A REALLY inconvenient truth!

I get REALLY cross when my trust is broken.  For over 50 years, I have subscribed to Scientific American. It used to be a reliable source, reporting science by scientists.

About 10 years ago, it started to lose my trust when it treated the Skeptical Environmentalist, Bjorn Lomborg, with contempt. Having given four environmentalists the freedom to trash Lomborg's book (and to do so very badly, I might add), they then refused to allow Lomborg to respond. I was very glad to see the last of that particular editor.

In the latest issue, July 2012, Scientific American has gone wildly wrong again. "Witness to an Antarctic meltdown - as glaciers collapse toward the sea, scientists struggle to figure out how fast the southern continent is melting and what that means for sea level rise" is a piece by a freelance journalist, Douglas Fox.

Strike One - the piece was not about the continent, but about the Antarctic Peninsula, that finger which points north from the continent towards South America. It is not typical of the continent, because nowhere on it are you more than about 20km from the sea.  This means, of course, that it is naturally warmer than the continent proper.

Strike Two - there was a graphic showing how glaciers were supposed to be accelerating towards the sea, and to my surprise there was an arrow showing the sea providing a "Bracing force that resists creep." Now my comparatively brief close encounters with glaciers has convinced me of one thing - they will overcome! Nothing can ultimately withstand them. The resistance offered by the sea can be nothing, nada, niks.

By now my hackles were truly up, for the piece was all about the collapse of the Larsen ice shelves.  Who can forget La Gore, emoting over their collapse in An Inconvenient Truth? So I went to check the evidence on Google Earth - it is a really useful source of ground truth, made all the better by the fact that you can get historical images as well as current ones.

Indeed, back in 1999, all was looking fine:

 You can see the Larsen B Ice Shelf on the left and Larsen A on the right quite clearly. 

By 2002, Larsen A had done the disappearing act, and Larsen B was looking much the worse for wear.

By 2006, Larsen B had joined its brother, and gone to the great iceberg in the sky! 

And then came 2010!! Voila, they had reappeared! If global warming had made them disappear, had global cooling now made them reappear?? 

The ice shelf isn't perfect - it's repair still shows a few cracks - but back it is. (Imagery Date 30 Sept 2010, location Lat.65.59, Lon. -60.81 Altitude 14km)

Strike 3 - Fox was well and truly out, and Scientific American with him.  What gets into these people, that Global Climate Change has to be The Phenomenon That Changes All?? Do the glaciologists really have nothing to say about the movement of sheets of ice? 

Back I went into the article.  It got worse. "The disappearance of the heavy glaciers is allowing the earth's crust below to rebound."  Now look at the 2006 view.  Where the ice shelves had been, there was now open sea.  So the shelves were floating - the crust was not bearing their weight!

And then the article's map - "Former Larsen A Ice Shelf", "Former Larsen B Ice Shelf."  Hubris? Spelling mistake - should have been "Reformed"? You be the judge.

But whatever way you look at it, science has really lost the plot, and Scientific American with it, when the political correctness of  Global Warming distorts the truth to this extent.

Give our MP's something to do!

Recently I have had interesting chats with some friends who happen to be members of our judiciary.  They have had a host of complaints, including such things as the fact that the Johannesburg courts have been under jackhammers and dust for something like three years.  The imposition of incompetent senior judges hasn't hloped helped either.

But their greatest gripe is reserved for the plethora of laws that are being passed.  Our legislature sits, and its members have nothing better to do than to pass laws. To while away the time, they do just that.  Law follows law, often badly drafted, often in conflict with earlier laws, often in conflict with our own Constitution, an unending flood of poor legislation.

Then, of course, the civil service has its work cut out to draw up the regulations required to implement the laws. The regulations suffer from the same flaws as the laws themselves. We land up with a morass in which everything is regulated and nothing is accomplished.

The origin of this state of affairs is not difficult to find.  We have proportional representation in Parliament. This means that obeying the party whips is far more important than anything else.  In days gone by, you needed to pay attention to your constituency.  It was they who got you elected. Most of your time was spent away from Parliament and its work of passing laws. 

