Tag Archives: de-industrialisation

Climate Change on Trial. My Reflections, My Part 4

From Jennifer Marohasy

By jennifer

I’ve received a text message from Ann McElhinney, Unreported Story Society, it reads:

Hello Old Friend, we’re here in [Washington] DC, you’ve been mentioned fondly by Mark [Steyn] in the court and I was remembering your kindness to us …

Ann is in DC, with her partner Phelim McAleer, covering Michael Mann’s defamation trial against Mark Steyn; because Mark called the unfortunate hockey stick chart, that has become the cross of climate change delusion, a fraud.    Yes. A fraud.

While it may have been difficult for Conservative politicians, and others, to call it out as such (as fraud) at the time this nonsense historical temperature reconstruction was first published – in the journal Nature back in 1998.  There was an opportunity to do exactly this after the publication of emails between leading climate scientists as part of the Climategate saga.  Most importantly there is opportunity to call it out now, with all the evidence that is being presented at the defamation trial of Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg.

FOIA is a recognised shorthand for Freedom of Information Act. Legislation by this name has existed in the USA since 1966, Australia since 1982 and the UK legislation was introduced in 2000. It was climate scientists at the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, conspiring to evade the UK FOIA that inspired Climategate, with Mr FOIA, as the ‘whistle blower’ likes to calls himself, releasing over 220,000 documents and emails beginning in November 2009.

In an email sometime later he explained:

The circus was about to arrive in Copenhagen. Later on it could be too late.

By circus he is referring to a get together of governments from around the world, under the direction of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  He wanted to let it be known that leading climate scientists at that very meeting, knew that key supporting evidence was unreliable; that the famous hockey stick chart had been created by using Mike’s trick.

Indeed, by providing public access to emails and documents from leading climate scientists, Mr FOIA exposed how tricks, adjustments, and corrections, were routinely applied to climate data to support the propaganda of the largely government-funded (with your taxes) global warming industry.

An interpretation of the chart, and what this data looks like before and after Michael Mann’s trick is applied, was shown in court, in Washington DC last week.   As part of the defence of Mark Steyn’s co-accused, Rand Simberg.

It stars Prof. Richard Muller from UC Berkely explaining to his students why Michael Mann used the ‘apple and banana’ combination and how deceitful it is to boot.  You can watch the YouTube here:

Muller does not show or refer to apples and bananas.  But Mark Steyn does quote me in his 2015 book using this analogy with reference to the hockey stick chart.

Ann and Phelim are in DC to support Mark, specifically they have started a new podcast series, it is entitled ‘Climate Change on Trial’ – all about this trial, which is very much focused on the hockey stick of climate science and its veracity, or lack of.

Their podcast is working its way up the charts in the science category, at #2 in the UK.

Ann and I both consider this rather an achievement, especially given it questions so much that the English King believes so hard in, that it suggests he would do well to be less ‘certain’ about the veracity of the hockey stick.

I’m paraphrasing the first witness for the defence, Abraham Wyner, a statistician who spent some time explaining the concept of ‘uncertainty’ along with ‘p hacking’.

As Ann says in their most recent episode, they do more than feed us popcorn, at this circus, we even get to learn something about statistics.

So, given most of my readers are interested in politics and science, consider clicking across, subscribe, and leave a review, after you have listened to some episodes.  They are all good, and different.

I always like the last episode that I listened to best, which is Episode 11, Mann & [Judith] Curry.  And I look forward to the next one, including to hear the banter between Ann and Phelim.

There is lot of nastiness in each episode not between my friends, but from the climate scientists and I’m finding it cathartic.

The extent to which mainstream climate scientists block the work of those they disagree with, and then ridicule them.   That is something that needs to be publicly acknowledged, least this sad situation continues forever, or more likely until everyone shuts up and bows down to the authority of Michael Mann and the IPCC or those who only marginally disagree with them, including Judith Curry.  Yes.  Curry.  While a witness for Simberg, and a good one at that, in the end Curry is part of the problem, she and her electric car.

We know from the Climategate emails that there was terrible abuse of process through the 1990s.  I have firsthand experience of it still happening twenty years later.

Getting the dozen or so papers published on our new technique for better rainfall forecasts using artificial intelligence (AI) to mine historical data for climate cycles and patterns was not easy.  But John Abbot and I persisted, and now this research is part of the official record in so much as it has been published in some of the best peer-reviewed journals in climate science.

Every time we tried to publish on temperatures, it was an ordeal.  We got two minor publications through, and I will eventually triumph with Rutherglen, Darwin, and Mildura.  The unpublished Mildura manuscripts include lots and lots of temperature data that the Bureau, well they now claim none of this data exists.

