Rejoice Australia. The Star of Mann has crosseth The line of Capricorn. The great Prof has flown 10,000 miles to tell us “Australia is on fire”. Something only thirty million people knew already, including every Australian and the five million New Zealanders who can smell the smoke too.
According to Michael Mann, his plane causes bushfires, and he had to fly all the way to a nation on fire to tell them that.
Australia, your country is burning – dangerous climate change is here with you now
Sadly, everything he knows about the Australian climate comes from a Midnight oil song:
When we mine for coal, like the controversial planned Adani coalmine, which would more than double Australia’s coal-based carbon emissions, we are literally mining away at our blue skies. The Adani coalmine could rightly be renamed the Blue Sky mine.
In Australia, beds are burning. …
Now we know why those models keep failing.
As he goes on to explain:
The songs of Peter Garrett and Midnight Oil I first enjoyed decades ago have taken on a whole new meaning for me now. They seem disturbingly prescient in light of what we are witnessing unfold in Australia.
Prescient indeed. Yes, if only we’d made Peter Garrett the Environment Minister of Australia he could have fixed all this! Oh wait… we did!
Mann, condescendingly observes the fauna:
The locals, whom I found to be friendly and outgoing, would volunteer that they have never seen anything like this before.
Possibly because not many are 168 years old.
Some even uttered the words “climate change” without any prompting.
“Without prompting?” Hardly. They’ve had thirty years of prompting — in school, at uni, on the nightly news, in coloring in contests, cereal packets and pop songs. The marvel is that Australians are still capable of doing some science, despite the ABC’s and The Guardian’s best efforts.
Hypothesis lost: Your air conditioner causes bushfires?
This is science with error bars so wide they overlap til there’s no science left in between.
The prophet can see “climate change” with his superhuman eyes:
The brown skies I observed in the Blue Mountains this week are a product of human-caused climate change. Take record heat, combine it with unprecedented drought in already dry regions and you get unprecedented bushfires like the ones engulfing the Blue Mountains and spreading across the continent. It’s not complicated.
In Simple-Mann-land, heat and drought make fires. Sure, and that’s why the Sahara is the Fireball of Africa, right? Or maybe it’s just a marketing meme designed to scare the kiddies? Fire = hot, therefore “climate change”. In reality, fires need fuel more than hot weather. The worst fires in Australia are not at Oodnadatta where we have lots of heat and permanent drought, they’re in the South-east corner where there is lots of neglected forest. How could a “Prof” forget the most important factor? Looks like he is nearly as bad at science as that legendary guy who could take red noise or bus timetables and discover hockey sticks. The same man who sued someone for calling him a fraud, dragged it on for years, but couldn’t find any evidence to defend himself.
Could anyone calling themselves a prof really make statements so blandly conclusive: no caveats, no margins, missing the main point, and with no direct cause and effect link. Oh yes he can…
The warming of our planet – and the changes in climate associated with it – are due to the fossil fuels we’re burning: oil, whether at midnight or any other hour of the day, natural gas, and the biggest culprit of all, coal. That’s not complicated either.
Not complicated sayth the master guru. Yet none, not one, of the giant models predicts “simple” rainfall or drought?
If it’s so obvious, perhaps Mann can explain the part where a warmer world is a wetter world and the extra rain makes “more droughts”?
But we all know how this circular conversation pans out — Mann says that extra rain is just an average and there will be droughts in some spots and floods in others. I’ll ask him where and when those droughts and floods will happen in the 2020s, and Michael Mann will say “I don’t know, that’s weather, not climate”. And I’ll ask why a bushfire “is climate not weather”, and he’ll ignore the point and talk about extending bushfire seasons, which are not fires, but sound sorta the same. Or he’ll point to probabilities of extremes in models we know are broken, that use data we know is wildly adjusted, and he’ll call it science when it might as well be sorcery.
If there is any tiny link between coal mines and bushfires, it’s through an ocean of chaotic complexity — via changes in droughts and flood patterns thanks to jet-streams shifting, enhanced by ENSO oscillation, the Indian Dipole and the SOI. The skillless modelers can’t predict any of these. The error bars ate my science mum, and there’s nothing left here but a sales scheme of false pretenses built on magic spells, mystery assumptions, total failure, and parasitic self aggrandizement. All designed to prey on the weak-minded and gullible. Quick, someone protect “The Guardian”?
Petrochemical conspiracy — here we come:
Who needs facts when speculative conspiracies will do?
Morrison has shown himself to be beholden to coal interests and his administration is considered to have conspired with a small number of petrostates to sabotage the recent UN climate conference in Madrid (“COP25”), seen as a last ditch effort to keep planetary warming below a level (1.5C) considered by many to constitute “dangerous” planetary warming.
The Guardian thinks this is worth publishing?
Let’s post the editors a copy of A Disgrace To the Profession. That’s what The Guardian is.