Farewell ScoMo, hello crippling costs of climate fantasy

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Scott Morrison is heading off to lead Australia’s team at the Glasgow climate change meeting. He goes with a formula that will continue the nation’s shuffling towards diminished income levels from the politically motivated sabotage of the economy.   

Like Joe Biden and most other leaders who have decided to attend, Scott Morrison brings nothing extra to the table. Amidst the Conference’s impassioned pleas and scary stories, there will be no dramatic new pledges, no carbon border tariffs, no methane-driven constraint on beef growers and further deferrals in the promised gifting of $100 billion a year “compensation” the rich nations have promised poor nations. Voices from climate realists and alarmists alike will declare COP26 a failure just like the previous UN jamborees.   

But such conclusions are mistaken. They are largely conditioned by the woke media’s disappointment that climate alarmists have fallen short of their ambitious overreach.  In fact, the outcome of COP 26, like that of its 25 predecessors will be a further inching away of the world’s economies – more particularly those of the Western world – from the low cost, enterprise-driven production processes that have given even the poorest nations living standards that were inconceivable two centuries ago.  …. Read more here

The IPCC buries two millennia of fluctuating temperatures

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Probably nobody in the world has read the 3,949 pages of the latest IPCC report. But many people have studied the 41 page politically determined, Summary for Policymakers. Aside from rhetorical conjecture about increased human induced emissions of carbon dioxide bringing more storms, fires and pestilence, the following killer dual chart is placed at the outset of the Summary. …..Read more online …..pdf

Webinar: Reforming Environmental Science

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On 24 November 2020 The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) and AEF hosted what proved to be a stimulating and lively webinar.

You can watch a video of the event on the Forum’s YouTube channel here.

Dr Peter Ridd, Jo Nova and Alan Moran outlined the scientific failures in some of the most critical areas of environmental policy — Peter Ridd on the Great Barrier Reef; Jo Nova on bushfires; and Alan Moran on the Murray-Darling Basin. They then highlighted the problems were systematic and the task of fixing them went well beyond the halls of science.

The post-webinar survey of attendees indicated a high level of satisfaction with the event. So much so, respondent expressed strong support for a future event to discuss the key issues in more depth.

Registration Now Open for Upcoming Webinar

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Those who wish to attend the GWPF-AEF Webinar on Reforming Environmental Science, which is to be held on Tuesday, 24 November 2020, need to register in advance at the Zoom website. Attendance is free of charge.

Further details on the forthcoming Webinar are at the Events webpage.

CLICK HERE TO REGUSTER

Zoom will provide each registrant with instructions on how to join the webinar at the appropriate time. It will also remind each one the day before the event, just in case they forgot the relevant details or cannot locate the original email.

Zoom is very easy to use, even for retirees with minimal to no exposure to videoconferencing.

For example, the average member of my Probus Club is over 80 years of age but the large majority are able to participate in our meetings on Zoom. Most of those who do not participate, do not own a suitable device or an email account.

Immediately after a registration has been completed, Zoom automatically emails a hyperlink to the registrant. Simply clicking on that hyperlink connects the device — regardless of what type of personal computer, desktop computer, laptop, tablet or smartphone it is — to the ‘virtual meeting room’ that Zoom has reserved for the webinar.

One of our Zoom hosts will admit you to the ‘virtual meeting room’ and you are good to go.

The Zoom website has lots of online help for novices. This includes an easy-to-follow user guide for those attending a Zoom webinar for the first time [CLICK HERE}.

Among other things, the guide will help you adjust the video and/or audio settings on your device, should that be necessary. It will also show you how to use the Zoom Q & A feature. That’s pretty much all you need to know to enjoy the event to the full.

Should you run into any difficulties, you can email AEF for help at this address: editor@australianenvironment.org.

GWPF to Co-Host Webinar on Reforming Environmental Science

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The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) in the UK has joined with the AEF to co-host the webinar on reforming the quality of environmental research, which is to be held on Zoom on 24 November 2020.

Like the AEF, the GWPF is a rather unique environmental organisation in that it is interested in more than simply protecting the environment regardless and the cost and other implications of doing so. .

The two organisations are alike in many of the respects that matter — we both value sound science and rigorous evidence.— but we also differ in some others.

For its part, the GWPF is an all-party and non-party think tank and a registered educational charity. While the AEF is also a registered educational charity, it has quite consciously eschewed recruiting politicians to its Board in the interest of .

Both the AEF and the GWPF are open-minded about the contested science of global warming. Both also share a deep concern about the costs and other implications of many of the public policies that are currently being advocated to address global warming.

The GWPF was launched by Lord Lawson of Balby — a current Member of the UK House of Lords and former Chancellor of the Exchequer — and Dr Benny Peiser — the current Director of GWPF — in the run-up to the Copenhagen Climate Summit. It is based in London. A link to the GWPF website is here.

