Climate policy can't get any dumber than when PM Malcolm Turnbull is implementing the very energy policies he once described as "bullshit", writes Giles Parkinson.

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT that the public debate around clean energy in Australia could not possibly get any worse, any dumber, or any further divorced from reality... it did.

Conservatives have been railing against renewables and carbon pricing for at least a decade. So ingrained has it become in our national psyche that it is like a State of Origin contest between energy sources and their fans. “Queenslander”, shout the league fans. “Fossil fuels” screech the incumbents.

But it plumbed further depths this week. And it got really stupid and really nasty. Conservatives in the government and the media rebooted their attacks on wind and solar energy, and extended it to battery storage and vehicle emission standards — with the Murdoch media dubbing the latter as a “carbon tax on cars”.

To say the least, Michelangelo's paintings look like rough sketches compared to Da Vinci delicate brush strokes. Meanwhile:

Craig Kelly, the chair of Coalition’s energy policy committee, said renewable energy “would kill people” — a claim happily repeated by columnist Andrew Bolt.

Resources Minister Matt Canavan urged the Queensland Government to forget about climate change, while the LNP in Queensland considered a motion urging Australia to quit the Paris climate deal.

Worse, the conservatives started attacking individuals. The verbal assault on chief scientist Alan Finkel was launched way back in February, when it was clear he would not toe the fossil fuel line. And even after delivering what many consider a “soft option”, the conservatives rekindled their attack.

 Murdoch columnist Piers Akerman wrote:

'The Finkel report is a blueprint for destruction — of the Australian economy and destruction of the Liberal Party.'

Then they added another target — the new head of the Australian Energy Market Operator, Audrey Zibelman. Broadcaster Alan Jones urged that “this woman”, whom he accused of being a “global warming advocate and a promoter of wind turbines”, be “run out of town”.

Instead of trying to save the planet in 2050 the QLD labor should just concentrate on saving jobs today!

On the same day, writing in Quadrant magazine, Alan Moran, the former head of regulation for the Institute of Public Affairs, described Zibelman as a “refugee from Hillary Clinton’s presidential defeat”. (Actually, she worked for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.)

Read more:

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/the-coalition...

Meanwhile:

Estimates of climate change damage are central to the design of climate policies. Here, we develop a flexible architecture for computing damages that integrates climate science, econometric analyses, and process models. We use this approach to construct spatially explicit, probabilistic, and empirically derived estimates of economic damage in the United States from climate change. The combined value of market and nonmarket damage across analyzed sectors—agriculture, crime, coastal storms, energy, human mortality, and labor—increases quadratically in global mean temperature, costing roughly 1.2% of gross domestic product per +1°C on average. Importantly, risk is distributed unequally across locations, generating a large transfer of value northward and westward that increases economic inequality. By the late 21st century, the poorest third of counties are projected to experience damages between 2 and 20% of county income (90% chance) under business-as-usual emissions (Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5).

This is an article distributed under the terms of the Science Journals Default License.

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read more:

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6345/1362

see also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33287

and

 stinkers are doomed...

opening the gates of hell... The COALition of australia, blind to the obvious, scientifically ignorant, devious as can be...

Australia has had its warmest July on record, the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) has said.

A BOM report to be released later today will show the country's average July temperature was at its highest in more than 100 years of weather recording, forecaster David Crock said.

"The warmest parts have been through Queensland, Northern Territory, northern Western Australia and New South Wales," he said.

"The month has been dominated — at least in eastern Australia — by a ridge of high pressure which has seen very clear skies and a warm air mass sit over the country for days and weeks at a time.

"The inland areas have certainly been warmer away from the cooling influence of the ocean … but certainly some of the temperature anomalies extend right across northern Australia.

"Queensland had its warmest July on record for both maximum and minimum temperatures across the whole state — parts of Queensland have been very dry."

read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-01/australia-records-hottest-july-on-...

For the non-Aussies, Christmas down under is hot... Not the hottest than it can be, though last year it was 3.8 degrees Celsius above all summer. Christmas is in the first month of summer, December. You know. It snows where you live...

