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Search for Garth Paltridge

Comments matching the search Garth Paltridge:

Global warming deniers are an endangered species

mancan18 at 10:19 AM on 25 July, 2015

In Australia, Climate Change denial does pay. Australia is one of the world's largest coal exporters, a significant proportion of it's power generation comes from coal, and coal products are an important component the national income that underpins Australia's wealth. As a result, attitudes towards climate change follows party lines, with one party, Labor, promoting it as a serious issue and the other, Liberal/National Party, while giving it token support, take a "lukewarmer" position. This is the reason that the Government has implemented it's clayton's climate change policy, "Direct Action" and has attacked the climate advisory bodies, climate change funding arrangements for developing needed technologies, and promoted many climate change deniers to important positions upon it's economic advisory bodies.

The reason for this is actually quite simple. One of the main Liberal/National party policy think tanks is the Institute of Public Affairs (the IPA). It is Australia's equivalent of the George C Marshall Institute. The IPA, along with other Liberal Party policy think tanks like the Menzies Research Centre and the H. R. Nicholls Society, all actively promote Climate Change denial. Scientists like climate change deniers, Ian Plimer and Bob Carter are attached to the IPA, providing advice related to climate change policy. Plimer is also an important member of the Mining Council of Australia, having been it's chairman, and he influences it's political stance. Gina Reinhart, Australia's wealthiest person, who made her money from huge mining projects, is also related to the IPA. She funded a Christopher Monkton speaking tour of Australia, at the height of the ETS/Carbon Tax debate when Labor tried to introduce an ETS. The IPA is also an important source of climate change denial material and underpins the political stance of Murdoch media outlets who reach around 83% of the Australian population, where right wing commentators like Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine, and Piers Ackereman, and right wing shock jocks like Alan Jones and Ray Hadley, disseminate IPA inspired climate change denial material to their readers and listeners.

Also, the IPA, through it's journal, provides climate change material to its readers, and it's latest effort comes in the form of a book called "Climate Change - the Facts 2014" with contributions from Ian Plimer, Richard Lindzen, Bob Carter, Nigel Lawson, Bill Kininmonth, Willie Soon, Christopher Monckton, Garth Paltridge, Richard Tol, Brian Fisher, Bob Carter, Donna Laframboise, Anthony Watts, Alan Moran amongst others and other climate change deniers. Also, this book seems to form the basis of Matt Ridley's latest essay in June's Quadrant magazine "How the Climate Wars Undermine Science", where John Cook's Consensus Project is discredited, (in their eyes), by referring to it as being biased and unrepresentative.

Now I don't know about you, but, I don't think that climate change deniers are being marginalised in Australia. If anything, they are still pre-eminent due to the IPA's political and media reach. Trying to take effective action to tackle climate change in Australia has already seen the toppling of two prime minsters and a leader of the Liberal Party who did think that the issue was important. It will be a significant issue in the next election but whether the electorate will embrace it, after a fear campaign related to the hip pocket nerve and xenophobic fears related to asylum seekers, is questionable.

While it is easier to have a debate with like minded people; what is happening in Australia, while the Sydney Morning Herald and the Guardian do present material properly conveying the 97% consensus; demonstrates why climate change advocates need to be more engaged with the climate change deniers from the IPA, the Murdoch press, and the right wing shock jock community, because, at the moment the denier/lukewarmer argument is still pre-eminent and not getting it's proper voice with Australia's public.

NASA climate study warns of unprecedented North American drought

ryland at 16:05 PM on 17 February, 2015

Will@3 you may find the public are not as amenable to change as you might like. Pieces in the MSM such as that in today's Australian by Garth Paltridge a former CSIRO Chief Scientist and Director of the Antarctic Co-oerative Research Centre, which has some very critical comments about Climate Change, may well dissuade many from becoming to concerned about the future climate.

