In which the pond travels to plucky little England, before settling on some Killer science ...

 

The pond vividly remembers the time it was told as a child to stop hitting its head with a hammer ... the sense of relief was matched by the temptation to pick up the hammer again, on seeing petulant Peta back at the lizard Oz...

The pond hadn't even noticed her absence, yet on checking it was way back on August 4th that she scribbled a piece for the reptiles headed Dutton's Liberals must have guts to speak out against Indigenous voice ...

No longer having need of a hammer, the pond ignored her then, and so feels free to ignore her now, especially as "guts" seems to have transformed into "tensions" in "voice debate."

What a pathetic, wretched, wannabe shit-stirrer she is, but what then for the pond on a sodden Thursday?

The pond notes that Killer is out and about, but will save that as a treat for further down the page. Got to have something to keep the avid devotees of lizard Oz climate science scrolling down the page ...

In the interim, the pond thought it might turn to Carling and the current UK crisis. 

Last night the pond's logarithms went into a meltdown, with Sky News popping up at regular intervals with alarming news of the state of the pound - at one point it had hit an all time low of  US$1.03 - the IMF writing a note as if to a third world country, and a general sense of gloom and crisis and despair ... as a couple of rabid ideologues went about the business of wrecking everything still standing ...

What a relief to find not a whisper of all that in Carling ...

Meanwhile, on an entirely different planet ...

It wasn't just the Graudian, the Murdochians also seemed to realise something was afoot ...

And there was an added comical touch, which should have excited all those Brexit types with their feral fear of furriners ...

So much for plucky little England, pressing on alone against the cheese eating surrender monkeys, the rest of Europe and the world ...

Meanwhile, on planet Carling ...

Did the dear lad mention trickle down? We all know that warm feeling on the back of the neck, and the pleasure to be found in a Rowson cartoon taking the piss...

Meanwhile, the pond's logarithms continue to go wild, with Sky News - no longer a Murdochian brand - in wild-eyed meltdown ...

Tory backbenchers fuming as ministers deny economic turmoil ...

They weren't the only ones fuming ... Marina Hyde was positively smoking in The markets are in meltdown - but at least Kwasi Kwarteng's doomsday cult isn't to blame ...

And the punsters were out and about ...

Meanwhile, a last gasp from Carling, reporting from another planet ...

Ah, there's no way of knowing, a gamble with every chance of success, if you happen to be in the 1%, a bold experiment, wonders to be worked ...

And then there was Crace, crashing through in his usual way ...

Librium Liz and Kamikwasi couldn’t believe their eyes. First the IMF had morphed into a dangerous leftwing terrorist organisation. Worse than that, a woke, dangerous leftwing terrorist organisation. One that embraced Starmer’s touchy-feely fiscal rules. That’s the last time the Tories would be going to Davos – the Cuba of central Europe.

As for the bond markets, they were obviously crashing because financial traders were terrified of an IMF-backed Labour party. Er … Let’s think that one through. No one had heard of Labour before the Tories’ not-so-mini budget last week. Maybe not. Let’s try this. The markets were scared that Labour would crash the economy. Unlike the Conservatives who had already done that. Perhaps not again. Maybe, then, the traders were also secret socialists and had only increased bond yields to 4.5% just to topple Librium Liz. Nuts, but these are the mad excuses that were passing off as rational explanations in government circles.

It wasn’t just the economy that was crashing. It was people’s neural networks. Seldom has so much stupidity been concentrated in such a small area. Kamikwasi could be heard begging bankers not to make money by betting against the pound. Fool. Hadn’t he heard they had uncapped bonuses to make?

But enough of the splendid English sensa huma, which the pond has always enjoyed, as it marched across the Andes by frog ... it's on to the usual Thursday Killer ... and lordy lordy he really kills with this outing ...