Australian coal-fired power stations produce levels of toxic air pollution that would be illegal in the US, Europe and China, and regularly exceed even the lax limits imposed on them with few or no consequences, according to an investigation by Environmental Justice Australia.

The report reveals evidence that operators of coal power plants in Australia have been gaming the systems that monitor the deadly pollution, while others have reported figures the federal government says are not reliable.

EJA’s investigation reveals further cases of allegedly misleading behaviour. In Victoria, regulators are investigating one case in which a representative of a coal power plant allegedly said it regularly “simplifies” reporting during periods of excessive pollution by just reporting the figure allowed by its licence, rather than the actual amount.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/15/australian-coal-powe...

“Global Warming Is Almost Entirely Natural, Study Confirms,” wrote Breitbart. “Advanced Computer Models Suggest Most Global Warming Is From Natural Forces,” said the Daily Caller.

One of the authors, Jennifer Marohasy, took to the Spectator to claim her research had shown that recent global warming was almost entirely natural. The web traffic behemoth the Drudge Report also linked to Marohasy’s article.

None of the writers bothered to ask a single other genuine climate scientist for their view on the paper.

I asked five. They variously summarised the research as “junk science” and seriously flawed. Oh dear.

Scientists including Dr Gavin Schmidt, director of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies; Prof Steven Sherwood, deputy director at the University of New South Wales climate change research centre; and Prof Piers Forster, director of the Priestley international centre for climate at the University of Leeds, have pointed out to me serious flaws and errors in the paper’s methodology.

It also appears that the lead author, the IPA’s John Abbot, claimed an academic affiliation to James Cook University that, according to that university, had expired more than six months before the research was submitted to the journal.

I emailed Abbot and Marohasy to ask them to respond to the key points but didn’t hear back.

So what did Abbot and Marohasy do? Here’s where we get into the gory detail.

First, the pair used what’s known as proxy temperature records. These are estimates of past temperatures going back as far as 50AD that have been estimated from analysis of things such as tree rings and lake sediments.

There are hundreds of these temperature records but the authors chose only six, and they don’t say why they chose the ones they did.

They then fed these temperature records into several pieces of software and finally into another piece of software that performs a “machine learning” process. Out the other end comes a series of temperature reconstructions, from which Abbot and Marohasy make two claims.

First, they claim that their resulting data shows the world would have warmed by almost as much as it already has, even if the industrial revolution had not happened and we had not added any extra greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

Second, they claim that if you were to double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere then you would eventually see planet-wide warming of just 0.6C. Their estimate of this “equilibrium climate sensitivity” (ECS) is much lower than other studies (the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says, for example, that studies show the likely range will be between 1.5C and 4C).

So what did the scientists think?

Schmidt told me by email the paper was worthless “on a number of measures” and in his opinion demonstrated “what happens when people have their conclusions fixed before they start the work”.

Schmidt wrote that “conceptually this methodology can’t possibly work” because the way the authors had calculated the climate’s sensitivity had assumed that all the natural variability was part of the planet’s internal systems, rather than being “forced” externally by volcanic eruptions or changes in the output of the sun.

This, Schmidt said, was “in contradiction to their claims elsewhere in the paper.”

Schmidt also says “something went wrong” when Abbot and Marohasy digitised their results, meaning that for the northern hemisphere the data had shifted by about 35 years “so what they think is 2000, is actually 1965”. This meant that a huge part of modern warming had been missed.

Dr Benjamin Henley, of the University of Melbourne, has published several studies using proxy data to understand ancient climates. He says the paper should never have been published and should be withdrawn.

“The paper is seriously flawed and should be retracted by the journal,” Henley told me by email, pointing out several serious issues with the way the data had been used.

Henley questioned why only six “paleoclimate” records had been used, when a recent paper identified some 692 proxy records that could be used to determine temperatures.

He said the authors had not tried to verify their approach by comparing their data to actual temperature measurements – an “extremely unscientific approach”.

“The results are incorrectly interpreted and are not verified or even compared to observed instrumental data. The conclusions are not supported by the results.”