Rogues or respectable? How climate change sceptics spread doubt and denial

Bruce Caithness at 13:01 PM on 25 April, 2013

Some thoughts triggered by Garth Paltridges "The Climate Caper" (2010):

Hermann Hesse wrote a poem that is included in his novel "The Glass Bead Game. It is called "A Compromise" and it opens:

"The men of principled simplicity

Will have no traffic with our subtle doubt.

The world is flat, they tell us, and they shout:

The myth of depth is an absurdity!"

The goal of science is to find satisfactory explanations for whatever we feel needs explaining. Whatever explanations we come up with in science are regarded as permanently open to criticism and refinement, but the holding of doubt is subtle, for not even the philosopher Karl Popper would suggest that theories that have survived severe testing should be readily discarded without serious consideration.

The closing sentence of Hesse's excerpt raises the issue of who are the flat-earthers, the denialists of human accentuated climate change or the proponents? It is obvious in matters of conjecture and refutation that exaggeration and dogmatism can stain all sides of the debate. If Garth Paltridge's text highlights the dangers of an excess of dogmatism, the inertia of normal science, and the dangers of herd mentality, yes even in the IPCC, it is perhaps a worthy aim, if however it subtly reinforces denialist claims that have already been falsified in peer-reviewed testing then it would be a sad legacy for his eminent and long fought career. A forward by The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley is not a good way to start a work of serious intent. Sad career finales are not without precedent, Sir Ronald Fisher, arguably the greatest statistician of the twentieth century naively stained his legacy in the final years of his life in questioning the impact of smoking for public health. Science has implications that are far from neutral or saintly in their disinterest. Do shrill, and politically correct, warnings about the dangers of tobacco look so misguided now?

Moving to specifics, Garth Paltridge in this short book does question the hockey-stick model of climate change - later studies do seem to have falsified Garth's stance or at least have made it questionable.

It is all well and good to comment on the sociology of science, to stress situational analysis and piecemeal engineering rather than big budget government social engineering. The price of liberty is indeed eternal vigilance but even piecemeal solutions can turn toxic if out of context. Climate change does present complexities of a new scale that require a diversity of opinion and robust debate, but denialism is not scepticism.

2012 SkS Weekly Digest #24

adamski5807 at 17:19 PM on 23 June, 2012

Soundoff - I am sick of this line of attack. Garth Paltridge's puff piece shows how capitalists genuinely fear AGW, not because of the devastation that they KNOW is more and more likely to occur the more we pollute, but rather the changes in social relations, hierarchy, decision making and power. Challenging the current economic model is a challenge to neo-liberial laissez-faire capitalists like Paltridge where the principles and laws of science must be bypassed, ignored or even suspended to protect faith based beliefs. A post modernist claiming post modernist science?? Pathetic.

2012 SkS Weekly Digest #24

SoundOff at 10:24 AM on 23 June, 2012

Here’s an article that ran today and that really raised my ire. Perhaps someone at SkS has the energy to respond to it.

Science held hostage in climate debate – a Financial Review article by Garth Paltridge

Modern scientists, following in Galileo’s footsteps

Albatross at 14:10 PM on 30 September, 2011

Stevo @29,

Thanks. You made me look closer at the Galileo Movement, and what I read is very interesting/disturbing. Look who the advisors are for the Galileo Movement in Australia:

Professor Tim Ball
Warwick Hughes
Professor Fred Singer
Professor Dick Lindzen
Bill Kininmonth
Professor Bob Carter
Professor Ian Plimer
David Archibald
Professor Peter Ridd
Professor Garth Paltridge
Dr Vincent Gray
Dr Jennifer Marohasy
Jo Nova
Des Moore
John Nicol
David Flint
Andrew Bolt
John McLean
David Evans
Pat Michaels
Joe D'Aleo
Viscount Monckton

[Source]

Their purported guiding principles ironically include:
"Honesty: rely on factual data, ensure decisions are based on facts;
Fact based science: protect and use science, a key to human progress, objective and fair decisions and freedom"

and under "Purpose and Aims" ironically include:
"Protect science and restore scientific integrity"

Sounds great does it not? But, there is a very big problem with those proclamations, because unfortunately those lofty ethics and goals do not seem to be endorsed or even practised by several of their advisers, as has been demonstrated multiple times here at SkepticalScience and elsewhere. Some of the names on that list shocked me. What are Drs. Lindzen and Gray thinking?

