State. It has a web site. Professor Torcello is listed, he exists …

Lawrence Torcello, assistant professor of philosphy at Rochester Institute of Technology, calls for the funders of climate skepticism to face sanctions for criminal negligence.

Accurately understanding our natural environment and sharing that information can be a matter of life or death. When it comes to global warming, much of the public remains in denial about a set of facts that the majority of scientists clearly agree on. With such high stakes, an organised campaign funding misinformation ought to be considered criminally negligent.

He goes on to discuss the case of the Aquila earthquake in Italy in 2009 after which six Italian scientists and a local defence minister were subsequently sentenced to six years in prison, takes the critics of that case to task and comes up with …

The charge of criminal and moral negligence ought to extend to all activities of the climate deniers who receive funding as part of a sustained campaign to undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus.

Can we generalise from this that Professor Torcello places a high value on accuracy in presenting information about important matters? Or should we should we consider the alternative explanation that he has made up his mind and therefore further discussion should be suppressed? Is he on the side of accuracy or censorship?

There is a clue in his paper. One of the references the good professor cites in his support is the Guardian Newspaper. This is an article published just over two years ago based on leaks from an insider revealing that the Heartland Institute was engaged in a concerted campaign, funded by Big Oil interests, aimed at “dissuading teachers from teaching science.” This was a big story for the alarmists, the smoking gun that nailed Big Oil and the Koch brothers.

It subsequently turned out that the anonymous whistle blower was not an insider at all. Enter Peter Gleik who runs a Californian research organisation called the Pacific Institute …

The Pacific Institute’s Integrity of Science Initiative responds to and counters the assault on science and scientific integrity in the public policy arena, especially on issues related to water, climate change, and security.

Integrity however was not high in his attributes when he faked his identity, fraudulently obtained documents from the Heartland Foundation and released those documents to the press. And here’s the good bit, the documents did nothing to incriminate the foundation … but the two page fake memo that was added to them was a ripper.

He was eventually obliged to make an apology in which he acknowledges “a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics” and concludes …

My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved. Nevertheless I deeply regret my own actions in this case. I offer my personal apologies to all those affected.

Please note the words “and prevent this debate“. Just who is trying to prevent debate? And what better way to suppress debate than to throw one side of the debate in jail.

On the other hand we could go back to the title of Professor Torcello’s article, Is misinformation about the climate criminally negligent?, and if it is we might start to think of suitable punishments for those who misinformed us that …

… snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event, Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” Dr David Viner, CRU, March 2000.

 So even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and river systems”, Tim Flannery (Australian Climate Commissioner) 2007.

The entire north polar ice cap will be gone in 5 years” Al Gore, 2008.

50 million climate refugees by 2010. United Nations Environment Programme 2005.

seas could rise 100 metres in a century. Robyn Williams of their ABC, 2007.

to mention just a few.

Smart folk …

President Obama recently derided me as a flat earther, to my future king I am a headless chicken. To any number of climate scientists and climate science communicators I am a denier which links me nicely with the execrated group that deny the holocaust.

There are others like me that don’t expect the earth to fry any time soon. What are we really like?

A recent survey of 5,286 readers of leading skeptical blogs by Mike Haseler of the Scottish Climate & Energy Forum shows that the people driving the skeptical debate are predominantly engineers and hard scientists with backgrounds like maths, physics and chemistry. He reports …

A sceptical consensus: the science is right but catastrophic global warming is not going to happen

A recent survey of those participating in on-line forums showed that most of the 5,000 respondents were experienced engineers, scientists and IT professionals most degree qualified and around a third with post graduate qualifications. The survey, carried out by the Scottish Climate and Energy Forum, asked respondents for their views on CO2 and the effect it might have on global temperatures. The results were surprising. 96% of respondents said that atmospheric CO2 levels are increasing with 79% attributing the increase to man-made sources. 81% agreed that global temperatures had increased over the 20th century and 81% also agreed that CO2 is a warming gas. But only 2% believed that increases in CO2 would cause catastrophic global warming.

So what’s going on?

