Dr Michael Crawford has written a response to the Finkel Report.

From the introduction:

“I have read your recent report with interest. Over about half a century I have observed that government reports are sometimes dishonest, ideological, obfuscatory, authoritarian, bureaucratised, wanting in courage, illogical and sometimes downright stupid.

“I have to salute you sir. Your recent report appears to have set new heights in this respect.

“Let me take some time to explain why your report so qualifies.

“Dishonesty

“Under section 137.1(1) of the Criminal Code Act 1995, a person commits an offence if they give information to (i) a Commonwealth entity, or (ii) a person who is exercising powers or performing functions under, or in connection with, a law of the Commonwealth, AND the person (the source of the information) does so knowing that the information (i) is false or misleading; or (ii) omits any matter or thing without which the information is misleading.

“As will be seen below, your report appears to meet all of these conditions. Now I know that holding government officials to the same legal standards as apply to other citizens is considered, in official circles, to be unsporting. I also appreciate that the Prime Minister and sundry Ministers and other officials would find it enormously embarrassing were the author of your report to be taken before the courts. So I suspect the chance of you actually having to face charges is pretty slim.

“That does not alter the fact that your report appears in breach of section 137.1(1) of the Act in
a way that would lead to penalties for less privileged mortals.

“So as to the details…”

Read the full open letter: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/open-letter-to-dr-alan-finkel.pdf [PDF, 304 KB]

Dr Michael Crawford has a BSc and an MD in management from ANU and a BA and PhD in organisation theory and management from UNSW. He has undertaken research and teaching on the Executive Programs at the Australian Graduate School of Management.

He is co-author of the book Changing Power: Capabilities That Drive Corporate Renewal, based on a six year study of Australian and New Zealand corporate change.

After graduation Dr Crawford spent 11 years in the Australian public service and two years in the Australian Army including one year in Vietnam.

His consulting activities have covered major projects across a wide range of industries including food processing, mining, banking, IT, community services, healthcare and the public service.

He maintains an interest in the failings of government administration and policy.

The UN IPCC and others with a vested interest in the global warming scare have not bothered to check what sea level evidence says about global temperature changes.

Sea levels are very sensitive to temperature changes, and the oceanic indicators are currently reading “steady”.

So are all other thermometers.

Apart from bubbles of heat surrounding big cities, the thermometers and satellites of the world have not shown a warming trend for 17 years. This is in spite of some inspired fiddling with the records by those whose jobs, research grants and reputations depend on their ability to generate alarming forecasts of destructive global warming.

To explain this absence of warming on Earth’s surface, the warmists now claim that “the missing heat is hiding in the deep oceans”.

This sounds like a water-tight alibi, hard to disprove because of our inability to measure “average ocean temperature” directly.

However, the ocean itself is a huge thermometer – all we have to do is to read the gauges.

Most liquids expand when heated, and this property is used in traditional thermometers. They have a glass reservoir filled with liquid (usually mercury) and a graduated scale to measure any thermal expansion of that liquid.

More, as well as:

• The Environmental Multinationals have lost their Way

Read the full report: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/ocean-thermometer.pd [PDF, 153 KB]

Keywords: Sea levels, ocean warning, thermometers, Pacific islands, green multinationals, green energy, CSIRO, climate alarm.

Most of the last 500,000 years have seen Earth gripped by snow and ice, with short warm periods of about 10,000 years long every 100,000 years. We live in this continuing glacial era but are lucky to exist in one of the regular short warm periods.

There is nothing at all unusual about the current warm period, except maybe that it is the period during which modern human civilisation developed.

Within our warm era, we live in a time that is not unusual either – there have been periods warmer and cooler than today, with no real evidence that mankind has caused global warming (apart from minor urban heat bubbles around mega cities).

There is evidence of a correlation between sunspots and Earth temperature, as well as suggested mechanisms to explain this link. The sun clearly has an effect on Earth temperature, and the evidence tends to suggest we could expect global cooling in the near future.

Even within historical times, the Central England Temperature Record, which goes back to 1659, shows a general rising trend since the depths of the Little Ice age, rising to a peak with the solar cycles, and now signalling a falling trend.

Statistics on human usage of carbon fuels show that it is the undeveloped world not the developed world where usage is rising most sharply. Even in emissions per head of population, it is countries like China where the significant growth is occurring. Carbon taxes and targets are costly and futile.

However when we look at how carbon dioxide affects global temperature, the effect is so small as to be insignificant. It is the behaviour of the sun we should be watching.