Harry Wilkinson, the Head of Policy at GWPF, and Jeffrey Rae, the Executive Director of AEF. will be the co-hosts of the webinar and will share the hosting duties on Zoom.

Reforming Quality Assurance in Environmental Science

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The AEF will host a free webinar on the reforms that are urgently needed to quality assurance (QA) systems and practices in environmental science. It will take place on 24 November 2020, from 7:30 to 8:30 pm Australian Eastern Daylight Time (AEDT) and will be conducted on Zoom so as to allow participation from all over Australia, as well as abroad.

This webinar is the latest in a continuing series of events held by AEF to commemorate the life and work of Prof. Bob Carter, a former Director and Scientific Adviser, who died in 2016.

Our speakers are all well-known in their respective fields and knowledgeable about these issues. They are: geophysicist, Dr Peter Ridd; science blogger, Jo Nova; and economist, Alan Moran. All three are currently AEF Directors and Dr Ridd is its Scientific Adviser.

They will briefly survey the recent QA failures in the science than underpins three key environmental policy areas — the Great Barrier Reef, bushfire prevention and managment, and the Murray-Darling Basin — before engaging in a panel discussion of how to reform of QA systems and practices in environmental science.

The discussion will be open-ended but will focus on answers to the following questions:

• Do we need independent audits of individual research projects?

• Which elements of a research project should be audited and by whom?

• How should we manage and fund studies to test the replicability of policy-critical research?

• Should the conduct of publicly-funded research projects be fully transparent to the public?

• Should governments set up independent bodies to regulate QA practices in such research?

• How should we protect such regulators from capture by those who are meant to be regulated?

Other webinar participants will be able to use Zoom’s Q&A feature to submit questions to the panel.

Those who wish to participate must register in advance at the webpage created for this event at the Zoom website. Zoom will email each registrant the full details of how they can join the virtual ‘webinar room’ at the appropriate time.

At the end of this week, AEF will announce the URL for webinar registration on its website and email the details to those on its mailing lists. Anyone who is interested in receiving this email can do so by signing up for AEF News and Commentary. The Subscription form  is located on the right hand side of very page of this website.

Few Replication Studies in Environmental Science

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A recent survey in PeerJ — a multidisciplinary bioscience journal — by one of its academic editors has found that only 0.023 per cent of the ecology and evolution literature involved successful replication studies. In absolute terms, this is nine replications out of 38,730 papers published in one access journals. The survey is here.

For more than a decade, science has been convulsed by the world-wide phenomenon known as the replication crisis. The term refers to the fact that most of the independent attempts to replicate the findings of previous published research have failed to do so, and when such failures have ben reported in the literature they have generally been ignored.

All the scientific disciplines have been affected by the crisis and most have tried to do something about it. As a result there has been an increase in the prevalence of published replication studies, albeit from a very low historical base.

Not so in the environmental sciences, it seems.

The PeerJ survey found that only two of the 11 original-replication study pairs had sufficient detail for the author to conduct a formal analysis of replication success. He concluded that two teams had correctly concluded their replication was successful, but disagreed that a third team had conducted a failed replication, as it had claimed.

Subsequently Ecology and Evolution published a survey of environmental scientists to gauge their understanding of and opinions about replication studies in their fields. The published paper is here.

The majority of respondents considered replication studies were important (97 per cent), not prevalent enough (91 per cent), worth funding even given limited resources (61 per cent), and suitable for publication in all journals (62 per cent).

There is a vast gap between this expressed enthusiasm and the prevalence of replication studies in the literature. For example, the prevalence rate, reported above, is three magnitudes below the median estimate of 10 per cent given by survey respondents. A gap of this magnitude suggests that either the respondent have faked the enthusiasm or are profoundly ignorant of the literature in their discipline.

For their part, the survey authors thought the gap might be due to the difficulties involved in getting funding for replication studies, conducting them, and having their results published.

No Koalas in NSW by 2050?

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A NSW Parliamentary Committee has forecast that, without urgent government action, by 2050 there will be no koalas in NSW [LINK HERE].

In 2016 the NSW Government adopted a State-wide estimate of 36,000 koalas for the purposes of designing and administering the measures to protect them and their habitat. The NSW Chief Scientist proposed this number [LINK HERE], which was taken from the published results of a survey of the views of 16 scientists working in the field [LINK HERE].

Concerns about the future of the koala in NSW, led the Planning and Environment Portfolio Committee of the NSW Legislative Council to review of the situation and outlook for local populations and their habitats.

The Committee received different views on how many koalas lived in NSW and what was the best way to survey their numbers. Some were from environmental scientists, many from environmental activists, and not a few from people who are both of those things.

