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.

Ignore the evidence at our peril

Unpublished letter to the Sydney Morning Herald, sent 10 May 2010.

If Penny Wong, Kurt Lambeck and David Karoly want evidence (Climate scientists cross with Abbott for taking Christ's name in vain, 10/5) to suggest it was hotter 2000 years ago, they can find just one example, of many, in a recent article titled "Holocene thinning of the Greenland ice sheet" published in Nature in 2009. The article by Bo Vinther of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and colleagues uses oxygen Isotope data to reconstruct temperatures over Greenland through the Holocene. Not only does the Vinther data confirm the presence of the rather "toasty" Holocene Climate Optimum, it also reveals numerous warm pulses when temperatures were also higher than present. These include the Minoan Warm Period (1450–1300 BC), the Roman Warm Period (250–0 BC), discussed with students by Tony Abbott, and the Medieval Warm Period (800–1100AD) that the IPCC attempted to whitewash from history with its infamous hockey stick graph.

In developing policy to deal with future climate change Penny Wong should note that the long term temperature trend in the Vinther data is downwards.