Day 32 and the pond dallies with some world-class climate science ...

It's no doubt serendipity that David Pope should have led with this cartoon ... and more Pope here ... because the world of the BOMsters has been agog with talk of temperature records, and extreme weather events, and charts and graphs and studies ...

Like this one ...

But the pond pays no heed to this sort of nonsense, because when in doubt it always turns to the world's greatest climate scientist ... well, second only to Maurice of course ...

Now the Bolter has been offering his usual insightful commentaries and mounting a most successful crusade for the return of Malware's government ...

Well you know where that link leads us, to the reptiles of Oz, already featured on these pages, and is's passing strange, because the pond thought former chairman Tony was channeling former chairman Rudd - after all he's here to help - but these sorts of distractions shouldn't take away attention from more important issues:

Indeed, indeed. And naturally that speculation - if global warmists are capable of this dodgy stuff, what else are they saying that's false? - could only be matched by other speculations - if the Bolter is routinely stupid on one day, is he demonstrably stupid every other day?

But that's the sort of rigorous scientific enquiry that the pond loves.

Now it would be remiss of the pond not to provide a link to Don Atkin's excellent piece here, with his talk of closed minds, quasi-religious beliefs and scares and intellectually lost souls, because that's exactly the kind of rigorous scientific language that the pond misses, having mistakenly headed off into the y'artz when a career in science beckoned ....

And it would be remiss of the pond not to provide a gloss of Atkins' most excellent scientific record, as he outlines here.

Atkins first studied history at the UNE, and then he became a professor of politics, and then he became a vice chancellor, and along the way, he became involved in science, research and higher education policy, and then on retirement, he kept up an interest in research policy, and then he became interested in the ACT’s cultural facilities and in road safety, and in music, and as an academic in the social sciences and humanities, he’s done a lot of writing for newspapers and such like and appeared as a talking head on the goggle box …

And so on.

The pond couldn’t possibly imagine a career more perfectly placed to provide deep insights into climate science … as opposed to those quasi-religious frauds who work at BOM and such like places and are out in the field and doing and observing things.

Why his qualifications are almost as exceptional as the Bolters’, though perhaps he lacks the Bolters’ fine awareness of art and opera.

Some on the other hand, perverse and disagreeable souls, like to head off to read actual reports from actual people who have spent time on the ground observing actual events, as the pond did in a moment of distraction, when it read Dexter Filkins' The End of Ice in The New Yorker ... which happily for the moment is outside the paywall.

Filkins' story looks at the Himalayan glaciers on the Indian side, and the gist is that they're melting at a remarkable rate, though the research tools deployed are primitive, because few in India care and there's not much money for the research (the pond has compressed the paragraphing):

Standing at Stake 12, Azam measured how much of the stick was poking above the snow: about thirty inches. Then he used the G.P.S. device to determine the stick’s precise location. He was hoping to learn two things. The first was how much snow had been lost since 2013, when he was last on Chhota Shigri. It’s a simple calculation: if there’s more snow against the stakes than there was in 2013, then the glacier grew; if not, it shrank. “This seems like a normal amount of melt, but I won’t know until I get back to the lab,” he said. The second measurement was the glacier’s thickness. On a previous visit, Azam’s colleagues, using ground-penetrating radar, had charted the base of the glacier, where the ice meets the earth. Now, by measuring the elevation at various points, he could calculate the glacier’s thickness. The data from this trip would take Azam months to sort out. But in previous years the patterns were clear. In 2009, the ice near Stake 12 was four hundred and twenty feet thick. In 2013, it had thinned to three hundred and ninety feet. Ranjan was far behind us now, moving slowly but waving every so often to signal that he was O.K. At Ablation Stake 11, Azam took another measurement, gauging how much the stake had moved down the glacier. When snow accumulates on the surface of a glacier, its weight pushes the ice forward and down. Using the G.P.S. beacon, Azam calculated the location; since 2013, Stake 11 had moved about a hundred feet down the glacier. “All these measurements show us that the glacier is shrinking,” he said. Indeed, most of the other omens were not good: the Indian monsoon season in 2015 was among the driest in decades, and Chhota Shigri appears to have received less snow. The center line of the glacier, known as the medial moraine, was strewn with boulders that had tumbled and drifted down from the peak. Around many of them, the snow had melted away, leaving them perched like giant mushrooms on stems of snow. Stopping at one boulder, marked with red paint, Azam lay the G.P.S. device on top and calculated its location and elevation to find the speed of the glacier’s flow. As we trudged up the glacier, Azam stopped using his instruments and simply looked around, searching for clues to how Chhota Shigri was changing. His vision was uncanny; he spotted a pile of boulders that appeared to be of a different mineral than the ones around them. “You see those? They are not from here,” Azam said. They had originated high up on the glacier and moved all the way down. At one point, we stopped, and Azam gestured to where one of the glacier’s main tributaries jutted off. “It seems to be detaching itself from the main glacier,” he said. “That’s because the glacier is thinning.” 

How did the story end? (Spoiler alert):

The day before, I had stood with Azam as he prepared for another ascent. Tethered to a lone porter, he planned to climb to seventeen thousand feet and examine the ablation stakes planted there. In the coming year, Azam and other scientists plan to publish a number of papers based on research performed in the region, in the hope of filling the gap in knowledge. 
There is still little money in India for this kind of work, but the government seems to be slowly coming to appreciate its importance. In the weeks before the recent climate talks in Paris, some Indian politicians insisted that they should not have to restrict their country’s energy consumption to fix a problem that was mostly not of their making. 
Ahead of the conference, though, India agreed to significant reforms, including greater efforts in the Himalayas, and afterward the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, announced that “climate justice has won.” 
I asked Azam what he thought would happen to Chhota Shigri, whether it could survive global warming. “I am not going to save this glacier,” he said. “I am just going to find out what is happening.” He turned and looked up at the peak in front of him. 
“Once I do that, the next step will be to decide what has to be done. But these things don’t depend on science. They depend on politics.”

Now you can multiply these field observations by the hundreds from all over the place, and throw in heaps of data, and all you'll get back is talk closed minds, quasi-religious beliefs and scares.

Never mind, guided by Atkins and the Bolter, the pond knew at once what needed to be done to secure the future.

Burn more coal! Ship more coal to India! Mine more coal. Do it now!

It was the only way ahead that guaranteed the future of the Himalayan glaciers and the Great Barrier Reef ... and we could all feel at one with teh Donald, another incredible climate scientist.

Oh yes, and by the way, the pond also has a degree the y'artz from UNE.

How ironic and post-reflexive is that?

Strangely, it was supposed to train the pond to spot humbug, and simplistic arguments by people who really didn't have much of a clue but stick to their cluelessness with a religious fervour. It seems Atkins and the Bolter were absent from class that day ...

And so to a nice little drawing a kindly reader sent to the pond. See if you can spot the Bolter in it ...