Our Museum-Quality Carbon Freaks

TONY THOMAS

Pity the poor curator filling exhibit spaces with displays of global warming’s depredations. With all that jetting about the world to co-ordinate the alarmist message, not to mention the torments of expense-account dining and the obligation to sleep in nice hotels, is it any wonder that no one has noticed temperatures stopped rising almost two decades ago

As the halt to global surface warming continues beyond 17 years, science museums around the Western world are revving up their efforts to frighten  young visitors with visions of climate catastrophe. Indeed, as the “evidence” of a warming planet appears ever more feeble, efforts to promote the cause grow more concerted, not to mention strident. The museums are now coordinating their efforts while pursuing a shared policy of washing their apocalyptic story through multiple displays, including those dealing with history, anthropology, literature and the arts.

In this coordination, the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), in New York, and Australia’s National Museum, in Canberra, are taking leading roles. The institutions convened a joint conference in New York last October on more effective climate  displays. It was called Collecting the Future: Museums, Communities & Climate Change.

Participants were all chummy once again at a similar conference in Sydney in February,Encountering the Anthropocene — the Anthropocene being “where it seems humanity may bring on its own demise”.  Declaring a new geologic era, the “Anthropocene”, is a big call. The warming late last century lasted only 25 years,  compared with the previous Holocene period’s 12,000 years.

The New York joint organisers were our National Museum’s environmental historian, Dr Libby Robin, her  catastrophist colleague Dr Kirsten Wehner,  the AMNH’s Dr Jenny Newell (who thinks Pacific islands are “in the line of fire from climate change events”) and AMNH’s Jacklyn Lacey  (who imagines that Hurricane Katrina was climate-change related).[i]

My own visits to climate displays at world-leading science museums have found them error-ridden and bizarre. At the Smithsonian in Washington, I witnessed children being invited to play a computer game involving a nuclear war over resources. Michael Mann’s discredited ‘hockey stick’ temperature reconstruction may be a dead letter, even with the IPCC these days, but it’s alive and well in museum displays for students.

The Sydney Anthropocene conference was run by the Sydney University’s “Sydney Environment Institute”.  An SEI offshoot called  Australia-Pacific Observatory in Environmental Humanitieshelped fund the New York conference, and is itself funded by the New York-based Andrew Mellon Foundation.

Everyone seems to be rolling in both money and Sydney-New York contrails. (I counted at least seven academics attending both conferences). The Sydney University climate push scored $650,000 in grants in 2012-13 for two projects alone: “Rethinking climate justice” and  how  human societies “understand and adapt” to climate change that “has arrived, and will continue and expand”.

The tenor at both conferences was  darkest green, with complaints about the allegedly pernicious effects of ‘economic progress’ and accompanying predictions of catastrophe unless green zero-carbon agendas are adopted forthwith.

Fiona Allon, from – you guessed it! – the University of Sydney gender and cultural studies department, opined:

“In The Order of Things, Foucault expresses his ‘profound relief’ that Man is only a recent invention and that he will disappear again as quickly as he appeared. Ironically, the concept of the Anthropocene confirms this sense of relief as both prescient and as somewhat optimistic.”

And try this speech title from  Dr Libby Robin: The End of The Environment: Apocalypse, the Anthropocene and the Future.

Robin gloomed:

“If we can say ‘the environment’  began in 1948, the advent of the Anthropocene in 2000 marks its end… No longer can we afford to limit our thinking to ̳’probable‘ futures: they are too grim. Finding possibilities for living with the Great Acceleration is the greatest human problem of our time. The Anthropocene offers a metaphor to stimulate the imagination.”

Indeed, the imagination is stimulated to the extent that a recent polar vortex in the US, and the previous Australian hot summer, were deemed in Sydney to be facets of human causation. Sydney participants competed for the catastropharian crown. A good contender was research associate Ben Dibley (UWS), who spoke of the Anthropocene as showing  “the relative insignificance of human life, and thus of the interval in which it appeared and, most likely, will disappear.”

The New York conference was an irony-free zone. Speakers even trotted out the “striking images” of distressed polar bears on crumbling ice floes (bear populations in fact are doing fine, Al Gore notwithstanding). Arctic sea ice minima in 2007 and 2012 were paraded with no reference to the rebound in 2013 (let alone the current record extent of Antarctic sea ice and rising sea ice in total).

The arrival of artists into the climate-change hullaballoo enabled participants to enjoy fictional fantasies even more free from the discomfit of considering empirical facts about climate than their academic conference confreres. One of the three themes at the Sydney conference was

“The roles that artists and writers play in the interpretation and popularization of scientific ideas and themes 
in the broader cultural landscape.”

Here’s an example from the New York conference:

Perched on the roof of his small house, armed only with a typewriter and a rare imagination, a dog attempts to adapt after a [“Sandy-like”] hurricane that left him stranded and floating far away from home. Inspired by [Peanuts cartoonist] Charles Shultz’s iconic beagle, incorporating leading climate science [yeah, right!] and featuring live music and unique physicality, Don’t Be Sad, Flying Ace! is a multi-disciplinary tour-de-force arousing hope for a changing world.

To cultivated minds,  the three-minute Youtube précis below (42 views)  seems interminable, but the full thing goes on, alas,  for 45 minutes.

Another example of catastrophists co-opting artists was the Sydney talk by Professor Kate Rigby (Environmental Humanities, Monash University) on a book for children 8+ years, the late Colin Thiele’s “February Dragon” (1985). Rigby says the kids’ story  “affords consideration of the educational potential of narratives of eco-catastrophe for young readers.”  But hey, Kate, what about the under-eight kids! Surely they’d also benefit from a dose of eco-catastrophism?

A celebrated artist, Mandy Martin,  titled her talk Vivitur Ex Rapto (Man lives off greed), referencing her paintings series

“about the rapacious wave of mining sweeping across Australia and the changing climate chasing it. It is time to draw a line in the dirt … as we face the sublime state of extinction (we) must look for ways to stop rising carbon emissions and wholesale destruction of environments now.”

One can even feel sorry for some arty presenters. Joshua Wodak, an inter-disciplinary artist exploring climate change, told the Sydney audience:

“Models of climate change trajectories show the shape of things to come for the biosphere and its inhabitants this century. Scientific organisations worldwide overwhelmingly maintain that the window to avoid runaway catastrophic climate change is closing fast: being one decade…at most.”

Nice try, but the IPCC  acknowledged this year that 111 of its 114 models are running too hot.

An example of how remote Australian curators have become from mainstream Australians was the New York conference talk by Dr George Main, an environmental historian  whose specialty is “people and the environment” at our National Museum.

Most Australians are proud of the stump-jump plough, invented in South Australia in 1876, but Main pans it for ‘erasure of indigenous biological communities’, ‘devastating changes in land and climate [huh?]’, and ‘the release of immense [huh?] volumes of carbon into the atmosphere’. Main reinterprets the plough’s history  “to reveal and undermine cultural foundations of climatic and ecological disorder.”

It is worth recalling that the Canberra museum’s designers slyly inserted the coded words “Forgive us our genocide”, and “Sorry” in braille on the museum facade, as intended mockery of then Prime Minister Howard, who officially opened the museum in 2001 and had declined to apologise to Aborigines for the British takeover of Australia in 1788. Maybe ‘forgive us our stump-jump ploughs’ should be added to the facade, also in braille.

At both conferences, speakers were big on new concepts of “justice” – particularly “environmental justice”  — in line with the UN’s push for unlimited climate  ‘compensation’ from ( as a wag put it)  the poor in the First-World  to the rich in the Third-World. New York keynote speaker Rob Nixon banged on about ‘widening inequalities’ in the so-called Anthropocene, as if humanity’s climb from poverty in the past half-century (think China and India) is a myth.[ii]

Another theme at these museum conferences is about the imminent drowning of  coral-island communities like Tuvalu and the Maldives. It is tiresome that Quadrant needs to point out yet againto expert museum curators that these islands are not being swallowed by rising seas, and that any salt-water contamination is due to over-population and environment mismanagement. This is true no matter how many Maldives scuba-tank cabinet meetings are arranged as picture-opportunities for the gullible world media.

In the two conferences, only one presenter, Raluca Ellis, from the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, was off-message. Her biography reads, “Raluca is very passionate about sharing the fun and wonderful side of science with the public, engaging in lifelong learning, and encouraging young kids, especially girls, to pursue science.”  Assuming, we hope, that the Anthropocene doesn’t do the girls in first.

MUSEUM NEWS UPDATE: Climate change is maybe not Uganda’s most pressing problem. But the British Government decided in 2009 that a new and permanent climate change exhibition would be great for the Uganda Museum in Kampala.

The  display shows that if Uganda’s climate gets 2degC hotter, lots of bad things will happen to the people and the country. Moreover, the display fibs that climate change’s impacts have already hurt the country, as in floods and droughts, which never occurred previously (sarc).

So the exhibition urges Ugandans to do more bike-riding, and even switch to mini-cars and ‘buses’ powered by human pedaling to save CO2 emissions. So much for progress.

Uganda Radio Network did a report on the exhibition and said that although admission was free, “Ugandans are not giving it a second thought”. The radio noted that in two hours, only two Ugandans went in, one of them a professor. This contrasted with the earlier rush of ministers, MPs and flunkeys to the exhibition opening, sponsored by the British High Commission and doubtless including wine and cheese.

On the same day, the radio station aired another report about the  ‘filthy’ police mortuary at Hoima, 200km to the north-west. A horrible stench from murder and accident victims was escaping, along with swarms of flies, through the big holes in the mortuary roof.  In such a Ugandan  milieu, forecasts of climate doom in future decades don’t get much traction.

Tony Thomas blogs at  tthomas061.wordpress.com

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[i] The   conference  was back-ended by a soiree at the Ocean Grill, Columbus Avenue,   “ to explore, over a glass of wine, how museums are shifting their agendas, roles and practices to respond to the global challenge of climate change.”

 

[ii]  Nixon happens to be the “Rachel Carson & Elizabeth Ritzmann Professor of English” at Wisconsin University. Carson’s error-filled attack on DDT in her 1962  book  Silent Spring led to millions of malaria deaths in the Third World.

 

Chatting With ‘A Climate Heretic’

TONY THOMAS

Doing science by consensus is not science at all, says the climatologist all the alarmists love to hate. Not that the enmity bothers Judith Curry too much — and certainly not as much as the debasement of impartial inquiry by which the warmist establishment keeps all those lovely grants coming

When climatologist Judith Curry visited Melbourne last week she took the time to chat with Quadrant Online contributor Tony Thomas. The professor and chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology is something of a stormy petrel in the climate-change community, as she has broken ranks with alarmist colleagues to question the articles and ethics of the warmist faith. This has made her less than popular in certain circles, even inspiring Scientific American, house journal of the catastropharians, to brand her “a heretic” who has “turned on her colleagues.”

Such criticism leaves Curry unmoved. If anyone needs counselling, she says, then it is those academics who continue to preach the planet’s sweaty doom despite the fact that no warming has been observed for almost two decades.

The edited transcript of Curry’s conversation with Thomas is below:

TONY THOMAS: If the skeptic/orthodox spectrum is a range from 1 (intense skeptic) to 10 (intensely IPCC orthodox), where on the scale would you put yourself

(a) as at 2009

(b) as at 2014,

and why has there been a shift (if any)?
JUDITH CURRY: In early 2009, I would have rated myself as 7; at this point I would rate myself as a 3.  Climategate and the weak response of the IPCC and other scientists triggered a massive re-examination of my support of the IPCC, and made me look at the science much more sceptically.