Above all, these highly qualified people – experts in their own spheres – look at the published data and trust their own analysis, so their views match the available data. They agree that the climate warmed over the 20th century (this has been measured), that CO2 levels are increasing (this too has been measured) and that CO2 is a warming gas (it helps trap heat in the atmosphere and the effects can be measured). Beyond this, the survey found that 98% of respondents believe that the climate varies naturally and that increasing CO2 levels won’t cause catastrophic warming.

(Filched from JoNova).

I’d be surprised if any of them believe in homeopathy or are opposed to GM foods.

Dragon breaks free …

China Daily reports …

The stranded Chinese icebreaker, Xuelong, or Snow Dragon, broke through the Antarctic’s heavy ice floes at about 6 pm on Tuesday and was headed for open water, according to Xinhua News Agency.

After being stranded in heavy ice for five days, the ship had broken free by Tuesday evening and was making its way through lighter ice, China Central Television reported on Tuesday.

The vessel, which had been conducting China’s 30th Antarctic expedition before going to the aid of the Russian ship Akademik Shokalskiy, will now continue with its scheduled activities.

The Akademik S remains fast …

mawson_irony

Clitanic – the movie …

The ship of fools is now just the ship, but the Akademik Shokalskiy is still stuck in the ice.

One of its rescuers, the Xue Long is also stuck but happy that it can hold out until it breaks free.

The Aurora Australis is free and has continued on its way towards Casey Station.

The US ice breaker, Polar Star is heading to Commonwealth bay and may assist both the Akademic S and the Xue Long in due course.

The French vessel Astrolabe was also requisitioned for a week to assist in the rescue mission and can now resume its task of resupplying Dumont d’Urville.

Yves Frenot, director of the French Polar Institute had this to say …

This kind of commemorative expedition has no interest from a scientific point of view,

Because of the rescue operations, French scientists had had to scrap a two-week oceanographic campaign this month using the Astrolabe.

The Chinese have had to cancel all their scientific programme, and my counterpart in Australia is spitting tacks with anger, because their entire summer has been wiped out.

(Antarctica has about 80 scientific bases, of which around 40 are permanently staffed and others manned on a seasonal or temporary basis.

Only three bases are inland; the others are on the coast.)

‘If we want these bases to operate all year round, it is essential to resupply with food and fuel during the brief window of opportunity.

Diverting supply ships to rescue tasks ‘imperilled’ this link.

Clitanic, the closing days …

Sigh of relief, the Aurora Australis is in clear water.

Not, however, clear to go on its way, the Xue Long is not certain of its ability to escape the pack so she must stand by to render assistance.

Meanwhile it is rumoured that 98% of main stream media reports don’t mention the mission or as Jo Nova puts it …

In the magical world of media spin, a boat full of mostly Australian climate scientists has turned into a Russian passenger ship stuck in ice. … where media crew on-board take hours to get the news out and everyone pretends this mission was not about promoting climate fear via the BBC World Service. The media contingent is so large on this mission there is not only a BBC journalist, and two Guardian reporters, but it also includes two Fairfax reporters on board the Aurora Australis as well.Never before in modern satellite media communications has it taken so many journalists to say so little, so slowly and so vaguely.

http://youtu.be/03SWGkxt72A

Clitanic abandoned …

Good news for the passengers, the fossil fuelled helicopter rescue has been safely completed. The crew of the Akademik Shokalskiy remain to look after her but the others are all now ensconced on the Aurora Australis.

This includes, of course, Professor Turney’s children who are vital members of the scientific party, their task being to communicate the awful news of clear and present climate change to school children throughout the world.

The main stream media are doing their utmost to present this fiasco in the least embarrassing light. News.com bring us this …

While scientists expect and observe more extreme weather with man-made global warming, some say it’s not quite fair to blame the Antarctic blizzard that trapped the ship on climate change.

University of Colorado ice scientist Waleed Abdalati, NASA’s former chief scientist, cautioned, like many scientists do, that while researchers can spot a trend in extreme weather, they can’t immediately associate an individual event -like a blizzard – with changing climate.

When scientists do attribute an individual extreme weather event to climate change, it is usually more than a year later after numerous computer model simulations and then published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Also, Antarctica, which is more governed by localised wind circulation and other characteristics, “is kind of its own beast,” Dr Abdalati said.