Ed Hoskins has looked at all of the above factors in a short but revealing essay.

To read more see:http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/hoskins-global-warming-climate-change.pdf [PDF, 1.8MB]

Alley, R.B 2000 The Younger Dryas cold interval as viewed from central Greenland. Quaternary Science Reviews 19: pp 213-226.

Heat waves are nothing new.

It is often said that many people do not read the minutes of the last meeting.

For days now we have been hearing, about “unprecedented heat” and record temperatures. Naturally the government science and media arms are quick to blame carbon dioxide or man-made global warming for this (and every other unusual weather event).

Three comments:

Firstly, when the Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) reports a “record” temperature, they mean “since 1910 in BOM’s adjusted records”. They ignore all records earlier than 1910 on the excuse such records were not taken in the shade according to their method.

Secondly, they have “adjusted” their raw data for various reasons, and the adjustments have generally “cooled the past” thus increasing the apparent warming trend, and increasing the chances that a recent heat wave will produce “highest ever temperatures”.

Thirdly, neither the BOM nor their lazy media megaphones have learnt to look at the past as recorded in newspapers of the times.

Rick Dean has had such a look and his report, taken verbatim from newspapers of the times, shows that heatwaves (and associated bushfires) are nothing new. He records at least 24 heatwaves in Australia in the period 1886 to 1929. For example:

In 1895 at Bourke there were 66 deaths from heat apoplexy over a period of six weeks, during which time the heat was never under 114 degrees shade heat and, what was worse, never under 100 degrees at night. The maximum temperature recorded under true shade conditions was 128 DegF (53.3 DegC). In Sydney in Jan 1896 the temperature reached 131 DegF in the shade (55 DegC). Publications at the times recorded many earlier heat waves back to 1791.

Read more from this fascinating look at past weather extremes: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/heatwaves-nothing-new.pdf [PDF, 52 KB]

Sea levels have been rising and falling for as far back as we have evidence, and current sea levels are lower than they were during the Roman Warm Period.

Robert Endlich has looked at the evidence still visible today:

An important turning point in British history occurred in 1066, when William the Conqueror defeated King Harold II at the Battle of Hastings. Less well-known is that, when William landed, he occupied an old Roman fort now known as Pevensey Castle, which at the time was located on a small island in a harbor on England’s south coast. A draw bridge connected it to the mainland. Pevensey is infamous because unfortunate prisoners were thrown into this “Sea Gate,” so that their bodies would be washed away by the tide. Pevensey Castle is now a mile from the coast – further proof of a much higher sea level fewer than 1000 years ago.

Before modern Italy, the region was dominated by the famous City States of the Mediterranean, among which is Pisa, with its picturesque Cathedral Square and famous Leaning Tower. Located near the mouth of the Arno River, Pisa was a powerful city, because maritime trade brought goods from sailing ships right into the port. Its reign ended after 1300 AD, the onset of the Little Ice Age, when sea levels fell and ships could no longer sail to her port. Once again, some say “river silting” was the cause.

However, Pisa is now seven miles from the Tyrrhenian Sea, with large meanders upstream from Pisa and little meandering downstream. When a river is “at grade,” the downstream gradient is as low as possible, as with the meandering Mississippi River and delta in Louisiana. Rivers with a strong downstream gradient flow to the sea in a direct route, with few meanders, as with the Rio Grande in New Mexico.

The facts of history are clear. Sea level was 400 feet lower at the end of the Wisconsin Ice Age, 18,000 years ago. Sea levels rose rapidly until 8,000 years ago. As recently as 1066, when the Normans conquered England, sea levels were quite a bit higher than today.

During the Little Ice Age, 1300 to 1850 – when temperatures were the coldest during any time in the past 10,000 years – snow and ice accumulated in Greenland, Antarctica, Europe and glaciers worldwide. As a consequence, sea levels fell so much that important Roman Era and Medieval port cities (like Ephesus, Ostia Antica and Pisa) were left miles from the Mediterranean.

Since the Little Ice Age ended about 160 years ago, tide gages show that sea level has risen at a steady rate – with no correlation to the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

Sea level is a dynamic property in our planet’s climate cycles, which are closely linked to changes in solar energy output and other natural factors. It is unlikely to change in response to tax policies that make energy more expensive and economies less robust – no matter what politicians in Washington, Brussels or the United Nations might say.

Much to their chagrin, Mother Nature doesn’t listen to them. She has a mind of her own.

