Climate Science You Can Believe – Watts Up With That?

From Quadrant

Tony Thomas

Top-tier climate scientists are pushing for the urgent establishment of a national climate agency. This agency will coordinate the science needed to harden up Australia’s response to climate change, get us successfully to net zero emissions by 2050 and put an end to those pesky droughts, floods, bushfires and storms.

This climate super-bureaucracy is the brainchild of Andy Pitman of UNSW, chair of the Science Academy’s National Committee for Earth System Science and director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes. He’s also the chap who let the climate cat out of the bag when he  told an audience in 2019 that global warming doesn’t cause droughts, rather the opposite, since warm air holds more water.[1] He suggested the media were lying about this simple fact — but which of his fellow climateers had been briefing the media?

His truth outraged the alarmist crowd and Pitman had to  pull his head in for a spell. But heavens, he now admits on behalf of the Academy that “we are building our climate policies on crumbling foundations” and there’s “critical gaps in our understanding” and “our knowledge is incomplete”. And even, “(W)e risk investments that lead to maladaptation, incorrect disclosure of financial risk by business, and erroneous assessments of national and regional risks associated with climate change.”

Andy, whatever you do, don’t share those qualms with Climate Minister Chris Bowen. The mad minister intent on spending trillions of the taxpayer coin on his renewables mirage. “Crumbling foundations” is not what he wants to hear, especially from the woke and Labor-captured Academy.

Pitman and his Academy are finally catching up with what sceptics have been pointing out since the start of the net-zero farrago: no amount of battery and hydro backup can offset the certain failure of renewables during sustained wind droughts and cloud cover across regions– which the ingenious Germans call Dunkelflaute or “dark doldrums”. In his Academy paper Pitman writes, in a masterpiece of understatement: “High impact events also include long periods of low solar radiation coinciding with low winds… these impact national strategies to achieve net zero emissions” (Decadal Plan, P4). Andy’s such a tease: he offers no solution.

Here’s what else he’s confessing – Tim Flannery and David Karoly’s Climate Council will have a meltdown[2]: Global climate models can’t predict whether natural disasters will become more or less common in the warming era (P17). Remember Pitman’s words when you next hear the ABC Climate Propaganda Unit and the  Climate Council telling us that such-and-such storm or flood has been “climate-fuelled”.

♦“Earth system models omit crucial components, not by choice but due to lack of investment coupled with weak national coordination and no mechanisms to align investment with strategic challenges to answer critical Earth system science questions.” (P3).

 So the multi-trillion renewables rollout by Minister Bowen is just government spending via fire-hose?

♦ “Current organisational and funding structures impede rather than enable our ability to answer critical questions. We therefore need to build and implement a strategically well-aligned and integrated national Earth System Science plan. Without such a plan and clear direction, our current strategies for observations, process-based understanding and the building of modelling systems will fail to answer the key questions that confront Australia and impede efforts to combat and respond to the risks of climate change” (P3)

Pitman’s advocacy for a top-level institute includes a 40-minute Academy webinar illustrating that whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. The Academy with its grand institute proposal must first kow-tow to Aboriginality. Climate Professor Julie Arblaster of Monash University kicks off by respecting the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin custodians of Academy edifices (not that the Academy plans to pay them rent). She pays her respects to Indigenous leaders past present and future – though I don’t know why past Indigenous leader and five-year ATSIC chair Geoff Clark, 72, deserves the Academy’s “respect”. He’s now doing six years’ in prison for stealing $1 million of Aboriginal funding from 2001-15.

Nor do I know why “future” leaders must be respected, since they might also be a mixed bag. The professor went on to respect Aboriginal knowledge “embedded forever” in Custodianship, which is also a mixed bag historically of ecological and survival knowhow, misogyny, sorcery and payback vengeance.

Arblaster handed over to Academy stalwart, ex-Chief Scientist and ex-ANU Vice-Chancellor Ian Chubb, whose acknowledgements were mercifully briefer. Chubb in turn handed over to Pitman, who was equally reverential, though he omitted – perhaps accidentally – to respect the “future” leaders. Pitman admired indigenes “rich history of knowledge about our continent” – but pre-colonial Aboriginal clans knew nothing about the “continent” per se. These Academicians need to catch up on last year’s referendum defeat and Trump’s election: wokeism is so yesterday.

