Sherwood's Forest

This Letter missed the cut at The Oz, in reply to an Op Ed piece by Steven Sherwood

Dear Editor,

That Steven Sherwood is unable to condense 50 years of investigation, paid for by billions of dollars of public research money (that may have been better spent elsewhere), into a succinct argument in favour of catastrophic man made warming is one of the clearest admissions of failure I have seen to date from a working climate scientist (Why experts refuse to debate climate science 28/10). Surprisingly Sherwood wants to debate the science in a court room, but he should know that debate in science is not like debate in the legal system as unlike a barrister, a scientist with integrity would give all the information, not just the information that leads to a judgment in one direction or another. A scientist with integrity does not pick cherries!


In the face of such inherent uncertainty, and apparent deep confusion about the manner in which science should be debated, the policy response favoured by the current government and the case for urgent, dramatic action being promulgated by activist scientists, politicians and our under qualified climate commissioners, is looking decidedly premature and lacking in solid foundation. In the long run I have faith that the scientific method, in the absence of political interference, will provide a definitive answer that will provide scientists convincing evidence about the future behaviour of the climate system, on which sound public policy might be developed and enacted. However until then, rather than risk a misdiagnosis and subsequent improper treatment of the problem, a prudent response is required that does not kill the patient. Such a response might involve taking measures to mitigate against current known weather extremes, and enacting policy to remove nonsensical political barriers to competing base load electricity generation such as thorium based nuclear reactors.

The Prince of Precaution

The current print run of The Prince of Precaution has sold out. You can still view it on You Tube.

More copies once orders start to mount up!

find truth in the trends

Thus, although poor station quality might affect absolute temperature, it does not appear to affect trends, and for global warming estimates, the trend is what is important.

Prof. Richard Muller (Testimony at the U.S. House of Representatives Hearing on Climate Change: Examining the Processes Used to Create Science and Policy 31/3/2011)

Some interesting trends above, which one best represents temperature in the vicinity of Melbourne?

Seems reasonable to ask the question

From the cutting room floor at the Sydney Morning Herald...

Dear Editor,
Daniel Bray (Climate change is real. Let's deal with it, 3/3) asks the question: Given the long-standing scientific consensus, why is climate change an unreasoning issue? Perhaps the fact that the observed warming trend (0.1 degrees Celsius per decade) is well below IPCC projections that range up to 0.6 degrees per decade has something to do with it? As current trends clearly falsify the doomsday projections of catastrophic warming derived from the climate models, it is not at all unreasonable to ask what all the fuss is about.

stop the floods, drive an SUV

The following letter left on the cutting room floor at the Sydney Morning Herald:

Dear Editor,

Penny Sackett blames the current floods on global warming (Nature raw in tooth and claw, 15/1). That may be the case, for based on BOM records the Brisbane River experienced a major flood 8 times between 1841 and 1900, and only 2 major floods in the 111 years since, including the current one. It seems one of the consequences of global warming is actually a reduction in the frequency of major flood events! A return to a natural cycle of 8 major floods per century would be devastating, so in order to further reduce flood frequency perhaps the Australian Government could provide every Australian with a gas guzzling SUV and hydrocarbon credits and commission a few more coal fired power plants. As Penny Sackett says "We owe that to those who are feeling the effects of nature's force this summer."

Mug Punt

The following letter left on the cutting room floor at the Sydney Morning Herald:

Dear Editor,

Like a mug punter Barry Jones wants us to take a huge gamble on climate change “action” without having read the form or seen the horses in the mounting yard (Doing nothing on climate is a fool's wager, 8/12). Barry says human suffering will be averted if we take action, but a link between climate disasters and CO₂ has failed to emerge^[1]. He claims little will be lost if the “problem” abates for other reasons, failing to see how those wasted billions could have been more wisely spent. He mistakes prudent “inaction” for stupidity at a time when the worst case scenario is but a chimera in the digital fantasy of falsified climate models^[2]. Lastly, he suggests that if there is no disaster it will be through luck, rather than astute judgement to side-step the mistaken missives of a politicized science.

At this stage a wait and see approach on climate still makes more sense than Barry’s bet on a well flogged horse on its way to the knackery.

[1] Eric Neumayer and Fabian Barthel, Normalizing economic loss from natural disasters: A global analysis, Global Environmental Change, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 18 November 2010, ISSN 0959-3780, DOI: 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2010.10.004.

2 A comparison of local and aggregated climate model outputs with observed data Anagnostopoulos, G. G. , Koutsoyiannis, D. , Christofides, A. , Efstratiadis, A. and Mamassis, N. ‘A comparison of local and aggregated climate model outputs with observed data’,Hydrological Sciences Journal, 55:7, 1094 – 1110

Butterfly emergence study- a case of Cargo Cult Science?

A recent journal article titled "Early emergence in a butterfly causally linked to anthropogenic warming" published online by Biology Letters claimed to have linked a change in butterfly emergence with temperature changes caused by increased greenhouse gas emissions. A comment on the article now posted by Biology Letters (HERE) shows the methodology and results are unfounded, the study could not be repeated. We wonder if the media will spend as much energy reporting on this damaging critique as it spent enthusiastically promoting the findings of the original paper.

In his famous Caltech speech "Cargo Cult Science" the late Richard Fynman stated:

"We've learned from experience that the truth will out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in Cargo Cult Science."

With the truth buried deeply in the servers of Biology Letters it appears the butterfly emergence study joins others that have all the hallmarks of the Cargo Cult that Feynman so eloquently described.