As usual, it's the elephant stamps that do the heavy feminist climate science lifting ... or some such thing ...

(Above: click to enlarge).


Funny, in the funny peculiar way beloved of Miranda the Devine, thought for the day?

Our nuns taught us the meaning of selflessness, and told us we could be anything we wanted to be. They were the original feminists, though they were builders, not wreckers. (An Easter message of hope).

First of all you have to enjoy bitter, twisted and warped logic.

You see nuns were the original feminists. But the original feminists and every feminist ever since has been a wrecker. QED, there has to be a different kind of original feminist, builders, not wreckers, and you can only find decent builder feminists in the Catholic church.

Yes, it's the reason you can't take a single word the Devine says seriously, because if there was ever a wrecker, full of bile and contempt, and certainly not a builder ...

Driven mad at an early age by Catholic fundamentalism, she's stayed that way ever since:

My earliest memory is of a kind and brilliant nun, Sister St John, who taught me at a French school in Tokyo. She paid special attention to spelling and writing and gave me badges at the end of each week. She was so enthusiastic and encouraging that my whole life’s aim at that time was to please her.

Oh dear. It's worth bearing this in mind should you happen to stumble across the Devine writing about modern educational practices in pieces like The Gonski Illusion.

More badges and pens and stamps and special stars please, it's the only way forward. Oh and Gregorian chanting, lots of Gregorian chanting, just in case the rapture comes tomorrow ...

Meanwhile, in other news, Tony "climate science is crap" Abbott maintains the rage in relation to climate science, abolishing this, that and the other, as noted in Abbott to 'shoot messenger' on climate.

Uh huh, the pond feels a special column in The Australian coming on. The true believers have been out and about publishing alarming reports, and that's just not on.

Come on down Murry Salby, and scribble furiously Last summer was not actually angrier than other summers (behind the paywall so you can pay for the science if you chose, or listen to people who'll tell you things for free without lurking behind a Murdoch paywall).

Naturally Salby, who wears the professor of climate title at Macquarie University like an inviolable shield, is shocked, indignant and outraged at the crap climate scientists have been putting out recently:

Claims from the latest report by the Climate Commission, titled The Angry Summer, have been widely circulated through international media. On the basis of a few sporadic episodes, which in any other era would have been regarded as marginal weather (infrequent but perennial), the Climate Commission has proclaimed that such events are now the norm - the signature of climate change come home to roost. This report is but the latest in a series of dire proclamations from this panel. It just happens to buttress the government's controversial carbon tax, a maladroit policy that will be pivotal in the forthcoming federal election.

Do you like it? Maladroit policy?

The pond has a droit policy to hand.

Sack Tim Flannery, who after all, as Mr. Abbott notes, gives us the benefit of his views without taxpayer funding, and put Murry Salby in his place, so that we may learn that the mass of climate scientists are in the grip of a massive hallucination.

No doubt Mr. Salby graced the pages of The Australian without anything so sordid as an actual payment for his column - he surely does it for the scientific glory and the community service involved - and it's that kind of forward, disinterested community thinking the world needs right now ...

You see, everything is steady as she goes, and there's nothing to see here. Move along people.

Oh before you move along, let's just note that the Climate Commission consists of a bunch of politically appointed hacks, unlike Murry Salby, who understands and sees the light with an unnerving and astonishingly singular awareness.

And the data these hacks used are a singular mess of routinely rejigged, corrupt, discretionary, arbitrary figures - we'd be tempted to say deliberately fraudulent if it weren't for the issue of slander or defamation involved - and it's only Murry Salby through the dint of his own universal understanding and diligence  that understands how deeply flawed that other data is. Why the rogues can barely tell the weather in Sydney from one day to the next ...

Only Prof Salby's own data can be relied upon with any objectivity and certainty, though it might well turn out in due course that the data he interprets springs from the very same sources, routinely adjusted, obsolete, discretionary, randomly applied, with said adjustments understood by very few, though that chosen few includes Murry Salby, of course.

It almost goes without saying, but the pond and Murry Salby will say it anyway, just so you can understand you understand nothing, or very little ...