Monckton at odds with the very scientists he cites

Tom Curtis at 01:53 AM on 19 July, 2011

Rob Honeycutt @22, you obviously like your humor black.

Not only is he (as you put it) an all round bad seed, he is also intimately connected with all the major deniers in Australia. These are the "independent advisers" of the ironically named "Galileo Movement":

Professor Tim Ball
Warwick Hughes
Professor Fred Singer
Professor Dick Lindzen
Bill Kininmonth
Professor Bob Carter
Professor Ian Plimer
David Archibald
Professor Peter Ridd
Professor Garth Paltridge
Dr Vincent Gray
Dr Jennifer Marohasy
Jo Nova
Des Moore
John Nicol
David Flint
Andrew Bolt
John McLean
David Evans
Pat Michaels
Joe D'Aleo
Viscount Monckton

Jo Nova in particular, has been sharing the podium with Monckton on his speaking tour. While she has been saying,

"We sceptics are not calling for anyone to be silenced."

he has been getting up and saying:

"So to the bogus scientists who have produced the bogus science that invented this bogus scare I say, we are coming after you, we are going to prosecute you and we are going to lock you up!"

Apparently they do not see the disconnect. What is transparently lacking is responsible media who put to those involved why they are willing to associate with a man like Monckton (no more accurate description can be given with in comment policy).

Trenberth on Tracking Earth’s energy: A key to climate variability and change

David Lewis at 09:24 AM on 14 July, 2011

One thing that seems certain in all this are these words from Dr. Trenberth's above post:

"we have observing systems in place that nominally can measure the major storage and flux terms but due to errors and uncertainty, it remains a challenge to track anomalies with confidence".

In Trenberth's original "Perspectives" paper published in Science Tracking Earth's Energy, he was clear that the "missing energy" he was discussing was "due to either inadequate measurement accuracy or inadequate data processing".

However, Dr. Trenberth often talks or writes as if there is some actual "missing energy" he expects to find one day, as opposed to tracking down measurement or processing errors, which may lead to confusion for some.

What Trenberth wrote in his original Science paper appears to place him very close to Hansen's view, i.e. that this is at present murky territory, except Hansen appears to be questioning how much heat models should be allocating to the deep ocean when Trenberth appears not to be.

Hansen discusses how difficult he thinks it is to measure Earth's energy imbalance accurately, starting on page 44 in Earth's Energy Imbalance and Implications.

Hansen says he thinks the Argo float system, if extended and maintained for the long term, added to other data on the smaller heat reservoirs, could provide "potentially accurate" data on Earth's energy balance, where it is less likely, in his view, that current or proposed satellites can.

Trenberth has written about the Argo system which, with some other fairly new items in the data collection arsenal, constitutes a "revolutionary" change in what scientists have available for analysis.

In the meantime, I think many are taking too much away from their reading of Dr. Trenberth. It seems to me he's using "missing energy" in the way particle physicists use the term, when their calculations involving the latest data prove to them, because nothing can be missing, that they're mistaken somewhere. Trenberth assessed the data available, added it up, and found what should not be able to be found if the data was complete and good, i.e., that something was "missing". He published his findings and went back to the drawing board, or computer model as it turned out.

