Will Steffen and all of climate science vs Bjorn Lomborg and deniers - no contest! But Tony Abbott picks the loser.

Some Australian readers will have received a copy of this letter from Tim Flannery, which, given it's wide mailout, I think is okay to share more broadly. (Bernard has already posted a copy in the comments).

Deceiving the Australian public

The Australian Government today announced they would contribute $4m for Danish climate contrarian Bjorn Lomborg to establish a new “consensus centre” at the University of Western Australia.

In the face of deep cuts to the CSIRO and other scientific research organisations, it's an insult to Australia’s scientific community.

As the Climate Commission, we were abolished by the Abbott Government in 2013 on the basis that our $1.5 million annual operating costs were too expensive. We relaunched as the Climate Council after thousands of Australians chipped in to the nation’s biggest crowd-funding campaign - ​remember this video?

It seems extraordinary that the Climate Commission, which was composed of Australia’s best climate scientists, economists and energy experts, was abolished on the basis of a lack of funding and yet here we are three years later and the money has become available to import a politically-motivated think tank to work in the same space.

This is why the work of the Climate Council is so important- to counter this continuing ideological attempt at deceiving the Australian public. 

Please consider chipping in a few dollars a week to help us stay independent and continue to fight the rising tide of misinformation. 

Mr Lomborg’s views have no credibility in the scientific community. His message hasn’t varied at all in the last decade and he still believes we shouldn't take any steps to mitigate climate change. When someone is unwilling to adapt their view on the basis of new science or information, it's usually a sign those views are politically motivated. 

But with your support we will continue to fight back and reach millions of Australians with information that is based on the best science available. 

Thank you 

Tim Flannery

P.S We're already busy responding to misinformation in the media. We just called out The Australian for deliberately misinterpreting the science and the Prime Ministers Business Advisor Maurice Newman for getting his facts wrong. 

I've also previously written about Maurice Newman's wrong facts, such as here and here and here. And on several occasions about misleading articles in the Australian.

I've also been told about an article in the Guardian on the topic of Bjorn Lomborg's new creation (h/t Bert).

My reaction is the same as Tim Flannery's. One of the very first things the Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott did was to abolish the Climate Commission. Australians were outraged, and within only a few days Australian people donated $500,000 dollars to create the Climate Council. And soon doubled it. It must vie with the biggest responses of any appeal for donations.

Now Tony Abbott is reportedly funding a "denier" (as defined by rationalwiki) at around the same annual cost of the then Climate Commission. (I'll need to check the numbers.)

I don't have time to write any more about this. Feel free to express your opinions in the comments.

The new Climate Council - Australians aim high!

Almost $400,000 raised in just one day for the Climate Council - so Australians will continue to get solid information about our changing climate.

Mostly from small donations.  Australians have spoken!

Source: @ClimateCouncil

It would be great to get it to $5 million.  That would help set it up properly for the longer term.

You can become a Founding Friend and donate here.

Become a Founding Friend of the Climate Council today!

Late edition: see below.

The Climate Commission was shut down and the Climate Council has opened for business.

The twitter account @climatecouncil had such a rush of followers it was automatically suspended!  Hopefully it will be back on Twitter soon.

From the Climate Council website:

1. What is the Climate Council?

The Climate Council is a non-profit independent organisation which aims to provide clear, independent advice to the Australian community. We are fiercely independent and apolitical.

2. Why is it important?

Information: information is the currency of democracy, and Australians deserve to have independent information on the state of our climate. Similarly, emergency services, health professionals, local government and journalists need accurate information about a changing climate.

Action: already this year has been one of the earliest starts to the Australian bushfire season. Last summer was the hottest on record, breaking over 120 extreme weather records. This is the critical decade for tackling climate change and reducing our emissions. But we can’t tackle climate change without a well-informed public – and that’s where we come in. Our expert reports help journalists and the public, with timely, expert, and independent information about climate change and its effects on our economy, environment, security, and health.

3. Who is involved?

The Councillors: All the former Climate Commissioners are supporting the initiative with or without Government funding. We’re volunteering our time to get this set up. (Sou: The Commissioners were Professor Tim Flannery, Mr Roger Beale AO, Mr Gerry Heuston, Professor Veena Sahajwalla and Professor Will Steffen.)

The Public: over the last week, we’ve been flooded with people offering encouragement, support, and even donations to keep us going. They come from all political persuasions – they have one thing in common: they know that independent information so important in our democracy.

The Experts: we’ve worked with Australia’s leading experts in emergency services, climate science, health, and defence. Many of them have spoken out in the last week, to call for us to keep going. They know that climate change has real implications now for our health, our security, our food, and for extreme weather. They value the information we provide and they want us to continue, and to continue working with us.

4. How will it make a difference?

We’ll continue to provide journalists and the public with authoritative independent reports, starting with next week’s international climate science update. This will be accompanied by a range of communications materials relevant to different audiences, videos, infographics, fact sheets, and other resources. Similarly we will continue to provide information to the community directly through speeches, community forums and briefings.

The info-graphic below accompanied the Climate Commission’s Angry Summer report illustrating the wide-ranging number of records that were broken over the last Australian summer. (Click to enlarge)

Australia's Angry Summer

5. How do you plan to cover operating costs?

We have already had some seed funding, and we’re seeking funding from the public. If you’d like to help please visit our donate page.

Become a founding friend of the Climate Council and donate to help get it going.

