Members' Contributions

PM's Science Adviser Challenged on “Misleading” Climate Report

The Prime Minister’s chief science adviser, Professor Sir Peter Gluckman has been challenged by a group of scientists and engineers who have expressed their concern about the nature of his report “New Zealand’s Changing Climate and Oceans: The Impact of Human Activity and Implications For the Future” submitted in July 2013. The twelve signatories, all members of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, in an open letter to Sir Peter have expressed concern at three aspects:

Firstly, the timing and purpose of the report, with the next Summary for Policy Makers from the UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) due later in September asking Sir Peter why he would try to pre-empt it with information and hypotheses based on an IPCC report now seven years old.

My view of the proposal that the earth is experiencing serious climate change -by Rob Morley-Smith

21st September 2013   

by Rob Morley-Smith

 
Almost every form of mass media have, over the past three decades entered into emotional comment upon the subject of 'global warming' yet once analysed, there seems to be little if any hard evidence to back up the colourful rhetoric! Almost all the data being promulgated is sourced not from physical measurements taken at various locations around the globe, but extrapolations conjured up from 'computer models'. Simply this is, presently known and confirmed information fed into a computer program, the protagonists then program the computer with various 'what if' questions. The computer then makes 'say' a 25 years into the future prediction based upon the weather boffins extreme 'what if' prognosis - He/she then proclaims the result of their choice, as 'fact'! Why, you may ask, would a scientist take such an irresponsible position - the answer is actually typically human - money - One organisation in the UK alone has a grant of 11 million pounds (over 30 million dollars) a year of British taxpayers' money - not about to say there is no problem after spending that every year!

Parasitic Power Producers

The green energy twins, wind and solar, are parasitic power producers. They cannot produce continuous predictable electricity without sucking backup from their hosts - real power plants using coal, gas, nuclear, hydro or geothermal energy..

They start their freeloading life by attaching themselves to an electricity network built and paid for by their hosts. They seldom contribute to the capital or maintenance cost of the transmission network, and they force consumers to subsidise the feed-in price received for their unreliable output. 

Fallacies, Fables and Fibs

I see in the NZH today (26/8) Dr Salinger makes all sorts of self-serving statements about  this winter being '...the warmest since records began in the 1860s, which confirms the warming trend, blah, blah, blah'.   It's ironic that his warming waffle is accompanied by a picture titled 'Dippers brave freezing water at Mission Bay'.  The NZH has a sense of humour!

World Federation of Scientists Report "Global Warming Is Not A Threat"

by Robert A. Cook, PE

ERICE, SICILY – It’s official. The scare is over. The World Federation of Scientists, at its annual seminars on planetary emergencies, has been advised by its own climate monitoring panel that global warming is no longer a planetary emergency.

The President of the Italian Senate, Judge Pietro Grasso, who was the judge in Sicily’s first maxiprocesso, a class-action prosecution of dozens of Mafiosi who were sent to prison for a total of 2600 years, gave the magistral lecture at the opening plenary session of the seminars, which ended this week.

Both Judge Grasso and the President of the Federation, Professor Antonino Zichichi, said that care should be taken to examine carefully the basis for concern about CO2 emissions as well as the relevance and cost-effectiveness of proposed mitigation measures.

Last year’s magistral lecture to the Federation was by Professor Vaclav Klaus, then president of the Czech Republic, whose talk was entitled The manmade contribution to global warming is not a planetary emergency.

Who are the Deniers?

Reblogged from The Climate Skeptics Party, Australia:

by physicist Dr. Gordon J. Fulks

Global warmers are forever calling those of us who disagree with them 'deniers.' This thinly veiled reference to the Holocaust and the murder of six million people is far from appropriate. Do skeptics deny the Holocaust and the science? Of course not, but it brings up an interesting question: 

Who denies natural climate change? 

  • Who denies the importance of variable solar irradiance and the possible importance of solar modulation of galactic cosmic rays? 
  • Who denies that our Sun is a variable star? 
  • Who denies that our oceans contain the vast majority of mobile heat on this planet and therefore dominate our climate, year to year and decade to decade? 

White lies in winter?

From Ken Ring’s latest newsletter:

Climatism or global warming alarmism is the most prominent recent example of science being co-opted to serve a political agenda, writes Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the fall 2013 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. Lindzen claims that ambiguous statements by scientists are translated into alarmist statements by media and advocacy groups, influencing politicians to feed more money to the acquiescent scientists.