Some seem to have problems with Dr. Trenberth's way of expressing himself. Most famously is the way his "missing energy" email was seized by deniers. But James Lovelock illustrates how badly someone can misunderstand Dr. Trenberth even if wilful distortion is not the goal. See Stewart Brand's online Afterword

In this Afterword, Brand quotes Lovelock telling him that after reading Trenberth's "missing energy" paper he decided that"something unknown appears to be slowing the rate of global warming", which caused Brand in his subsequent public speeches to describe a possibility that by 2050 "nothing" will have happened to Earth's climate. Further discussion of Brand's thought here Brand and Lovelock are wandering around touting the work of Garth Paltridge, specifically, this "sensible skeptic"s (Brand's words) book with its Foreword by Lord Monckton.

It seems Lovelock, via Trenberth, ended up at Monckton's front door. Yow.

Dr. Trenberth is clear when he talks about whether when describing things using this "missing energy" concept it means he thinks global warming has stopped - "the AGW signature is not large enough to overwhelm natural variability and so the trend from increased GHGs is only clear on time scales of 25 or more years. We used 25 years in Chapter 3 of IPCC as the lowest trend we provided that was meaningful.... So any pause in sfc T increase from 2000 to 2008 is not unexpected and the first 8 months of this year were the warmest on record and have restored the upward trend. So there is no evidence of a reduction in trend" (personal communication).

P.S. There are some great graphics N.O.A.A. provides that may make it clearer to some who wonder what El Nino/La Nina a.k.a. ENSO is. Imagine we've sliced into the ocean so we can get a 3D view of its heat content at various times during the ENSO cycle:

Hansen describes ENSO as heat "sloshing around" in the planetary system. As the hotter water spreads out its heat is more available for transfer into the atmosphere. When the hotter water forms a deeper pool there is less surface area for heat to come out of it into the air. Since by far most heat entering the planetary system is going into the ocean, and it sloshes around like this, it becomes more apparent how El Nino/La Nina can influence the average global surface temperature chart in the way it appears to do.

Hansen's Bjerknes Lecture had a chart showing the correlation between El Nino/La Nina (depicted at the bottom of his chart) and the average global surface temperature chart depicted at the top:

Of satellites and temperatures

Berényi Péter at 06:50 AM on 17 August, 2010

#21 doug_bostrom at 01:50 AM on 17 August, 2010
If there's a substantial issue it would be an error producing a trend artifact. Is there?

If there is one, it should be a secular downward trend in upper tropospheric humidity. Paltridge 2009 is still looming above.

He has used NCEP balloon radiosonde reanalysis data on face value and found considerable drying of upper troposphere. Of course there are known problems with radiosonde humidity measurements, but have a look at this graph (mid frame from Fig. 3 of the paper):

At 700 hPa (about 3000 m) temperature in the tropics is still well above freezing, so frost-related problems of humidity measurements can not possibly occur. I think this downward trend is particularly hard to be explained away.

If models used to convert brightness values in narrow microwave channels to proper temperatures do not take this trend into account, they can misidentify increased brightness due to increasing transparency of upper troposphere (making lower, warmer layers "visible" to satellites) to increasing temperature.

Theor Appl Climatol
DOI 10.1007/s00704-009-0117-x
Trends in middle- and upper-level tropospheric humidity from NCEP reanalysis data
Garth Paltridge, Albert Arking & Michael Pook
Received: 21 July 2008
Accepted: 4 February 2009
Published online: 26 February 2009

But not even average specific humidity has to decrease to fool model calculations. It is quite enough for horizontal humidity distribution to become a bit more uneven to increase average brightness. I do not know if we have ready-made data on trends in higher moments of humidity distribution, but it would worth the effort to have a peek.

How many climate scientists are climate skeptics?

Berényi Péter at 20:27 PM on 23 June, 2010

#81 doug_bostrom at 10:22 AM on 23 June, 2010
I would not call that article by Wu and Liu "fundamental" research. It attempts to refine application of fundamentals but it upsets no applecarts.