Pitman uses language and assumptions in unusual ways such as,

We don’t actually know to what degree our terrestrial and marine systems will continue to support net-zero ambitions: they might turn out to be sources of CO2 and methane and undermine our net zero ambitions. (Webinar).

He also admits that he and fellow climate alarmists have no idea

♦ when and where so-called “tipping points” might arise (wow, so honest!)

♦ whether climate change will increase or decrease the Murray Darling water flows

♦ whether an increase in CO2 will cause more or less rain for a given location

♦ how climate change will impact cities and urban landscapes (Andy, stop upsetting the Melbourne and Sydney city councils’ climate crusaders)

♦ how wind droughts and heavy clouding might undermine renewables and net-zero targeting (via week-long blackouts).

In a repudiation of the “settled science” notion the climate crowd has pushed for 25 years, Pitman now acknowledges that despite decades of study, the catastrophists still have no idea if Australia will see more El Nino, rather than La Nina, climate events, or even whether more vegetation will reduce or increase greenhouse emissions (so much for tree plantings offsetting emissions). “These are not easily solvable but offer profoundly different futures for Australia,” he admits (p13). Odd that we are to invest trillions in net zero when we have no idea what’s what.

Other profound unknowns include, according to Pitman, include sea-ice extent, cloud processes, ice-sheet dynamics and urban and agricultural landscape impacts (p22). He lets another cat out of the bag with news that between March 16 and 18 of this year, a giant 70-billion tonne snowfall hit East Antarctica, contributing to a net ice gain in Antarctica reversing the 20-year trend of ice loss. Climate models remain too crude to handle the key processes of atmospheric rivers around the Antarctic which created that startling reversal, he says (p25). This is quite a hiccup to the orthodoxy of Antarctica contributing to sea rise, a typical manifestation of boffins’ “incomplete” knowledge and “major gaps”.

Pitman even concedes that current climate models can’t predict whether natural disasters will become more or less common in the warming era. Remember his words when you next hear the ABC or Climate Council claiming that such-and-such storms and floods are “climate-fuelled”.

As for  global climate models, Pitman says they aren’t fit for purpose as they can’t catch “key processes in all spheres of the climate system.” With the globe divided into 100-square-kilometre units, models can’t represent “critical weather systems” such as Southern Ocean. Nor can they predict weather-disaster processes such as the lead-up to the Lismore 2022 floods. He wants resolution improved down to 1 square km, “overcoming a long-recognised Achilles heel in climate modelling.” (p17). The super-computing cost? He doesn’t say.

Pitman also threw the climate dogmatists under his Uncertainty Bus with these further remarks:

♦ Climate predictions are built on very old science. The quality of the science is as good as we can do with the systems in place, but are nowhere near as good as if we genuinely address the Australian organisational environment for earth system science (Webinar, 14mins).

♦ The uncoordinated, duplicated and overlapped science effort is currently no-one’s concern, he complained, lamenting how “we’re investing heavily in things that won’t happen and not investing in things that will. (17.30)

He wants ample two-tiered taxpayer funding for his Institute: its core funding plus centralised taxpayer funds to dole out to approved third-party researchers — a system that might operate somewhat like top-directed ARC Grants. The Institute’s power of the purse would force the myriad climate grifters and know-alls in their risibly-named Centres of Excellence to further the Institute’s priorities. I hope that would also cut out entirely the bottom-feeders like Sydney Environmental Institute’s hard-line feminists and wokesters and their “sustainability”  and “anti-colonial” lookalikes throughout the wretched university sector.

In webinar questions, one-time Academy president Suzanne Cory[3] asked: “Is there any appetite in government for establishing this institute? If not, what is the Academy doing?” Ex-Chief Scientist Chubb’s response: “The last federal budget announced a strategic examination of Australia’s R&D, but not yet the terms of reference or panel names to conduct it. It’s a good sign, we in the Academy have been arguing for this a long time. The appetite is greater now but we need a much more root and branch review.”

Meanwhile Pitman blasts the “fundamental lack of strategy from the [Albanese?] Australian government”, the differing priorities of universities, CSIRO and BoM, and poaching of funds from basic science to “climate services and products”. he writes: “Either we establish a national strategy, or we lose our national capability to deliver robust climate intelligence in support of reliable decision-making and effective investment in climate adaptation.” (p5). He also writes of “many other crucial research fields where foundational science is prioritised, lauded and appropriately resourced” (p8). Clearly his climate crowd doesn’t get enough of that  “lauding”. I’d recommend reward cards in their breakfast cereals.[4]

And he laments that Australia has no key climate think-tanks like the Max Planck Institutes in Germany, the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in the US, and the Hadley Centre in the UK. I’m amazed he would cite the discredited Hadley Centre, epicentre of the climate data frauds, vendettas against sceptic scientists’ careers and perversion of the peer-review systems, all revealed in the massive Climategate email dump of 2009. For some gory detail see here and here.