The pond was exceptionally pleased that Killer raised Koonin, a physicist - why are they always physicists? - because it allows the pond to link to a story in the Scientific American ... it was by Gary Yohe, and not so long ago, in May 2021, and headed A New Book Manages to Get Climate Science Badly Wrong, and it began ...

Steven Koonin, a former undersecretary for science of the Department of Energy in the Obama administration, but more recently considered for an advisory post to Scott Pruitt when he was administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, has published a new book. Released on May 4 and entitled Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, its major theme is that the science about the Earth’s climate is anything but settled. He argues that pundits and politicians and most of the population who feel otherwise are victims of what he has publicly called “consensus science.”

Koonin is wrong on both counts. The science is stronger than ever around findings that speak to the likelihood and consequences of climate impacts, and has been growing stronger for decades. In the early days of research, the uncertainty was wide; but with each subsequent step that uncertainty has narrowed or become better understood. This is how science works, and in the case of climate, the early indications detected and attributed in the 1980s and 1990s, have come true, over and over again and sooner than anticipated.

This is not to say that uncertainty is being eliminated, but decision makers have become more comfortable dealing with the inevitable residuals. They are using the best and most honest science to inform prospective investments in abatement (reducing greenhouse gas emissions to diminish the estimated likelihoods of dangerous climate change impacts) and adaptation (reducing vulnerabilities to diminish their current and projected consequences).

Koonin’s intervention into the debate about what to do about climate risks seems to be designed to subvert this progress in all respects by making distracting, irrelevant, misguided, misleading and unqualified statements about supposed uncertainties that he thinks scientists have buried under the rug. 

Here, I consider a few early statements in his own words. They are taken verbatim from his introductory pages so he must want the reader to see them as relevant take-home findings from the entire book. They are evaluated briefly in their proper context, supported by findings documented in the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It is important to note that Koonin recognizes this source in his discussion of assessments, and even covers the foundations of the confidence and likelihood language embedded in its findings (specific references from the IPCC report are presented in brackets).

Two such statements by Koonin followed the simple preamble “For example, both the literature and government reports that summarize and assess the state of climate science say clearly that…”:

• “Heat waves in the US are now no more common than they were in 1900, and that the warmest temperatures in the US have not risen in the past fifty years.” (Italics in the original.) This is a questionable statement depending on the definition of “heat wave”, and so it is really uninformative. Heat waves are poor indicators of heat stress. Whether or not they are becoming more frequent, they have clearly become hotter and longer over the past few decades while populations have grown more vulnerable in large measure because they are, on average, older [Section 19.6.2.1]. Moreover, during these longer extreme heat events, it is nighttime temperatures that are increasing most. As a result, people never get relief from insufferable heat and more of them are at risk of dying.

• “The warmest temperatures in the US have not risen in the past fifty years.” According to what measure? Highest annual global averages? Absolutely not. That the planet is has warmed since the industrial revolution is unequivocal with more than 30 percent of that warming having occurred over the last 25 years, and the hottest annual temperatures in that history have followed suit [Section SPM.1].

And so on and so endlessly forth, and that's the delight with Killer, because he unfailingly tuns to terrible sources, and so the pond gets to learn things ...

With What's on base, Who's up next?

Ah, he had to lead off that gobbet with an old faithful, the gushing geyser known as Shellenberger ...

A casual googler would be overwhelmed by the references to this lad, but the pond will select just one ... a bunch of wild-eyed scientists going a little feral ... about an article promoting his tome (the pond prefers the pretentiousness of tome because of that echo of tomb ...

Zeke Hausfather, Director of Climate and Energy, The Breakthrough Institute:

Shellenberger’s article promoting his new book “Apocalypse Never” includes a mix of accurate, misleading, and patently false statements. While it is useful to push back against claims that climate change will lead to the end of the world or human extinction, to do so by inaccurately downplaying real climate risks is deeply problematic and counterproductive.

Shellenberger’s claims that climate plays no role in natural disasters and wildfires fly in the face of a large peer-reviewed scientific literature showing clear links between climate change and extreme heat events, drought, and extreme rainfall as well as links between hotter and drier conditions and wildfire areas burned in many regions of the world[1-4].