Forster reviewed the paper and told me he thought “the methodology is unphysical” because it simply took data and then extrapolated it rather than accounting for what was actually known to be happening in the real world.

Forster said the paper contained “fundamental errors” and gave me a detailed rundown.

For example, Forster says Marohasy and Abbot’s methodology assumes that all previous natural swings, or oscillations, in temperature that happened before the industrial revolution would continue up to present day.

In reality there a very few periodic or quasi-periodic oscillations in the Earth system. In reality most are random and not periodic. Volcanoes are the biggest issue. Their method assumes that any periodicity caused by volcanoes prior to 1880 has simply continued though to 2000. We know this is not the case and have a good handle on what volcanic activity has been – it was nothing like it was prior to 1880. Their approach is therefore completely unphysical. They also assume that oscillations seen at a given proxy location will also cause the same oscillation on global average or hemispheric average temperatures. We know this is not the case.

He said the authors had assumed most of the 1C warming that the planet had seen was caused by random variation, “but we know this is not the case.” He said the paper’s conclusion the ECS was only 0.6C could be ruled out entirely.

He said: “Attribution studies with careful statistics put random variability (of the climate) as contributing a maximum of around 0.2C. With 1C of warming already, and only halfway to doubling CO2, we can rule out ECS below about 1.5 C already.”

Sherwood wrote: “The analysis by the authors seems to work like magic.

“What is interesting about this fancy curve-fitting exercise is that the authors are doing exactly what mainstream climate scientists have falsely been accused of doing: extrapolating into the future from short past records.

“There is much evidence that recent warming is unprecedented, for example ancient ice in various mountain regions such as Peru that is now melting for the first time in millennia. Thus the authors’ conclusion is contradicted by direct physical evidence. Also, the authors are alleging that the climate can exert large natural swings in temperature but is insensitive to heating. This is a contradiction.”

Prof David Karoly, a climate scientist at the University of Melbourne, told me the study “appears to be junk science” and listed several major issues with the paper’s methodology.

He said the authors had not bothered to describe the detailed method they had used to calculate ECS, adding: “ECS is based on global mean temperature changes and cannot be estimated without the globally averaged temperature estimates first.”

“In my view the claimed conclusions are not supported by the methods used and the results are likely to be unreliable,” he said.

So none of this is a surprise.

The IPA, which does not have to reveal its funders, has long pushed climate science denial, while promoting fossil fuels and denigrating renewable energy. It’s what they do.

According to the journal manuscript, Marohasy and Abbot list their affiliations as the IPA and the Climate Modelling Laboratory.

The Climate Modelling Laboratory is a trading name linked to Marohasy’s personal business number.

Abbot also adds James Cook University (JCU) to his list of affiliations.

But a JCU spokesperson told me: “John Abbot is no longer affiliated with James Cook University. He was an adjunct senior research fellow between October 2015 and September 2016.”

According to the journal’s website, and confirmed by a journal editor, Abbot and Marohasy submitted their manuscript to the journal in 22 April 2017 – more than six months after Abbot’s affiliation with JCU had ended.

I also asked Abbot and Marohasy about the nature of the Climate Modelling Laboratory and the affiliation to JCU but have not had a response.

The journal editor who handled the Abbot paper, Dr Vasile Ersek, of Northumbria University in the UK, said he was “sorry to see it involved in a controversy” but said the article “was reviewed by two independent referees and neither found major flaws with the manuscript”.

As I’ve written on Planet Oz before, Marohasy has repeatedly claimed that Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology is deliberately conspiring to tamper with its temperature records with the express intention to make global warming look worse than it is.

Marohasy was also the editor of the IPA’s most recent climate book – a collection of essays from a line-up of climate science deniers and contrarians.

The IPA said the book had contributions from “some of the world’s leading experts”. Among these “leading experts” is a New Zealander who has written several New Age-style books on cats (including Pawmistry: How to Read Your Cats Paws) while being the “king of rubber-band magic”.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2017/aug/26/institute-...

Global warming is real and anthropogenic. See:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33287