Huge BoM rain and temperature prediction failures

Warwick Hughes takes a look at BoM predictions and concludes:

I am at a loss to understand how a well funded org of professionals can repeatedly get these Outlooks so wrong. Obviously the models they use are not worth a cup full of warm spit.

Australia pays for better and deserves better.

Check out the article here on Warwicks excellent blog.

Apocalyptic Syndrome

And from Professor Denis Dutton, professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand we have more clarifying good sense percolating to the top of the cesspool that is climate science in the New York Times on 31 December 2009; a fitting and thoughtful commentary for the end of the decade published in the New York Times.

“It’s Always the End of the World as We Know It

... Apocalyptic scenarios are a diversion from real problems — poverty, terrorism, broken financial systems — needing intelligent attention. Even something as down-to-earth as the swine-flu scare has seemed at moments to be less about testing our health care system and its emergency readiness than about the fate of a diseased civilization drowning in its own fluids. We wallow in the idea that one day everything might change in, as St. Paul put it, the “twinkling of an eye” — that a calamity might prove to be the longed-for transformation. But turning practical problems into cosmic cataclysms takes us further away from actual solutions.

This applies, in my view, to the towering seas, storms, droughts and mass extinctions of popular climate catastrophism. Such entertaining visions owe less to scientific climatology than to eschatology, and that familiar sense that modernity and its wasteful comforts are bringing us closer to a biblical day of judgment. As that headline put it for Y2K, predictions of the end of the world are often intertwined with condemnations of human “folly, greed and denial.” Repent and recycle!”

Self loathing seems to be a symptom of modern ecokookism which must be why its proponents seem so drawn to one Armageddon scenario after another with each being more ludicrous than the previous. The absurdity of discussing the immanent species extinction of home sapien species whilst dining in elegant surroundings at exotic locations seems to escape them. After returning to Bali in October 2009 (it was last there in December 2007), the IPCC circus would have barely had time to unpack before they all flew off to Copenhagen in December 2009.

Scientists Gone Wild! End of Human Race Within 90 Years.

It's hard to drink coffee at the same time as reading the prediction of this top scientist without laughing and choking as the liquid goes down the wrong way. I stumbled upon this little gem all the way back from late 2004.

A top NZ scientist believes that there will be no human race left inside 90 years. That means there are people being born today that will probably see the last day of human beings on planet Earth.

Scary thought isn't it? Only of course if you smoked too much weed during your youth. For the rest of us it is just more petrol on the fire that has become the global warming scam.

Stand back while I toss a match.

(See the original article here.)

A top New Zealand researcher is using a prestigious award ceremony in Christchurch to warn that humans face extinction by the end of the century.

Professor Peter Barrett will be presented with the Marsden Medal tonight for his 40-year contribution to Antarctic research, latterly focusing on climate change.

The director of Victoria University's Antarctic Research Centre expects to use his acceptance speech to warn climate change was a major threat to the planet.

"After 40 years, I'm part of a huge community of scientists who have become alarmed with our discovery, that we know from our knowledge of the ancient past, that if we continue our present growth path, we are facing extinction," Barrett said. "Not in millions of years, or even millennia, but by the end of this century."

Barrett won the award – designed to mark lifetime achievement in the sciences – for his research into Antarctica, which began with helping prove New Zealand was once part of the Gondwanaland supercontinent.

He then changed disciplines, to predicting the impact of climate change. The result was a body of research on Antarctic ice sheets "which to our surprise is becoming increasingly relevant to the world as a consequence of global warming".

In a way this might be good news. I am going to ask politicians to stop wasting money funding long term infrastructure like roads, railways, universities etc. In fact education funding can be cut to zero right now. What's the point of spending money on education when it's only got a less than 90 year time frame for pay back. Space research and medical research should likewise be stopped.

Is there anyone else besides Kevin Parker of Deutsche Bank that actually believes this nonsense? If you do believe it please contact me and I will arrange medical assistance for you.

Update: I almost forgot, UN chief Ban Ki-moon also believes the human race will be driven to extinction. He announced his prophecy in 2007 at yet another climate conference in Bali. Kevin Rudd was there and didn't criticize that statement. It would be a good question to ask him if he agrees with Ban Ki-moon and Barrett that we are going to become extinct due to AGW. I wonder if Ban Ki-moon also believes in the tooth fairy. You have to be a little worried when the leader of the UN makes absurd statements.

The good Dr Barrett appears to have spent far too long down in Antartica with his head buried in cold snow.

I wonder when we are going to see the billions of humans die that Barrett predicts. Will we see it beginning in the next 30 years? 70 years? or will they all die in the last decade leading up to 2100.