THOMAS: The US debate has been galvanised in recent weeks by strong statements against CO2 emissions by President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry. What is your view of the case they made out, and your thoughts about why the statements are now being made?
CURRY: I am mystified as to why President Obama and John Kerry are making such strong (and indefensible) statements about climate change.  Particularly with regards to extreme weather events, their case is very weak.  Especially at this time, given that much of the rest of the world is pulling back against commitments to reduce emissions and combat climate change.

THOMAS: Re the halt to warming in the past 15-17 years, has this been adequately explained to the public? If it continues a few more years, is that the end of the orthodox case?
CURRY: Regarding the hiatus in warming, I would say that this has not been adequately explained to the public, the IPCC certainly gave the issue short shrift.

The hiatus is serving to highlight the importance of natural climate variability.  If the hiatus continues a few more years, climate model results will seriously be called into question.  When trying to understand and model a complex system, there is, unfortunately, no simple test for rejecting a hypothesis or a model.

THOMAS: What empirical evidence is there, as distinct from modelling, that ‘missing heat’ has gone into the deep oceans?
CURRY: Basically, none.  Observations below 2 km in the ocean are exceedingly rare, and it is only since 2005 that we have substantial coverage below 700 metres.

THOMAS: Should there be a 6th AR from the IPCC? Why/why not?
CURRY: In my opinion, the IPCC has outlived its original usefulness.  The framing of the climate-change problem by the UNFCCC/IPCC, and the early articulation of a preferred policy option by the UNFCCC, has arguably marginalized research on broader issues surrounding climate change, and resulted in an overconfident assessment of the importance of greenhouse gases in future climate change, and stifled the development of a broader range of policy options.

The result of this simplified framing of a wicked problem is that we lack the kinds of information to more broadly understand climate change and societal vulnerability.

The first place to start is to abandon the consensus-seeking approach to climate science that has been implemented by the IPCC.  Scientists do not need to be consensual to be authoritative. Authority rests in the credibility of the arguments, which must include explicit reflection on uncertainties, ambiguities and areas of ignorance and more openness for dissent. The role of scientists should not be to develop political will to act by hiding or simplifying the uncertainties, either explicitly or implicitly, behind a negotiated consensus.

THOMAS: Since the first IPCC report a quarter century ago, what has been the most significant advance in the case that 50+% of recent warming is human-caused?
CURRY: The period of global warming from 1976-1998.

THOMAS: Similarly, what has been the most significant advance in the case that 50+% of recent warming is NOT human-caused?
CURRY: The stagnation in global temperatures since 1998 is causing scientists to take a much closer look at natural climate variability.

THOMAS: What was the main take-away point from your congressional testimony last Aprilon climate?
CURRY: My testimony made the following main points: The IPCC AR5 presents an overall weaker case for anthropogenic climate change [and] variations in nearly all extreme weather events are dominated by natural variability, not anthropogenic climate change

THOMAS:  Are you supportive of the line that the ‘quiet sun’ presages an era of global cooling in the next few decades?
CURRY: One of the unfortunate consequences of the focus on anthropogenic forcing of climate is that solar effects on climate have been largely neglected.  I think that solar effects, combined with the large scale ocean-circulation regimes, presage continued stagnation in global temperatures for the next two decades.

THOMAS:  Are you supportive of the arguments of Varenholt, Svensmark et al that indirect effects of solar irradiance are seeding clouds and causing cooling in this phase of the sunspot cycle?
CURRY: It seems to me that solar effects on climate are much more complex than the sun as a source of heating, and that there are indirect effects of the sun on climate.  What these indirect effects might be is at the frontiers of knowledge – the method proposed by Svensmark and others could be important, but we don’t yet have sufficient understanding of this.

THOMAS:  Are you aware of any national science bodies that reject or have backed away from the orthodox position? What weight do you give to the fact that these bodies are virtually unanimous in support of the orthodox line?
CURRY: The major scientific societies continue in their unanimous support of the IPCC consensus.

THOMAS:  Why is academia so strongly supportive of the orthodoxy, if the orthodox case is flawed?
CURRY:  Well, that is a topic for social psychologists at this point.  The academic community has a lot invested in the case for anthropogenic climate change – substantial government funding, prestige, and political influence.

THOMAS:  There seems very little direct debate (i.e. in public fora) between orthodox and skeptic people. Why is this education tool neglected?
CURRY:  The establishment scientists who support the IPCC consensus do not debate sceptics, for two reasons.  They do not wish to lend legitimacy to the sceptics and the sceptical positions.  Secondly, the few public debates that have been held did not go well for the establishment scientists – formal, oral debate is not a format for which most scientists have experience.

THOMAS: Young people tend to follow the orthodox line. Have you seen any change in this?
CURRY:  Young people tend to have a rebellious streak that is critical of the older generation, I’m not sure if I would call that an ‘orthodox line’.  Climate-change orthodoxy is certainly infiltrating the educational system.  The most interesting thing I have seen is the emergence of Austrian social critic and rap musician Kilez More who produced and posted a climate science sceptic video.

 

 

Suitable Cases For Treatment

TONY THOMAS

Wreathed in self-importance but boasting little grasp of the science, the Australian Psychological Society is no fair-weather friend of the warmist movement. Indeed, its dire prophecies and ill-informed endorsements of the most dubious methods and “evidence” make it a case study in institutional delusion

Professor of Psychology Stephan Lewandowsky is much in the news of late because the science publishers Frontiers dumped his paper, Recursive Fury (pathologising climate skeptics), because of its ethical shortcomings. Lewandowsky  is a favorite of the Australian Psychological Society (APS).According to UK Guardian, the APS backed him all the way. The APS, said The Guardian, offers  “a good example for journals to follow when subjected to organized bullying from contrarians trying to censor sound but inconvenient research.”

It seems time for a look at the APS, a 21,000-member international pacesetter among psychology bodies for ministering to alleged mental health impacts of alleged climate change. It cites as me-too organisations the American, British and Canadian psychology societies (APA, BPS and CPA).

Long-time senior psychologist at the APS is Dr Susie Burke, who also co-authored  the APS position statement on climate change. In October, 2013, she put out a statement on the 5^th IPCC report: “The threats that unmitigated climate change pose to physical and mental health rise every year”. This is a bit hard to reconcile with the halt to warming since 1997, but Burke’s inclination to gush about her role models remains undiminished. Here’s a sample, re a Perth APS conference, which is headlined lugubriously, The Hopeful Space between Denial and Despair:

“Exhibitors have packed up, the corridors are empty, voices echo, the complimentary coffee trolley has gone home. You’d be forgiven for thinking the Conference was over. But wait, not yet, what’s this? Down the corridors stride three professors to talk about one of the most serious environmental and health threats of the 21st Century, and why mental health professionals care about it.”

Who were these eminent psychologists who “lowered the mood, and raised the pulse”? Professor Carmen Lawrence, a former  Labor premier and ALP president;  Lewandowsky, the chronicler of the now-failed Recursive Fury; and Professor Joseph Reser, the APS’s opinion survey guru. (There will be more on Reser in Part Two of this series).

PART II OF THIS SERIES WILL BE PUBLISHED TOMORROW

The APS endeavours to out-do Greenpeace in climate catastrophism. Here’s some samples from the APS website  (heaven knows what gets written in the ‘member-only’ sections):

• Climate change is arguably the biggest challenge facing the human race.
• Reduce greenhouse pollution or risk catastrophic climate change that could drive humanity to the edge of extinction.  
  
• … each passing month of rising global emissions, insufficient action from world leaders,increasing hopelessness and ever-worsening scientific predictions.
• the impact of climate change on suicidal behaviour [among farmers] so far has only been inferred.
• The simple fact is that growth in population and consumption cannot continue unabatedon a finite planet. A human population in excess of 2 billion is generally considered unsustainable.

Perhaps the APS could take its own advice:

“We generally cope better, and are more effective at making changes, when we are calm and rational…  don’t over-react and start behaving as though catastrophic change is imminent. Lasting change requires sustained commitment, and fanning short-term panic can have the opposite effect.”

The APS has only the most tenuous grasp of the on-going  warming debate. For example, it is  incapable of distinguishing weather (including droughts, floods, storms etc) from longer-term climate, let alone critiquing the IPCC’s climate modelling. But the APS is happy to discover and see treated whatever neuroses and depressions that warming talk (including its own) is generating. The APS clearly expects these conditions to become epidemic as CO2 does its deadly work. In  its own words, the APS goal is  “to position psychologists as a professional group with expert knowledge, skills  and resources that can help in climate change science, including mitigation and adaptation.”

While excoriating sceptics as part of a giant conspiracy backed by Big Oil, the APS was fretting in the queue for some  oil money itself: “We need to lobby the Australian Government to divert at least some of its climate change research budget towards psychological research … There may also be money available from fossil fuel companies(such as coal and oil producers and consumers) in the same way that tobacco companies contributed to research designed to prevent adolescents from taking up smoking.”

The APS’s big coup  was to publish a “Tip Sheet” on how children can be indoctrinatedwith the warming messages without sending them clinically insane. This is a worldwide issue. As an American journal put it, “Before she had even lost  her baby teeth, a small girl was saying, ‘I worry about [global warming] because I don’t want to die.’ Surveys across the Anglosphere have shown children under the age of 11 are fretting that global warming will destroy the planet before they can grow up. And slightly older children can be more worried about climate change than dating.

So the APS Tip Sheet was timely:

Alarmed small children may show behavior changes  —“ e.g., in their play, drawing, or dreams that might suggest that something is unsettling them.” They might find it easier to talk about environmental issues via a toy or puppet. Try asking, “And how are you feeling today, Teddy?”. [This seems to  be cut and pasted from child-sexual-abuse counseling].

Climate issues have the potential to bring up strong feelings like fear, anxiety, frustration, sadness, depression, helplessness, anger or despair:

“Worries and anxieties about these threats can become difficult for children of all ages to deal with.”

Parents should reassure small children “that their home is a safe place” [but who is telling them it isn’t?]

Climate talk, like sex and divorce talk, is to be avoided in front of small children.

“Adults need to be conscious of the presence of children when discussing climate change and other worrying environmental problems…Be mindful of how you are reacting to news about environmental problems in front of your child. If your reactions are too strong, these can upset and confuse your child.”

Children may need to be reassured that environmental catastrophes are not happening near them.

“Small details can quickly turn into large generalisations (e.g., ‘If the planet is getting hotter, will we all get burnt?’).”

The Tip Sheet promotes activist groups, with even primary school-aged children being urged to help choose an environmental group for family donations. [Is pointing children towards green activist groups likely to improve a tot’s equanimity?]

Adolescents are encouraged to precociously pester the talk-back radio and newspapers, and lobby the government and industry. Activist websites are recommended.

“Encourage your whole family to be part of a world-wide movement of people who recognise that there are limits to the world’s natural resources,”

The above advice is either a platitude or drawn from the discredited 1972 Club of Rome forecast, “Limits to Growth”. More than four decades later, and despite its dire prognosis for the planet having failed to materialise, the defence of that flawed and foolish tract continues.