Robert W. Endlich served as a weather officer in the US Air Force for 21 years and a US Army meteorologist for 17 years. He was elected to Chi Epsilon Pi, the national Meteorology Honor Society, while a basic meteorology student at Texas A&M University. He has degrees in geology and meteorology from Rutgers University and the Pennsylvania State University, respectively, and has studied and visited the ancient sites of Rome, Ostia Antica and Pisa.

For the full article see: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/endlich-sea-level-claims.pdf [PDF, 76 KB]

Reference: http://www.cfact.org/2013/12/01/history-falsifies-climate-alarmist-sea-level-claims/

The Carbon Sense Coalition today accused the UN Warsaw climate conference and some world media of callous exploitation of human suffering in the recent typhoon in order to promote their international carbon tax levelling plans.

The Chairman of Carbon Sense, Mr Viv Forbes, said that the leaders of the global warming scare campaign who are blaming the use of carbon fuels for Typhoon Haiyan should read their own IPCC scientific report which makes no such claim.

Damaging typhoons have been a fact of life in the Western Pacific for all of recorded history. In 1274, Japan was saved from invasion by Kublai Khan when a typhoon destroyed a huge Mongol invasion fleet. A second bigger fleet in 1281 was destroyed by another typhoon which was named Kamikaze or “divine wind” by the grateful Japanese. Typhoons were also frequent and severe during the Little Ice Age around 1670.
(more…)

Carbon Dioxide is not Pollution

The Carbon Sense Coalition has accused those waging a war on carbon dioxide of being “anti-green”.

The Chairman of Carbon Sense, Mr Viv Forbes, said that carbon dioxide is the gas of life, feeding every green plant, producing food for every animal and in the process releasing oxygen, another gas of life, into the atmosphere.

A recent report on measuring global vegetation growth notes that data from remote sensing devices show significant increase in annual vegetation growth during the last three decades. They also report that CO2 fertilization is more important than climate variation in determining the magnitude of the vegetation growth. “The CO2 fertilization effect of the carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere by mankind’s burning of fossil fuels, such as coal, gas and oil, is beginning to assume its vaulted position of being a tremendous boon to the biosphere…”

More, as well as:

• Correlation, Causation or a Carbon Tax Con-Job?
• Carbon Tax gets two Vetoes
• Absolute Safety is a Terrible Risk – the Costs of Environmental Scaremongering
• The Last Word: The Big Dollars are against us

Read the full report: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/greening-the-globe.pdf [PDF, 50KB]

Keywords: Pollution, London, Pittsburgh, Asian smog, carbon dioxide, plant fertiliser, climate correlations and causes, carbon tax, electoral veto, Climate Council, safety and risk.

The Case for Repeal

We support the immediate repeal of the carbon tax. This tax was introduced by stealth, and the justification for its introduction is spurious. It should be repealed or made ineffective immediately.

We are told its purpose is to “reduce carbon pollution” – just three words, each of which is based on a lie.

• “Reduce”: The effect of Australia’s carbon tax on the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is so tiny as to be undetectable and any miniscule reduction would be totally swamped in the far bigger natural seasonal variations of carbon dioxide levels. The effect on global climate, if any, would also be too small to be measured and of no benefit to the climate or life on Earth.
• “Carbon”: It is NOT a tax on carbon. Carbon is a solid – either soft and black like graphite and soot, or crystalline, hard and beautiful like diamond. It is definitely not the colourless gas created when carbon is burned. The “carbon” tax falls mainly on carbon dioxide, a colourless, harmless natural gas which has always been present in Earth’s atmosphere, usually in far greater amounts than at present. The use of “carbon” when referring to “carbon dioxide” is a deliberate deception. It would be like calling liquid water by the name “hydrogen”, a major element in the water molecule which is a dangerous explosive flammable gas. Based on the carbon example, a tax on water vapour (another “greenhouse gas) would probably be called “The Hydrogen Tax” by government propagandists.
• “Pollution”: Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, and should never have been called one. It is the essential gas-of-life for all plants and they support all animals on Earth. It is no more a pollutant than oxygen, which is the gas-of-life for animals, or water vapour which is essential for all life. All three gases have effects on earth’s surface temperature, and on surface life, and such effects are usually highly beneficial. Additional carbon dioxide has been improving and will continue to improve the growth rate and drought tolerance of all plants on earth. Far from polluting the Earth, extra carbon dioxide has been greening the globe for decades.

There has been no attempt at an independent cost benefit analysis to justify the tax.

