Politics / Propaganda The real hot topic is CSIRO's prediction on global warming
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18 March 2010
THE CSIRO, once our top scientific institution, this week showed how shoddy and politicised it's become.
It's issued State of the Climate, a pamphlet it drew up with the Bureau of Meteorology, to silence the sceptics of catastrophic man-made warming.
"Climate change is real," it announced. The proof was that Australia's mean temperature went up 0.7 per cent since 1960, seas were rising in some places by 3mm a year, and less rain now fell on our most settled areas.
Phew. That's put me in my place. Or so you'd think from the uncritical coverage this propaganda got from the ABC, The Age and even the Herald Sun.
But the document, barely even six pages, despite its big graphs, is a testament not to the truth of man-made warming, but to the CSIRO's decline.
First, no one doubts "climate change is real". Climate changes all the time. For the CSIRO to suggest this is the debate is dishonest.
We're also talking about global warming, so why does the CSIRO give only Australian temperatures?
My guess? It's because to show the global temperatures would be to admit they have not actually risen since 2001.
Yes, the warming seen since the mid-1970s may resume this year, but this long pause already casts doubt on how much man's fast-increasing gases drove the post-mini-ice-age warming.
Indeed, recent papers by climate scientists as influential as Dr Richard Lindzen, professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, say the climate may not be as sensitive to our gases as many first thought. For the CSIRO not to discuss this is treating us like fools.
But even the little Australian data seems picked to paint the most alarmist picture. For example, the CSIRO claims: "While total rainfall on the Australian continent has been relatively stable, the geographic distribution of rainfall has changed significantly over the past 50 years."
True, rainfall patterns have shifted, but missing is a graphic you can find on the BOM's website showing that far from being "relatively stable", total rainfall over Australia has risen markedly since 1900. For the CSIRO not to admit this reassuring fact, other than in the briefest footnote, is shifty.
Nor does the CSIRO document address the recent challenges to the processes which produced the International Panel on Climate Change's "consensus" that man is almost certainly to blame for most of the post-war warming.
It also does not discuss what the Climategate emails leaked from the University of East Anglia revealed -
top climate scientists conspiring in censorship of critics, fraud, cover-ups and the destruction of evidence needed by sceptics to check their claims.
For the CSIRO not to address even what IPCC lead author Kevin Trenberth admitted in one email - "we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't" - is evading a critical issue.
The CSIRO ends by concluding "much of Australia will (sic) be drier in coming decades", when in fact much of Australia has got wetter.
What's more, while it claims a fall in rainfall in our populated east and south is "likely", it fails to add that a CSIRO study last year admitted that a third of the 23 models it relies on for its predictions say we'll actually get not less rain, but, if anything, more.
For the CSIRO not to admit to such uncertainties in its predictions seems like scaremongering. But isn't that the aim of its six pages of fluff?
Comments
Why in blazes do they not look at the actual temperature record and look at the cyclic changes and overall long term trends?
There is obviously something severely wrong with the models if you need this many to what? Look for a consensus among programmers?
Let's take a bunch of computer programmers and simply ask them for a forecast during their coffee break -it might be more reliable or at least just as miserable or equally worthless, more likely the last.
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