ELECTRICITY PRICES SET TO SOAR AS A RESULT OF GOVT. POLICY

Annabel Hepworth from The Australian interviews Origin Energy CEO, Grant King who says "the intermittent nature of wind means that it would need to be backed up with big-ticket investment in gas turbine power plants" and he suspected that policymakers "didn't truly know the cost" of policies that had been introduced.

LINK to article

SO WHERE ARE THE CO2 REDUCTIONS?

Robert Bryce at the Energy Tribune website queries the basic premise of support for wind power.

"Over the last few years, the wind industry has achieved remarkable growth largely due to the industry’s claim that using more wind energy will result in major reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. There’s just one problem with that claim: it’s not true."

LINK to article

ICE CORE EVIDENCE - WHERE IS CO2's MAJOR EFFECT?

The ice cores are often lauded as evidence of the effects of carbon dioxide. Frank Lansner asks a pointed question and goes hunting to find any effects that can be attributed to carbon.

Where is the data that actually shows a strong and important warming effect of CO2? If CO2 has this strong warming effect, would not nature reflect this in data?

LINK to article

SOUTH PACIFIC SEA LEVEL: A REASSESSMENT

IPCC expert reviewer, Dr Vincent Gray undertakes a reassessment of th SEAFRAME sea-level study conducted over the last 19 years.  No need to make room for South Pacific climate change refugees!

LINK to SPPI paper

RISING SEA OF IRRESPONSIBILITY

Des Moore, director of the Institute of Private Enterprise and ACSC advisor, Dr Tom Quirk have been looking at the real world effects of reports on rising sea levels.

"Although there was little debate during the election about climate change policies, a lot of action has been going on behind the scenes on sea levels. This reflects the acceptance by our governments of questionable sea level projections in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 Fourth Assessment Report and even of extensions of these projections to unrealistic levels on advice from the CSIRO"

LINK to article

NEW PAPER BURIES HOCKEY STICK GRAPH - AGAIN

Joanne Nova at her website reviews a new paper by McShane and Wyner that looks at the temperature reconstruction via proxy data.

Each one of these points is enough to cast grave doubts on the Hockey Stick.

   1. The Hockey Stick uses the wrong type of proxy – tree rings. Trees grow faster when it’s warmer, and when it’s wetter, or when the tree next-door falls down and a herd of manure-making cows move in. Almost all other types of proxies disagree (like ice cores, ocean sediments, corals, and stalagmites). Over 6000 boreholes, hundreds of studies, as well as recorded history show the world was warmer 1,000 years ago. (See here for the refs.)
   2. Even among tree rings, the Hockey Stick uses the wrong type of tree – Bristlecone pines – which appear to grow faster as CO2 rises, regardless of the temperature.
   3. It uses the wrong type of averaging. The Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was centered over the last 150 years instead of the entire millenia. McIntyre and McKitrick showed that this would produce a hockey stick even if it were fed random numbers instead of tree ring data.
   4. The data is massively incomplete, spatially autocorrelated, the signal is weak, and the number of covariates greatly outnumbers the independent observations.
   5. The data has been calibrated with a short period of temperature records that are themselves substantially processed with smoothing, adjustments, discontinuities and imputation of missing data, all of which may introduce errors.
   6. Assuming that tree rings are not so bad, that bristlecones are not misleading, and that the calibration data is not in error, McShane shows that during the last 150 years the most random of “fake” data (white noise and brownian motion) has more predictive ability than the proxy data, and that uncertainties are huge, and neither real (nor fake data) has any meaning over the last 1000 years.

LINK to review and paper