More, as well as:

• Petition
• John Howard Joins the Deniers (well almost)
• The Many Benefits of CO2
• Keeping a Sense of Perspective on Global Warming
• Funds Flow in, in Enormous Dollops

Read the full report: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/cold-turkey2.pdf [PDF, 140KB]

Keywords: Carbon Tax, deceptive advertising, cost-benefits, enquiry into the science, pollution, National Pollution Inventory Scheme, Kyoto Agreement, price surveillance, IPCC, Climate Change Authority, Direct Action, renewable energy targets.

What determines surface temperature at any spot on earth?

Apart from a tad of geothermal heat and a wisp of heat from nuclear power generators, every bit of surface energy (including coal and biomass) comes directly or indirectly from the sun. There is no other source of surface heat – everything else just stores, releases or re-directs solar energy.

Surface heat is maximised when the sun is directly overhead, near a peak in the sunspot cycle and when Earth’s orbit comes closest to the sun (perihelion). The hottest places on earth will be found near the equator, after mid-day, in mid-summer, at perihelion and when there are no clouds in the sky to reflect solar radiation. Temperature will be maximised when there is no cooling wind and no nearby surface water or moist soils to cool things by evaporation. Since higher temperature also occurs at lower altitudes, one of the hottest places on earth is Death Valley, a desert below sea level, where the temperature can reach 56 °C on a mid-summer afternoon.

Frigid temperatures are found near the poles, where solar energy is weak. The coldest place on Earth is Vostok at high altitude in Antarctica where the air is very dry and where the temperature can go as low as minus 89 °C with a cloudless sky in the dead of winter.

Since both extremes could occur simultaneously, Earth’s maximum daily temperature range is thus up to 145 °C. But at any single place, the diurnal variation is more likely to be about 15-40 °C.

Carbon dioxide has no effect on any of the above temperature drivers – it generates no new heat, cannot affect latitude, solar orbits, sun spots, altitude, season, time of day, clouds or the proximity of water. All it can possibly do is encourage plant growth, and intercept, absorb and redirect a tiny bit radiant energy passing either way between the sun, Earth’s surface and space. But that effect is almost exhausted at current levels of carbon dioxide. Doubling the carbon dioxide content from 400 ppm to 800 ppm (which may take the next 100 years) might possibly increase surface temperatures by up to 2 °C – not even noticeable compared to the daily temperature ranges we cope with now.

Everyone can feel the powerful warmth of the rising sun, the variations between summer and winter, the moderating effect of clouds and the shock of hot and cold winds.

But even if carbon dioxide levels doubled overnight, most people on earth would not notice any difference.

More, as well as:

• Water is the Weather Wildcard
• Heatwave Hype and Wind Wisdom
• Heatwaves in Australia are Nothing New
• The Long Retreat from Copenhagen
• My How the Money Rolls in

Read the full report: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/sun-water-winds-and-weather.pdf [PDF, 52KB]

Keywords: Temperature, sun, solar cycles, water, evaporation, clouds, wind, feedbacks, carbon dioxide, weather, heatwaves, data manipulation, green energy subsidies.

Carbon Dioxide May Calm the Climate, but it Cannot Cause Wild Weird Weather

Every day some place in the world has “wild weather”. And in recent times, human industry gets the blame. “It’s all caused by man-made global warming” (generally shortened to “global warming”, or GW by alarmists).

Floods or droughts – blame GW; bushfires or snowstorms – blame GW; frosts or heatwaves – blame GW; hail storms or dust storms – blame GW; cyclones or tornadoes – blame GW.

In fact, here is a complete list of all the things blamed on global warming:
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm

If all of this were true, then carbon dioxide is surely the most powerful and disruptive gas on the planet. That great scientist, John Kerry, even calls it a “weapon of mass destruction”.

Thanks to cartoonist Steve Hunter who has gambled again that we may raise enough money to pay him.

But carbon dioxide (CO2) is one of the most stable, predictable, unreactive and puny of all climate
factors. And its effect diminishes for each addition of CO2 to the atmosphere. Adding more now has
almost zero effect on temperature.

More, as well as:

• Wandering Professor causes Global Cooling?
• How they cope with Global Warming in Kiwi Land
• As Climate Alarm Unravels, Things are Getting Nasty
• And Still the Money Rolls in

Read the full report: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/wild-weird-weather.pdf [PDF, 155KB]

Keywords: Wild weather, carbon dioxide, weapon of mass destruction, solar cycles, temperature gradient, ice age storms, snow on rail, abuse replaces debate, climate deniers.