Missing News: Critical flaws found in the critical decade

ABC has taken no interest in providing news of a report by prominent Australian scientists that debunks the alarming claims about climate change made by the Australian Government's climate commission. The scientific audit of the commission's "Magnum Opus" by  Bob Carter, David Evans, Stewart Franks and William Kininmonth can be found HERE.
Here's an extract from the conclusion that makes it newsworthy...
"The scientific advice contained within The Critical Decade is an inadequate, flawed and misleading basis on which to set national policy. The report is emotive and tendentious throughout, ignores sound scientific criticism of IPCC shibboleths that has been made previously, and is shotgun in its approach and at the same time selective in its use of evidence. The arguments presented depend heavily upon unvalidated computer models the predictions of which have been wrong for the last 23 years, and which are are unremittingly and unjustifiably alarmist in nature. Further, in concentrating upon the hypothetical risk of human-caused warming, the Climate Commission has all but ignored the very real and omnipresent risks of dangerous natural climate-related events and change, which are certain to continue to occur in the future."

Cut and pasted - IPCC errors

From the cut and paste section in today's Australian newspaper...

A sturdy declaration on p19 of the climate commission magnum opus, The Critical Decade:

THE [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]'s Fourth Assessment Report has been intensively and exhaustively scrutinised and is virtually error-free.

ABC News Watch blog on Thursday:

HERE are links to the IPCC's own list of errors in the AR4 report, it runs to about 3200 words. When we cut and pasted them all into MSword we ended up with 31 pages.

For more errors and lies from the Climate commission...
see Lies of the climate commission PART 1, PART 2, PART 3, PART 4 and PART 5

None of these reported by Australia's state owned media corporation.

Whose ABC?

Whose ABC? Feature and editorial at The Australian.

"Under Mark Scott's leadership, the ABC no longer aspires to be "Your ABC", the slogan it adopted on Australia Day 1997 to launch its now familiar wave-form logo. A sly coup by a coterie of like-minded, inner-city staff has commandeered the ABC's transmitters and stipend to broadcast almost exclusively to the vocal minority who share their prejudices."

Lies of the Climate Commission: Part 5-Calcification rates

In its report The Critical Decade, the Australian government's Climate Commissioners state (on page 27):
Increasing acidity in tropical ocean surface waters is already affecting coral growth; calcification rates have dropped by about 15% over the past two decades.
Seems pretty frightening. The maximum rate of loss based on the graph in Figure 19a on page 30 of the commissions report is about -0.014 units per year (between 1994 and 2005 - see Figure 19a below which is based on Death et al., 2009).

  Figure 19a - Variation of (a) calcification (grams per square centimetre per Year).

(That shape sure looks familiar)

About the Death et a 2009 study the commission state: "The observational study was carried out using 328 sites on 69 reefs and showed a precipitous drop in calcification rate, linear extension and coral density, all indicators of coral growth, in the last 15-20 years of a 400-year record (Figure 19)." Hang on this graph only shows the last 100 years, what about the last 400?

Here's a graph from Lough and Barnes 1997 that goes back a little further. (Lough JM and Barnes DJ (1997) Centuries-long records of coral growth on the Great Barrier Reef. pp. 149-157. In: Wachenfeld D, Oliver JK and Davis K (eds) State of the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area Workshop. Proceedings of a technical workshop held in Townsville, Queensland, Australia 27-29 November 1995. GBRMPA Workshop Series. 23. Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.)

Figure 4. from Lough and Barnes 1997. The raw data incorporated into Death et al. 2009 (see their figure 2 but without the high degree of smoothing that masks the short term variation-this relevant given the short time frame used by the commission to score a political point.) The drammatic change from 1994-2005 used by the climate commission to present a case of alarm is shown as the red line scaled to match this graph at the top, as are intervals where the rate is about equal to, or exceeded by historical data (red arrows) based on the 5 year filter.


The last 15 years does indeed show a "precipitous drop" however looking at the longer term, similar "drops" appear at least 13 times over the last 4 centuries. When placed in its historical context, the commission's case for alarm vanishes into thin air. 

The Climate Commission, who judge climate in in 30 year slices, didn't bother looking past the last "two decades" to reach their alarming conclusions on calcification rates. Someone appears to be confusing the weather for climate.

