Posts by Mat Ballard

Oz teachers lugging obsolete lappies

That's a pretty good deal for a government department!

This is fairly typical of government departments.

Where I worked IT purchasing managed to obtain Dell laptops that had lower specs than could be obtained on their websites, at prices about 40% higher.

'Missing heat': Is global warmth vanishing into space?

Yawn. Not another Spencer "paper"

Yawn.

Here we go again.

Is this the 8th or 9th time Roy Spencer has "disproved" global warming ?

If a 2nd year phys chem student handed in a "paper" like this, with no error analysis, they would be told where to shove it.

For a complete analysis of its flaws see:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/07/misdiagnosis-of-surface-temperature-feedback/

Aussie synchrotron in doubt after Victoria pulls funding

Build it and they will come

This synchrotron was a technological and scientific "Field of Dreams", based on the proposition that Australian industry - you know, those "hewers and wood and diggers of soil", would be beating the gates down in their haste to use its marvelousness.

Oh no they didn't !

The tragedy was that the several hundred million dollars invested so far could have funded an awful lot of real science and scientists.

Researchers: Arctic cooled to pre-industrial levels from 1950-1990

Faking the hockey stick

The reason why it's so easy to create a hockey stick in an analysis like Mann's is because the hockey stick is in the raw data:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/07/the-montford-delusion/

The hard trick is to fudge it away :D

Soot, hydrofluorocarbs 'low-hanging fruit' to fight warming

Ignorance is bliss

Ignorance is bliss, isn't it ?

Even a rudimentary search on the effect of water vapour would show you that it has a residence time in the atmosphere of about 5 days - at which point it turns into rain somewhere. So adding more water vapour to the atmosphere is literally pissing in the wind - and has as just as little effect.

In contrast, CO2 stays in the atmosphere and biosphere for several tens of thousand of years :(

And a slightly bigger search would show you that decline in the ratio of atmospheric CO2 13C:12C is due to the burning of (13C depleted) fossil fuels. Yes folks, that's our CO2 piling up there!

And what did Arrhenius work out 100 years ago? CO2 absorbs infra-red radiation (heat), so adding more CO2 to the atmosphere causes it to heat up, by absorbing more of the the infra-red radiated by the earth's surface.

And that's what's been seen in the three surface temperature data sets (GISSTemp, HadCRUt and NCDC), and the satellite data.

This isn't rocket science. The only complicated part is calculating exactly what the temperature rise will be, and how fast, for a given CO2 concentration. And guess what: the calculations (models) match up very well with the observed temperature changes, even after events like volcanic eruptions.

In particular, the "smoking gun" for many scientists is that models successfully predicted both the rise in surface air temperature and the *decline* in stratospheric air temperatures. No other proposed cause of global warming leads to a *decline* in stratosphere temperatures.

ps: the emissions from a hydrogen "fuel" cell (water vapour) are in fact harmless - but the emissions from making the hydrogen in the first place are not !

Drought effect on rainforests is negligible

Dr Mat

First of all, congratulations on being one of the few anti-AGW journalists who permit pro-AGW posts on your site.

As for some convincing evidence, have a quick look at:

http://www.csiro.au/resources/State-of-the-Climate.html

Note that this was personally authorized by the CEO of CSIRO, Dr Megan Clark, who spent most of her career in that well-know greenie leftist bunch called "Western Mining Corporation", followed by those tree-hugging commies in BHP Billiton, which owns most of the coal in Australia.

Or, if you want something that is a bit more meaty and globally orientated, try:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/

I'm a sceptic now, says ex-NASA climate boss

More FUD from a professional sceptic

You are confusing two completely different issues, and twisting Dr Theon's words:

1. The inadequacy of the computer models that attempt to predict future climate (with which many scientists agree with Dr Theon criticisms);

2. One set of data on global temperatures, and issues with the accuracy of those results.

You (and Dr Theon) are also ignoring dozens of other phenomena that point to global warming: loss of glaciers, loss of sea-ice from the Arctic and Antarctic, increasing frequency of and damage from severe storm events, changes in sea-level, and so on. And you are ignoring the ice records from Lake Vostok, Domes C and F, and others, which clearly show a very strong link between CO2 levels and global temperatures.

To paraphrase the good book, do not try to remove the mote from Dr Hansen's eye until you take the log out of your own!

The return of Killer Chlorine

TriHalo Methanes CAN be a problem

While the original work on the toxicity of TriHalo Methanes (THMs are a byproduct of the chlorination or ozonation of water) was not the greatest, it is not the only work on the subject, and the general consensus in the water treatment industry is that high concentrations of THMs in drinking water are undesirable. As a consequence, there are legislative limits to their concentration in many countries.

The issue is quite similar to radioactivity: what happens when you expose a large population to very low doses of a probably toxic material over a long period of time, and what do you do about it ? The practical engineer does a cost analysis of the benefits and the risks, and then builds in sufficient safeguards to minimize the overall costs to society. Unfortunately, there are always a few lunatics at both ends of the spectrum who ignore either the risks (Chernobyl) or the benefits (chlorination in Peru).