The Tip Sheet encourages adolescents to study diverse views, but   implies that skeptic views are beyond the pale. Recommended authors include environmental zealot David Suzuki,who wants sceptic politicians gaoled on criminal charges. Elsewhere, the APS positively urges that children be shoved into the front lines as warmist climate-fodder:

Schools also increasingly include environmental education in the curriculum. Psychological research can help optimise the effectiveness of schools’ efforts by identifying factors influencing ESB [environmentally sustainable behavior] in young people. These include lack of knowledge, believing actions won’t make much difference, frustration, action paralysis, and pessimism…

Schools can provide students with experiences of ‘active citizenship’, like writing letters, signing petitions and making complaints. This pro-environmental concern can be passed on from children to parents…although there is conflicting evidence about the effectiveness of children as environmental change agents.

For the 2010 election, the APS issued its climate change manifesto calling for “development and implementation of school based curriculum promoting sustainable values, attitudes and behaviour in school aged children, and developing a series of guidelines for educators.”

Business is business, and the APS sees money-making potentials with its kiddie tip sheet.

“There are many ways you can use APS Tip Sheets as a marketing resource for your practice. Start by always remembering to place your practice’s name and address stamp in the empty box provided on the back page, then try the following ideas:

• Distribute Tip Sheets to clients and their families as an extra tool for education and understanding
• When updating a GP about a jointly managed patient, enclose a Tip Sheet and business card. GPs are a great distribution channel for Tip Sheets
• Enclose a Tip Sheet with every introduction/thank you letter you send to referral sources
• Display Tip Sheets in your waiting room
• Mail Tip Sheets to phone enquirers
• Distribute Tip Sheets at public speaking  engagements

The APS’s bestie was the now-axed Climate Commission. The APS saw the commission as a font of “independent” warming advice, notwithstanding federal funding that included   $180,000-a-year for three days’ work a week by its chief commissioner Tim Flannery, of whom the APS gushed:

“At the meeting’s end, Tim leant forward in his chair, gazed out the 13th floor window and asked ‘Did you know you had a falcon nest above your office?’ What a fitting way to end our exchange, being reminded of the wild and wonderful world, even in the heart of a major metropolitan city, that we have a responsibility to protect by restoring a safe climate.”

Not surprisingly, the APS provided the Commission with  “additional psychological principles” to reinforce Flannery & Co.’s  crusade.

Apart from the much-admired Tim, other alleged authorities revered by the APS include Al Gore plus Inconvenient Truth,  Professor Ian Lowe, president of the activist Australian Conservation Foundation, and any other green propagandist the APS encounters.  Fiction films like the crazed Day After Tomorrow, The Age of Stupid, and The 11^th Hour are described as “addressing climate change”. Even  APS people can have brief moments of lucidity, such as in these comments:

• Trust [of scientists and government] is easily damaged, and when e-mails are stolen and selectively quoted, or a single overeager scientist exaggerates future climate change outcomes even in one region, widespread distrust can be created.
• Disparaging sceptic blog comments, namely: It figures that a bunch of psychologists need to mess with people’s heads to get them to fall in line with this “eco-friendly” nonsense. … Climate change is a problem invented by “scientists who are pursuing a phantom issue” and   scientists are ignoring research “proving” the problem is overestimated or does not exist.
• Disparaging sceptic blog comments, namely: The host of a popular show on a leading U.S. television network held up a copy of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and said, “The shrinks are trying to brainwash us again.”

A little scepticism can’t shake a true believer’s faith however, so the APS pumps out advice like that below. If the tone seems a tad patronising, it may just be that the author had in mind the anxiety-prone warmists who purport to report climate news for The Age, SMHand ABC:

• Although environmental threats are real and can be frightening, remaining in a state of heightened distress is not helpful for ourselves or for others.
• Remember, other people may well be like you and feel anxious or unsettled at learning about some of the environmental threats looming.
• Spending time with loved ones can be helpful in keeping yourself grounded and energised. Enjoy friends and family, and make sure there are at least one or two people with whom you can share your concerns when feeling dispirited.
• Ensure you are familiar with common arguments and useful counter-arguments that will help you respond more comfortably and smoothly. Asking a friend to role-play a sceptic, and practising how you’re going to handle these different perspectives can be very helpful. 
• Sometimes taking a news break can be helpful. Turning off the radio or TV, and having a break from the newspaper for a few days can be a welcome relief. Taking a deliberate break is quite different from becoming desensitised.

Tony Thomas achieved a B-pass in Psychology 101 at UWA in 1959. He blogs attthomas061.wordpress.com

The Head-Shrinking Scourge Of Sceptics

TONY THOMAS

Professor Joseph Reser of the Australian Psychological Association fears that “climate deniers” are hobbling the push to save our poor, sweating planet. He would be better advised to check his “facts”, because many aren’t merely wrong, they are ludicrously so

The  eminence grise of the 21,000-member Australian Psychology Society (APS) is Professor Joseph Reser of Griffith University, a contributing author to the 5^th IPCC report. With funding support from the since-axed Department of Climate Change, he and his team ran two large-scale Australian surveys in 2010 and 2011 (3096 and 4347 respondents), to document people’s climate change views.  From the results he has filed two academic reports totaling 340 pages, endlessly quoted by the APS.

Reser found that  “genuine distress at the implications of climate change appeared to be a reality for possibly 20% of survey respondents” (p141). Amazingly, 52% of the total 7443 respondents thought that global warming impacts were “currently” being felt in Australia, 45% thought they had personally witnessed the environmental impacts, and 59% thought their home turf was vulnerable to climate change horrors.

Climate worrywarts, according to Reser, are suffering

“…apprehension, anxiety, or loss due to the threat and projected consequences of climate change, for oneself, humanity, and/or the natural world”,  along with hopelessness, dread, “uncertainly” (sic) , resignation, pessimism, real sadness, preoccupation, psychological distress, genuine alarm and fear, “and a clear sense that things will likely get worse”.

He also has discovered supercharged sorrow because of  the alleged loss of species and ecosystems through lately non-existent warming.

PART I OF THIS SERIES: SUITABLE CASES FOR TREATMENT

The APS sees all this as a great opportunity to provide ‘stress and distress’ counseling to our panicking citizenry, and to help   design behavior-change programs. Considering the APS favors 30% emission cuts by 2020, and 90% by 2050 (back to the caves, everyone!), our behaviour would  certainly need some changing. Yikes, we’re nearly to 2020 already. Even Kevin Rudd wanted only a 5% cut by 2020, from 2000 levels.

Amusingly, Reser imagines that human emissions have been damaging the planet “for at least the past several hundred years” (p123). Those 600 steam engines 18^th century Europe clearly have a lot of global warming to answer for. So, apparently, do  the Virgin Queen’s fireplaces.

In the 2010 survey, Reser asked how concerned you are that “electricity will become unaffordable”. A whopping 85% said they were fairly or very concerned. This embarrassing question disappeared from the bigger July-August 2011 survey, without explanation.

While professing to play a straight bat with his 2011 survey, Reser includes a question about what strategies you are relying on re climate change, “such as, ‘Pretend that climate change is not happening’”. Well, for 15 years that warming hasn’t been happening, so no need to “pretend” anything. Another question precludes any sceptical answer:

• Which of the following statements best describes how you feel about climate change?
• The issue is overwhelming and I feel helpless
• I am frustrated that not enough is being done
• I am hopeful that if we take action now, we can stop it
• I am tired of hearing about it, and I want to see some action taken. (author’s emphasis).

Maybe we need a fifth choice here:

• I wish Professor Reser would stop frightening the horses.

The tenor of Reser’s surveys also can be judged by the ten questions he asks to test respondents’ “objective knowledge” about climate “facts”, then cross-tabulated against a myriad of other survey findings. Below are five statements he rates as “True” and he marks down anyone saying they are “False”. The result: most respondents struggled to get the 50% pass rate on Reser’s ‘facts’ (but Greens voters got the best scores):

1.  Australia is one of the most exposed nations with respect to projected impacts of climate change 2. Climate change will increase the risk in Australia for diseases transmitted by water and mosquitoes over the next 100 years.[1]
3. Globally, the current burning of fossil fuels accounts for 80-85% (CO2) emissions added to the atmosphere.[2]
4. The change in global temperature for the last 100 years is greater than for the last 1000 years  [Hello to Michael Mann’s discredited “Hockey Stick” reconstruction of global temperatures].
5. The number of weather-related disasters around the world has doubled since the mid 1990s.[3]

Regarding 1, we can discover elsewhere in Reser’s report  that CSIRO and  Bureau of Meteorology and Professor Will Steffen merely ‘deem’ Australia to be more exposed than other continents (not ‘nations’) to this hypothetical warming, because of hypothetical flooding of our long coastlines and all that.

The four “fact” options are, in fact, a mix of futurology (1 and 2), a Nobel Prize-worthy discovery, if ever established (3), paleoclimatology – a highly-uncertain science (4),  and vagueness multiplied (5). In the first survey, he muddled his own preamble to a  question, wrongly claiming (p78) that the 2007 census asked people about their concern about climate change.

While Reser is a whiz at survey-processing, his lack of smarts on the man-made warming debate let him down. Not once in 340 pages does he mention the halt to warming since 1997 – although even the IPCC now acknowledges a 15-year hiatus.  Instead, Reser discovers   “more and more … a profoundly changing global environment” (p134). He spends scores of pages, and much of his survey, on making or noting illegitimate connections between various recent big weather events and the ogre of (not-happening) global warming. Even IPCC scientists reject links between climate change and specific weather events, other than heat waves and precipitation.

But he suggests that since nearly half the public is convinced such links exist (eg., between climate change and 2009′s Black Saturday bushfire catastrophe in Victoria), the misperception should be harnessed for warmist-indoctrination purposes.  (One respondent was convinced about the global warming narrative because he/she had seen snakes in mid-winter). Reser continues that it makes “considerable practical as well as psychological sense” to bring climate change “home” to people via the climate/weather-extreme linkages, to prompt people to swap light globes and other green activities (p134).

He’s personally convinced there ares links and evidently feels no moral discomfort. He believes the “hard-line position” of science against linking specific extreme weather events and climate change is crumbling in favor of a ‘more pragmatic’ stance, which will accept the need for ‘near real time’ causal accounts and explanations. In any event, scientists can fall back on the meme that linking climate change to a storm etc., can be done, if couched in ways involving “the probabilistic nature of attribution”, he says. So let’s go with the link, he says, since “ newspaper, new media, and popular science headlines and images around the world repeatedly proclaim this interconnection between climate change and the increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events” (p136).

I suspect the Reser formula for this climate “education” has gained real traction, given the drumbeat of stories lately making the dud climate/storm/drought linkages.

Reser is rattled by surveys – including CSIRO’s – finding ‘sceptics’ in the community numbering 40% or so. He insists on a figure for sceptics of 4.7-8.5%, based on his own surveys. His concern is that larger sceptic numbers, like 40%, from other polls and even from the ABC, are broadcast by the media, and  then plunge believers into swamps of “confusion, frustration and pessimism” (p145).

His solution is simple: he redefines ‘sceptics’ so stringently that hardly anyone would qualify. To Reser, a stringent sceptic (4.7% of population) believes the world’s climate is not changing . They also believe that climate change is entirely natural and Australia will never start feeling any impacts of climate change. A more-inclusive Reser-defined sceptic  (8.5%) embraces a sceptic take on most of those propositions. The CSIRO is more plausible. It reported in January that, of of mid-2013, less than half of all Australians (47.3%) thought climate change was happening and humans were causing it.

