Guest essay by Eric Worrall

h/t JoNova; Courageous Reef Scientist Peter Ridd needs your help. He plans to continue the battle against James Cook University, to protect the right of Australian professors to be uncollegial, their right to publicly criticise the work of other scientists. Ridd intends to appeal a court judgement which which suggests Academic Freedom as most people understand it is a “historical concept“.

From Peter Ridd’s GoFundMe page;

We have had a setback, but my lawyers have carefully gone over the judgement, and believe there are numerous strong grounds for appeal to the High Court of Australia. We are re-opening the fundraising campaign and will carry on with the legal action.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/peter-ridd-legal-action-fund-2019

In the final analysis, I was fired for saying that, because of systemic problems with quality assurance, work from the JCU coral reef centre, which also publishes extensively on climate change, was untrustworthy. I believe what I said was true and have given plenty of published evidence to support the statement. After I was fired, it was proven beyond doubt that I was correct when a group of seven international scientists who audited eight of the major studies from the JCU coral reef centre found them ALL to be 100% wrong. You can’t get much more scientifically untrustworthy than that. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/ex-judge-investigate-controversial-marine-research.

I don’t take the decision to appeal lightly. The financial and emotional costs are high and legal action is fraught with uncertainties. In addition to the $300K Cheryl and I have spent on this case, I have received from you, and about four thousand other people, over $800K. It is matter that rests heavily on my conscience. You have already done your bit, but I’d appreciate if you could share this with other people. I also thank you for your words of support to continue the fight.

We have an excellent chance, but we might lose. There are, however, too many important principles at stake to walk away at this stage.

This case has already demonstrated a major problem with Academic Freedom of Speech at a university. This ultimately affects what academics are prepared to say on controversial topics such as climate change, or the fate of the Great Barrier Reef. The Commonwealth government has already signalled its intention to consider adapting the French Review Model Code to prevent a similar case. This may be the most important long-term implication of the case. Ironically, even if we lose in the High Court, it will demonstrate beyond doubt that the work contracts at universities have the effect of crushing free speech. I have little doubt the Education Minister will have something to say about that once the legal action is over.

So even if we lose the High Court challenge, we still win the ultimate political battle.

Many thanks again for your support

Peter

For those interested in the detailed 80 page judgement, this is the link.

https://www.judgments.fedcourt.gov.au/judgments/Judgments/fca/full/2020/2020fcafc0123

Why will this appeal cost so much? Legal action is horrendously expensive especially when going to the highest court in Australia. There is a large amount of legal documentation to be reviewed in order to put forward the strongest arguments backed with case law evidence. Also the Federal Court judgement must be forensically examined.

Note 1: We are just continuing the last gofundme campaign which raised $100K rather than start a brand new campaign. So the counter starts at $100K. The history of all the appeals is below.

Note 2: for overseas people, the High Court is Australia’s highest court. 

Note 3: My lawyers, led by Stuart Wood QC AM, are of the highest calibre and greatly respected in the legal fraternity.

Note 4: If we end up with excess funds, they will be donated to help the cause of academic freedom especially for those who have expressed controversial ideas and then been penalised.

Note 5: For those who would rather make a direct donation by bank transfer, my phone number is in the white pages. Peter RIdd Townsville

Note 6: Apologies to multiple donors if this is a duplicate message

Source: Peter Ridd GoFundMe Page

People who have waded through the entire judgment have dug up some truly eyebrow raising passages.

From JoNova’s website;

The judges reasoning is essentially that academic freedom doesn’t mean freedom in academia because J S Mill, John Locke and Isiah Berlin didn’t have any facebook trolls.

From Gideon Rozner at the IPA:

… this decision has proven how serious the freedom of speech crisis on campus is. You can read the judgment here, but this part in particular – found at paragraph 94 – is absolutely unbelievable:

There is little to be gained in resorting to historical concepts and definitions of academic freedom. Whatever the concept once meant, it has evolved to take into account contemporary circumstances which present a challenge to it, including the internet, social media and trolling, none of which informed the view of persons such as J S Mill, John Locke, Isaiah Berlin and others who have written on the topic.

The judges argue that academic freedom is indispensable to universities, but is dispensable enough to toss to the wind. The right of Professors to speak is now determined by students who are demanding safe spaces where their favourite delusions can hide. The judges admit they are in uncharted territory.

