“In 2007 Professor Flannery said Sydney, Adelaide and Brisbane were in urgent need of desalination plants.Four years on, Warragamba Dam is on the verge of overflowing and Brisbane last year endured the worst flooding in almost four decades”
http://www.news.com.au/national/weather-forecasting-is-obviously-not-professor-tim-flannerys-forte/story-e6frfkvr-1226285686347#ixzz1uwdJHrsm

NOW, HOW CAN WE BELIEVE YOUR PREDICTIONS & MODELS WHEN WE CAN'T BELIEVE THOSE OF OUR CLIMATE COMMISSIONER?

Great to return to find csteele still having such a gas.

Re Flannery,

Making decisions based on past data and future projections is done everyday. I lost dosh in the GFC because I called it wrong, farmers grow crops that fail due to unexpected drought or flooding rain. A geothermal power plants is destroyed by flood where it never rains, damns fill against the long-term trend and a desalination plant goes into mothballs until needed. Why doesn't Bolt extend his laughter to everyone who has lost anything through a wrong call, such as a decision to live in a flood-prone part of Queensland?

Standing at the water's edge as the tide comes in you see waves falling well short of you, some drawing level and others almost sweeping you off your feet. There are alarmists, who sheet everything to AGW, claiming the tide is approaching and others who, equally, use anything to justify their denial of it. Those who truly have a handle on the science, who scientifically research climate and argue it out well above the level discussed here, tell us the tide is coming in and man is significantly to blame. For their troubles they are consigned by some, who don't like the implications of what they hear, to be accomplices to breath-takingly absurd conspiracies and simultaneously throw up conjecture as if it is the equal of research.

Once more, for Sir Dr. Prof. Austin Powerless OBE, BO, FI, esq., you send your form in, with box ticked as you like, with no contact details, so no enquiry can come back to you. No documentation supporting your claim to qualifications is required, and THAT's IT, you're on the petition? Do you think they check you off against a list? What list? All they do is check for names appearing twice and somehow, lord knows how, claim to check for false signatures. It's a pile of bull. I do not doubt that there are PhD's MSc's and BSc's who are genuine, but surely you can't expect anybody to take the petition seriously as proof of some massive counter-consensus.

Hi Bully,

Sorry to hear that you'll have to move further up the hill a few metres every 100 years or so, this massive climate warming thing is so inconvenient, isn't it ?

I'm alarmed that in today's paper, there were two 'lowest minimums' and only one 'highest maximum' over the past decade, out of the past sixteen decades, for any of the eight capital cities. But for all that, it seems that 'highest maximums' just tend to outnumber the 'lowest minimums' over a week or a month, suggesting that measured temperatures are indeed increasing, rather than declining. But only just :)

But it's unfortunate that temperatures are not measured at isolated stations, away from any heat island effects, rather than in the cities. Somebody pointed out today on the letters page, the rise has been 0.7 degrees C over the past century, with no real sign of accelerating temperature rise.

The question arises, has this 0.7 degrees been affected in any way by the location factor, that the measuring stations have tended to be conveniently located near or in urban areas ? How powerful IS the urban 'heat island effect' ?

Cheers,

Joe

Dear SPQR,

Then the captain of the Geebungs raised him slowly from the ground,
Though his wounds were mostly mortal, yet he fiercely gazed around;
There was no one to oppose him - all the rest were in a trance,
So he scrambled on his pony for his last expiring chance,
For he meant to make an effort to get victory to his side;
So he struck at goal - and missed it - then he tumbled off and died.

All laughing aside it is good to see a spirited comeback and because you have gone to so much effort I'm going to take you up on your offer to take my pick and be greedy and choose two if that is okay.

Actually I'm going to go a step further and say while the actual topic is rather peripheral to the science of AGW you have probably provided the best post of any of your mob on this thread. You've done a bit of research and quoted from mainly neutral sources, though admittedly anything from News Limited is borderline.

But overall I'm going to tip my hat to you and encourage you to keep it up.

Right, on with the analysis.

First you quote; “In 2007 Professor Flannery said Sydney, Adelaide and Brisbane were in urgent need of desalination plants.Four years on, Warragamba Dam is on the verge of overflowing and Brisbane last year endured the worst flooding in almost four decades”

What on earth is wrong with Flannery's statement? All three cities were in dire need of supplimental water sources. Would you have advised them just to sit tight because flooding rains were just around the corner? And how much would you have charged for the Tarot readings?

As expressed earlier in this thread I myself was frustrated by Flannery and certainly share the sentiments contained in your link of Dick Whitaker when he said of him making weather predictions. "People ideally suited to that are meteorologists. From what I can see on Tim Flannery, meteorology wasn't one of his specialties,"

Cont...

Cont...

Dick Whitaker is an award winning meteorologist who had put in over 3 decades at the Bureau of Meteorology and now works for the Weather Channel.

His position on AGW? “''When you get the vast majority of reputable climatology scientists saying there's a human footprint on the climate, my attitude is it's probably the most likely outcome.''. Sounds pretty sensible to me. What about you?

My next pick was the piece by Stewart Franks from the School of Engineering at the University of Newcastle. Again a person with good qualifications and someone who acknowledges Flannery is at best an amateur enthusiast climate scientist, rather he is an expert on mammalian evolution. Yet surely Franks goes to far when he says Flannery has got it “spectacularly wrong”.

What Flannery actually said was the “Warragamba Dam is never again going to be full unless there is a freak period of high rainfall unlikely to be sustained”. We certainly don't know whether this is a period of abnormally high rainfall, one suspects it is, the question is what will this weather cycle retreat to. I suspect even Franks doesn't know.

So has Flannery's quite valid concern over the survival of many of the species he studies through his professional career, coupled with his knowledge of what drives species to extinction, served to hype some of his pronouncements on climate predictions? Probably.

Does that mean the whole AGW is a crock? Certainly not. All it means is that we take all pronouncements from non-climate scientists with a grain of salt and for our definitive projections we go to people like James Hansen who has thus far been spectacularly correct.

Anyway congratulations again on a half way decent post. Looking forward to more.

Csteele, you are not just pushing the fraud are you?

You actually believe this stuff, don't you.

For heavens sake, in that case go read some of the mountain of literature showing what a con it is.

Then for heavens read some of the climate gate emails.

Did you fall for the Y2K bug too? How much did that cost you, as distinct from us?

If you have much math, try some of Tallbloke's Talkshop. It can get a bit math heavy sometimes, but it is not just counter/counter stuff.