Missing News: That climate sensitivity thing again

ABC take any and every chance to jump on news that supports an alarmist take global warming, however when the news fits a different picture, only crickets to be heard in those drab Ultimo corridors.

Heat going out of global temperature rises

GLOBAL temperature increases as a result of increased carbon dioxide levels in the Earth's atmosphere are likely to be lower than previously thought, an international research team has found.

The Oxford University-led study found that a predicted doubling of CO2 concentrations, expected to occur later this century, is likely to raise global temperatures in the short term by between 1.3C and 2C.

Update: ABC play catch up but fail to see the internal contradictions in their reporting. On the one the headline reads...New reports suggests global warming could be slower than first thought yet somehow this supports the notion that the "Longer-term warming trend will not change". Seems a few reporters forgot to pack their brains before heading off to Palais Ultimo this morning!

As for natural cycles being responsible, this has been the case of sceptical scientists for sometime, but you wouldn't have read about it on the ABC, because it doesn't fit their alarmist message.

Shock: ABC's extreme left wing bias confirmed

An article on the Tax payer funded The Conversation has some interesting statistics on the voting intentions of ABC activists journalists. Based on the latest Newspoll figures current community voting intentions are as follows for primary votes:
ALP: 31%
Coalition: 46%
Greens: 9%
Other:14%

The upside down figures for the ABC:
"41.2% of the 34 ABC journalists who declared a voting intention said they would vote for the Greens, followed by 32.4% for Labor and 14.7% for the Coalition."
Is it any surprise that ABC leans left of the left? One wonders whether the 14.7% are real or fudged, especially as ABC does not employ a single conservative to lead any of its prominent current affairs programs.

That clause from ABC's charter (our bold):
The functions of the Corporation are:...to provide:
(i) broadcasting programs that contribute to a sense of national identity and inform and entertain, and reflect the cultural diversity of, the Australian community;

Mark Scott, how can your organisation reflect the cultural diversity of, the Australian community when its employees are demonstrably dominated by one cultural group?

ABC cross the 400ppm barrier..well sort of.

ABC's environmental activists were quick to report on levels of atmospheric CO2 from Mauna Loa that are approaching 400ppm. Based on a NOAA press release ABC claimed Carbon pollution hits highest point in 3 million years.

 "atmospheric carbon dioxide reached 400 parts per million for the first time in over three million years".

However after ABC's activist reporters jumped the gun with some rushed opinion pieces, NOAA adjusted the figure slightly downwards resulting in this update being posted, after we pointed it out (it seems ABC's fact checkers asleep at the wheel)...

"Update

Since this article was published, NOAA revised the reading of the CO₂ levels at Mauna Loa down to 399.89ppm, not 400ppm. The milestone has not therefore yet been reached, however the CO₂ levels remain higher than at any time in the past three million years and continue to trend upwards.

ABC have not offered any further corrections. See how the LA times covered the correction here:  Carbon dioxide in atmosphere did not break 400 ppm at Hawaii site

SO with the northern hemisphere spring bringing plant growth that will soak up some of that CO2, we may need to wait until next year to see that magical figure of 400ppm daily average atm CO2  passed.  Mind you, with the climate's sensitivity to CO2 being lower than IPCC projections it seems in the long term that this will pass as a Y2K moment, rather than the climate Armageddon being actively promoted by the ABC. But of course those missing stories don't fit the ABC play book.

Missing News: Selection bias in climate models

Some missing climate news as auntie's climate activists go into hyper drive with the 400ppm average daily CO2 mark breached at Mauna Loa, well it was almost breached!

Emerging selection bias in large-scale climate change simulations

Kyle L. Swanson
Abstract
Climate change simulations are the output of enormously complicated models containing resolved and parameterized physical processes ranging in scale from microns to the size of the Earth itself. Given this complexity, the application of subjective criteria in model development is inevitable. Here we show one danger of the use of such criteria in the construction of these simulations, namely the apparent emergence of a selection bias between generations of these simulations. Earlier generation ensembles of model simulations are shown to possess sufficient diversity to capture recent observed shifts in both the mean surface air temperature as well as the frequency of extreme monthly mean temperature events due to climate warming. However, current generation ensembles of model simulations are statistically inconsistent with these observed shifts, despite a marked reduction in the spread among ensemble members that by itself suggests convergence towards some common solution. This convergence indicates the possibility of a selection bias based upon warming rate. It is hypothesized that this bias is driven by the desire to more accurately capture the observed recent acceleration of warming in the Arctic and corresponding decline in Arctic sea ice. However, this convergence is difficult to justify given the significant and widening discrepancy between the modeled and observed warming rates outside of the Arctic.