Australian law is now set by teenage twitter mobs.

The court went on to quote a passage from an academic textbook that endorses the view that intellectual freedom is an outdated concept:

Academic freedom plays an indispensable role in fulfilling the mission of the university… But a host of new challenges have arisen in recent years in response to the changing norms and expectations of the university. With the increasing role of the Internet in research, the rise of social media in both professional and extramural exchanges, and student demands for accommodations such as content warnings and safe spaces, the parameters of, and challenges to, academic freedom often leave us in unchartered territory.

Source: JoNova

If scientists no longer enjoy academic freedom, if they risk termination for making a public comment the University Chancellor or Dean does not support, then they are no longer free to challenge or condemn pseudoscience. Scientific truth will subordinated to other considerations.

If this judgement is allowed to stand it could affect more than Australia. Sometimes courts reference judgements made in similar cases in other jurisdictions, even other nations, when searching for an applicable precedent. Next time a dean or chancellor challenges a US or British professor on the grounds the professors public comments violated their safe space, a court judge looking for applicable precedent could very well cite the Ridd case as the reason for their decision.

Please provide a donation to help Peter Ridd defend the right of academics to speak their minds, without having to check whether their department head or university dean or chancellor or students approve of their views.

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July 29, 2020 at 12:37PM

The fall of Rome corresponds with the Late Antique Little Ice Age.
______

Climate change has been a permanent feature of human existence

tom0mason

I have borrowed heavily from an Aeon piece written in 2017 called ‘How climate change and disease helped the fall of Rome’ that the Smithsonian magazine (smithsonianmag.com) says has now been republished under Creative Commons. Attribution at the end of this comment.

In the middle of the second century, the Romans controlled a huge, geographically diverse part of the globe, from northern Britain to the edges of the Sahara, from the Atlantic to Mesopotamia. The generally prosperous population peaked at 75 million. Eventually, all free inhabitants of the empire came to enjoy the rights of Roman citizenship.

…

Five centuries later, the Roman empire was a small Byzantine rump-state controlled from Constantinople, its near-eastern provinces lost to Islamic invasions, its western lands covered by a patchwork of Germanic kingdoms.
Trade receded, cities shrank, and technological advance halted. Despite the cultural vitality and spiritual legacy of these centuries, this period was marked by a declining population, political fragmentation, and lower levels of material complexity.

However during this time politicians and rulers of Rome became more and more corrupt; Infighting and civil wars within the Empire were rife. [Echos of today perhaps]

…new evidence has started to unveil the crucial role played by changes in the natural environment. The paradoxes of social development, and the inherent unpredictability of nature, worked in concert to bring about Rome’s demise.

Climate change did not begin with the exhaust fumes of industrialisation, but has been a permanent feature of human existence. Orbital mechanics (small variations in the tilt, spin and eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit) and solar cycles alter the amount and distribution of energy received from the Sun. And volcanic eruptions spew reflective sulphates into the atmosphere, sometimes with long-reaching effects. …
But climate change per se is nothing new.
…
The end of this lucky climate regime did not immediately, or in any simple deterministic sense, spell the doom of Rome. Rather, a less favourable climate undermined its power just when the empire was imperilled by more dangerous enemies – Germans, Persians – from without.

Climate instability peaked in the sixth century, during the reign of Justinian. Work by dendro-chronologists and ice-core experts points to an enormous spasm of volcanic activity in the 530s and 540s CE, unlike anything else in the past few thousand years. This violent sequence of eruptions triggered what is now called the ‘Late Antique Little Ice Age’, when much colder temperatures endured for at least 150 years. This phase of climate deterioration had decisive effects in Rome’s unravelling. It was also intimately linked to a catastrophe of even greater moment: the outbreak of the first pandemic of bubonic plague.

See https://aeon.co/ideas/how-climate-change-and-disease-helped-the-fall-of-rome for the full story complete with nods to modern fiction of ‘climate change’.

The post Climate change has been a permanent feature of human existence appeared first on Ice Age Now.

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July 29, 2020 at 12:25PM

Efforts to attribute specific weather events to global warming, now much in vogue, are rife with errors

Climate scientists can confidently tie global warming to impacts such as sea-level rise and extreme heat. But ask how rising temperatures will affect rainfall and storms, and the answers get a lot shakier. For a long time, researchers chalked the problem up to natural variability in wind patterns—the inherently unpredictable fluctuations of a chaotic atmosphere.