Even on Reser’s stringent definition, scepticism grew from 2010 to 2011. His desperate rationalisations include media campaigning biased against true believers – this argument relying on axe-grinding work he cites  by researchers like Wendy Bacon. [Bacon, a journalism academic,  thinks any coverage whatsoever of sceptic views constitutes media bias]. Noting that  sceptics are ‘conservative white males’ sharing a weird worldview (p31), he suggests that they are dismissing the ‘science’ to reduce their anxieties. It never occurs to Reser that an unpredicted halt to warming of well over a decade might be encouraging a bit more scepticism about the IPCC.

In fact, his 2011 survey showed that only 29% bought the IPCC line of dominant human influence on warming, and nearly 70% did not (p176).

Reser’s view seems to be that sceptics can’t face the terror of global warming, so they are ‘frantically shoring up’ their equanimity by trying to discredit “the science, the scientists, and confronting documentaries” – I assume he means Gore’s  error-riddled Inconvenient Truth. Reser at no point grasps the importance to the science debate of the IPCC’s 51%-plus attribution of warming to human activity.

He brushes aside notions that “climate change” means any climate change, and insists that by the conveniently-circular United Nations definition, “climate change” means “human-caused climate change”. However, he concedes that his use of the term “climate change” in the survey might have led to confusions among respondents. Nonetheless, he thinks, “climate change” ought to “immediately raise issues of responsibility, accountability, and guilt” (p126).

He blames some rising scepticism on “oversaturated and sensationalized media coverage” (p142), as if his own output isn’t full of sensational claims about storms, disasters and planetary crises. As he puts it,  “Unfolding environmental changes and dire science prognoses are strongly suggesting that Australia and the world will be facing very serious and life-affecting challenges. …what is at risk are not only cherished aspects of familiar local and global natural environments, but life support systems and livelihoods as the world alters” (p160).

He discovers that Hurricane Sandy has generated “the global significance of much of New York City being inundated by a disaster associated with climate change”, although there is no evidence whatsoever that the hurricane was climate-change related (p152).

Reser’s endemic confusion between “climate” and “weather” probably stems from his use of the American Psychological Association definition, which fails to specify any time period, let alone the normal 30-year averaging of weather. The 2011 survey was funded not only by the late Department of Climate Change et al, but also by the Australian Red Cross.

Thus your Red  Cross donations, which you might imagine help feed starving Somalis,  may be  funding academics to labour over  mental health impacts in Australia of less than a degree of warming in the past  100 years.

Tony Thomas has suffered resignation, pessimism, real sadness, preoccupation, psychological distress etc from having to plough through Reser’s reports. He blogs attthomas061.wordpress.com

 

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[1] See https://tthomas061.wordpress.com/2014/02/21/climate-science-how-she-is-done/   for a contrary view

[2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921818112001658  Changes in atmospheric CO₂ are not tracking changes in human emissions.

 

 

 

 

[3]

[Normalised insurance data disproves this – http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com.au/2011/11/new-study-on-insured-losses-and-climate.html

Climate Papers Without Peer

TONY THOMAS

Want your, er, highly innovative research to get lots of attention, the sort that keeps those grants coming? You could do worse than start with some kind words from a peer-reviewer whose work is glowingly cited in your own paper. After that, apply for the next batch of grants

Peer review is claimed to be the gold standard for scientific papers. Yet in the establishment climate science world, “peer review” operates differently. Professor Stephan Lewandowsky’s now-retracted paper Recursive Fury, about conspiracy-mindedness of “deniers”, raises a few issues about peer reviewing.

The background is that in 2012  Lewandowsky, Winthrop professor of psychology at the University of Western Australia, wrote a paper on climate “denialism” with the provocative title “NASA Faked the Moon Landing-Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science”.  This caused an outcry on climate sceptic blogs, where it was alleged, among other things, that the survey was based on only 10 anonymous internet responses.  Lewandowsky, now at Bristol University, surveyed and analysed the outcry and created last year a new paper, “Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation”.

I won’t go into this paper’s merits, except to note that its host journal, Frontiers, has retracted the paper, saying,

As a result of its investigation, which was carried out in respect of academic, ethical and legal factors, Frontiers came to the conclusion that it could not continue to carry the paper, which does not sufficiently protect the rights of the studied subjects. Specifically, the article categorizes the behaviour of identifiable individuals within the context of psychopathological characteristics.[1] [2]

Lewandowsky is undeniably a heavy hitter in his psychology patch. He’s been publishing scores of papers for nearly 30 years (20 in the past three years alone) since gaining his Ph.D. He has taught at UWA for nearly 20 years and was awarded the UK Royal Society’s Wolfson Research Merit Award last year.

So who peer reviewed his Recursive Fury paper? It was an ambitious paper, and when published,it got 30,000 online views and more than 9000 downloads, a record for the journal. The editors would hardly have selected as a peer reviewer a mere post-graduate Sydney student in journalism, would they?

Step forward Elaine McKewon, student at the sub-august  Australian Centre for Independent Journalism at the University of Technology, Sydney, one of the three reviewers.  (Check the output of its star researcher Wendy Bacon here).[3]

McKewon’s academic lustre shines with a BA (Hons) in Geography, UWA, and a Grad Dip in Journalism at UTS.

Her studies for a PhD involve, a la Wendy Bacon, “examining coverage of climate science in Australian newspapers during 1996-2010.” The primary aim, she says, “is to explain how the scientific consensus on climate change was reconstructed as a ‘scientific debate’ in the Australian news media.”  In other words, how and why have evil sceptics been casting doubt on the certain, absolutely settled case for catastrophic human-caused global warming that will occur in the late 21st century. Or in her own words, “I am developing an interdisciplinary model of the social production of scientific ignorance — the process whereby a coalition of agents from different social fields constructs a false scientific controversy at the public level in order to undermine authoritative scientific knowledge.”[4]

Here also speaks McKewon, terrifying the horses at a journalism education conference in Perth:

“The latest report of the (IPCC) in 2007 raises the  prospect of unthinkable scenarios over the coming century: millions of people without adequate water supply, devastating droughts and bushfires, mass starvation, catastrophic floods, more frequent extreme weather events, rising sea levels, millions of people displaced in an environmental refugee crisis and one-third of the world’s species committed to extinction…”[5]

I’m not surprised that the Australian Psychological Society (which adores Lewandowsky’s papers) has put out a special bulletin on how to educate kiddies about climate change without traumatizing them permanently.[6]

Lewandowsky is a fan of McKewon’s work. In a 40-minute video he did last month at Bristol University, he quotes (at 28:04) from his Recursive Fury conclusion about “a possible role of conspiracist ideation in the rejection of science”. He adds that this “is a finding that aligns well with previous research”. His graphic then pops up alongside, reading  “Other research aligns with our basic thinking, e.g. McKewon 2012.”[7]

 

McKewon published two studies in 2012.  Lewandowsky is probably referring to both of them:  “The use of neoliberal think tank [i.e. Institute of Public Affairs] fantasy themes to delegitimise scientific knowledge of climate change in Australian newspapers” and “Conspiracy theories vs climate science in regional newspaper coverage of Ian Plimer’s book, Heaven and Earth”.

In the Recursive Fury paper, Lewandowsky cites McKewon’s two papers no less than five times.[8] I imagine McKewon would have noticed the citations she was getting, but not let that affect her objectivity as peer reviewer. As it happened, she seems to have missed, as reviewer, the ethics issues identified by Frontiers’ journal management.

McKewon’s own account is: “Satisfied that the paper was a solid work of scholarship that could advance our understanding of science denial and improve the effectiveness of science communication, I recommended publication. Two other independent reviewers agreed.”[9]

The peer-review guidelines of the Frontier family of journals, including Frontiers of Psychology, advise that it is mandatory for review editors who endorse publication of a manuscript to have their identities listed on the published article.[10] On the Recursive Fury article still on the UWA website, I can’t find any reviewer names. There may be some routine explanation for that, but it’s odd.

The Frontier guidelines also say that review editors are “appointed to the Frontiers editorial Boards from the community’s top experts  worldwide”. We must assume that McKewon met that criterion.

McKewon lists in her online CV her “reviewer” status for Frontiers in Personality Science and Individual Differences, and presumably she has reviewer status also for Frontiers in Psychology, since she herself has announced she was a peer reviewer of the Lewandowsky Recursive article there.[11]

She also says she is Reviewer for Australian Humanities Review and Journal of Applied Communication Research. I imagine a climate sceptic, submitting a piece on, say, “Failure of Academics to Notice the 17-Year Warming Hiatus” might get some trenchant questioning from McKewon as reviewer.

Of McKewon’s other three papers, one also involves the rubbishing of Plimer’s book, and two are about prostitution in WA. She has also written a book on Kalgoorlie prostitution.[12]

Her grants include $12,696 from the federal Department of Industry this year towards her Ph.D. rubbishing the alleged coalition of IPA, News Corp, fossil fuel barons etc for “undermining authoritative scientific knowledge”. (How kind of Industry Minister Ian McFarlane to pay the government’s enemies to crusade against it and its supporters). McKewon also scored an earlier $70,881 grant over three years for Ph.D. work, funded by a Rudd department.

“Peer review” has been a feature of IPCC science. Who could forget the Climategate email of East Anglia’s climate guru Phil Jones:  “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

I have not been aware of any controversy over credentials of peer reviewers themselves. So let’s take a closer look at Ms McKewon, “a top expert worldwide”, according to the Frontier journal group’s criteria.

She’s from New Orleans and has been in Australia a couple of decades. Her journalism to 2008 seems to be 200-plus news items for a New Orleans blog called BayouBuzz, these items being mostly rehashes of mainstream media reports – part of any journo’s stock-in-trade. The main exception is her climate reports, which are long, passionate pieces on planet-saving themes.

Her recent item titles speak for themselves:

• ‘The journal that gave in to climate deniers’ intimidation‘. — The Conversation, April 2, 2014  [Frontiers new explanation for pulling the Recursive Fury piece seems to render McKewon’s story obsolete].
• ‘The Big Oil-backed climate denier who hoodwinked Fairfax’. — Crikey, January 13, 2014. Opinion piece based on doctoral research.
• ‘Think tank a false climate prophet’. Opinion piece based on doctoral research‘.  –  SMH, 20 June, 2013
• ‘Think tank talking points deepen the divide over climate change’.  The Conversation, February 16, 2012   Opinion piece based on doctoral research.

Her twitter account is alive with disparagement of “deniers”.  Sceptics are equated with anti-vaccine campaigners; Melbourne sceptic John McLean is a “Big Oil-backed climate denier” (show us the Exxon cheques, John!). She’s enthusiastic about banning sceptic commentary from the media;  “climate denial” is a “machine” or “industry” powered by the IPA;  polar bears are starving; climate-change diseases are rife; and the Marshall Islands are drowning.