The Hadley Centre has been deeply involved with the crucial HadCRUT temperature datasets for many years. Melbourne’s Dr John McLean published his 2018 PhD audit of the outfit’s HadCRUT global temperature series on which Western climate policy is largely based, the first such audit in 30 years of government use. He found the series riddled with errors and absurdities, such as three stations recording monthly mean temps of 67-90degC, compared with their single-day records of around 55degC.[5] At Bulawayo-Goetz (Zimbabwe), the May mean temp was 16.29degC but for May 2013 it was given as minus 16.3deg. In the tropical Pacific, the Truk WSO/A station found an average January temp of 27.09deg but in January 2012 the Pacific divers’ paradise was recorded as an icy zero degrees. At Apto Otu station (Columbia), the mid-year average was about 27deg but for 1978 it was recorded as 81-83degC – probably someone forgot to convert from Fahrenheit. It was noticed neither by the HadCRUT4 compilers nor the governments that use the data.[6]

Pitman agrees on the webinar (30mins) that overseas climate models “don’t work great” here, given Australia’s unusual parameters: “You can’t do it [modelling] by importing 1.5m lines of code from somewhere else and assume it’s OK, it really doesn’t work that way.” He should have mentioned that our universities are hosting myriad climate centres for which this flawed and inappropriate overseas modelling is their daily bread. He writes, unhelpfully to the academics:

Using current CMIP [global] models, or indeed the regional models that rely on them, therefore risks fundamentally wrong projections of future climate and its variability.

Alarmingly, he concedes that Australia has no funded mechanism to audit climate models’ veracity and their flaws. I’d say first step would be a public check on the models’ forecasts versus actual readings. In coded understatement Pitman says:

Such a mechanism could lead to targeted research to resolve these issues and enhance the national capability to answer critical questions…Australia is investing to increase resilience to climate change. Decisions are based on climate projections that are far more uncertain than they need to be, particularly for our cities. Australia risks investing in ineffective adaptation strategies because of limited modelling capacity. (P24).

Pitman wants to “manage the exposure of our cities to climate extremes”. Another tip for Andy: a simple check of heatwaves over our big cities in past 140 years[7] shows no increase in their intensity (other than Melbourne and Adelaide, where the BoM three-day heatwave count shows a barely-significant positive slope). All this chatter about rising city heatwaves is garbage, why can’t Andy just look up the BoM data?

He does offer taxpayers carrots as well as sticks, claiming his climate crowd can help with health, financial resilience, economic well-being and agriculture. My own take is that he’s dreaming:

♦ Health: Our important indices have remained positive through the warming era. Life expectancy (males): up 13.7 years since 1973 to 81.3 years (females, up 11.2 years to 85.4). Warming has saved huge net numbers of lives through its reduction of deaths from winter  chills, as multiple studies show.

♦ Financial resilience and well-being: To the contrary, net-zero will demolish our economy and living standards, in disasters cascading from shutdown of $175b in fossil fuel exports.[8] Net zero-crippled Australia would wind up as a colony for Xi Jinping, who’s building coal-fired power like there’s no tomorrow.

♦ Agriculture: Output has soared to record levels with 2024-25 forecast to be the second-best year ever in value, namely $88b. A grievous  threat to agriculture is lawfare by the Greens and Pitman’s climate crowd, with their obsessions about farting cows and purported environmental vandalism, while farmers weep over Aborigines’ escalating land and heritage demands. Our entire export sector depends on cheap energy and cheap transport, both of which will disappear under net-zero penalties.

Pitman also bemoans the scarcity of Australia’s earth sciences researchers. To train one earth scientist takes ten years, he says, and that person is then apt to disappear after one phone call offering better-paid commercial work. And on a related note, he deplores that the future science workforce suffers from science teaching by non-science-trained teachers. These not-so-numerates ignore that weather, climate and earth system knowledge is science, technology, engineering and maths-based. He even wants universities to transfer “earth system” i.e. “climate” work to their maths and physics departments. That would turn many or most of the incumbents into McDonald’s burger-flippers.