Anyone would think it unbelievable, that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology could obfuscate for so long on the existence of the parallel data sets that would enable some comparison of the temperature measurements from electronic probes versus mercury thermometers.  This data needs to be analysed if we are to have confidence in the instrumental record going forward.  This is a key point that mainstream climate scientists and sceptics alike are so far mostly ignoring.  It has not been mentioned in this trial.   I discuss some of the associated issues in Part 2, of this series, entitled ‘Climate Scientists More Generally, and Boris Kelly Gerreyn More Specifically’.

You will perhaps be more sympathetic to what I have had to endure, after you hear the extent of the shenanigan by way of the evidence in the Mark Steyn versus Michael Mann trial.   When I eventually get the Mildura data published, and when I eventually get to tell my story, you might believe me because it is all just an extension of the continuing malfeasance within mainstream climate science, as unbelievable as it will all seem.  Indeed, sometimes fact is more unbelievable than fiction.

After John Abbot and I did get our second research paper concerning temperatures and artificial intelligence (AI) – demonstrating how AI can be used to distinguish natural versus human-caused climate change – published by the Elsevier journal, GeoResJ back in 2017 (vol 14), Gavin Schmidt (a mate of Michael Mann’s) launched an attack including to get this paper retracted.

Schmidt worked hard, including at Twitter. Alas, these few years later and our paper is still standing, so to speak, which is more than what Mark Steyn can do at the moment, and the journal that published us has since been closed down.   I am sorry that Mark Steyn has had three heart attacks this last year and is now defending himself and from a wheel chair.  I am sorry that the journal GeoResJ no longer publishes real science, because it can no longer publish anything.

There should be much more acknowledgment of the toll all of this can take on individuals, on the foot soldiers in this war against what Mr FOIA referred to as the ‘hole digging and filling in’.

I have explained the significance of our very technical research as published in volume 14 of GeoResJ in an article for The Spectator online. The late Christian Kerr told me at the time it was their most viewed article at Flat White that year – in 2017.

You can still read the piece at The Spectator online, entitled ‘Big Data Finds the Medieval Warm Period – No Denial Here’.   The Spectator still exists as a publication, that is something I am also grateful for.   Thank you Rowan Dean for all your efforts.

A longer defence of our GeoResJ paper, that Schmidt attempted to have destroyed, is at Climatelab.com, the website for my company ClimateLab Pty Ltd..

With this new podcast series produced by Ann and Phelim entitled ‘Climate change on trial’, as I listen along, I know that this is being broadcast publicly: that the ‘whole world’ is hearing how brazen and nasty mainstream climate scientists can be.  And I’m feeling a burden lifted, even if much of it is ugly.   Sharing the ugly can somehow make it less personal, any good therapist will affirm that as truth.

I have often been told, by those who could better support my work with John Abbot, that it is all very technical and difficult to understand.  Even that I am not a very good communicator, and so they promote the work of Judith Curry instead, even though she is just rehashing the problems we already known about with General Circulation Models. They just rehash what we already know to be hopeless, rather than attempting to understand the solution by way of a new tool, that John Abbot and I are offering.

It was in 2015 that Mark Steyn published ‘A Disgrace to the Profession’ that sets out in very plain English – Mark is not a scientist but rather a radio and television presenter, and expert on the history of musical theatre – how absurd a centre piece of one of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports really is.  Of course, I’m back referring to the hockey stick now.

We need to abandon this absurd historical reconstruction, along with General Circulation Models, if are to ever understand climate change and move to better systems for forecasting droughts and floods.

Steyn quotes me on page 55 of his 2015 book, and a witness in the trial has made the very same observation.  Dr Abraham Wyner a statistician from the University of Pennsylvania explains that the shaft of the ‘hockey stick’ is not of the same stuff as the handle of this infamous temperature reconstruction.

Mark Steyn thought my explanation very clear.  Quoting from my blog, he wrote back in 2015, she found Mann’s famous graph an ‘unlikely proposition’.  In 2013, I suggested it was analogous to ‘sticking an apple on the end of a banana’.

I began these scribbles with mention of a text I got from Ann, and the word kindness.

You can show your kindness in a very practical way by clicking across to their donation page.  Send them some money, as a show of appreciation for all their efforts so far.

Show your kindness to Mark Steyn and also Ann and Phelim by making a Donation, LINK HERE.

POSTSCRIPT

It was a long time ago, 2006, that I travelled with Ann and Phelim, helping to promote their first documentary film, ‘Mine Your Own Business’.  That was after I raised a good amount of money to bring them to Australia, and successfully booked their film into theatres in Hobart, Perth, Sydney and Melbourne.   I really wanted them to be well supported, that is the kindness Ann remembers.

And as Phelim McAleer explained during that tour:

The film [Mine Your Own Business], in its essence, is not really at all a story about mining, but rather, it is a story about human rights. The human right to a job, the human right to have your children educated, the human right to see your child reach their first birthday.

