Climate change the science & the lies Tony Eggleton Outline - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Climate change the science & the lies

Tony Eggleton

Outline

Some basic climate stuff – what the science says About trust and lies How to misinform 1. Attack the person 2. “It stands to reason” 3. Cherry pick or brush aside 4. Use lots of wrong numbers 5. Use the wrong data 6. Be important, be wrong, and say it anyway

The pillars of climate science

causes causes

Global warming.

• What is the evidence?
• Land-based thermometers

Boulia, Qld

Of course one Met station is not enough, but 30,000 is

Temperature rise (°C)

NASA Goddard Space Institute

13.4 13.6 13.8 14.0 14.2 14.4 14.6 14.8

1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Don’t like scientists’ measurements?

• What about oenologists? Date of maturity for

grapes is getting earlier every year 2010 1930

Mar 20 Mar 1

The Greenhouse

Warm body radiates heat away and gets cold

Add a blanket, reduce heat loss

Thicker blanket, more heat trapped, now a hot dog

We are warmed by the sun and radiate our warmth out into space

sun earth

There is a lot of cold space out there to accept our radiated heat

OK, so you can see

14° C

• 23°

C

We have an atmosphere blanket, the moon does not

Sun’s heat comes in

29% is reflected back into space

That is known as Earth’s albedo. Compare Venus 90%, the moon 7%.

Earth warms air, air radiates heat away

Greenhouse gases and their part in keeping us warm

4%± 400 ppm = 0.04% 0.3 ppm 1.8 ppm

Why has the Earth warmed over the past two centuries? Because we have added a lot of CO2

Are you sure? Perhaps it is just a coincidence!

And what does a bit of warming do?

Melts ice, mainly in the Arctic. So melted ice (=seawater) absorbs sunshine, whereas ice would have reflected it. Thus the Arctic Ocean warms. AND So what?

Humidity

Warmer air can carry more water vapour – increased humidity. What is the main greenhouse gas? Water vapour. So a bit of warming by CO2 is enhanced by making a thicker greenhouse blanket of water vapour

Three strikes and you’re hot

Strike 1. More CO2 – a bit of warming Strike 2. Some ice melts, more sunshine absorbed – a bit more warming Strike 3. More water vapour in the air – even more warming.

Snowball earth

Ice ages – different trigger

• 1. Orbital changes expand north polar ice
• 2. More ice, less Arctic warming, cooler Earth
• 3. Cooler Earth, less humidity, more cooling
• 4. Cooler oceans take up more CO2
• 5. Thinner greenhouse blanket, more cooling
• 6. Glaciation – until...
• 7. Orbital change melts more summer ice
• 8. Sequence reverses to an interglacial - now

The Climate Lies

Despite the real simplicity of the science, there are people who don’t want you to believe it. They call themselves skeptics. Others call them Deniers You decide what to call them.

When a scientist uses evidence to support an argument, and has not checked to see if that evidence is correct or appropriate, to me that is lying

How do they do convince you the science is faulty?

Misinformation step 1: Denigrate climate scientists as self- serving and corrupt (all 30,000 of them)

• The scientists have no respect for data,

science and honesty. (I. Plimer)

• (The consensus about climate change) is an

enormous case of organized scientific fraud... It is also a criminal act. (R Tracinski quoted by R.

Carter)

• The fact that the climate change

establishment creates such misleading information to manipulate opinion is clear evidence that its scientific foundation doesn’t

• exist. (The Marshall Institute – USA)

Thousands of corrupt climate scientists

• Are they all corrupt?

Why do the crooked scientists all study climate?

Didn’t any do medicine? Engineering? Astronomy

Are there no young guns eager to show up those crooked old fogeys?

Not only the scientists, the temperature data is corrupt

Urban heat island effect From the US Heartland Institute. (They also denied the smoking-cancer link) Surface-based temperature histories of the globe almost certainly contain a significant warming bias introduced by insufficient corrections for the non- greenhouse-gas- induced urban heat island effect.

Bob Carter, reporting Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts

Instrumental temperature data have been so widely, systematically and unidirectionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant global warming in the 20th century

Berkeley Group

Skeptical physicists and statisticians, they didn’t believe the conclusions of climate scientists and so reanalysed all the temperature data.

