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Readers may remember a CAGW paper, co-authored by Professor David Karoly, that professed to demonstrate recent climate extremes in south-east Australia were unprecedented in the paleoclimate record. This paper was announced with suitably hysterical headlines as you might expect. Then sceptic Steve McIntyre identified a fatal flaw within hours of publication and it was withdrawn for “revision”. This took all of four years to publish and, when resubmitted, produced markedly less alarming conclusions. To no-one’s surprise this farce was conveniently overlooked by the mainstream media. You can read all about it here.
Anyway, the redoubtable Dr Karoly is back in the news today having co-authored a new paper which can only strike those without a seat on the warmist gravy train as plumbing the depths of desperation. They can see the writing on the wall. As CO2 concentrations inexorably rise and global temperatures disobligingly refuse to rocket upwards, the warmist establishment sees the need for a new and foolproof narrative. They have done it often enough before, so it is not as if switching stories is a great challenge. Remember those dams that would never fill again and, when they did, how the narrative switched tacks and proclaimed torrential downpours and flooding as the “genuine” consequences of electricity bills that just aren’t high enough?
The latest line appears to be that, even if CO2 doesn’t cause warming per se it can still cause “extreme weather” through some other, unspecified and malign influence. Thanks to Eric Worrall at WUWT for spotting the latest meme switch.
Now I haven’t read the paper, it being paywalled, and even if I did I’m sure it would dazzle baffle me with ‘science’. However, I have read the abstract, which pretty much tells you all you need to know. Here is how it begins (emphasis added):
The Paris Agreement aims to ‘pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.’ However, it has been suggested that temperature targets alone are insufficient to limit the risks associated with anthropogenic emissions
So, greenhouse gases raise temperatures, and if they don’traise temperatures there is still no need to hand back all those lovely grants and turn-left seats on jets shuttling the climate priesthood to the next international conference with full room service. This is the next stage in the terminological evolution from Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, through Climate Change, to Climate Disruption. It’s a very long way from a quite specific theory we were told was ‘the settled science’ to one that infinitely malleable. So how did professor Karoly et al formulate their latest alarum? With yet more models, of course!
Here, using an ensemble of model simulations, we show that atmospheric CO2 increase—an even more predictable consequence of emissions than global temperature increase—has a significant direct impact on Northern Hemisphere summer temperature, heat stress, and tropical precipitation extremes.
What do they want from this?
Hence in an iterative climate mitigation regime aiming solely for a specific temperature goal, an unexpectedly low climate response may have corresponding ‘dangerous’ changes in extreme events. The direct impact of higher CO2 concentrations on climate extremes therefore substantially reduces the upper bound of the carbon budget, and highlights the need to explicitly limit atmospheric CO2 concentration when formulating allowable emissions. Thus, complementing global mean temperature goals with explicit limits on atmospheric CO2 concentrations in future climate policy would limit the adverse effects of high-impact weather extremes.
This is just laughable. What they appear to be saying is that ‘we don’t seem to be able to predict warming all that well. But we can predict atmospheric CO2 concentrations pretty accurately, so let’s make them our focus rather than those temperature increases that haven’t been happening’. Don’t look behind the curtain, folks, there’s nothing to see there. Too right, there’s not.
And of course, there is a rider: Predictably it is an implicit plea to keep those grants coming.
“Future work is needed to confirm exactly why we see this direct CO2 effect, but current research points to a combination of circulation and cloud cover changes, and an increase in the amount of direct radiation on the Earth’s surface due to simply having more CO2 in the atmosphere,” said Hugh Baker, a DPhil student at Oxford University.
Ah yes, follow the money.
It is difficult for the layman to decipher the complexities of a scientific paper, particularly given the nature of statistics which underpins ‘climate research’ to a greater extent than most fields of study. As has been their norm throughout the climate scam’s endless hyperbolic iterations, we can expect politicians to accept the latest advice by supposedly objective scientific advisors. If the past is any indication, the natural scepticism that should be a character trait of all who dispense public monies will not likely be in evidence.
Sad indeed it is that, while the ever-changing tales of careerist catastropharians are accepted as gospel without benefit of empirical evidence, the beggaring of household budgets and very obvious destruction of a nation’s industrial capacity by ruinous electricity costs is never noticed.
In 2009, Professor Karoly was adamant about the direct relationship between CO2 and much higher temperatures, as he explains about 90 seconds into the above clip. Today, not so much.
> ” … beggaring of household budgets and very obvious destruction of a nation’s industrial capacity by ruinous electricity costs is never noticed”
Well, never reported as such in the MSM.
It’s over anyway – the greenies have won. That’s been noted before and is in no way news. There is also nothing to be done to change this, as the electorate will not again be offered an electoral choice to do so.
There will be “Nonsense, we’ll fight” statements from the pollyannas, so here are three consecutive developments to demonstrate that we don’t know how to fight.