The commission further mislead the public with their mis-representation of climate science and make a mockery of the commission's task to: Explain the science of climate change and the impacts on Australia.
The ABC continue to let this pass without in-depth investigation, to the great detriment of its audience. Having its reporters "embedded" in the commission does not appear to be a good starting point, and appears somewhat at odds with the ABC's task of providing News that is impartial and free of personal bias.

Lies of the Climate Commission: Part 4

The following statement appears on page 20 of the Climate Commission's report "The Critical Decade".

"The IPCC AR4 has been intensively and exhaustively scrutinised, including formal reviews such as that by the InterAcademy Council (2010), and only two peripheral errors, both of them in the WG 2 report on impacts and adaptation, have yet been found (in a publication containing approximately 2.5 million words!)."

on page 19:––The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report has been intensively and exhaustively scrutinised and is virtually error-free.

Here are links (below) to the IPCC's own list of errors in the AR4 report. Combined it runs to about 3200 words. When we cut and pasted them all into MSword we ended up with 31 pages. These errors were noted after the report was published which doesn't say much for the "exhaustive, thorough process" of review described by the climate commissioners. "The Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), published in 2007, involved about 1,250 expert authors and 2,500 reviewers, who produced about 90,000 comments on drafts, each one of which was addressed explicitly by the authors (ed. many of these were totally ignored)". Here's how some IPCC authors dealt with peer reviewed papers critical of the IPCC consensus:

 "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep

them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !

Cheers Phil" Source

That's Phil Jones of Climategate fame

New errors have been noted in AR4 as recently as last month.

(Note our own small contribution to the list of errors in WG2 brought about thanks to the ABC's reliance on the IPCC as a "reliable" source of climate information-seems parts of Sri Lanka were not warming at a rate of 2 degrees per year).

Errors in WORKING GROUP I
Note. The following is a list of errata and corrections to the Working Group I contribution to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. Last updated: 4 April 2011

Errors in WORKING GROUP II

Note. The following is a list of errata and corrections to the Working Group II contribution to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. Last updated 24 February 2011

Errors in Working GROUP III
Errata for the Working Group III contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report. (Last updated 28 July 2010)

Will the ABC report on this misleading statement, or will it continue to leave its audience in the dark?

Lies of the Climate Commission: Part 3

Roger Peilke jnr has a guest post by Ryan Crompton of Macquarie University's Risk Frontiers dealing with the Climate Commissions treatment of Bushfires. It's titled Treatment of Bushfires by the Australian Climate Commission.

On  page 40 of its report (The Critical Decade) the climate commission, states that 'The intensity and seasonality of large bushfires in southeast Australia appears to be changing, with climate change a possible contributing factor (Cai et al. 2009c)."

Crompton is joint author of an important study the ABC did not feel newsworthy. This study, omitted from the report by the Climate Commission (whose commissioners can not be relied upon for accurate information about climate science-see Part 1.), found that "that there is no discernable evidence that normalized building damage is being influenced by climate change due to the emission of greenhouse gases". The study remains unreported by the ABC. Its authors recently comprehensively smacked down critics of the study in the peer reviewed press. 

Crompton's post deals with the use of (Cai et al, 2009) as a supporting reference for the statement made by our climate commission: 

My main issue is the report’s use of a key reference, the study by Cai et al. (2009c) entitled “Positive Indian Ocean dipole events precondition southeast Australia bushfires”, to support the statement that 

“the intensity and seasonality of large bushfires in southeast Australia appears to be changing, with climate change a possible contributing factor”

While I have no issue with the Cai et al. study itself (we cited this in our recent bushfire paper), at best, the use of it in the Commission’s report is clumsy, and at worst, misleading.

Crompton goes on to state:

If instead the statement in the report was referring to impacts, then why was the conclusion from our research not cited here – that there is "no discernable evidence that the normalized Australian bushfire building damage (1925-2009) is being influenced by climate change due to the emission of greenhouse gases"(PDF)? 

Concluding:

In sum, as far as the bushfire sub-section of the Climate Commission’s report is concerned, it seems that both accuracy and clarity have been sacrificed for economy. And that, unfortunately, will always do far more harm than good. 

Read the whole post at Roger' blog. This seems newsworthy, will ABC report it?

Let the sun shine in

Janet Albrechtsen's piece in today's Australian titled Bob, the sun is shining on you looks at recent claims of right wing bias at the ABC, and the need for increased scrutiny of The Greens. Worth a read.
"A RIGHT-WING ABC? No, just Chris Uhlmann doing his job properly, unlike his colleagues.