You can imagine how quickly that line would have been forgotten had the expedition not been thwarted by inescapable evidence of extreme cold.

All that remains now is for the Aurora Australis to reach clear water. The view out the back shows that they aren’t exactly ripping along …

A140030100B

You can check their progress at http://www.antarctica.gov.au/webcams/aurora

Latest from the Clitanic …

Rescue of the “tourists” and the “scientists” is underway. Our ABC reports that the first batch have been airlifted directly to the Aurora Australis, and they managed to bring us that news without once mentioning global warming or the fact that the leader is Professor of Climate Change.

There are real scientific programs in progress in Antarctica. Supplies and personel have been diverted with the Aurora Australis and the other ice breakers sent to assist the Akademik Shokalskiy. Programs that have been long in the planning may well be impossible to complete. For what? An activists junket, a consciousness raising exercise.

And rumour has it that one of the rescue ships, the Xue Long, is now beset.

The main stream media were in there raising our consciousness with great enthusiasm ahead of the debacle. Let’s hear about it now …

polarbearscooking

 

Melting moments …

On 2 December 1911 Douglas Mawson departed from Hobart as leader of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition. The good ship Aurora landed them in Commonwealth Bay on 8 January 1912. He and two companions set out on a sledging expedition – Mawson was the sole survivor. He arrived back at his base to find that the Aurora had departed. Some of the party had stayed behind in the hope that his party would return. The group had to wait until December 1913 before they could depart Antarctica’s shore.

In 2007 United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon visited Antarctica in an effort to highlight global warming the BBC reported …

Mr Ban – the first UN chief to visit the continent – wanted to see for himself the effects of climate change on the world’s largest wilderness.

After flying over melting glaciers, he told reporters that what he had seen had been both “extraordinarily beautiful” and “disturbing”.

Just a quick look and he was able to see for himself that disaster lay just around the corner. The glaciers are melting.

This year a party led by Professor Chris Turney, calling itself the Australasian Antarctic Expedition 2013, set out to follow in Mr Moon and Mawson’s footsteps and highlight the disaster of increasing temperatures and melting ice. As the ABC reported on Lateline of 25 November …

$1.5 million Australian expedition to Antarctica Professor Chris Turney from the University of NSW is mounting the largest Australian science expeditions to the Antarctic with an 85-person team to try to answer questions about how climate change in the frozen continent might be already shifting weather patterns in Australia.
ABC’s MARGOT O’NEILL: The research stakes are high. Antarctica is one of the great engines driving the world’s oceans, winds and weather, especially in Australia. But there’s ominous signs of climate change.
CHRIS TURNEY: The Southern Hemisphere westerly winds encircle Antarctica, and over the last 20 or 30 years or so, they’ve been pushing further south. Now – so actually in a way it’s almost like Antarctica’s withdrawing itself from the rest of the world…

They thoughtfully took with them reporters for the BBC and the Guardian and initially things were going very much to plan …

Several scout teams had investigated the ice sheet between the ship and the hut in the three days we had been at the frozen continent, however, and their news didn’t look good: a recent warm spell had melted lots of the snow cover on the fast ice, and the route across it was riddled with pools of water covered with thin, easily broken ice.

Clear evidence of melting here … although it had been open water in 1912.

The warm spell did not continue. The ice closed in. The Australian Maritime Safety Authority received a distress call on Christmas morning. The expedition ship was stuck fast. News.com and the Weather Channel brought us the news that very day. I don’t know if they had a reporter on board.

Eventually the Guardian brought the news from its intrepid reporter …

Trapped in heavy pack ice just off the coast of Cape de la Motte for the past two days, we await icebreaker assistance.

There’s nothing like a scoop, eh …

Since then a couple of icebreakers have tried to bust them free. If all else fails they will be helicoptered to safety. Just think of the carbon footprint.

Well, you gotta take risks if you want to do science. But think about it, comparing 2013 with 1912 when weather can be so variable, maybe that wasn’t going to be great science to start with.

Perhaps they should have looked at the data for a number of years …

S_timeseries

That’s one difference … more ice this year.