Now all this might sound a little problematic, so we must dress it up with scientific discourse:

Contamination by urban development. Operational thermometers historically have been installed in association with human settlement. Station measurements are therefore biased through the so-called urban heat island effect. 
Consequently, individual measurements are often representative of localised conditions, but not of the expansive area. 
Non-uniform sampling of the continent. Owing to Australia's sparse population, historical records of temperature are concentrated in a small fraction of the continent. 
Exacerbated by their proximity to infrastructure, the irregular sampling by the surface network complicates the evaluation of continental mean temperature.

This sounds shocking and alarming. It seems there's simply no data to be trusted.

Oh wait, Murry Salby has his very own data, derived from satellites, and the data, which is uniform and reliable and consistent, proves conclusively that everything's well in the world.

 Naturally there are a couple of graphs in support in Salby's piece - where would climate science be without graphs - and the news is most excellent:

Figure 2 displays the record of anomalous temperature for all months. It places the summer of 2012-13 into perspective. Anomalous temperature (red solid circles) lies well within the envelope of other warm anomalies during the preceding three decades. Cold anomalies are just as numerous. If anything, they are even stronger.

It's true you know. Right at this minute, if the pond looks out the window, it's a relatively chilly and sodden autumn day in Sydney. What more conclusive evidence do you want?

Please confirm this Murry Salby:

For many on Australia's eastern seaboard, this summer was not anomalously hot but, rather, anomalously cool and wet. This is confirmed by the temperature record at Sydney. The central station reported only two marginal days. And during the entire summer maximum temperature reached 32C on only three days.

Yes, yes, the data we had conclusively dismissed as distorted, fabricated, futile, useless, arbitrary, and heat sink irrelevant actually confirm the satellite data! It's been wet and inclined to chilliness in Sydney.

You see! The temperature record for the central station on the ground in Sydney confirms everything.

And then comes a flourish worthy of the Bolter:

In the light of the satellite record, as well as the absence of any systematic change in global temperature for almost two decades, the proclaimed interpretation of this summer should be recognised for what it is: a simplistic explanation of a complex physical system.

Which is of course completely unlike yabbering about the temperature record in Sydney, because unlike the pond with its petty Sydney-centric ways, Murry Salby would never ever look to the temperature record at Sydney involving completely useless central station records ...

He wouldn't for example fall in to the trap of the mindless stupidity of Craig Kelly MP, member for Hughes, explaining it all in Global Warming? .... It was warmer in Sydney in 1790.

Yes you have to do the hard yards if you want to get out and about in denialist circles, and see what's coming when Tony "climate science is crap" and his team of denialists sweep into government.

Happily the pond is currently preparing its own paper, Global Warming? What global warming ... it was warmer in what would become Sydney in ten million B.C. when that hottie Raquel Welch roamed the earth with dinosaurs and maybe Ringo Starr ...

Naturally you can find alarmist alternative views presented by and for the cardigan-wearers at the ABC, as in Top scientists agree climate has chanted for good.

But you might not be satisifed. You might trot off to the Scientific American and read Global Average Temperatures Are Close to 11,000-Year Peak. (reprehensibly the rogues who wrote that report use all sorts of data)

You might even browse all the recent pieces in the Scientific American gathered under the tag Global Warming.

It will be a futile, useless browse.

These rogue scientists actually think that climate change is happening,  relying on their simplistic explanations of complex physical systems that only competent scientists like Murry Salby can understand .. by talking about the weather in Sydney.

Happily Prof Salby has dumbed down his incredibly complex understanding of a complex physical system so dumb readers of The Australian can feel comfortable and relaxed in this crazy, crazy world ... or at least the ones living in Sydney.

Harumph, all this talk of global warming, and it's been deuced wet and cold in Sydney this summer. Why the pond only has to look out the window to know the truth ...

And now it's time to say toodeloo old chums and toddle off, because we have  the pond's next scientific study to prepare, which explains why looking at the horizon by getting up on a tall building in Sydney and looking out to sea is a sure guide to why the earth is flat ...

Strange, we were looking around for collaborators and couldn't find any. It turns out that Lord Monckton has finished his tour of the provinces down under, and right at this moment is enlightening New Zealand, and yet there hasn't been a beep or a boo from him in The Australian ... though he's been terribly busy launching important political parties ...

How lucky we all are that there are others who can step up to the plate ...

(Below: a shocking scientific distortion. Everyone knows that elephants do the heavy lifting).

See. This drawn from satellite data:

Phew. That's enough science for the day.