Wishing you all Happy New Year

It's New Year's Eve where I live, so let me wish everyone a very happy, healthy and safe 2017.

This coming year is high risk from many perspectives. Climate change is an ongoing threat and will undoubtedly cause problems in many locations. It will contribute to civil unrest, food shortages, and more extreme weather events. The rise of corporations running governments is a threat to people everywhere, including those places where it's not happening to the same extent because of the on-flow impact on world trade. There is a heightened threat to world-wide security with the election of the unstable, reckless Donald Trump to the highest position in the USA. There is a threat to science and a devaluation of knowledge, which are being disregarded in many countries particularly in the USA, Australia, the UK. Many people in power are actively pursuing plans and policies to spread falsehoods on a scale that is unimaginable to some. The tactics being used are very familiar to those of us who've been watching them applied to climate information: smear the experts, create fake experts, make up false "facts", appeal to greed and fear and bigotry.

We cannot afford to just sit back and wait to see what happens. This is a time to take action in whatever way we can.

While some people are worse off and for some their circumstances have changed little, most people in the world have never been better off materially or health-wise than they are today, yet they have elected corrupt leaders or had them foisted on them, in part because their expectations exceeded the reality. We have allowed the wrong people to run (ruin) the world, people who are motivated not by any intent to make the world a better place, but by greed and a lust for personal power at the expense of the world as a whole.

Don't let them get away with it.

I'm sorry to write such a downer article while wishing you all a Happy New Year. We are on the edge of a dangerous precipice. Let's not fall into it.

Deniers hang their hopes on wrong information from a government website in Wisconsin

It's not clear that the partial scrubbing of climate change from the website of the Department of Natural Resources in Wisconsin was at the directive of the Governor Scott Walker, or if there happens to be a stray science denier who got lodged in the Department itself. What is clear is that it's got climate conspiracy theorists at WUWT enthused and hopeful. They seem to think that if the words "climate" and "change" are scrubbed from government websites, then global warming will stop. It won't.

(Scott Walker was a presidential hopeful at one stage, and reportedly dodged questions on climate change.)

Anthony Watts is so excited about this latest bit of climate censorship that he's posted two articles about it. One was written by Bob Tisdale (archived here) and the other by Kip Hansen (archived here).

Denier weirdness in Las Vegas, and WUWT wages war on clean energy in California

This comment can be seen at WUWT today, under another article by Eric Worrall (archived here). (Eric was protesting California's intent to modernise the energy sector. He prefers smog and dangerous climate change.)

Before I post the comment, you may have read how Las Vegas has joined other cities in the USA and shifted to 100% renewables, which is is expected to save the city an annual $5 million in operating costs. It's the city that's shifted, not all of the strip. On the official Las Vegas blog, it was announced that:

This morning, Mayor Carolyn G. Goodman and NV Energy Senior Vice President of Customer Operations Pat Egan announced that we are the first large city in the country and one of the first major customers in Nevada to be served exclusively with renewable energy. We are now one of the few cities of the world that can say all the power we use comes from a green source.  In partnership with NV Energy, every streetlight, city park, community center, fire station, service yard and public building owned by the city, totaling 140 facilities, will be 100 percent powered by renewable energy.

All the power used by the city itself now comes exclusively from renewable energy. While that doesn't mean that all the power used on the strip or in households come from renewable energy, it's a big step forward. On Snopes, it was pointed out that some businesses on the strip are following suit because it makes good business sense.

A climate science denier, John Barry, loses his #climate cool on Twitter

You'd think climate science deniers would be more laid back these days, basking in the election of an anti-science billionaire, Donald Trump. Instead, it seems to me they've just got more upset with climate science. Maybe they are figuring out that Trump won't stop climate change and can't change scientific knowledge.

This little exchange is quite typical of anti-science deniers and climate conspiracy theorists. Deniers are such fake sceptics that they cannot bear to see tweets from a climate hawk on Twitter, as this episode with John Barry @CardsFanTX illustrates.

To explain - this just happened. Someone called John Barry @CardsFanTX tweeted me, before blocking me. He made an easily disproven statement (link):

Happy Holiday

Happy holiday one and all. It's Christmas at our place, and we'll be having a family get-together, on a warm 38 C (100 F) sunny day.

Whatever you're up to, be happy, stay safe, and enjoy the break if you're lucky enough to have one.

PS If you think I'm jumping the gun, it'll be Christmas Day in just half an hour here :)

Anthony Watts, Tim Ball, Christopher Monckton, and Willie Soon and chemtrails, HAARP, and the New World Order

I'm of the view that one shouldn't get on the same platform with people who aren't credible. It gives them an undeserved legitimacy and you'll end up confusing anyone ignorant of the subject.