1) Sky programmes such as Credlin and Outsiders do offer opposition – and their commentary on this topic is generally reasonable. BUT the producers or Sky management (millenials to a transgender) *always* cut across the talking heads with background images of cooling towers with the setting sun behind the water vapour outlets so that it looks like thick black smoke, interspersed with shots of gentle windmills frolicking in the meadows with the sun shining benignly. Portraying water vapour as particulate, black smoke has been pointed out as abysmally deceitful times beyond counting yet this deliberate deceit is practised gleefully every time without the slightest hint of shame. That the talking heads accept this deceit without comment tells me that it is part of their “social licence” to be permitted saying this stuff on air. It’s a powerful part of propagandising the electorate to allow:
2) those who travel in the west of Sydney regularly well know the M4. The “inner” half – Parramatta to Concord – is still in a roadworks mess but now with heavy tolls. The “outer” half – Penrith to Parramatta – has been toll free but is now undergoing major rework construction, with extensive roadworks slowly enveloping the entire 60km stretch. I had expected tolls when construction is finished (no announcement of that, of course – the western electorate depends almost entirely on the M4 for economic lifelines) but it is way worse than that. There has appeared at last a very sneaky little sign near the start of the roadworks going west, well camouflaged in khaki and grey, stating “SMART MOTORWAY”. In real words, not just tolls but distance-based tolls. The M4 is Sydney’s blue collar road. It is completely full, all three lanes, at 6:30am going east and again at 4:30pm going west. The trains, such as they are, are full to the gunnels by Blacktown. Yet the electorate will accept this while grumbling loudly. Berejiklian is as sneaky and slimy as Waffle. Then:
3) the ACT has implemented an electricity tariff which will be spread as “smart” meters are continually installed. Basically, using the “smart” meter data, the 30 minutes of your highest recorded power use within a year will be used as the template for invoicing you on a daily basis, irrespective of whether you are even home. The electorate will grumble and whine, then pay up.
If anyone has useful, practical comments on how to stop this cancer, apart from emigrating, then please speak up. Pollyannas are welcome as there is no censorship here, but they will be ignored.
We’re in the Democratic Republic of Canberra and have just received notice that on a day to be advised in the near future our power will be cut for a day while our meters are “tested” and, if necessary, replaced. Not a word in the notice about “smart meters”, but I bet that our meter will “need” to be replaced with a smart meter. The current ACT government is a gaggle of fifth rate politicians being wagged by the Green with the balance of power whose sole claim to fame before his election was as a member of the crew of the pirate ship, Sea Shepherd.
Aren’t we a privileged lot here?
You mean Peoples Democratic Republic of Canberra.
ianl; Before Australian Safeway Stores was bought out by Woolworths, it spent many thousands on power factor correction and demand control in its supermarkets. Maximum demand in a month (NSW only at that time) was billed along with kWh usage for the period. I sincerely hope you are wrong in your point 3 above. It would be monstrous to apply maximum demand recorded in a whole year to monthly accounts. However, as with global warming, the scientific ignorance of the public and governments would probably allow this scam to go through unchallenged.
I currently have no mobility because of debilitating back pain. Yesterday I was listening in the car to Radio National while my husband was in Woolworths and I happened to hear the execrable Waleed talking with somebody else about “steadfastness”. Name of program unknown. Waleed piped up and said that it applied to all aspects of life and even at university when people ‘steadfastly’ refused to accept the science of climate change. They both spoke like this, denouncing ‘deniers’ as some kind of sub-human species. The smugness was palpable.
As I’ve said before, I sit on the fence with regard to climate science – mostly because I mistrust universities which have been invaded by lefty loonies. Not necessarily in the hard faculties – like STEM – but in the social sciences and humanities. And universities have prostituted themselves, IMO, to get the dirty dollar and all this conspires to make me extremely skeptical of anything that comes out of them. They’re simply untrustworthy, for the most. And Brian Schmidt is a disingenuous academic lacky who’ll do and say anything to gain the approval of his peers. In short, the opposite prerequisite for LEADERSHIP. Given that kind of culture in universities people are bound to be cynical about what they produce. There are other organizations researching the climate and they are less dubious, of course.
I’m exhausted by the siege mentality of the Left, and its obedient and lap-dog cohort. For me, much of the talk of ‘climate change’ is a proxy for anti-establishment chicanery. They are destroying their own case!! And they are desperately trying to destroy dissenting voices like Jordan Peterson, the Weinstein brothers, Sam Harris, Gad Saad and Steven Pinker – who’ve had a gutful of it too.
There’s a huge movement afoot, ladies and gentlemen; do you want to be part of it? I’m not kidding; this is bigger than Ben Hur!
https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/1006742798962384896
Some may be interested in this; ignore the BBC stooge interviewer who cannot stray from the script and feels shock about an alternative opinion:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b60wnq
There is a theory that comes from the school of Economics on the value of experts in forecasting. It is called the Seer – Sucker theory and it states that “no matter how much evidence there is that Seers do not exist, Suckers will pay for the existence of Seers”.
The Seer – Sucker theory could apply equally well to the climate catastropharians. A multitude of so-called climate experts have, over the past 20 to 30 years, made hundreds of forecasts about the impending doom that the carbon dioxide molecule is about to inflict upon us, and nary a one has eventuated. Flannery told us the dams wouldn’t fill with the rain that falls. He told us Perth would be the first ghost metropolis of the 21st century. We have been told polar bears would become extinct. We have been told that sea levels would rise, island nations would disappear, there would be millions of climate refugees, and so the list goes on. And all of this would happen because there is too much carbon dioxide in the air. The solution that these grant and subsidy farmers want to inflict upon us is for us to pay a tax on carbon dioxide emissions. In other words, the Flannerys, Turnbulls and Blanchetts locally, and Gores, Suzukis and Di Caprios internationally, want us to be the suckers to pay for the existence of their seeing.
You would have to be a sucker to fall for it!
Rather surprisingly, this has appeared in the Wall Street Journal and may be behind a pay wall. You’ll get the gist of it:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-has-run-its-course-1528152876
There is now a large number of well researched, written and documented texts about the global warming/climate deception. Dr Tim Ball’s “The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science” et al, plus Ian Plimer’s more recent title, “Climate Change Delusion and the Great Electricity Ripoff” obviously need to be read by PM Turnbull, Di Caprio, MP Freydenberg (sp?) and anyone else who thinks that we need to be paying carbon tax and shutting down productive coal-fired power stations.
It’s the second greatest hoax in human history,