Rooinek, your list looks impressive, but I would first like to know which of those organisations do get grants from their government. Those that do get support can easily adopt an attitude of why would they bite the hand that feed them.
Now my 2c contribution:
Challenging climate change claims. Source: HeraldSun
NOT once when boarding a jet have I thought of ducking into the cockpit to give the pilot tips on engine thrust or fuel loads. He’s the expert. Still, if I’d booked for Bali only to land in Karachi I would know this: whatever the pilot’s credentials, he’d goofed.
I thought such a principle was so obvious that all laymen would consult it in every contact with any professional. Your extension falls down? Sue the builder.
But in one tiny yet catastrophically expensive field of human endeavour this law has been suspended. Yes, climate science.
This is the science where one plus one can equal three one day and six the next — yet never may we question the expert.
This must change and I believe, finally, that it is. The common sense of the layman is at last being restored.
Hey, didn’t you guys say it would never flood? Then what’s this stuff that’s washed my car down the Queensland street? Hmm, didn’t you also predict runaway warming? So why these 16 years of non-warming? Think I’ll get me new experts.
See, after more than a decade of scares, we are now getting the years of the busted predictions — that “Er, this isn’t Bali” moment at the top of the aeroplane stairs.
Here are just some of those moments that give us not just a reason to doubt the alarmists, but a duty.
In 2009 Professor Tim Flannery, now Climate Council head, warned: “The soil is warmer because of global warming ... So even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and our river systems.”
In fact: Queensland, NSW and Victoria have since suffered severe floods. Dams in Brisbane, Sydney and Canberra have all filled.
In 2007 Flannery predicted: “In Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane, water supplies are so low they need desalinated water urgently, possibly in as little as 18 months.”
In fact: Both Sydney and Brisbane’s dams are today more than 81 per cent full. Adelaide’s catchments are 75 per cent full. Sydney and Brisbane have mothballed their desalination plants. Adelaide is about to.
In 2009 Bertrand Timbal, a Bureau of Meteorology climatologist, predicted: “The rainfall we had in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s was a benchmark, but we are just not going to have that sort of good rain again as long as the system is warming up.”
In fact: The bureau has since declared 2010 and 2011 “Australia’s wettest two-year period on record”.
In 1999 Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change lead author, predicted oceans would get so warm that mass bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef would occur every second year from 2010.
In fact: The last mass bleaching occurred in 2006.
In 2000 Hoegh-Guldberg claimed “we now have more evidence that corals cannot fully recover from bleaching episodes such as the major event in 1998”.
In fact: The Australian Institute of Marine Science reports “most reefs recovered fully”.
In 2007 Professor Mike Archer, dean of science at the University of NSW, said: “Forget Venice; I mean we’re talking about sharks in the middle of Sydney” because seas would rise “100 metres”. The ABC’s chief science presenter, Robyn Williams, agreed “it is possible, yes” this would occur before the end of this century.
In fact: Sea level rises for the past 20 years have averaged just 3.2mm a year, according to the University of Colorado — a rate of 32cm a century. Sea levels have slowly risen since 1880, well before human influence on the climate is said to have become significant.
In 2006 warmist alarmist Al Gore claimed in his film, An Inconvenient Truth, that seas were rising so fast “that’s why the citizens of these Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand”.
In fact: In Britain, Justice Michael Burton found “no evidence of any such evacuation having yet happened”. In 2010 an Auckland University survey noted 86 per cent of 27 Pacific islands studied — including Kiribati and Tuvalu — had grown or stayed the same size over the past 20 to 60 years.
In 2008 Flannery asked people to imagine “a world five years from now, when there is no more ice over the Arctic” and Gore predicted “the entire north polar ice cap will be gone in five years”.
In fact: At the height of last year’s summer melt, the Arctic was covered by six million square kilometres of ice, more than in the previous three years. In 2009 Gore predicted the Antarctic would melt away, too: “They’re seeing the complete disappearance of the polar ice caps ...” Professor Chris Turney, of the NSW Climate Change Research Centre, last year led an expedition to Antarctica, claiming: “Sea ice is disappearing due to climate change ...”
In fact: NASA says sea ice cover in Antarctica has grown 1.5 per cent a decade for several decades. Turney’s ship was trapped in ice.
In 2000 Dr David Viner, of Britain’s Climatic Research Unit, claimed that within a few years winter snow would become “a very rare and exciting event” and “children just aren’t going to know what snow is”. In 2007 Sir John Houghton, former head of Britain’s Met Office, said “less snow is absolutely in line with what we expect from global warming”.
In fact: Five of the northern hemisphere’s six snowiest winters in the past 46 years have occurred since Viner’s prediction, according to Rutgers University Global Snow Lab numbers.
In 2007 Britain’s Met Office said: “By 2014 we’re predicting it will be 0.3 degrees warmer than 2004.”
In fact: Met Office data for 2013 show no statistically significant rise in atmospheric temperatures for at least 16 years. Climate scientist Professor Judith Curry told the US Congress this year: “For the past 16 years, there has been no significant increase in surface temperature.”
In 2006 Gore in An Inconvenient Truth claimed Hurricane Katrina was evidence of global warming, adding: “We have seen in the last couple of years, a lot of big hurricanes.”
In 2011 Greens leader Bob Brown blamed coal miners for Cyclone Yasi because “it’s the single biggest cause — burning coal — for climate change”.
In fact: The IPCC last year said the number of cyclones and hurricanes reaching land had fallen and the Bureau of Meteorology reports fewer cyclones reaching Australia.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/false-alarms-have-put-us-under-the-weather/story-fni0ffxg-1227159717382