Thermodynamics of open systems (those exchanging energy with their environment) is not settled, possibly never will. A proposed 45% increase in the alleged entropy production rate of Earth (from 893 mW m^-2 K^-1 to 1297 mW m^-2 K^-1) is not an easygoing move. More than twenty years after the science of climate is publicly declared to be settled, at least in principle, with uncountable millions pouring into computational models simulating khrrrm... what?

I would be way happier with a paper discussing consensus in the climate science community not on AGW, but on a much simpler question.

Is the entropy production rate of the climate system supposed to increase (I) or decrease (D) as a response to increasing atmospheric CO₂ abundance?

I or D? Which one? Percentage of scientists supporting either one of these noble causes? Degree of consensus?

A story by Paltridge, one of the scientists on the list shows neatly how problematic fairly basic issues concerning non-equilibrium thermodynamics may get if one tries to apply them to climate (which is per definitionem a fairly steady state non-equilibrium process).

Entropy 2009, 11, 945-948;
doi:10.3390/e11040945
A Story and a Recommendation about the Principle of Maximum Entropy Production
Garth W. Paltridge

It is just a story, nothing serious. It tells more about the state of affairs in climate science than about climate itself.

Are we too stupid?

Marcus at 21:58 PM on 7 April, 2010

embb accuses me of setting up a "convenient straw man" in blaming the Oil Industry for the bulk of the skepticism out there. In truth, I'm just telling it as I see it. Look at the evidence:

Exhibit A: Heartland Institute. Major skeptical organization, has received funding from the Fossil Fuel industry over the years-particularly Exxon.

Exhibit B: George C Marshall Institute. Major skeptical organization which receives money from Exxon, amongst others, & has a former Exxon lobbyist, William O'Keefe, as its CEO.

Exhibit C: Global Climate Coalition. Another Skeptic Organization-now defunct-had members from a number of large oil & automobile companies, as well as a lobbyist for Exxon. It also received considerable funding from the Oil industry in particular.

Exhibit D: The Lavoisier Group. Key members are current or former members of Western Mining Corporation, Alcoa & other coal/mineral companies.

Exhibit E: major skeptics, such as Ian Plimer, William Kininmonth & Garth Paltridge are all members of the group named in Exhibit D.

So we see that, though not the source of *all* skepticism, the oil, coal & aluminium industries are definitely deeply involved in the skeptic "movement"-mostly because action against climate change will go against their short term interests. This isn't a straw man, its just THE FACTS!

Is the science settled?

HumanityRules at 13:24 PM on 25 March, 2010

"What's the uncertainty?" I don't know but.....

This analysis which takes the data through to 2007 (beyond trenberth). It shows a mixed picture of water vapour trends in the troposhere. It also suggests that present models have got things wrong. It also says
"Put the other way around, increases in total column water vapor in response to global warming do not necessarily indicate positive water vapor feedback, since very small decreases of water vapor in the mid-to-upper troposphere can negate the effect of large increases in the boundary layer."

Trends in middle- and upper-level tropospheric humidity
from NCEP reanalysis data.
Garth Paltridge & Albert Arking & Michael Pook
Theor Appl Climatol (2009) 98:351–359

So a "Straight dependence on temperature" seems a little to simplistic.

Skeptical Science now an iPhone app

Berényi Péter at 04:26 AM on 17 January, 2010

doug_bostrom at 17:23 PM on 16 January, 2010:

Post-diction is not the same as pre-diction. No amount of past data can make up the difference. A real world series can be reproduced by simple curve-fitting using only a few parameters if the dataset is given.

It is not a matter of perception, it\'s cold fact.

However, past data can and should be used to _falsify_ theory if possible.

It happens to be the case that the job is already done.

Theor Appl Climatol
DOI 10.1007/s00704-009-0117-x
Trends in middle- and upper-level tropospheric humidity from NCEP reanalysis data Garth Paltridge & Albert Arking & Michael Pook
Received: 21 July 2008 / Accepted: 4 February 2009 http://www.theclimatescam.se/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/paltridgearkingpook.pdf

35 years of upper troposphere radiosonde water vapor measurements show a definitive downward trend. It is on a pressure level where the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere really matters for IR radiation can escape from there diretly to space as opposed to sea level from where only a narrow IR window is available to this end, the air being opaque otherwise. In other words this is the very photosphere of Earth.