Goddard Institute for Space Studies (USA), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (USA), Hadley Climatic Research Unit (UK)

Result

Their results exactly matched the 3 previous analyses. Removing urban Met Stations from the data set made no difference at all.

Berkeley Earth Group

Richard Muller: “Call me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I'm now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause." July

2012

Misinformation step 2

• Simplify the science to a single issue

and claim commonsense would tell it is wrong

CO2 rises uniformly, temperature wriggles about, therefore CO2 cannot explain the temperature – stands to reason!

But maybe there is more than

• ne factor

Global temperature depends on several things:

• Ocean temperature and currents
• Volcanic ash in the upper air acting as a sun-

shade

• Small changes in the sun – sunspot cycles
• Industrial pollutants

Which all contribute to the variation

Recent impact of the Southern Oscillation on global temperature

SOI T

• 20
• 10

10 20 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2015

• 25
• 20
• 15
• 10
• 5

5 10 15 20 25 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015

El Niño – warm Pacific Ocean surface La Niña cool ocean

Pacific Decadal Oscillation

Volcanic dust and sunspot cycles

Goddard institute for Space Studies (NASA)

Take the long view – 130 years 20th century average Deviation from average x 100

• 60
• 40
• 20

20 40 60 80 1905 1925 1945 1965 1985 2005

The ups and down are natural variation

And another simple example of something apparently so obvious

Plimer: Would you expect warming after the Little Ice

Age? His Answer “Of course” Why “of course? Shouldn’t you ask why did it get cooler in the first place, then ask why did it not stay cool, or cool more?

The last 13,000 years

Marcott et al (2013) in Science

Step 3: cherry-pick

Select a limited set of observations and pretend they represent the norm

Earth stopped warming in 1998

10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 Temperature change (°C*100)

This is the data used to make that statement

Looks a bit different if you expand the data set (20-year pick)

10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 Temperature change (°C*100)

And expand a bit wider: earth is still warming (36-year pick)

Air temperature (land ocean)

y = 1.62x - 3193.4 R² = 0.805 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015

Global temperature anomaly - °C x 0.01

Post-script

If the global temperature data are corrupt and so cannot show global warming, how can these same data show that the warming has stopped?

But has the rate of warming the air eased?

There has been a slowdown since about 2005

70% 0f the Sun’s heat goes into the ocean

4 every second

In response to extreme temperature

“Well the climate has always varied, heat waves are nothing new, some years are hot, some not, it is just natural variation” And “We’ve had heat waves before, it’s a cyclical thing”

Alice Springs # “hot” days (>40°C)

1920 1921 1922 3 1923 8 1924 5 1925 2 1926 20 1927 7 1928 7 1929 14 Average 6 1961 4 1962 13 1963 14 1964 9 1965 6 1966 3 1967 11 1968 11 1969 12 1970 22 Average 10 2005 20 2006 26 2007 9 2008 21 2009 6 2010 7 2011 3 2012 26 2013 31 2014 17 Average 15

Misinformation step 4

Speak with confidence and include lots of numbers – nobody will know if they are correct

Alan Jones, Q&A July 20th

80% of Australia’s energy comes from coal fired power, and it’s about 79 dollars a kilowatt hour, wind power is about 1,502 dollars a kilowatt hour, that is unaffordable Facts: Actually $79 per MEGAwatt hour for coal, OK dumb but easy to make error. Wind about $150-214 in the report supposedly quoted, but by now about $110 Jones has fully admitted the mistakes

Any increase in CO2 is from natural sources

This is a very popular myth, you will find it in the writings of Prof Bob Carter from JCU, Ian Plimer, Jo Nova and all the denialist web sites.

A statement that is doing the rounds of e-mails and the web

When the volcano Mt Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, it spewed out more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the entire human race had emitted in all its years on earth.

Fact check

Pinatubo had no discernable effect on the atmospheric CO2

500,000 1,000,000 1,500,000 2,000,000 2,500,000

Million tonnes of CO2 Atmosphere in 1750 Increase 1750-2015 All volcanoes since 1750 One volcanic cough Last year’s burning

Misinformation step 5

• Use the wrong data

Ice-cores and field measurements

Carter: 380 ppm CO2 is nothing new

Beck E-G. (2007) 180 years of atmospheric CO2 gas analysis by chemical methods. Energy & Environment 18, 259-282.