As a member of an endangered species I am going to have myself listed in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species and try to get my own world heritage reserve to live in. I hope they can make the reserve somewhere around Port Douglas up on the Barrier Reef - that would be nice. I am sure Dr Barrett would support such a IUCN Red listing - he really has no choice.

SBS Greenhouse Documentary from 1990

I was sent a link to an old documentary by SBS from 1990 on global warming (or greenhouse effect as it was known then). This is a very interesting documentary to view now as it helps put things in their historical perspective. If you want to see where the greenhouse debate was 20 years ago this video is just the ticket. It also illustrates the same problems with the global warming model that are still in serious dispute today e.g. that there is a simple linear relationship between the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and temperature. I found this documentary to be of great interest and recommend that it to anyone wanting to get an overview of the subject. The 5th video is a must see if nothing else as it deals with the influence of funding. Tom Wigley has great difficulty answering a question as to the influence of funding on the science of climatology. With the benefit of hindsight you can see the Climategate affair lay down its roots 20 years ago. The documentary comes in 6 parts available on YouTube.

Let me know if you found these videos useful. I know it is a bit of a download on slower connections with 6 of them in the series but I think it is worth the wait.

Extinction of Human Race Forecast by Deutsche Banker Kevin Parker

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The crystal ballers are at it again. Mr Kevin Parker is Global Head of Deutsche Bank Asset Management which is responsible for over $500 billion in assets globally. He’s not a scientist but his public prediction published in the New York Times is just too good to let go, what with it being such a slow news day today for global spontaneous combustion and the like.

“People often ask about the costs,” said Kevin Parker, the global head of Deutsche Bank Asset Management, who tracks climate policy for the bank. “But the figures people tend to cite don’t take into account conservation and efficiency measures that are easily available. And they don’t look at the cost of inaction, which is the extinction of the human race. Period.”

Period! You got that – nil chance of being wrong, no qualification to his extinction of the human race due to man made global warming predication. The answer is obvious to Kevin, spend trillions of dollars in the next few (US45 trillion to be precise) decades (managed of course by banks) or die!

Kevin wasn't so certain of the extinction of the human species in a speech he gave at the World Future Energy Summit in January this year in Abu Dhabi. Ten months ago he only thought catostrophy was a potential outcome of us reaching a "tipping point". He must have some new information that exctinction is going to inevitably result now.

I’d love to get a commission on that $US45 trillion deal. It’s a no brainer really. Where do I sign up? No doubt Kevin rides a bike to work. Only a hypocrite would want to be responsible for the extinction of the entire human species.

* Picture of end of the world courtesy of NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day *

The Cooling World - Newsweek 28 Apr 1975

Continuing with the theme of climate alarmism in its historical context I am following the last post with the text of the 1975 Newsweek article entitled, The Cooling World. The link to the original scan of the article is abailable in the last post and is repeated here.

The Cooling World - Newsweek April 28 1975

"There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.

The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree – a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.

To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. “A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.”

A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.

To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth’s average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras – and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average. Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the “little ice age” conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 – years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.

Just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery. “Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data,” concedes the National Academy of Sciences report. “Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions.”

Meteorologists think that they can forecast the short-term results of the return to the norm of the last century. They begin by noting the slight drop in overall temperature that produces large numbers of pressure centers in the upper atmosphere. These break up the smooth flow of westerly winds over temperate areas. The stagnant air produced in this way causes an increase in extremes of local weather such as droughts, floods, extended dry spells, long freezes, delayed monsoons and even local temperature increases – all of which have a direct impact on food supplies.

“The world’s food-producing system,” warns Dr. James D. McQuigg of NOAA’s Center for Climatic and Environmental Assessment, “is much more sensitive to the weather variable than it was even five years ago.” Furthermore, the growth of world population and creation of new national boundaries make it impossible for starving peoples to migrate from their devastated fields, as they did during past famines.

Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.

—PETER GWYNNE with bureau reports"

Thanks to Prof Denis Dutton for the retype of the article found at his website.

Climate Change Fears - An Historical Context

Over the last century scientists, researchers and journalists have been alarming the public with predictions of disaster caused by climate change. The well known Newsweek article as recently as 1975 predicted global cooling and a coming ice age. It seems the soothsayers all agree that climate does indeed change but it is shown that historically they cannot make up their minds whether it is warming or cooling. Of particular concern is the call from some scientists quoted inthe Newsweek article that the Arctic be melted by us (geoengineering) in order to halt the disasterous global cooling! Fortunately such insane ideas were not followed through with possibly in part due to man's inability to actually carry them out at least at the time. To put the current crop of climate alarmist's fears into perspective lets a take a quick look at some of the predictions made in the last 100 years. This is necessary as it is very easy from a human perspective to think that this current panic is new and urgent.