Now you merely need to fight your way up a list, and all the benefits of being a legislator are yours. So of course you legislate diligently - that way you will progress up the list, and be more secure in your sinecure.

One of the best bits of political advice I ever received was that democracy was great, but the Westminster system missed the greatest democratic opportunity. It lacked giving people the right to vote for what they were going to vote for.  When your choice is merely a party, and you have to live with the chosen party for at least four years, politics is damned dull.  When you have to decide how much you are prepared to pay the street cleaner or your children's teachers or for the street lights to stay on after midnight, then you become much more involved.  

And when you are involved, then anyone who hopes to represent you is also involved - with you! He or she doesn't have time to waste drawing up bad laws. What bliss it must be! 

The Great Climate Change Propaganda Machine

I opened my paper, and there was a half-page spread trumpeting "MORE CLIMATE CHANGE MEANS LESS WATER," with the sub-text "Unless we play our part, this will have serious consequences on our water systems."

Normally I would not have worried, but in this case the advertisement had been placed by none other than our own Department of Environment Affairs. Your and my tax moneys were being used to spread lies - outright, downright lies, propaganda of the worst kind.

I think I must be getting more intemperate as I get older. Without further ado, I went to the web page of the Advertising Standards Authority of South Africa. It was great - within minutes I was lodging a formal objection.

Section 11 of the Preface to the Advertising Code says “Advertising is a service to the public and, as such, should be informative, factual, honest, decent and its content should not violate any of the laws of the country,”while Section 2 of the General Principles of the Code says “2. Honesty Advertisements should not be so framed as to abuse the trust of the consumer or exploit his lack of experience or knowledge or his credulity.”

Right!! The advertisement is neither factual nor honest, and is not therefore informative.
It says that the earth’s temperature is increasing. That much is true.There is general agreement that the earth’s temperature has been increasing since at least 1880. But then it goes on to say "this will have serious consequences on our water system," and that is just false. I have studied South Africa’s rainfall over the past century, and failed to find any relationship between temperature and the supply of water. The same is true globally, as the following figure indicates:

Globally averaged annual precipitation over land areas from GHCN (green bars)

with respect to the 1981–2000 base period

However, the propaganda didn't speak just of rainfall, but of water systems. So let's look at rivers. Dai and others (Dai, A., T. T. Qian, K. E. Trenberth, and J. D. Milliman, 2009: Changes in Continental Freshwater Discharge from 1948 to 2004. Journal of Climate, 22, 2773-2792.) considered 925 downstream stations on the largest rivers monitoring 80 % of the global ocean draining land areas and capturing 73 % of the continental runoff. They found that only about one-third of the top 200 rivers (including the Congo, Mississippi, Yenisey, Paraná, Ganges, Columbia, Uruguay, and Niger) show statistically significant trends during 1948–2004, with the rivers having downward trends (45) outnumbering those with upward trends (19). Given the increasing abstraction due to population increases, it is surprising that there were any upward trends.

So historically there has been no link between temperature and water systems. Is this likely to change? I have been unable to find any evidence that further warming may introduce a relationship that does not at present exist, i.e. that any further warming will have serious consequences for our water supply. I have found however predictions based on climate models: (IPCC 4th Assessment Report, WG2 Technical Summary page 33)

where DJF = December January February and JJA = June July August. Southern Africa = SAF.

The error bars are so large that no scientifically valid conclusions regarding future precipitation are possible. The claims by the Department are thus neither factual nor honest.

In a similar vein, Section 3.1 of the General Principles of the Code says “3.1 Fear Advertisements should not without justifiable reason play on fear.” What does this advertisement do? Why, it plays on fear. The picture is one of a dry surface, with the brown sky suggesting dust. The threat is “Unless we play our part, it will have serious consequences,” which is as overt a threat as could be wished.

It is worth considering that South Africa contributes ~1% to global carbon dioxide emissions, and that China’s emissions are presently growing each year by more than South Africa’s total emissions. So even if the thesis were valid, that carbon dioxide emissions were causing global warming, and they were behind ‘climate change’, no part we could play would have any impact. The advertisement is misleading.

And so it went. One after another, the Advertising Standards were broken. We taxpayers have paid to be fed pure propaganda by our Government - it is wrong, period.