I mentioned peer-review standards in climate science are sometimes not as high as in proper science. The use of junior people as purported experts and authorities is also a feature of  IPCC climate science. Here’s some examples, unearthed by investigator Donna Lamframboise for her 2011 book Delinquent Teenager:

• Richard Klein  in 1992 turned 23, completed a Masters degree, and worked as a Greenpeace campaigner. Two years later, at the tender age of 25, he found himself serving as an IPCC lead author. He became a top-level coordinating lead author at age 28, six years before he completed his Ph.D. in 2003.
• Environmentalist Laurens Bouwer in 1999-2000 served as an IPCC lead author on an chapter devoted to insurance before earning his Masters in 2001. His insurance expertise? He’d been a trainee at Munich Re.[13]

My scientist friends tell me that peer review generally has degraded, partly because of the upsurge in numbers of papers seeking publication. Since each paper needs a mimimum of three reviewers, the demands on serious-minded reviewers are so great that many now refuse to fritter their time on that task. Hence publishers are reduced to begging would-be authors to come up with names of five reviewers, any reviewers, academic stature be hanged. Publishers may even ask authors for a list of reviewers who should not be asked, hence the growth of groupthink in academia.

The unravelling of issues around  Lewandowsky’s Recursive Fury paper has some distance to run – particularly in respect of UWA giving it a tick for ethical procedures.

I hope McKewon can find time for a follow-up on her April 2 piece in The Conversation, where she seems to have grabbed the bull by the tail:

“The journal’s management and editors were clearly intimidated by climate deniers who threatened to sue. So Frontiers bowed to their demands, retracted the paper, damaged its own reputation, and ultimately gave a free kick to aggressive climate deniers.

I would have expected a scientific journal to have more backbone, certainly when it comes to the crucially important issue of academic freedom.”[14]

Her think-piece was considered so outstanding by Scientific American, it republished it in full.[15] So did Social Science Space.[16]

But as Frontiers now says, “Frontiers did not “cave in to threats”; in fact, Frontiers received no threats.”[17]

UPDATE: The Recursive Fury paper was edited by Viren Swami, University of Westminster. Strangely, he is also one of the two peer reviewers of the paper, along with McKewon.  The Sydney Morning Herald reported on April 2,  that McKewon was one of  “three independent reviewers”.
Dr Swami’s Ph.D was on body-size ideals across cultures.  His papers include :
>Female physical attractiveness in Britain and Malaysia: A cross-cultural study
>Female physical attractiveness in Britain and Japan: A cross‐cultural study
>The missing arms of Vénus de Milo: reflections on the science of attractiveness
>A critical test of the waist-to-hip ratio hypothesis of women’s physical attractiveness in Britain and Greece
>Unattractive, promiscuous and heavy drinkers: Perceptions of women with tattoos.

Reporter Tony Thomas is still hoping for a Professorship in Journalism at UTS. He blogs attthomas061.wordpress.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[1] http://www.frontiersin.org/blog/Retraction_of_Recursive_Fury_A_Statement/812

[2] Joanne Nova sums up the thrust of the Recursive Fury paper: “that sceptics who objected this previous paper were barking-mad conspiracy theorists with nefarious intent”

[3] http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2013/11/wendy-bacons-warmist-wonderland/

[4] http://uts.academia.edu/ElaineMcKewon/CurriculumVitae

[5] http://www.academia.edu/1293123/Resurrecting_the_war-by-media_on_climate_science_Ian_Plimers_Heaven_Earth

[6] https://www.psychology.org.au/publications/tip_sheets/children_environment/

[7] http://vimeo.com/89099432

[8] On p3, 5, 29, and 36 (twice)

[9] http://theconversation.com/the-journal-that-gave-in-to-climate-deniers-intimidation-25085

[10] http://www.frontiersin.org/about/faq

[11] see 8

[12] http://uts.academia.edu/ElaineMcKewon

[13] http://www.amazon.com/Delinquent-Teenager-Mistaken-Worlds-Climate-ebook/dp/B005UEVB8Q

[14] http://theconversation.com/the-journal-that-gave-in-to-climate-deniers-intimidation-25085

[15] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-deniers-intimidate-journal-into-retracting-paper-that-finds-they-believe-conspiracy-theories/

[16] http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2014/04/reviewer-journal-wilts-under-climate-of-intimidation/

[17] http://www.frontiersin.org/blog/Retraction_of_Recursive_Fury_A_Statement/812

Gergis findings re-surface – the Hockey Stick lives!

By Tony Thomas

Hello Hockey Stick again, goodbye global Medieval Warming Period.
These are the conclusions of a multi-proxy 1000-year climate reconstruction published today (March 31) in Nature Climate Change, by Dr Raphael Neukom of the Oeschger Centre at the University of Bern, and Dr Joelle Gergis of the University of Melbourne.
Dr Neukom summed up for a University of Melbourne press release: “The study showed the ‘Medieval Warm Period’, as identified in some European chronicles, was a regional phenomenon.
“During the same period, temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere were only average. Our study revealed it was not a common climate event that many people have previously assumed.”

The paper claims that in 99.7 percent of the results, the warmest decade of the millennium occurred after 1970.
The press release says, “And surprisingly, only twice over the entire past millennium have both hemispheres simultaneously shown extreme temperatures.
One of these occasions was a global cold period in the 17th century; the other was the current warming phase”.”

The paper’s content has had a convoluted history. It appeared on-line at Nature Climate Change about May 17, 2012, with Gergis cited as the lead author. The multiple authors, who included IPCC stalwart Dr David Karoly, withdrew it three weeks later after an altercation with blogger Steve McIntyre, who had spotted that it used invalid statistical techniques, involving the ‘screening fallacy’.
Moreover, Dr Gergis, a la Michael Mann and Phil Jones, was loathe to provide McIntyre with the raw data for checking, citing third-party confidentialities. She told McIntyre to go seek the data from the third parties:
“The compilation of this database represents years of our research effort based on the development of our professional networks. We risk damaging our work relationships by releasing other people’s records against their wishes. Clearly this is something that we are not prepared to do.”
She then added, “This is commonly referred to as ‘research’. We will not be entertaining any further correspondence on the matter.”
The Nature Climate Change paper, as described by the University of Melbourne press release, has Neukom as the lead author, and Gergis as co-author. The release says,

A new international study has published the most comprehensive Southern Hemisphere reconstruction of past climate records, revealing a clearer climate picture of the globe’s temperature history than ever before.
The study revealed that over the past 1000 years temperature variations have differed greatly between the two hemispheres, yet it confirmed they shared the one warm period after the 1970s.
Led by the Oeschger Centre at the University of Bern, the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL and the University of Melbourne, the study Inter-hemispheric temperature variability over the past millennium was published today in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Co-author Dr Joelle Gergis, ARC Fellow from the University of Melbourne, said the study finally put the Southern Hemisphere on the map in terms of recording past climate variations over the past 1000 years.
“Our findings showed there were considerable decade-to-decade regional temperature variations in the Southern Hemisphere, that were different to the Northern Hemisphere,’’ she said.
“The Southern Hemisphere is a vast oceanic region that is influenced by ocean circulation features such as El Niño. Our study showed that these internal climate cycles may have played a role in influencing regional climate compared to the land-dominated Northern Hemisphere, where external changes in volcanic and solar variations have a more direct influence.
“But despite the two hemispheres behaving differently over the past 1000 years, what is consistent is the recent warming in the last 40 years.
“This study provided an opportunity to refine regional climate model predictions in the Southern Hemisphere for countries like Australia and South America by extending our understanding of natural temperature variations recorded since 1850 back over the past 1000 years,” she said.
The study involved the coordination of an international scientific team with expertise in past climate information from tree-rings, lake sediments, corals, ice cores and climate modelling.
Scientists compiled climate data from hundreds of different locations and used a range of methods to estimate Southern Hemisphere temperatures over the past 1000 years….
The study showed that regional differences such as these were larger than previously thought.

As far as I can establish, pending clarification from the University of Melbourne, Neukom, Gergis et al reworked the maths in their original paper and re-submitted it to the Journal of Climate some time ago, but it has not reappeared there.
Meanwhile, the paper’s underlying data, allegedly certified by an independent team of scientists, was incorporated in a paper by third parties in Nature Geosciences in April 2013. Today’s release is in Nature Climate Change, and bears a strong family resemblance to the original Gergis/Neukom exercise.

Melbourne-based Tony Thomas writes for Quadrant.org.au.

Climate Change Is Hiding Flt 370!

If you’re not a climate scientist this may come as a surprise. It seems the reason searchers haven’t been able to locate the wreckage of the Malaysian jetliner has everything to do with mankind’s carbon emissions and the way they have tormented the southern oceans. And yes, the experts are serious

Why have we so far not found wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370? Because of global warming. This is the line being run by way-left US news organization Mother Jones, home of “smart, fearless journalism”, assisted by two leading Australian climate scientists.

Step forward Professor Matthew England, joint director of Climate Change Research Centre at the University of NSW. This is the very same centre that created the ‘ship of fools’ led by Professor Chris Turney. (That ship got locked in Antarctic pack last December when trying to demonstrate that climate change had reduced the ice).

Professor England has form on alarmism, as befits a contributor to the second and third IPCC reports, and a ‘convening lead author’ for the 2009 Copenhagen summit debacle.

His most recent peer-reviewed paper, published this year, blamed “trade winds” for what he says is the 13-year global surface-warming hiatus.[1] But a year earlier, he described as untruth-tellers those claiming that the IPCC warming projections were over-stated.[2] And a year before that, he was blaming the intensity of Queensland flooding on global warming.[3]

A second source for the Mother Jones report is Dr Steven Rintoul, a CSIRO ocean scientist based in Hobart who specialises in the southern oceans. He was a coordinating lead author on the IPCC Fifth Report.

The third source is Joellen Russell, an associate professor in biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona.

So how has dastardly climate change foiled the MH 370 search? Mother Jones says, “Scientists say man-made climate change has fundamentally altered the currents of the vast, deep oceans where investigators are currently scouring for the missing Malaysian Airlines flight.”

This seems prima facie improbable, given that the past 100 years’ total climate change is about 0.75degC, and there has been a surface warming halt for between 15 years and 17 years, depending on who is doing the calculating.

Anyway, the three climate scientists say the winds of the Southern Indian Ocean bordering the Southern Ocean have been shifting southwards and intensifying over the last twpo or three decades, in part due to a warming atmosphere and the hole in the ozone layer. Ocean currents are also tightening around Antarctica, shifting whole climate systems towards the South Pole, they say.

Matthew England thinks his putative climate-change impacts can decrease the amount of carbon you can get into the oceans, and “affect the temperatures off the Antarctic ice shelf, which is a real worry.” Actually, even the IPCC agrees that Antarctic ice had been growing by about 1.5% per decade during the satellite era, despite the IPCC models predicting a decline.[4] So Dr England seems a bit of a worry-wart.

He does concede that there are ‘basic holes’ in scientific understandings of these oceans. And he continues,

“The reality is that the ocean there is very poorly measured. We have some evidence from satellites, but not nearly enough measurements, not nearly enough understanding of the flow patterns there. We largely rely on models to piece that together. There’s a bit of guesswork there.” (author’s emphasis).

As usual, the model-based climate apocalysm comes first, too bad about the data. Bob Tisdale, a specialist in auditing the IPCC climate models, has reported that the IPCC CMIP3 models for Indian and Pacific Ocean surface temperatures , 1995-2012, forecast an acceleration, whereas the data are flat. For the 30 years to 2012, the models forecast more than double the actual rate of those oceans’ warming.[5]

CSIRO’s Dr Rintoul claims the southward shift of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and the Indian Ocean Gyre Current, are largely human-caused, through wind effects of greenhouse gases and the ozone hole. He also thinks the climate impacts on the ocean are accelerating: “We have seen changes in the last few years that even 5 or 10 years ago we would have thought highly unlikely,” he says. Again, a curious perswpective, given the prolonged halt to warming.