In normal science, models are judged by how well they agree with nature, Lindzen explains. In the climate “debate,” however, the models are given a claim to validity independent of agreement with real observations. In other words, the models have nothing to do with reality, and cause alarmism which becomes a religion damaging to science and costly to society.

As if to perfectly exemplify Lindzen's claim, in NZ media there has been an excited claim by ex-NIWA boss Dr Jim Salinger that we have had a warmest-ever winter. But what farmers call winter is quite different to the call from Metservice and NIWA. In continuing desperation to find even the smallest global warming evidence, their outlooks focus on mild spells and downplay icy events. Farmers tend to bask in but distrust occasional mild spells in winter and instead keep a lookout for deep polar blasts from the south and southwest because that threatens financial ruin.

What months constitute winter has always been provincial. “Winter months” will never be universal in NZ due to our deep variation in latitudes and terrains. Farmers work to operational timetables and not months. No region in NZ speaks for all, and with no standardisation climatologists can and do say as they please.

We paid for it. We have a right to see it.

Publicly-funded scientists who keep their work secret should be censured and cut off from future funding

by Ron Arnold

Who owns taxpayer-funded science? From the way many scientists behave, it’s not the taxpayers.

Many scientific studies funded by federal agencies – through grants, contracts or cooperative agreements – hide the guts of the science. What the scientists keep secret is the raw data they obtain and the methods they use to interpret it, as if those were personal possessions. It’s an especially outrageous attitude when their work is used to justify the horrendous, burdensome regulations.

Independent scientist Rob Roy Ramey recounted an extreme example: “A researcher tracked endangered desert bighorn sheep with government GPS radio collars to record precise animal locations for wildlife rangers. He then reset the access codes so only he could download the data remotely, and refused to surrender the codes. California Fish and Game had to track down and net-gun the bighorns from a helicopter, to manually download the data, costing a fortune and endangering both animals and people.”

Agency “science” frequently isn’t about data collection at all. Instead, it’s a “literature search,” with researchers in a library selecting papers and reports written by others, merely summarizing results and giving opinions of the actual scientists. These agency researchers never even see the underlying data, much less collect it in the field. The agency then holds up those second-hand opinions as if they had rigorously tested them against the data. Using this unscrupulous tactic, they can cherry-pick the literature to make any case they want, for any regulation they want to impose.

Making an impact in Parliament?

This was round two(2) of two (Graham suffered KO in each) last week.  Graham turned white and sat down.

 

3. Climate Change—Minister of Finance’s Statements

[Sitting date: 08 August 2013. Volume:692;Page:4. Text is subject to correction.]

3. Dr KENNEDY GRAHAM (Green) to the Minister for Climate Change Issues: Does he stand by the answer given by the Minister of Finance to the question “Does he accept that human-induced climate change is real?” that “It may well be …”?

Hon TIM GROSER (Minister for Climate Change Issues) : Yes, and now that I have had time to check the context, I can inform the member and the House that the context of this reply was when he was asked by Russel Norman whether the drought was attributable to climate change. As anyone who knows anything about the science knows, it is absurd to say that a particular event is related to climate change; climate change is the frequency of extreme events. To either deny that it could be the consequence of climate change or say that it was would not be a scientifically plausible response, so the Deputy Prime Minister gave the only respectable scientific response: it may well be.

Dr Kennedy Graham : Is he proud—[Interruption ]

Mr SPEAKER : Order! Dr Kennedy Graham can start the question again.

NZ Govt's Climate Report- Ken's reaction

2nd  August 2013
 
To view report:
 
 
New Zealand’s changing climate and oceans: The impact of human activity and implications for the future. Ah well no hint of presumption and bias there then?

Sir Peter Gluckman’s report to government out today summarises the ‘science” for the public. Mostly it is a reiteration of the dogma and rhetoric we are familiar with, but a few phrases caused me some mirth….

Many decisions will be required at both national and local levels, and within both the public and private sectors. These decisions will need to be made in the face of inevitable and unresolvable degrees of scientific uncertainty.

In the foreword, and a foretaste of the maybe, might, coulda, shoulda, don’t blame me, everyone else said it, tone.

Here’s another cracker as the first paragraph of the exec summary:

An assessment of current scientific reports on the global climate show a very high level of consistency with previous work and with the continuing scientific consensus. There is unequivocal evidence that the Earth’s climate is changing, and there is strong scientific agreement that this is predominantly as a result of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

Oh good! Well now we know we were right, because we checked with what we said before. And it hasn’t changed. Today seems to be a day of aggregating what many have said and seeing that as proof. Consensus is the modern scientific benchmark, but how will we know if it is only a popular delusion?

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