Where would you go to measure atmospheric CO2? Out in the open, such as Cape Grim, NW Tasmania

Ice-cores and field measurements

Beck’s measurements

3 sets of observations – all of soil sourced CO2 Many old analyses

Misinformation step 6

• Just get it wrong

Not too serious in a pub chat, but in well publicised books by Professors or declarations from those in high places...

About CO2 again

Plimer in 2009: Five of the six major ice ages occurred when the atmospheric CO2 content was up to 1,000 times higher than at present (that would be 40%) 2 billion years ago – CO2 probably 25x today, under a weak sun. Geologists worry more about why it wasn’t freezing all the time! 700 million – snowball Earth - CO2 about 8 x, sun ~90% 450 million – short glaciation - CO2 about 3 x 250 million – Permian glaciation - CO2 250 ppm

5 previous glaciations – many millions of years ago

100 million - Early Cretaceous polar ice only - CO2 ~ 800 ppm

Last 64 million years

Antarctic ice

David Murray, head of a Government review into Australia’s $5 trillion financial services sector

“There is no correlation between climate changes and carbon dioxide” (10/6/2011)

Maurice Newman

Chair, coalition’s business advisory council

• Thinks the science of AGW is really a

means to establish a new world order under the control of the UN.

• He thinks warming is caused by the sun

and cosmic rays.

• Solar scientists allow maybe 5% of 20th

century warming might be due to the sun.

Dick Warburton Chair RET

“I am not a denier of climate change,” he

• said. “I am a sceptic that man-made

carbon dioxide is creating global warming.”

IPCC predictions fail

• WA Liberal MP Dennis Jensen:

– For instance in the last decade-and-a-half the global average temperature hasn't warmed anything like the majority of the models projected.

Here is the prediction made in 2000

Monthly rank 2015 J-2 F-1 M-1 A-3 M-1 J-1 J-1

Greg Hunt on Labor’s ETS

Will cost $633 billion over the next 15 years WOW!

He means $633 b more than DOING NOTHING

Over the next 15 years our GDP will amount to $46 TRILLION, so even $633b is only 1.37% of total GDP

With no carbon reduction, Treasury estimates we would grow to a GDP

• f $46 Trillion by 2030

But with a 45% carbon reduction, we would not reach that target until

And what next?

The temperature will rise

The Arctic will warm more

1960-2009 change in regional temperature

Rainfall: wet gets wetter, dry gets drier

Summer Arctic sea-ice will decline

Sea level will rise

118,000 years ago, the Eemian interglacial

CO2 ~285 ppm Temp ≤ 1° warmer than today Sea level + 8 m

Heat waves will be more frequent Fewer but more intense cyclones More green growth but some crops less nutritious Fish migration away from the equator Malaria and other mosquito diseases spread south

Conclusion

If you want to know something, make sure you have a reliable source. Such as

Or even

The NW Passage was open in 1940

• This is one of Ian Plimer’s

misconceptions (he said politely)

In his book How to get expelled from school he asks: “Why could the Northwest Passage be navigated in the 1930s and 1940s in wooden boats, yet it could not be navigated in the late 20th century warming?”

Nobody made the transit in the 1930-s. One boat, the St Roch, skippered by Henry Larsen of the RCMP, had been specially constructed of Douglas Fir with an outer hull of Ironbark hardwood and it just made it through in 1940-42, and back in 1944.

Could not be navigated in late 20th century warming?

Transits of the NW Passage to 2009

1850 The North-West passage across the Canadian Arctic 1950 2013

Misinformation step 6

Misquote: Plimer again: “the good news is the glaciers are not receding” (Braithwaite 2002) Braithwaite: There is no sign of any recent global trend towards increased glacier melting

1941 1950 2004

Muir glacier, Alaska

Comment

Kreutz (1941) wrote: Apparently the CO2 content in this case is in two

• components. The first has its origin in the soil. The 2nd component

certainly comes essentially from waste gases from the city’s industry. Misra’s title: Studies on the carbon dioxide factor in the air and soil layers near the ground (1941). Duerst, University of Bern, explained very clearly that the high values he measured were a consequence of the release of carbon dioxide by soil

• rganisms.

If I can find this out quite easily, why didn’t Carter, Plimer and the others?

Bob Baldwin is Parliamentary Secretary to the Minster for the Environment.

nitrogen

• xygen

C O2 H2O

Atmospheric amount

Would he measures exports that way?