The differences were profound and, in part, reflect the practical difficulties involved. In the wild, the number of koalas per hectare is generally very low, individuals are difficult to identify, and there is much we do not know about the koala and how it behaves. In his oral evidence to the Committee, Professor Matthew Crowther, an ecologist with the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney [LINK HERE], summarised the difficulties this way:

“I would not want to give [an estimate for NSW] because we do not know. Many populations are very low density and very hard to estimate. Many of the methods rely on having so many koalas to count for some accuracy of the estimation.”

Professor Crowther added that the difficulty of predicting how a given habitat will change over time meant that scientists could not forecast the size of its koala population at any time in the future.

The Committee could have made a useful contribution to resolving some of this uncertainty, at least from a public policy perspective. For example, it could have actively facilitated a structured and open debate among the relevant scientists to see what might emerge from it in terms of a more nuanced understanding of the disputed science. In parallel it could have widened the debate to include scientists from our disciplines, such as statisticians and complex systems specialists.

Instead the Committee decided to ignore Professor Crowther’s advice completely. It concluded that the current offical estimate was outdated and unreliable; and therefore the NSW Koala Strategy was a failure.

Black Summer: the 2019-20 Bushfires

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The Editors of the scientific journal Australian Forestry have reviewed the state of our knowledge of the causes and environmental consequences of the devastating bushfires that disfigured the 2019-20 summer with the loss of 33 lives and 3,100 homes [LINK HERE].

The Black Summer bushfires burnt an area totalling 10.2 million hectares. This consisted of native forest, commercial plantations, and other forest areas. The estimates were prepared for Australian Forestry by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES) using the National Forest Inventory and other Australian Government spatial datasets.

Some 8.2 million hectares were burnt areas of native forest — equivalent to 6 per cent of all Australian native forest — mostly in nature conservation reserves and multiple-use public forests. These varied by State but were concentrated in NSW, Victoria and WA.

The Australian Forestry Editors conclude that the 2019-20 bushfires provide important insights into, and raise profound questions about, land management generally and, in particular, the management of bushfire risk through regular prescribed burning on all types of land tenure.

On the latter point they note that:

“…the current fire management will not, or is unlikely to, sustain the full range of ecosystem processes and biodiversity, nor reduce to an acceptable level the impact of wildfires on local and rural communities, forests and ecological communities, biodiversity and wood resources.”

Peter Ridd to advise Global Warming Policy Foundation

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The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) in the UK has appointed Professor Peter Ridd to its Academic Advisory Committee [LINK HERE].

Professor Ridd’s most recent research has focussed on improving Quality Assurance in the science used in public policy.

In August 2019, he gave a series of public lectures on this issue, which focussed on the quality of the research into human impacts on water quality across the Great Barrier Reef; the lectures were hosted by AEF to commemorate the live and work of Professor Bob Carter.

Professor Carter had been one of Professor Ridd’s colleagues at JCU and the two had much in common, both professionally and personally — marine geophysical research, a strong commitment to scientific rigour and intellectual independance, AEF Directorships, and scientific advisory roles in both AEF and GWPF.

The GWPF is an apolitical think tank and registered educational charity, which is open-minded about the contested science of global warming but deeply concerned about the costs and other implications of many of the policy measures that are being advocated to address it. Lord Lawson of Blaby, a current member of the UK House of Lords and a former Chancellor of the Exchequer in Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Government, was one its co-founders. The other was Dr Bennny Peiser, who is currently the Director of the GPWF.

The GWPF’s Academic Advisory Council is a group of scientists, economists and other experts who provide the Foundation with timely scientific, economic and policy advice. It reviews and evaluates new GWPF reports and papers, explores future research projects, and makes recommendations on issues related to climate research and policy.

To Rebuild Manufacturing: Cut Energy Costs→

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Alan Moran, The Spectator Australia, 2 June 2020

In one of the most challenging commentaries by a senior politician, former resources minister Matt Canavan, advocates leaving the Paris Agreement under which Australia has agreed to take actions that will reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.  He argues that Australia cannot afford to meet the treaty obligations which require replacing electricity generated from coal by expensive wind and solar. The subsidies this requires drive up the cost of energy and, with our high wage economy, prevents us having a vibrant manufacturing sector.  ….. Read more ….. pdf version

Carbon Tax: Why Morrison's leaving door open?

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Alan Moran, The Spectator Australia, 20 May 2020

As part of the ABC’s climate conspiracy agenda, Four Corners this week highlighted the “anger” at the government from the senior mandarins from its failure to deliver their goal of a carbon tax.  Their preferred approach was notwithstanding the tax rate would today have to be $US100 per tonne, a staggering $80 billion a year impost. ….. READ MORE …..PDF VERSION