Time to polish those crystal balls

In the summer of 2006, The Guardian announced:

Scientists know a lot about how events will unfold...which means that whatever we do, our climate destiny is fixed for the next few decades... Rainfall will decline in the summer and the increased deluges in winter will struggle to replenish thirsty reservoirs because much of the water will run off the baked ground.

Roll forward two years, and The Daily Telegraph has this to say:

The second wet summer in succession has left water levels in many reservoirs at the highest levels seen in recent memory... "It is really exceptional, I've never known it so full at the end of August," he said... Usually you would expect it to be 50 per cent down at this time of year."
...
In south west England Wimbleball and Burrator reservoirs in Dartmoor are at 100 per cent of their capacity, creating a dramatic waterfall effect as excess water flows over a weir in a storage area.

Sometimes I get the feeling that a Magic 8 ball would be more useful than reading what the mainstream media has to say about the climate's future.

While you're at it, have a read of Christopher Booker's article on the politics behind the IPCC and the "consensus" that climate change is caused by man's activities, particularly related to CO2. Our governments are planning on spending $45 trillion on fighting climate change, but the supporting evidence is being shown to be increasing unreliable, if not purely fictitious.

As an example, the infamous "hockey stick" graph, showing centuries of level temperatures until recent decades when temperatures swing upwards, is a complete fabrication:

When, with great difficulty, they eventually persuaded Mann to hand over his data, it turned out he had built into his programme an algorithm which would produce a hockey stick shape whatever data were fed into it. Even numbers from the phonebook would come out looking like a hockey stick.

...

As it was put by Roger Cohen, a senior US physicist formerly involved with the IPCC process, who long accepted its orthodoxy: "I was appalled at how flimsy the case is. I was also appalled at the behaviour of many of those who helped produce the IPCC reports and by many of those who promote it.

 

"In particular I am referring to the arrogance, the activities aimed at shutting down debate; the outright fabrications; the mindless defense of bogus science; and the politicisation of the IPCC process and the science process itself."

So next time that you hear how much the government wants to put up taxes to pay for climate change programs, ask yourself what basis they have for doing it.

Caspar and the Jesus Paper

A fantastic title for a very eye-opening post by Bishop Hill, establishing just how corrupt science can be, especially in the field of climate study, where there is so much money to be made, usually provided by the government and environmental lobby concerns.

With this new, and pretty much entirely arbitrary hurdle in place, Wahl and Amman were able to reject several of the runs which stood between the hockey stick and what they saw as its rightful place as the gold standard for climate reconstructions. That the statistical foundations on which they had built this paleoclimate castle were a swamp of misrepresentation, deceit and malfeasance was, to Wahl and Amman, an irrelevance. For political and public consumption, the hockey stick still lived, ready to guide political decision-making for years to come.

Would you believe that Al Gore's woeful An Inconvenient Truth is being shown to school children in the UK as accepted fact, whereas nearly all its arguments have been shown to be junk science?

Something to think about next time the government tells you prices will have to shoot up in the next few years to pay for all those carbon trading schemes. I noticed the Sydney Morning Herald has been carrying a lot of articles about climate change, saying that it's all proven scientific fact, that the research has been meticulously peer-reviewed, that anyone who says anything contrary is in the pocket of the energy companies and going against the consensus. I think the above article should put paid to most of that.

What a shame that the mainstream press aren't interested in covering this sort of thing, preferring populist alarmism to "Sorry folks, it's all a sham".

Today's forecast - cold and sunny

No, not Sydney; and with a maximum temperature of -32 °C and a minimum of -80 °C, it's not even Canberra. Courtesy of the Canadian Space Agency, we can now get the daily forecast for Mars. Best wrap up warm.