Ignoring history-Thatcher and Climate Change

ABC's environment website is a type example of bias and mis-information. Their propaganda playbook straight out of Orwell's 1984. No surprise there, given it's run by environmental activists who enjoy trouncing ABC's editorial policies.

The latest piece of mis-information; an op ed titled "How Margaret Thatcher led the way on climate change"

Amazingly this piece omits Thatcher's comments made in her 2003 book "Statecraft" in which she almost completely recants the views contained in ABC's op ed. ABC's writer and editor willfully ignore the facts for the sake of spruiking their own agenda. Once again ABC's audience left in the dark.

Here are a few choice quotes from Statecraft, from the section "Hot Air and Global Warming" (P.449)

"The doomsters favourite subject today is climate change."

"Indeed, the lack of any sense of proportion is what characterises many pronouncements on the matter by otherwise sensible people."

"Ït would, though, be difficult to beat for apocalyptic hyperbole former Vice-President Gore." (ed. MT not aware of the dire pronouncements of our own Climate Commission!)

Marcott: Another Gergis moment

Search for "Gergis" on the ABC site through Google provides 2 pages of results. The first story is:
"Last 50 years were Australia's hottest: study". It's not until the very end of the article that the following editorial note appears in a smaller font:
Editor's note (June 21): Since this story was originally broadcast, errors have been identified in aspects of the data processing which may affect the results of this study. As a result, publication has been delayed and the research has been withdrawn from online publication. Professor Karoly says the data will be recalculated, peer reviewed and published in due course.

The world is still waiting for this deeply flawed study to be published. ABC ignored reporting on the manner in which the paper was found to be flawed. Those interested might like to re-visit relevant posts at Climate Audit. 

In the meantime in early March ABC uncritically re-published an AFP article that reported on a new study proclaiming:

"We already knew that on a global scale, Earth is warmer today than it was over much of the past 2,000 years," said Shaun Marcott, the lead author of the study, which was published in Science.
"Now we know that it is warmer than most of the past 11,300 years."

Through the tireless efforts of Steve McIntyre we now know that the specular uptick at the end of Marcott's temperature graph that lead to the alarming claims, is an artefact of an inappropriate statistical methodology, It seems the dates of sediments from cores used in the study were shifted in time up to 1000 years. This effectively shifted warming of the Medieval Warm Period into the modern period. Results that showed cooling were truncated from the period of the uptick. Anyone smell the cherries?

How long now to wait for the ABC to comprehensively report on the issue? 

Perhaps this time around rather than adding a footnote, ABC's "journalists" might take the time to fully investigate and report on the matter. However with activists in charge, we won't be holding our breath.

Lies of the climate commission: Part 16 "bald faced liars"

Professor Roger Pielke Jnr has a piece on the commission's latest effort to misrepresent the science of climate change. As Andrew Bolt says: time they were sacked. Perhaps the public can also be refunded their ridiculous salaries.

Read the whole article at Roger's blog, some excerpts below.

Thou Shall Not Critique the Australian Climate Commission

Badly misrepresent? At no point do Crompton and McAneney ever "assert that the Commission wrongly used insurance losses in the Angry Summer report." Sorry, but this is a bald-faced lie from the Commission. Crompton and McAneney accurately state that the report refers to the "significant impacts of extreme weather on property" during the "angry summer." You can see a tweet below from the Commission which refers uncritically to another recent piece at The Conversation, one that is chock full of scientific inaccuracies. Apparently being completely wrong did not merit a press release, but I digress.

The statement by Will Steffen, a scientist speaking for the government in his official capacity on the climate commission, beggars belief -- "opportunistic and unbecoming of a research institution." The comment, which explicitly makes reference to the university as a whole, brings to mind the time that Richard Nixon demanded that all funding for MIT be cut of because he didn't like its politics.

There is actually nothing more becoming of a research institution than researchers willing to engage the public with the results of their scientific research. In democracies, it is OK to crtiique government -- in fact, governance is improved through such critique. There is nothing more offensive than a government that attacks researchers for the temerity to offer legitimate critique. In the US, we saw how the Bush Administration learned that lesson the hard way. It looks like the Climate Commission hasn't taken note.