Garth’s posterous

Maybe global warming is really bringing a new Noah’s Flood to once more drown a sinful world:

Suneeta Mukherjee, country representative of the United Nations Food Population Fund (UNFPA), said women in the Philippines are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change in the country.

“Climate change could reduce income from farming and fishing possibly driving some women into sex work...”

Andrew Bolt

Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents…

The planet’s temperature curve rose sharply for almost 30 years, as global temperatures increased by an average of 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.25 degrees Fahrenheit) from the 1970s to the late 1990s. ”At present, however, the warming is taking a break,” confirms meteorologist Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in the northern German city of Kiel. Latif, one of Germany’s best-known climatologists, says that the temperature curve has reached a plateau. “There can be no argument about that,” he says. “We have to face that fact.”

Even though the temperature standstill probably has no effect on the long-term warming trend, it does raise doubts about the predictive value of climate models, and it is also a political issue. For months, climate change skeptics have been gloating over the findings on their Internet forums. This has prompted many a climatologist to treat the temperature data in public with a sense of shame, thereby damaging their own credibility.

“It cannot be denied that this is one of the hottest issues in the scientific community,” says Jochem Marotzke, director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. “We don’t really know why this stagnation is taking place at this point.”

Just a few weeks ago, Britain’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research added more fuel to the fire with its latest calculations of global average temperatures. According to the Hadley figures, the world grew warmer by 0.07 degrees Celsius from 1999 to 2008 and not by the 0.2 degrees Celsius assumed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And, say the British experts, when their figure is adjusted for two naturally occurring climate phenomena, El Niño and La Niña, the resulting temperature trend is reduced to 0.0 degrees Celsius—in other words, a standstill.

the fictional copy block, below, contains the full Palin quote, we will be giving Palin a dose of her own medicine. Most people will read the quote and believe Palin really did say something that inane. And I would love for her to have to refute it the same way she had to refute Tina Fey’s “front porch” quote.

But first I’ll give you the (Wong’s) Department’s interpretation of the (Bureau of Meterology’s) research (on sea level rises):

“Global mean sea level has risen about 20 centimetres since pre-industrial times (Figure 2.6), at an average rate of 1.7 millimetres per year during the 20th century. Since 1993, high-quality satellite observations of sea levels have enabled more accurate modelling of global and regional sea-level change. From 1993 to 2003, global sea level rose by about 3.1 millimetres per year, compared to 1.8 millimetres per year from 1961 to 2003. These rates of increase are an order of magnitude greater than the average rate of sea-level rise over the previous several thousand years.”

Is that enough to scare you? An average of 3.1 millimetres per year between 1993 to 2003… But hold on, let’s see what the Bureau of Meteorology actually had to say...:

“A useful datum to distinguish abnormally high sea levels is the Highest Astronomical Tide (HAT), the highest level that can be predicted to occur under any combination of astronomical conditions. Likewise the Lowest Astronomical Tide (LAT) is the lowest level that can be predicted under any combination of astronomical conditions. To properly determine HAT and LAT tidal predictions must span at least 18.6 years, which is the period of a full rotation of the moon’s orbital plane about the ecliptic.”

In other words, using a ten year time frame is not scientifically valid as it doesn’t take into account the full 18.6 year orbit of the moon. And every fifth grader knows that the moon influences the tides…

But look at the quote above from the Department again. It states, that since pre-industrial times the global mean sea level has risen at “an average rate of 1.7 millimetres per year during the 20th century.” It then says that between 1961 to 2003 the rate was “1.8 millimetres per year.”

But shock horror, between 1993 to 2003 (too short a period to measure remember) it was “3.1 millimetres per year.”

That surely proves the man-made effect and that it has increased rapidly during the last sixteen years, right? Only, there’s one small sentence the Department didn’t include in their summary of the BoM’s report. It’s this, and it relates to the increase between 1993 and 2003:

“Studies have shown that comparably large rates of average sea level rise have been observed in previous decades.”

In other words, far from this being a unique phenomena, BoM has “observed” similar large increases in previous decades. Why would the Department not include this in its report?

And it doesn’t quite fit in with the Department’s artistic licence when they claim, “These rates of increase are an order of magnitude greater than the average rate of sea-level rise over the previous several thousand years.” That’s just not true as BoM says they’ve seen these increases observed in previous decades…

The whole ‘science’ or the interpretation of the science behind climate change is getting ropier and smellier the more we look.