It is my very favourite film of all times – about the human experience, and totally politically incorrect.   In that regard, it is much like this Mark Steyn defamation trial.

At the time I was covering a trial in Indonesia, that I wrote about for the IPA Review, it was about Richard Ness.

Against the odds, Ness won in what was the longest running criminal trial in Indonesia.   Here’s hoping that Mark Steyn wins.  It could be all over very soon.

Richard Ness won his trial in an Indonesia Court. And then did something very brave, flanked by his two sons he walked out the front of the court house and down a street lined by angry protesters. I shall always remember his determination, and also the bravery of his two sons. Not to forget that the Indonesian Judges hearing the trial made their decisions based on the available evidence, defying the politics.

Wind & Solar ‘Transition’ Turning First World Economies Into First Order Disasters

From STOP THESE THINGS

Make electricity unreliable and unaffordable and you’ll soon turn your economy to ashes. Australia is on the brink of a major recession, and energy costs are front and centre.

Power prices will jump by 25 to 30% next month following the closure of yet another perfectly operable 2,000MW coal-fired power plant. Since the Federal Government’s Renewable Energy Target was ramped up by the Labor government in 2010, Australians have been hit with double-digit percentage increases in their power bills every year since.

Households are being hammered by rising interest rates and power bills that they simply cannot afford.

Then there are energy-hungry industries, like mineral processing, which are all but done for. Aluminium smelters will be the first to go, wiping out thousands of well-paid jobs in the bargain.

Peta Credlin taps into comments made recently by Peter Day, a director of one of Australia’s last remaining smelters. Day’s brutal analysis: Australia is well on the road to de-industrialisation, thanks to its idiotic energy policy.

‘We can have lower emissions or a first world economy – not both’
Sky News
Peta Credlin
30 May 2023

Alumina Limited Director Peter Day had some sad home truths on what is Australia’s counterproductive energy policy, says Sky News host Peta Credlin.

Mr Day addressed his worries towards established industries that rely on coal and gas and also the government’s lack of acknowledgement towards the inefficient backup capacities of renewable energy.

“In plain language terms, the Alumina boss is telling us that we are on a rapid road to de-industrialisation,” Ms Credlin said.

“At some stage, we will have to wake up to the fact that we can have much lower emissions or a first world economy – but not both.”

Transcript

Peta Credlin: It’s rare to find a business leader today talking about business and not virtue signalling on the voice or climate change or diversity and inclusion. But yesterday on issues impacting his business, the chairman of Alumina, one of our biggest manufacturing businesses that runs the Portland smelter in Victoria and an Alumina refinery in Western Australia, Peter Day, had some sad home truths on Australia’s energy policy.

The Alumina chairman pointed out that, and I quote, “The country’s now taking steps that will challenge,” I note that word challenge, “that will challenge many of its established industries that are dependent on coal or gas. Having power that’s available 24/7,” he said, “is a particular challenge. Transition plans in Australia,” he said, that is plans for the transition to renewables are, and I quote, “currently not addressing the issues of backup capacity adequately given battery technologies do not currently provide a viable long duration back-up solution.”

“For example,” he said, “the largest battery currently in Australia could power half the Portland smelter for a maximum of an hour. Further,” he said, “actions to reduce carbon emissions that threaten Australia’s value adding industries,” which he said, “are already in the world’s lowest emissions quartile are counterproductive.”

That’s right. Counterproductive. And he said we’ve just produce even more emissions in countries that aren’t as fastidious about emissions as we are here. Now, this is the chairman of a business that over the past five years has paid almost $3 billion in taxes and royalties and nearly 4 billion in wages, stating that without continued access to competitively priced fossil fuels, gas in this particular case, this value adding venture would cease. In other words, we would cease to be a country with heavy industry.

Day said, and I’ll quote him again, “Current plans for Australia’s energy transition threatened to create immense uncertainty, immense uncertainty on the availability and cost of future energy supply.” So in plain language terms, the Alumina boss is telling us that we’re on a rapid road to de-industrialization. Like the alarm of speculation about future weather events or hysteria about the Barrier Reef, his words are buried in the business section of just one newspaper.

As you know, I don’t oppose reducing emissions as reasonable enough, but not in ways that impose massive extra costs on consumers and ways that weaken us compared to places like China, which never put emissions reduction ahead of economic and military strength. At some stage, we’ll have to wake up to the fact that we can have much lower emissions or a first world economy, but not both. Let’s hope our leaders will soon wake up to these too and ensure that we don’t lose any more coal-fired power until there’s a reliable alternative in place and that we green light the new gas fields we need for ourselves, and of course, the allies that depend on Australia.
Sky News

Aluminium smelter workers are all set to ‘transition’ to the dole queue.