Professor Russell got on her soapbox to say that these southern oceans are gobbling up “so much of the heat that man-made climate change is generating” – presumably, an explanation of the hiatus in surface warming. Shamelessly exploiting an aviation tragedy for climate propaganda purposes, she continues, “This is one of the few areas of the global ocean that is immediately and definitely playing a role in the temperature on land, because it’s taking up all this anthropogenic heat and carbon. The whole ocean is doing that, but here it’s doing it more than it ought to, which is giving us a moment of grace.”

Her error margins are somewhat large – she claims that the Southern Ocean takes up something like 70 percent “plus or minus 30 percent” of all the anthropogenic heat that goes under the ocean. Clever ocean, to select this man-made heat and tuck it down where it can’t be measured! (Actually, in Andrei Tarkovsky’s science fiction film, the ocean on planet Solaris is an agglomeration of intelligent life. Maybe Russell is on to something).

Russell has a grand theory that increasing westerly winds are somehow messing with the southern oceans’ ability to absorb heat, “and potentially shortening this so-called ‘grace’ period where the oceans are giving us a helping hand.” In other words, the MH370 disaster is an excuse to claim that the ocean is gobbling up the ‘missing heat’ and will spit out all that warming when the ocean gets tired of giving humans a grace period from climate disaster.

None of the three scientists have yet blamed global warming for the actual destruction of MH370, but watch that space.

Tony Thomas blames global warming for his poor form at tennis yesterday. He blogs at tthomas061.wordpress.com

[1] http://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science/pacific-trade-winds-stall-global-surface-warming-now

[2] http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s3487316.htm

[3] http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/13/and-you-knew-it-would-be-said-oz-floods-due-to-global-warming/

[4] http://judithcurry.com/2014/02/03/why-is-there-so-much-antarctic-sea-ice/

[5] http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/how-you-can-confirm-the-sst-anomalies-for-the-indian-and-pacific-ocean-subset-have-not-warmed-for-17-years/

Climate Science, How She Is Done

TONY THOMAS

A widely touted report detailing the current death toll from rising temperatures — which aren’t rising at all, just by the way — is even more dubious than the provenance of the 14-year-old academic guesstimate on which the current alarms are based.

mozzieWith the Australian Academy of Science’s climate team now re-writing its 2010 booklet on dangerous climate change, it’s time for a bit of investigation. The original, 24-page booklet went out to nearly a million users, mainly schoolkids and teachers, so the current re-writing team has a heavy responsibility to treat the climate controversies fairly.

The Academy’s then-president, Kurt Lambeck, had gone cap in hand to the Department of Climate Change for funding of the first edition, walking away with $55,000. Sorry, Kurt, not a good look.

The 2010 document, by a working group of two AAS Fellows (Dr John Church and Dr Mike Raupach, co-chair), and seven non-Fellows brought in to lend a hand, often lapsed into advocacy, as I discussed here. One of those was Professor David Karoly, one of Australia’s most frequent climate-catastrophe publicists.

The 2010 document says the draft was “reviewed” by an Oversight Committee, of six Fellows and one non-Fellow. Asked who is re-writing and reviewing the 2014 version, the academy’s PR person informed me,

“Both groups are the same as for the previous booklet, with the exception that Professor Garth Paltridge has withdrawn and his place taken by Professor Kurt Lambeck.” (Actually Paltridge, a highly-qualified sceptic, never ‘withdrew’. He wasn’t asked to participate in the 2014 re-write).

In the case of Karoly, let’s look at his handling of some internal business of the 2010 report. In mid-2011, he published an essay on the university/CSIRO-funded blog The Conversation. His essay was the 12th in a 13-part (no less) Conversation series, each an assault on climate sceptics. In the 13th essay, Karoly and other signatories endorsed the interesting claim that 140,000 people are being killed annually by climate change.

There seems a real risk that this improbable factoid could worm its way into the Academy’s re-write, terrifying the schoolkids. In his essay, Karoly writes,

“This [2010 Academy] report was thoroughly reviewed by an independent Oversight Committee, comprised of a number of Fellows of the Academy and a well-known climate change sceptic.

They all approved the whole report, including its key conclusions:

“Global average temperature has increased over the last 100 years.”
“Human activities are increasing greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere.”
“It is very likely that most of the recent global warming is due to this increase in greenhouse gases.”
“It is very likely there will be significant warming through the 21st century and beyond.”
“Climate change will have significant impacts on our society and environment, both directly and by altering the impacts of other stresses.”
Karoly’s claim is quite specific — and checkable. Who was the lone sceptic on the AAS’ “Independent Oversight Committee”? Clearly, AAS Fellow Dr Garth Paltridge, an atmospheric scientist. Paltridge was a chief research scientist of CSIRO’s Atmospheric Research Division, and from 1990 until his retirement in 2002 he was director of Tasmania University’s Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean Studies. He continues with honorary and visiting roles in atmospheric science.

According to Karoly, who ought to know, Paltridge endorsed the whole alarmist story of the AAS document. That endorsement might be taken by some to show how sound and persuasive the alarmist story is.

First check – a simple one: Where is Paltridge’s name on the document’s listing of its Oversight Committee members? Seven names are listed, but no mention of Paltridge. Strange. I emailed Paltridge in Hobart this week for clarification.

Paltridge agrees he is the sceptic referred to by Karoly, further noting that he has gone public, including this recent Quadrant essay, with his sceptical views on the climate story — a breaking of ranks which he says is ‘not cricket’ in these days of political correctness. He observes that it is, generally speaking, a career-limiting move for anyone in government-funded climate research to voice scepticism too loudly “even within the restricted earshot of their own work colleagues.” His email continues,

“The then Academy President Dr Kurt Lambeck told the Oversight Committee members right at the start of the process that their role was to act purely as reviewers.

“We could advise, but not insist on, alterations to the content of the working committee’s document. We were to be the equivalent of normal reviewers of a manuscript submitted to a scientific journal. Normal reviewers of such things are anonymous – precisely because (among other things) a particular reviewer can object strongly to something in a manuscript while knowing and accepting that the editor might not take his advice. The reviewer would not be in danger of having his name publicly associated with a finally published research paper with which he is not happy.

“The idea of putting the names of the oversight committee members on the Academy’s climate document came out of the blue right towards the end of the review process. There could be no reason for the move other than it would expand the ‘impressiveness’ of the document in the minds of the public. It would enable advocates for the cause to imply exactly what Professor Karoly is now saying – namely, that a number of Fellows of the Academy, one of whom was a well-known sceptic, ‘all approved the whole report, including its key conclusions’.

“Suffice it to say that I refused to have my name put on the document. If I had known about the naming ploy early in the process, I would have been far less civilised (flexible?) in expressing opinions throughout the meeting.

“For the record, I would not have agreed then, and do not agree now, with three of the five “key conclusions” quoted by Professor Karoly – namely:

It is very likely that most of the recent global warming is due to this increase in greenhouse gases.
It is very likely that there will be significant warming through the 21st century and beyond.
Climate change will have significant impacts on our society and environment, both directly and by altering the impacts of other stresses.”
Well, I’ll leave Quadrant readers to make up their own minds about Karoly’s narrative about his colleague Paltridge.

What of the claim by Dr Karoly and his team attributing 140,000 deaths a year from climate change? It seems inherently unlikely. Global temperatures in the past 100 years (ignoring dubious early temperature measurements and recent official adjustments), have risen 0.8degC. Of that, “the dominant cause” in the past half-century is “extremely likely” (IPCC) to be human activity, i.e. at most 0.41degC. That’s less than the difference in temperature between 11 am and 11.30 am in Melbourne on a recent mild day. And this 0.41deg rise is killing 140,000 people a year?

For the marvelous 140,000 annual death toll, the essay cites the World Health Organisation (WHO). Let’s chase this rabbit down to its burrow.

First, who’s who in WHO? WHO is just like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – it is run by the 194 member states of the UN, nearly half of them kleptocracies and corrupt dictatorships. WHO’s current supremo is Australia’s own Professor Jane Halton, long-time permanent head of the Federal Health Department. Her huge board includes reps from Albania, Andorra, Azerbaijan, Cameroon, Chad, Cuba, Iran, Lebanon, Nigeria, Panama, PNG, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Suriname and Uzbekistan. And the Maldives (pop 338,000).

Well of course the Maldives must have a seat! The Maldives is also a vice-chair of the top-level Bureau of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which wants the world to transfer trillions of dollars from the First World to phony Third World ‘climate victims’ like, well, the Maldives. With such a WHO board, any politico-climate publicity merits a sniff test.

So here we go. Karoly has signed on to The Conversation piece, co-authored by the celebrated ex-UWA psychology professor Stephan Lewandowsky. The paper is generously titled “The false, the confused and the mendacious: how the media gets it wrong on climate change.” Lewandowsky is also the author of the peer-reviewed survey last year published as “NASA faked the moon landing—Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science.” That is, Lewandowsky’s ‘proved’ that sceptics are conspiracy-believing moon-fakist loonies. These flat-earth types would include, presumably, avowed AGW sceptics Charles Duke and Harrison Schmitt, who actually walked on the moon in 1972.

Anyway, Lewandowsky, Karoly et al wrote,

Climate scientists are likewise motivated by the fact that climate change kills 140,000 people per year right at this very moment, according to the World Health Organization.

Their reference clicks through to a WHO “Fact Sheet”, which looks very sciencey. Specifically, the Fact Sheet says,

“Measuring the health effects from climate change can only be very approximate. Nevertheless, a WHO assessment, taking into account only a subset of the possible health impacts, concluded that the modest warming that has occurred since the 1970s was already causing over 140 000 excess deaths annually by the year 2004.”

Strange, but deaths “by the year 2004” in the document have become to Lewandowsky, Karoly et al “right at this very moment, according to the World Health Organisation.” In 2004, 2011, whatever. Whence did the WHO Fact Sheet get its 140,000 deaths in 2004? It is footnoted as, “Global health risks: mortality and burden of disease attributable to selected major risks. WHO, Geneva, 2009.“

In that study, the only basis for the climate-death number is a WHO Comparative Risk Assessment, published in 2004 and using data as at the year 2000. That 2000 work was led (with 11 assistants) by our very own climate mortality guru Emeritus Professor Tony McMichael of the ANU. Using a four-function calculator, WHO projected McMichael’s results from 2000 to (sort of) establish climate mortalities in 2004.

Now, at last, we reach the rabbit’s burrow: How did McMichael get his results in 2000? His study is a 106-page chapter, “Global Climate Change” in a 2200-page WHO compendium “Comparative Quantification of Health Risks”.

McMichael cheerfully concedes his key climate figures are “at this stage, predominantly a model-based exercise … rather than direct experience” (p1561). He also concedes that “little emphasis has been given to the validation of models relating climate change to health.” (p1549). And concerning health, “several outcomes can only be estimated by crude adaptation of the outputs of available models.”(p1556).

The 1999 Hadley Centre climate model McMichael used is the equivalent in today’s terms of a T-Model Ford. McMichael believed it was ‘validated by back-casting’, i.e. while purportedly explaining past trends it had no track record in regard to forecasting (p1553).