New York Times article (1975): “Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to be Inevitable.”

Of course the question now isn’t whether the global climate changes, it obviously does, but whether the data shows warming trends and whether those trends are attributable to an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere caused mostly by the activities of man. Despite the so called IPCC consensus this has not been established.


A link to a PDF of the original article is located here.
Newsweek 1975 - A Cooling World

Here are some claims made over the last century. I have added “cold” and “warm” to highlight the way the opinions swing throughout history:

- The Times (24 Feb 1895) COLD "Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again"

- Time (10 Sep 1923) COLD “The discoveries of changes in the sun’s heat and the southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age”

- New York Times (NYT) (18 Sep 1934) COLD “MacMillan Reports Signs of New Ice Age”

- NYT (27 Mar 1933) WARM “America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-Year Rise”

- Time (2 Jan 1939) WARM “Gaffers who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right... weather men have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer.”

- Time (24 Jun 1974) COLD “Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.”

- NYT (21 May 1975) COLD “Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable”

- Time (9 Apr 2001) WARM “[S]cientists no longer doubt that global warming is happening, and almost nobody questions the fact that humans are at least partly responsible.”

- NYT (27 Dec 2005) WARM “Past Hot Times Hold Few Reasons to Relax About New Warming”

It can be seen that that the print news media have warned of four seperate climate changes in just over 100 years - cooling, warming, cooling and warming once more. A PDF is available on line of the article, Fire and Ice here which discusses this topic in more detail. I found their analysis of predictions made by modern day climate alarmists on page 12 of their article particularly interesting and dare I say it, amusing.

Extinction, Climate Change

Extinction, Climate Change & Modeling Mayhem | The Resilient Earth

Posted using ShareThis

A very interesting look at climate change and modelling.

Australia's Chief Scientist predicts Global Disaster within 5 years

Let us look at a few of the predictions of climate alarmists and see how they actually stack up. To get the ball rolling we'll kick off with Prof Penny Stack. Now Penny Stack is not just any old garden variety scientist, she is Australia's Chief Scientist and that means her crystal balling must be right. I mean if she is wrong that means all lesser clergy have no chance. We'll keep track of Penny's prediction right here on The Dog Ate my Data and show her to be the genius she is to be able to forsee the future.

So what is Penny's prediction? "The planet has just 5 years to avoid disastrous global warming" (Source: Herald Sun, 4 Dec 2009). She made that prediction on 4 Dec 2009 so that means that by 4 Dec 2014 you my dear reader will be suffering disasterous global warming along with the rest of the planet and its inhabitants.

Note: Now those skeptics amongst you may already have picked up that, following Prof Phil "hide the decline" Jones et al (1996), I have made the data fit the model in so far as the nifty little count down timer shown above. You see there are not enough digits to show more than 999 days so until sometime in 2011 the number of days to go until the earth spontaneously combusts will be truncated in the "tens" column - at least until I find a better countdown timer. Lets not worry too much about that however as, in the words of one famous climate scientist "all the errors will cancel themselves out" and it would be a "travesty" that I can't display my nifty timer just because it is going to be BS until 2011. I'm not sure if that methodology came from a peer reviewed article so care should be exercised in its use.

I was thinking of having children in the next couple of years. Would it be irresponsible of me to bring children into the world when they face certain disaster within a few years of their birth? I might email Penny and ask her advice as my wife is getting clucky. I might even sell my house and quite my job and travel around while I can as 5 years is not a long time to enjoy myself before disaster strikes!


Well 2 days have passed since Penny predicted the end of the world as we know it, it is already the 6 December as I write this, and the earth is not a disaster yet. I predict that on 4 December 2014 as people are planning their Christmas shopping it will be business as usual for the rest of us while Penny is hiding out in her survival bunker with a few thousand cans of beans.

In the article referenced above in the Herald Sun Penny also said "When scientists talk about global warming, they are referring to the temperature of the whole earth and most of the heat is stored in the oceans, which have not cooled in 10 years." Unfortunately she appears to have overlooked this:




See here for more information.

Let's recap - the models Penny Stack relies on cannot explain the current cooling since 1998 whilst CO2 in the atmosphere continues to grow and it looks as if the science isn't exactly settled on her hypothesis that ocean heat has increased according to the above paper. Perhaps her professional judgement with respect to her prediction that the world will be a global disaster from AGW by 2014 will be accurate. Time will tell, and we don't have a very long wait to find out. Thanks to the blog of Andrew Bolt for the heads up.