He’s put forward a list of five multidisciplinary questions that Australia’s present science infrastructure and expertise cannot answer. Even with infrastructure reform, “Each might take 10 years to answer, a scale of endeavour that requires a new national structure with a long-term capacity to plan” (P3). These aims sort of dovetail with the Labor government’s research priorities.[9]

1/ How can terrestrial and marine systems be managed to support net zero ambitions and positive environmental outcomes?

2/ Where is Australia at risk of abrupt changes in weather and climate, including but not limited to tipping points?

3/ Where is freshwater availability in Australia resilient to climate change, and where does it require adaptation strategies to ensure supplies for human consumption, agriculture and natural ecosystems?

4/ What exposure do urban areas have to climate change, including climate extremes and air quality interactions?

5/ Where will changes in high impact weather events support and/or undermine net zero ambition and where can associated risks be managed effectively?

I’d say the first job for Andy and his super-institute should actually be to set the record straight for the UN’s socialist Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Antonio says “global boiling” (100degC) has arrived, but of Melbourne when I last checked, the water’s only 18degC, so CO2 emissions aren’t boiling our oceans away, as Guterres’ mate Al Gore  claims.

There seems kinship between Andy’s would-be super-institute and Germany’s horrid Potsdam Institute (PIK). Out of the PIK came that infamous 2010 quote of Dr Professor Ottmar Edenhofer, co-chair of IPCC Working Group 111:

“…one has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth…Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection. The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.”[10]

The Potsdam crowd – also climate advisers to the Pope — laid the theoretical foundations for Germany to run itself over the renewables cliff, with sky-high power prices gutting Germany’s famed manufacturing and bringing winter misery to consumers. Hence the rise in Germany, as in Italy and Netherlands, of the rational Right parties.

Australians owe Dr Pitman a large debt for his extraordinary candour. We suffer a daily media deluge of climate lies and fantasy while in Canberra maniacal ministers think nothing of spending billions on Snowy 2.0, windmills to devastate our rainforest ranges, and interminable “fixes” and subsidies to the electricity grid they’re busy destroying. Pitman’s analysis – notwithstanding his faith in net zero –   is truly a tipping point in the struggle for rational policy.

Tony Thomas’s latest book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 here

[1] Pitman: “…as far as the climate scientists know there is no link between climate change and drought.…there is no reason a priori why climate change should make the landscape more arid…this may not be what you read in newspapers…”

Moreover, he continued, Australian droughts are not increasing, and there’s no drying trend in one hundred years of data.

[2] Here’s a Dec 5 sample of the rubbish Karoly’s emailing me from the Council:

[3] When I interviewed Academy President Suzanne Cory, a molecular biologist, in 2012 for The Integrity of the Academy of Science, she readily agreed (“Exactly!”) that climate science was not “settled” . She had no idea what a heresy she was committing.

[4] Pitman’s colleague Julie Arblaster In 2014 won the Anton Hales Medal for research in earth sciences by the Australian Academy of Science. In 2017, she won the Priestley Medal from the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society. Academy colleague Ian Chubb AC was 2011 ACT Australian of the Year.

[5] The stations were Diego-Suarez (Madagascar), Oruro (Bolivia) and Wad Medani (Sudan).

[6] After McLean published his book ‘An Audit of the Creation and Contents of the HadCRUT4 Temperature Dataset’, which built on his earlier thesis, a new version of the HadCRUT temperature dataset was published, correcting many but not all of the problems that he identified but which others, with many years of experience with this data, had failed to notice.

[7] Sydney, Perth, Hobart, Darwin, Brisbane, Alice Springs. Top 40 heatwaves since about 1880-90

[8] 2024: Coal exports $A 91 billion, Oil and Condensates, $13b; Gas $69b; Uranium $1.4b. Total $175b (minor forward estimates involved).

[9] Australia’s national research priorities under Labor are

(1) transitioning to a net zero future [while the US, China, India and Russia go full-steam-ahead on prosperity from coal, oil and gas]

(2) supporting healthy and thriving communities [motherhood]

(3) elevating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders’ knowledge systems [maybe these Aboriginal savants should run Pitman’s Institute?]

(4) protecting and restoring Australia’s environment [motherhood]

(5) building a secure and resilient nation. [net-zero and imminent grid blackouts are doing the opposite].

[10] Google’s algorithm strives to bury and refute this Edenhofer quote but I’ve even checked it back to the original in German.