Anthony Watts, who runs a  "climate hoax" conspiracy blog wattsupwiththat.com, doesn't agree. He gives a platform to greenhouse effect denying "sky dragon slayers", despite weakly protesting on occasion that he "believes in" the greenhouse effect. However if you've read about Tim Ball and Christopher Monckton of Brenchley before, you know they are more than mere science quacks, they are wacky conspiracy nutters. Anthony Watts frequently promotes them and their silly ideas on his blog. Today I discovered they are associated with a whole society of utter nutters. A group, or if you like, a collective of individualists, wanting to take over the world. (Seriously.)

At WUWT, Anthony posted another conspiracy-laden article by Tim Ball, where he said: "Recently I spoke at the Freedom Force Conference in Phoenix on Climate Change. " So off I trotted to see what this "Freedom Force" group was all about.

The social cost of carbon is positive, admits Anthony Watts

Prickly Pear Qld 1930s.
Wikipedia.

At last Anthony Watts admits that there is a social cost of carbon (archived here). He doesn't say what it is, he's not a climate economist after all but at least he admits it. His headline was: "The Social “Cost” of Carbon is Positive".  Unfortunately the article he posted, by ex-coal director Viv Forbes, doesn't discuss the social cost.

Viv Forbes is a climate disinformer from Australia. He's no longer a director of Stanmore Coal, but he used to be. As he's done before, his article is in the form of a letter to some unnamed editor of an unnamed publication. I guess it's to the "editor" of WUWT.

Viv lists "social benefits" of burning fossil fuels in the following terms:

Greens seem unaware that “carbon” coming from man-made CO2 is beneficial plant food supporting all life on Earth including polar bears, cane toads, prickly pear, rain forests and wheat.

Another court victory for Michael Mann and climate science

There's been another victory for science and climate scientists everywhere. In case you missed it, Michael Mann is suing for defamation, and the District of Columbia Court of Appeals has just now removed yet another obstacle some of the alleged defamers put in his way.

Acting with reckless disregard

The decision is worth reading. One of the key paragraphs is, as Professor Mann wrote on his Facebook page:

" [The defendants' statement that] Dr. Mann has engaged in misconduct has been so definitively discredited, a reasonable jury could, if it so chooses, doubt the veracity of appellants’ claimed honest belief in that very notion. A jury could find, by clear and convincing evidence, that appellants “in fact entertained serious doubts” or had a “high degree of awareness” that the accusations that Dr. Mann engaged in scientific misconduct, fraud, and deception, were false, and, as a result, acted “with reckless disregard” for the statements’ truth when they were published." (p. 101)

Michael Mann is suing the following for defamation based on articles appearing on websites: Mark Steyn, The Competitive Enterprise Institute, Rand Simberg, and The National Review, Inc. All but Mark Steyn tried to get the case tossed under Anti-SLAPP Act. They tried this in a trial court and lost, so took it to the Appeals Court, where Michael Mann prevailed again.

The way is now cleared for Professor Mann to pursue his case for defamation.

Flashback to 1883: Burning coal is polluting the atmosphere

The letter below gets some things right and quite a bit wrong. What it does show is that 133 years ago, back in 1883, the general public was reading about how burning coal is polluting the atmosphere. Other newspaper flashbacks can be seen here, including my favourite, from 1884. Weirdly, there are still a few very vocal people who think gravity is a hoax or should I say the equivalent - that climate science is a hoax.

From the Wallaroo Times, South Australia, Saturday 1 September 1883

(The paragraph breaks and emphasis are mine.)

Pollution of the Atmosphere

There was a letter in Nature some time since, calling attention to the pollution of the atmosphere by the burning of coal; and it was calculated that in the year 1900, all animal life would cease, from the amount of carbonic dioxide; but, the author had overlooked the fact that the rain is continually cleansing the atmosphere of this, and the fall of this rain on the ground, and the combination of this with various salts ; besides the oceans alone would absorb their own bulk at normal pressure, but at an increased pressure of, say half a mile deep, would dissolve more than we are likely to need for hundreds of years.

But there are other products of combustion, or rather of incomplete combustion, that are not brought down in this manner by rain, as hydrogen and the hydrocarbons, chiefly marsh gas and ethylene. The latter has, I believe, been observed by the spectroscope on the Alps, and was supposed to have come from space.

It's still hot! Second hottest November in the NASA GISTemp record

According to GISS NASA, the average global surface temperature anomaly for November was 0.95 °C, which is the second hottest November on record, and only 0.07 °C lower than the hottest November during the El Niño in 2015.

The average for the eleven months to the end of November is 1.01 °C, which is 0.17 °C higher than the previous hottest January to November period in 2015, which with the latest data had an anomaly of 0.84 °C.

Here is a chart of the average of 12 months to November each year. The 12 months to November 2016 averaged 1.02 °C above the 1951-1980 mean and was 0.14 °C hotter than the 12 months to November 2015:

Figure 1 | Global mean surface temperature anomaly for the 12 months to November each year. The base period is 1951-1980. Data source: GISS NASA