Shellenberger also falls into the trap of seeing a single technology (nuclear) as the one true solution to climate change, and mistakenly sees denigrating other clean energy technologies as the best way to promote it. The real world involves messy trade-offs and uncertainties, and decarbonization will involve a range of different technological solutions across industries and geographies rather than a single panacea.

Stefan Doerr, Professor, Swansea University:

The article argues that society has been misled about causes and consequences of climate change, which has led to “climate alarmism.” The author advocates that we should be less concerned about climate change than many environmentalists argue. Whilst the latter is relative depending on how concerned an individual is and which specific (and perhaps extreme) view this aligns with, some of the supporting statements in the article related to wildfire are (i) inaccurate for key facts supporting argumentation, or (ii) omit important information that leads to flaws in the conclusions.

“Climate change is not making natural disasters worse”.

This is incorrect for wildfires. Several global climate trends promote fire: increased temperature, frequency, intensity and/or extent of heatwaves, droughts and extreme winds. This is very well established and summarised in the IPCC (2014) report[1,2].

“Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003″.

It is correct that the total global area burned has OVERALL declined over the last decades, BUT this is incorrectly used to argue that climate change is not affecting wildfires. The overall decrease is largely due a substantial reduction in flammable vegetation in African grasslands arising from human land use changes. Climate change has led to an increase in area burned in regions where fires burn more intensely and have a greater impact (e.g. western USA and Canada)[18,19]. This is omitted, leading to a false perception.

“The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California”.

Partially correct[17], but the assertion that the climate change related factors outlined above do not also contribute to increasingly “dangerous fires” is fundamentally flawed. It is comparable to suggesting that smoking alone and not obesity is responsible for an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. Both factors are clearly important.

Daniel Swain, Climate Scientist, University of California, Los Angeles:

The article presents a mix of out-of-context facts and outright falsehoods to reach conclusions that are, collectively, fundamentally misleading. The author claims to reference specific sources, including “the IPCC, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), [and] the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).” However, the author’s claims are broadly unsupported by any of these authoritative bodies[1].

Gerardo Ceballos, Professor, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico:

This is not a scientific paper. It is intended, I guess, to be an article for the general public. Unfortunately, it is neither. It does not have a logical structure that allows the reader to understand what he would like to address, aside from a very general and misleading idea that environmentalists and climate scientists have been alarmist in relation to climate change. He lists a series of eclectic environmental problems like the Sixth Mass Extinction, green energy, and climate disruption. And without any data nor any proof, he discredits the idea that those are human-caused, severe environmental problems. He just mentions loose ideas about why he is right and the rest of the scientists, environmentalists, and general public are wrong. Being objective, this is a really bad article. It will cause confusion among the public—perhaps that is his idea.

And so on and so endlessly forth, but the pond must now turn to expert killer climate scientist Killer for a last gobbet ...

The pond was reminded that only a few days ago it began with ...

Is this the silliest 'wondering why' of the year?

...we asked Graham Lloyd and his editor Chris Dore why they did not highlight any of those studies or conclusions, or mention them in the article. And why they failed to tell readers of some of the authors’ history of climate scepticism. 

They did not respond. 

But you have to wonder why The Australian lets its Environment Editor cherry-pick claims from climate sceptics and deniers and publish them without challenge from the vast majority of climate scientists who say they are wrong.

You have to wonder why? 

Why? What's with the wondering? After all these years, isn't it apparent? As the scorpion said to the frog, it's in my nature. 

The pond would be startled, shocked, if they changed their nature. It's a tricky, hard thing to do at the best of times and the lizard Oz's entire business model has depended on climate science denialism for decades.

Scorpion, say hello to Media Watch frog ... yet again and for at least the umpteenth time ...

And so to cartoonists ably keeping the pond in touch and entertained by the local issues of the day ...