Now, however, a new analysis has found that the problem is not with the climate, it’s with the massive computer models designed to forecast its behavior. “The climate is much more predictable than we previously thought,” says Doug Smith, a climate scientist at the United Kingdom’s Met Office who led the 39-person effort published this week in Nature. But models don’t capture that predictability, which means they are unlikely to correctly predict the long-term changes that are most influenced by large-scale wind patterns: rainfall, drought, flooding, and extreme storms. “Obviously we need to solve it,” Smith says.

The study, which includes authors from several leading modeling centers, casts doubt on many forecasts of regional climate change, which are crucial for policymaking. It also means efforts to attribute specific weather events to global warming, now much in vogue, are rife with errors. “The whole thing is concerning,” says Isla Simpson, an atmospheric dynamicist and modeler at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who was not involved in the study. “It could mean we’re not getting future climate projections right.”

The study does not cast doubt on forecasts of overall global warming, which is driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases. And it has a hopeful side: If models could be refined to capture the newfound predictability of winds and rains, they could be a boon for farming, flood management, and much else, says Laura Baker, a meteorologist at the University of Reading who was not involved in the study. “If you have reliable seasonal forecasts, that could make a big difference.”

The study stems from efforts at the Met Office to predict changes in the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), a large-scale wind pattern driven by the air pressure difference between Iceland and the Azores. The pressure difference reverses every few years, shunting the jet stream north or south; a more northerly jet stream drives warm, wet winters in northern Europe while drying out the continent’s south, and vice versa. In previous attempts to project the pattern decades into the future, a single model might yield opposite forecasts in different runs. The uncertainty seemed “huge and irreducible,” Smith says. […]

The missed predictability appears to be universal. “This is being pursued everywhere,” says Yochanan Kushnir, a climate scientist at Columbia University, whose team reported last week in Scientific Reports that rainfall in the Sahel zone is more predictable than models indicate. In forthcoming work, a group led by Benjamin Kirtman, an atmospheric scientist and model developer at the University of Miami, will flag similar missed predictability in wind patterns above many of the world’s oceans.

Kirtman thinks something fundamental is wrong with the models’ code. For the time being, he says, “You’re probably making pretty profound mistakes in your climate change assessment” by relying on regional forecasts. For example, models predicted that the Horn of Africa, which is heavily influenced by Indian Ocean winds, would get wetter with climate change. But since the early 1990s, rains have plummeted and the region has dried.

The missing predictability also undermines so-called event attribution, which attempts to link extreme weather to climate change by using models to predict how sea surface warming is altering wind patterns. The changes in winds, in turn, affect the odds of extreme weather events, like hurricanes or floods. But the new work suggests “the probabilities they derive will probably not be correct,” Smith says.

Full story

The post Flawed Models Are Throwing Off Climate Forecasts Of Rain And Storms appeared first on The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).

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July 29, 2020 at 12:25PM

German climatologist Professor Dr. Horst-Joachim Lüdecke recently took data from two independent studies and superimposed them. The result shows  the long claimed atmospheric CO2-global temperature correlation doesn’t exist. 

The first data set was global temperature anomaly going back 600 million years, taken from the results of a paper by Came and Veizer, appearing in Nature (2007) and plotted below (blue):

The second data set was of atmospheric CO2 going back 600 million years, taken from a published study by Berner (2003), also appearing in Nature. These data are plotted in the above chart in blue.

No correlation

The plots were combined in the above chart to see how well they correlated, if at all. The result: no correlation.

For example, as the chart shows, 150 million years ago the atmospheric CO2 concentration was over 2000 ppm, which is 5 times today’s atmospheric concentration of 410 ppm – a level that some climate scientists say is already “dangerously high”. Yet, the global temperature 150 million years ago was more than 2°C below the long-term mean.

450 million years ago the relationship was even far more on its head: atmospheric CO2 concentrations were more than 10 times today’s level, yet the global temperature was a frigid 3.5°C below the mean!

“There’s no correlation between earth temperature and CO2,” Prof. Lüdecke concludes, observing recorded data.

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July 29, 2020 at 09:49AM