His graph of the 1999 Hadley temperature forecast, based on business-as-usual CO2 emissions, shows rocketing temperatures after 2000 rising at about a 60-degree slope. The reality, we now know, has been a flat-line.

Even today, after mega-millions spent in tune-ups, the official climate models are still duds: the IPCC says 111 out of 114 of them have overestimated temperatures from 1998-2012. (p769.)

McMichael conceded that he put all his eggs into one basket by trusting this 1999 Hadley model, rather than averaging a suite of independent models. (Although it’s hard to see why the average of 10 unvalidated models is any more realistic than that derived from a single and unvalidated model).

For some reason, the key table in McMichael’s study shows 166,000 climate-change deaths in 2000, rather than the later version of “over 140,000”. McMichael’s deaths are 77,000 from malnutrition, 47,000 from diarrhea, 27,000 from malaria, 12,000 from cardiovascular and 2000 (would you believe) from floods caused by sea-level rise attributable to climate change (p 1606). He mentions that climate change long term will create mental illnesses but doesn’t factor that in to his year-2000 deaths (p 1583). He concludes,

“Considerable uncertainties surround these estimates. These stem partly from the complexity of climate models, partly from gaps in reliable data on which to base climate–health relationships, and, most importantly, from uncertainties around the degree to which current climate–health relationships will be modified by biological and socio-economic adaptation in the future.” (p1545).

To sum up: The 140,000 annual death toll from climate change which Karoly and Lewandowsky cite is drawn from stuff cobbled together on the basis of 2000 estimates by McMichael and based on clumsy and unvalidated models for both climate and health.

Other disease specialists have given short shrift to the warming/disease linkages. An expert on malaria and dengue is medical entomologist Professor Paul Reiter at the Institut Pasteur in France. As he emailed one IPCC stalwart, “In my field there is a lamentable dissemination of unsubstantiated statements that are not supported by any observations.” Worth noting: McMichael cites Reiter five times in his study.

Six dengue fever researchers wrote in the Medical Journal of Australia in 2009 a refutation that global warming would promote dengue fever, as claimed by McMichael, who has been broadcasting the health horrors of climate change for 20 years. In 1993 he wrote a book, Planetary Overload: Global Environmental Change and the Health of the Human Species which drew heavily on an early Greenpeace report on global warming, and put out the green message that environmental challenges require a massive ‘reordering of social values’.

McMichael then landd the job of heading the health chapter of the 1995 IPCC Report, and according to fact-checker Donna Laframboise, he cut and pasted eight bits from his book into the IPCC Chapter. But he did not include his ‘selfie’ book among the 182 references he cited, she says.

In a review in May, 2010, McMichael was happy to endorse double or treble the 4-6degC IPCC warming forecasts (based on the IPCC’s non-performing models), writing:

“To date, we have not had to think seriously about a foreseeable future world that is 10–12 °C warmer than today. However, as (the authors) point out, such temperature increases are not off the predictive scale if current trajectories continue and if full consequent global heating is realized over the next three centuries.”

Let us now draw all the threads together:

Professor Karoly, in his enthusiasm to destroy sceptics’ credibility, scores an own-goal by peddling an inaccurate account of his colleague Garth Paltridge’s role on the Academy of Science’s definitive booklet on climate change.

Karoly in the same series of essays endorses a bit of climate porn, claiming that 140,000 deaths a year from climate change are occurring. This claim is based on laughably crude modeling exercises, dating to 2000, by a fellow activist/scientist, Professor Tony McMichael.

Karoly is now assisting the Academy of Science to re-write its polemical booklet on the catastrophic global warming hypothesis, to be read, presumably, by further legions of Australian schoolkids.

Notwithstanding all these efforts by Karoly and the Academy, the CSIRO this month ascertained by survey that in July-August 2013 (during tenure of the Labor government and the six years of heavily funded climate propaganda it fostered):

Australians ranked climate change 14th out of 16 concerns, the list being led by health (1) and living costs (2).
Less than half of all Australians (47.3%) thought climate change was happening and humans were causing it.
You have to feel a bit sorry for Karoly and the Academy.

Tony Thomas has been a journalist for 50 years. He blogs at tthomas061.wordpress.com

A Rather One-Sided ‘Conversation’

TONY THOMAS

Staffed by left-leaning refugees from commercial news organisations’ withered operations, largely publicly funded and lavishly so, the online pulpit for academics to bang their favourite drums has little sympathy for those who doubt the planet is melting

hogarthIIThe lavishly-funded leftist blog for academia, The Conversation, has hired a new manager specifically to make contributors converse more politely. Cory Zanoni, an RMIT psychology graduate and social media guru, got the job of Community Manager in January. He was hired after complaints last year about vulgar comments on the articles with the responsibility for ‘creating a space for intelligent discussion’.

On February 13, Zanoni wrote, “I was appointed following concerns by some readers (and shared by editors) that there was a lack of civility in many comment threads. My brief is to fix this, not just for those who already comment but also for those who would take part if they felt it safe to do so. We want The Conversation to be a place for intelligent discussion and we think there’s more we can do to achieve that.”

Nice Mr Zanoni has now published the site’s new guidelines calling for all-round politeness, except towards climate skeptics, of course, who are to be banned for pointing out that the world ceased warming 17 years ago. Some extracts:

Be on-topic

Keep comments relevant to the article and replies relevant to the initiating post. We reserve the right to delete off-topic comments to keep threads on track.

For example: in an article about the policy response to climate change, comments made about denial of climate change will be considered off topic.

Be constructive

Explain why you disagree or agree with something. Your reasoning is as important as your opinion.

“This article sucks” will be deleted. “You’re an idiot” will be deleted.

Be proactive

Take responsibility for the quality of the conversations you participate in…Report posts you think violate these standards.

What we’ll do

We reserve the right to remove comments that breach these standards…”

Idly googling nice Mr Zanoni, I came across this twitter exchange, under Mr Zanoni’s new job title:

zanoniLet me confess. I’m not sure that I want to know what c—kspanking is. But it’s interesting that the newly-installed Community Manager of The Conversation, appointed to enforce higher standards on Conversation users, is tweeting things that – to put it mildly – don’t seem to raise the tone of online exchanges. And tweeting them, too, a bare 48 hours before publishing civility guidelines for The Conversation.

On at least one other matter, Zanoni’s perspective is unlikely to raise an eyebrow in arts faculty common rooms, the ABC or Fairfax:

zanoni bernardiI declare an interest. The Conversation people give Quadrant a hard time, unaware how easily our feelings are hurt. Here’s an example, “Tony Thomas, I’ve just had a look at Quadrant Online and am really shocked at the partisan outlook (rubbish) in this publication. Completely at odds with the reality of the science.” That’s why I’m being scrupulously fair in this piece.

At a time when mainstream media are hacking staff numbers to vestiges, the scale of The Conversation is disconcerting. It has Andrew Jaspan, the warmist ex-editor of The-Age as Executive Director, a managing editor, a chief operating officer, 18 sundry editors, an external relations director, the community manager, four developers, three in finance, an admin officer, and an apparently unfilled slot for a multi-media manager. Chair is Bendigo Bank supremo Robert Johanson, heading a 12-person board, plus there is a six-person editorial board. I’d guess the salary bill at $4m or so.

Plus there’s another 16 staff in the new UK office.

Jaspan laments that 12 of 39 Australian universities have so far declined to donate for yet more editors and suchlike. Hats off to UNSW Science, which recently flicked across $10,000, probably enough for the morning tea biscuits.

Strangely, donors to the site include Misha Ketchell, managing editor of The Conversation; Liz Minchin, Queensland editor; and Georgine Hall, just a lowly ‘Editor’. Some of the site’s most ferocious commentators are also listed as donors.

Andrew Jaspan invites personal questions, so last December I wrote to him,

“Hi Andrew, Does your organisation publish a public annual report and annual accounts? Have any of the 27 university members disclosed how much funding they are contributing to your group? If you are not legally obliged to make the accounts public, would it not be good to do so voluntarily?”

I still await his reply.

Key sponsors of The Conversation are founders CSIRO, and the universities Melbourne, WA, Monash and UTS. Strategic partners include toffy law firm Corrs Chambers Westgarth, CBA and the Victorian Department of Business (eh? I thought we had a Liberal-led government in Victoria?).

Jaspan says the Australian site gets 1.4m unique visitors a month, thanks to content “which is curated by professional editors while together we make every effort to adhere to high standards and ethics.”

A swathe of The Conversation’s output (motto: Academic rigour, journalistic flair) is non-contentious – academics writing ‘pop’ pieces on their research into Pacific Islanders, maths education, beetle behavior, whatever.

But on climate, The Conversation is an exclusive playground for left and green authors. Skeptics, including myself, enjoy giving the authors and authors’ fans an occasional poke by reminding them about the halt to warming. This drives the site’s warmists berserk, such that even middle-of-the-road readers are appalled at the abuse levels and drop The Conversation from their reading list. (Some skeptic commenters – not me – can be rude too, although most try to be gentlefolk).

All the editors from Jaspan down, raise their hands in horror at the suggestion that their site has any Green/left tilt. Some fan of the site challenged anyone to inspect a day’s contribution of around 20 articles and say how many are leftist. I have risen to the challenge and give you the following “environment” headers ads they appeared on on February 13.

Is $15 a year really too much to pay for renewable energy?

Sure, let’s debate nuclear power – just don’t call it ‘low emission’

Global warming stalled by strong winds driving heat into oceans

Climate change to hit snow industry

Coasting flooding could cost billions

Most Australians over-estimate how “green” they are

We know who’s profiting from emissions – let’s bill them

Scrapping sea level protection puts Australian homes at risk.

A retired geologist/engineer Peter Lang recently submitted this comment:

“It cannot be good for the country or for academia to have such Left ideological bias in our academic institutions. It would be very wise for politically impartial universities to not support The Conversation until it can demonstrate it is truly balanced and impartial. I would also urge the remainder of our publicly funded universities to withdraw or reduce their level of funding until the Conversation cleans up its act.”

He suggested that the editors be selected to balance the lefties with righties, proposing my own stern boss, Quadrant’s Keith Windschuttle,as a good choice for senior editor. Managing Editor Misha Ketchell, whose impeccable pedigree has included stints as Media Watch’s chief researcher and at Crikey!, replied:

“The truth is we have no political position and try and source a range of voices and views … We certainly don’t look for views that skew in any particular direction, but nor do we discourage academics from expressing their honestly held views.”

Another complainant pointed to a feature by Matt McDonald, senior lecturer in International Relations at Queensland University, in the pre-election phase last year. It was headed, “Why Labor should fight the 2013 election on climate change”. To McDonald’s chagrin, and despite his Labor boosterism, Abbott got in, so McDonald then wrote a feature, “Abbott’s climate ‘diplomacy’ sends the wrong message”.

The daddy of all climate articles on The Conversation was posted last month from Auckland climate scientist Jim Salinger, excoriating NZ skeptics who took the NZ meteorology establishment to court over alleged data-manipulation. The skeptics eventually lost at the High Court, and liquidated a trust such that court costs were difficult to collect. This piece attracted 443 comments — and the most graphic sledging ever seen on The Conversation, I reckon. The site’s beleaguered moderators were reduced to deleting abusive comments sometimes in slabs of a dozen at a time. The fact that “Liar” remains on the thread, suggests that the removed comments must have been NSFW (not suitable for work). Rod Andrew, identified as “editor, teacher and engineer”, blogged recently, “If The Conversation keeps publishing slanging matches like this then it is doomed as a reputable website. In fact I think it’s probably past that stage already.”