Late edition:

4:00 pm Tuesday 24 September 2013
The ABC seems to be doing its bit.  I logged onto the home page of their main website and this is what was displayed.  It is unusual for the ABC to give top prominence to climate matters. (Click image to enlarge.)

• The top headline of the moment is the new Climate Council.
• The third top headline was a link to the Media Watch segment from last night, exposing the lies about the IPCC which were being spread by radio shock jocks, newspapers and bloggers last week.

If we cut CO2 emissions today...or Dunning and Kruger visit WUWT again

Update: See below for ABC news item on the horrid but expected decision of this new government to disband Australia's Climate Commission. (The website is still up here.)

---

Anthony Watts has a cartoon by Josh as part of an article (archived here) telling his readers about how PM Tony Abbott has shut down the Climate Commission.  The cartoon is this one:

(you wouldn't) Credit: Josh - who suffers a serious case of the Dunning Kruger Effect
Source: Home of the DuKEs - WUWT

The object of the cartoon is Professor Tim Flannery who chaired Australia's Climate Commission.  Tim Flannery is not a meteorologist but he knows more about climate than all the deniers at WUWT and elsewhere put together.

If you read the top and bottom of the quote, you'd see that Josh (and presumably Anthony Watts) don't understand much about CO2 or climate.  As you'll see if you don't already know, Tim Flannery is, of course, correct.

One gets the feeling that Josh and Anthony Watts believe that a mere cut in CO2 would result in a drop in temperature.  That's pretty silly of them.  Any old cut in CO2 won't drop temperature.  As long as more CO2 is being added to the atmosphere than leaves it, then energy in the earth system will increase and temperatures will keep going up.  CO2 is a greenhouse gas and what it does is absorb IR radiation.  The more CO2 there is the less quickly will earth radiate energy to space.  That's why earth is heating up.

What the science says about CO2 and future temperature

I thought it might be worth writing an article about what the science says if the world suddenly stopped emitting any and all CO2 and what would happen if we started to cut emissions.

Australia's Angry Summer

The Climate on Steroids

From Ten News (of all places!)

The report from the Climate Commission

Here is a link to the Climate Commission report, "The Angry Summer".

Key facts: 

1. The Australian summer over 2012 and 2013 has been defined by extreme weather events across much of the continent, including record-breaking heat, severe bushfires, extreme rainfall and damaging flooding. Extreme heatwaves and catastrophic bushfire conditions during the Angry Summer were made worse by climate change. 
2. All weather, including extreme weather events is influenced by climate change. All extreme weather events are now occurring in a climate system that is warmer and moister than it was 50 years ago. This influences the nature, impact and intensity of extreme weather events. 
3. Australia’s Angry Summer shows that climate change is already adversely affecting Australians. The significant impacts of extreme weather on people, property, communities and the environment highlight the serious consequences of failing to adequately address climate change. 
4. It is highly likely that extreme hot weather will become even more frequent and severe in Australia and around the globe, over the coming decades. The decisions we make this decade will largely determine the severity of climate change and its influence on extreme events for our grandchildren. 
5. It is critical that we are aware of the influence of climate change on many types of extreme weather so that communities, emergency services and governments prepare for the risk of increasingly severe and frequent extreme weather.

Let's repeat one critical sentence:

The decisions we make this decade will largely determine the severity of climate change and its influence on extreme events for our grandchildren. 

This is The Critical Decade!

I believe it's fair to say that this decade has seen more record-breaking  and more extreme heat, fires, drought and floods than any similar length period in the past century in Australia, with accompanying loss of life, property, distress and chaos.  If we combine all this century's events, it would come close to the devastation wreaked by weather in the whole of the last century combined.  The Canberra fires; the Black Saturday fires; the Lockyer Valley floods; many places experienced two or more 100 year floods in a single year; the big drought and more.  And this is just the beginning.

The reaction by some people is dismissive.  Some will even point to a single event 70 years ago.  "What about the 1939 heatwave?", asks Ronsterm on HotCopper.  The answer is that the 39 heatwave wasn't part of the overall hotter temperatures we're seeing today.  These days we keep seeing records tumble year after year.  Look at a temperature chart for Australia over time - the answer's in the mean temperature for Australia from the Bureau (click here for other trends, such as the trend in maximums) (click image for larger version)

Here again is an animation of part of the Big Aussie Heatwave (click image for larger version):

Others like HotCopper's Watso make inane comments like: "it's colder in the northern hemisphere".  Does he think the arctic ice is melting so dramatically because it is colder? Did the USA just have its hottest year on record because it's colder?  Did upwards of 50,000 people die in the 2003 European heat wave, or 15,000 or more in the recent Russian heatwave because it was so cold?  (Watso could be simply referring to the fact that it's winter in the northern hemisphere while it's summer in Australia - now that would be inane!)

A Shift in the Climate

No - what's happening is that climates are shifting and we are experiencing the effects in day to day weather.

Deniers resort to picking random one-off weather events going back decades to match any one of the destructive weather events that have become more and more frequent in the past thirty years so and are commonplace this century.  

Disaster Fatigue

It's not just that we are experiencing heat, fires, floods and droughts it's that they are no longer one off events.  They are becoming so common that they no longer get the news coverage they used to get in times gone by eg the latest massive floods in Queensland and NSW.  The news outlets figure people down south are suffering flood fatigue.  Imagine what the poor people living in places like Gympie feel.

“I don’t think any other place in Queensland has had five floods in two years, four in 12 months, and two of those back-to-back in the last four weeks,”