All models based on the assumption of roughly constant relative humidity in the upper troposphere are disqualified. Period.

It is as simple as that.

We are left with two hard facts.

1. Atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing 2. Upper troposphere specific humidity is decreasing

Unfortunately there is no theoretical explanation as yet.

It suggests however, that viable models should show no net long term energy gain at TOA (Top of Atmosphere), ASR (Absorbed Shortwave Radiation) and OLR (Outgoing Longwave Radiation) being in balance due to roughly constant net greenhouse gas contents of photosphere.

Satellite ASR measurements are not reliable enough to be able to falsify this hypothesis. Even OLR measurements may have a large systematic error.

Balloon radiosonde measurements, as they are routinely used in daily weather forecast practice, are verified. Orders of magnitude more honest work went into data quality control on that area then into the entire field of climete research. The weatherguys\' performance is evaluated on a daily basis. Not only by the general public, but by the Navy, Airforce, civil air traffic control and the like as well.

You can see that there is considerable regional variation in upper troposphere specific humidity trends. Recently we have also learned that carbon dioxide is not as well mixed in upper troposphere as previously thought.

Pielke is right. Global averages are not too important, their long term trend may even be zero. It does not mean however, that the ocean/atmosphere system (biosphere included) is not trying to adapt to increased CO2 levels. And in doing so it may do funny things.

Understanding Trenberth's travesty

Berényi Péter at 14:38 PM on 30 December, 2009

John, you miss the point. It's rather irrelevant if Trenberth is believing in "global warming" or not. To be sure, he apparently does not believe in the possibility of radiation budget imbalances on the order of 6.4 W/m^2 like you do. For this is what's "observed by satellites".

But his alternative, "the TOA energy imbalance can probably be most accurately determined from climate models" is in no way better. It implies "correcting" the (mis)measured imbalance according to a model, then certifying the model by the imbalance found. Bit circular.

It turns out however, that TOA energy imbalance can be and is measured after all. By Argo floats, not satellites.

http://wo.jcommops.org/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Argo
http://www.bodc.ac.uk/projects/international/argo/project_overview/

Indirectly, of course. It's elementary thermodynamics. Global OHC (Ocean Heat Content) "anomaly" should be nearly proportional to the time integral of the "TOA energy imbalance" (integrating incoming and outgoing flux difference for an epoch on the surface of the globe, that is). Both specific heat of water and its quantity on Earth are enormous.

http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/

You can see on the NODC site that OHC is flat for the last five years. It also happens to be the time interval we have reliable data. For Argo coverage only reached a reasonable level at the end of 2003 (and was completed by 2007). Earlier "measurements" of OHC are guesswork.

Flat OHC means zero imbalance.

Incoming SW radiation is equal to OLR. No trapping.

It's easy to see why. As atmospheric CO2 concentration goes up, upper troposphere gets drier (documented), overall IR optical depth constant. No "greenhouse effect".

Models predicting imbalance are disqualified.

Trenberth, unlike you, knows his stuff. He is referring to Argo findings. "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't."

The only problem is that he failed to put this fact into a press release. He dared not.

Theor Appl Climatology
DOI 10.1007/s00704-009-0117-x
Trends in middle- and upper-level tropospheric humidity
from NCEP reanalysis data
Garth Paltridge & Albert Arking & Michael Pook
Received: 21 July 2008 / Accepted: 4 February 2009
http://www.theclimatescam.se/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/paltridgearkingpook.pdf

"it is important that the trends of water vapor shown by the NCEP data for the middle and upper troposphere should not be "written off" simply on the basis that they are not supported by climate models"

That's it.

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