One Conversation stalwart, and donor, is a certain Mike Hansen, who has flooded the site with 2450 comments since mid-2011. He has violently attacked the editors for allowing any comments from ‘climate cranks and conspiracy theorists’ to be published. “Your moderation policy is a disgrace,” he wrote. He urged The Conversation to block ‘deniers’ from the comment sections, praising the orthodox science blog Reddit Science for doing just that. The BBC and Fairfax newspapers have taken the same line, at least until recently.

One commenter analysed skeptics as being ‘idiots’, corrupt and/or mentally ill. He weakened his argument slightly by confessing that he was legally deemed to have a mental illness himself.

What probably touched a raw nerve at The Conversation was that warmist arguments were under steady challenge. As another warmist, Michael Wilbur Ham, (2166 comments) put it:

“So as far as I can see the deniers have had 15 very successful months on The Conversation where they have stymied any real discussion on the important issues. They are winning.” He urged The Conversation – apparently successfully – to “just say that posts critical of the basic science are off topic, encourage readers to report any such posts, and posts by trolls will quickly be deleted.”

Yet another, Ian Alexander (364 comments) wrote,

“As The Conversation editors, it is time you guys ‘grew a pair’. You know these pathetic old deniers are just here to spoil the thread yet you let them continue. You know the crap they peddle is lies and misinformation but you keep posting it. Are extra hits and posts that important to you?”

Gordon Angus Mackinlay, who describes himself as “a clinical psychologist”, wrote:

“I find a great deal of the comments made by people in regard to comments made by others extremely offensive. Such comments as here from ‘Developer’ “internet nut jobs, right wing lunies and others used by the fossil fuel lobby will be along shortly to obfuscate, deny, shift goal posts, do the straw man thing, and otherwise sow doubt and confusion” serve absolutely no purpose.”

It’s an accepted principle that private blog owners can run their comment sections as they like, whether they’re perspicacious Andrew Bolt or warmist John Quiggin. As Quiggin says, “ I publish it at my own expense and in my own time. It is not a public place. There is no automatic right to comment here.”

The Conversation, being publicly funded, may make no such assertion.

Tony Thomas is always polite

Dark, Deep, Demented Green

December 17th 2013 print

It must be a tipping point in the climate debate when a senior Shell executive notices something odd about the Green activists with whom he has been consorting. David Hone, Shell UK’s Melbourne-born “senior climate change adviser”, went to a Royal Society conference on “radical emission reduction strategies” in London on December 10-11. He concluded that he had fallen among eco-idiots wanting to remould society from the ground up.

Hone, who is also a director of the Emissions Trading Association, has a background in oil- and shipping-trade markets. One explanation for his blog outburst could be that he was still in shock from the collapse of carbon pricing and trading schemes at the Warsaw IPCC conference.

Hone blogged:

‘This was a room of catastrophists (as in “catastrophic global warming”), with the prevailing view, at least to my ears, that the issue could only be addressed by the complete transformation of the global energy and political systems, with the latter moving to one of state control and regulated consumerism. There would be no room for “ruthless individualism” in such a world. The posters that dotted the lecture theatre lobby area covered topics as diverse as vegan diets to an eventual return to low technology hunter-gatherer societies (but thankfully there was one CCS [carbon capture] poster in the middle of all this).

‘Much to my surprise I was not really at an emission reduction conference (despite the label saying I was), but a political ideology conference…

‘This was a room where there was a round of applause when one audience member asked how LNG and coal exporters in Australia might be “annihilated” following their (supposed) support for the repeal of the carbon tax in that country…

Another feature of the discussion was the view that like apartheid or the Berlin Wall, the change from the current state of the energy system to a zero emissions one (there is no 40% or 50% or even 80% reduction talk here) can happen overnight and be triggered in a similar way, i.e. a popular but peaceful uprising, hence the talk of a rapidly evolving “climate movement”.’

In passing, it is worth reminding that this conference of the Tyndall Centre (a consortium of universities) was held under the auspices of the Royal Society, once a great part of Great Britain, now happy to see hunter-gatherer advocates putting up posters on its conference walls.

Hone himself would normally be seen as a catastrophist, though in comparison with the conference attendees, he sees himself as a centrist. On his blog he has a video homily, which transcribed goes:

“WE have got politicians talking about 80% reductions in just 40 years. As the 80% -reduction world plays out, Shell will not look like the oil and gas company it is today…

CO2 will play havoc at some point in the future. Energy use today and the type and way we use it is completely unsustainable. We may think it will be all right in five or ten years, but cast your mind forward 50 or 100 years, is it sustainable? No it is not, it has got to change. I like to work in a company that thinks this way…The company is starting to make these changes along with the people inside it.”

The conference per se was unhinged, its manifesto burbling about ‘radical repercussions of severe climate change’ (but no warming since 1997) and calling for energy cuts of “at least” 8% per year to achieve 60% cuts within a decade. Maybe they could reduce household emissions by 8% a year by bulldozing one house in 12 each year. While tackling its ‘minus 8%’ plan, the conference aimed to “foster an up-beat and can-do mentality.”

The conference, sadly, was no less unhinged than the UK government’s legally mandated goal to cut CO2 emissions by at least 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. Stand by, hardy Britons, for brown and black-outs. By comparison, Australian national targets are merely 5% emission cuts by 2020, compared with 2000 levels.

Some readers may wonder that big-oil Shell and Greens have previously got on so well. In fact, Big Oil’s main product these days is gas and the Green’s No 1 goal is to kill coal-fired power generation. Less coal equals more gas sales. Moreover, new wind farms need to be backed up by gas-fired power, that can be fired up when the wind doesn’t blow. Thus Big Gas and Greens both want more wind farms.

The Australian reported a month ago that Shell has formed an advocacy department whose sole aim is to promote gas over coal-based power generation. Shell has even leant on the World Bank to cut bank funding for cheaper coal-fired generators in the Third World.

Believe it or not, Royal Dutch/Shell was the first corporate sponsor of the WWF half a century ago, with a start-up grant equivalent to a modern $US663,000.[i] John Loudon was Royal Dutch/Shell president for 15 years, then switched to presidency of World Wildlife Fund for four years. WWF took oil-company funding for more than 40 years. (These days WWF has a budget of $US750m a year for its advocacy work, compared with a piffling $US5m annual spend on all topics by America’s premier skeptic think-tank, the Heartland Institute).

The Sierra Club, America’s grass-roots environmental group, from 2007 to 2010 took $25m in donations from gas companies, mainly Chesapeake Energy, to campaign against coal. BP donated $US10m to the Nature Conservancy, and allied with 20 environmental and energy groups to set up the American Wind and Wildlife Institute, promoting wind power.

To sum up, Big Gas and Big Green are bedfellows not belligerents.

So back to David Hone, suddenly turning feral against his Green allies. His comments were made wearing his Shell hat. What will his warmist bosses make of that? (In fact Royal Dutch/Shell has a surprise new CEO from January 1: Dutchman Ben van Beurden supersedes Peter Voser, who wants more quality time with his family. Conspiracy theory, anyone?).

UK climate blogger Andrew Montford noted, “Hone’s sudden realization that many of his fellow-travelers in the environmental movement are completely round the twist is rather comical and you can’t help but wonder where he has been in the last twenty years.”

At this loopy conference, Australia’s fruit loop ideas on climate catastrophism were well represented. One weblink paper was from Laurence Delina and Dr. Mark Diesendorf, of the Institute of Environmental Studies, University of NSW. The title? ‘Is wartime mobilisation a suitable policy model for rapid national climate mitigation?’ No wonder Shell’s Hone felt trapped in a madhouse!

Our two experts in war-time mobilizations wrote,

“Climate activists assert that rapid mitigation is feasible, invoking the scale and scope of wartime mobilisation strategies. This paper draws upon historical accounts of social, technological and economic restructurings in several countries during World War 2 in order to investigate potential applications of wartime experience to radical, rigorous and rapid climate mitigation strategies…We find that, while wartime experience suggests some potential strategies for rapid climate mitigation in the areas of finance and labour, it also has severe limitations, resulting from its lack of democratic processes. Furthermore, since restructuring the existing socio-economic system to mitigate climate change is more complex than fighting a war and since the threat of climate change is less obvious to non-scientists, it is unlikely that the public will be unified in support of such executive action…”

Yep, that could be right.

Delina has been doing a Ph.D on strategies that could be used by the Australian government and people in the event that a future decision is made to undertake urgent, rapid and radical actions to mitigate Australia’s greenhouse emissions. With Tony Abbott now Prime Minister, Delina may need to tweak his topic.

Dr Diesendorf is a big fan of wind power (no pun intended) and has authored Climate Action: a campaign manual for greenhouse solutions. He also enjoys conspiracy theories about fluoridation of water.

Another participant was Professor John Wiseman, of Melbourne University’s Sustainable Society Institute, whose talk via weblink was titled, ‘Winning the climate war: removing political roadblocks to radical emissions reductions’.

I particularly enjoyed a portrait of Professor Wiseman at an Australian conference last October, shown alongside a slide projection quoting excitable Green activist Miriam Lyons: “The highest priority action for achieving a rapid transition to a just health and resilient post-carbon future is to sculpt visions of the future that are beautiful, and lifelike enough to fall in love with.” (Needless to say, Ms Lyons is a regular guest on Radio National’s Drive and Outsiders programs, along with ABC television’s QandA and The Drum).

Among Wiseman’s authorships is ‘Hope, despair and transformation: climate change and the promotion of mental health and wellbeing’. Hopefully the absence of global warming since 1997 has restored to sanity the victims of climate scare campaigns.

Another Aussie was Dr. Jane O’Sullivan, of the University of Queensland, whose topic was “Reducing emissions through family planning and women’s empowerment.” A gung-ho person on carbon taxes, Dr O’Sullivan shows symptoms of Life of Brian’s People’s Front of Judea divisiveness, being “frustrated by the tangled web of misconceptions and the determination of environmental activists to regard any criticism of the cap-and-trade proposal as climate change denial.”

However, our Aussie presenters seem conservative compared to the Poms.

Typical of the green contingent was Pete Brace, an IT nerd and seven-year careerist in computer games, who wound up three years ago in a community called Tinkers Bubble which prohibits fossil fuels. His ambition is zero emissions plus a high quality of life.

Dr. Jane Hindley and Professor Ted Benton, of the Essex Sustainability Institute, did a paper called ‘What would Churchill say? Political leadership, collective action and the framing of radical emissions reduction strategies’. Dr Hindley describes herself as “a comparative, political sociologist and a member of the Red-Green Study Group, UK”, hardly the sort of group Churchill would normally hang out with. So what might Churchill say? Perhaps, “Cultured people are merely the glittering scum which floats upon the deep river of production.”

The whole show, including David Hone’s epiphany, would be funny — except that taxpayers, including Australia’s, must have funded 90% of it.

Tony Thomas is distraught that he missed Dr Jane O’Sullivan’s lecture on climate change and women’s empowerment

[1] http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2012/04/11/the-wwfs-vast-pool-of-oil-money/