Guest essay by Larry Hamlin

Governor DeSantis provided a spectacular example of political leadership while demonstrating his climate science knowledge and credibility when he addressed a news conference regarding the state’s situation and status in dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Milton as shown below.

His significance remarks regarding Florida’s hurricane history and impacts as well as actions being taken to address Hurricane Milton’s outcome merit being displayed in print as best as possible as well as being listened to at several websites that carried his extraordinarily competent news conference remarks.

Toward that end I have tried to summarize and encapsulate his key remarks and capture the many hurricane climate science perspectives addressed by Governor DeSantis as an example of competent climate science political leadership and knowledge.  

In response to a reporter’s question attempting to connect “human caused global warming” to increasing numbers and impacts of hurricanes and tornadoes Governor DeSantis noted:

“Tornadoes – I think you can go back and find tornadoes for all human history, for sure, especially in Florida.

How does this storm rate – in kind of – the history of storms.

I think this storm hit with a barometric pressure of – what was it – about 950 millibars when it hit,”

“If you go back to 1851, there’s probably been 27 hurricanes that have had lower barometric, so the lower the barometric pressure, the stronger it is”.

“I think there have been about 27 hurricanes that have had lower barometric pressure on landfall than Milton did, and of those, 17 occurred I think prior to 1960.”

“The most powerful hurricane on record since the 1850s in the state of Florida occurred in the 1930s, the Labor Day Hurricane, barometric pressure on that was 892 millibars,”

“It totally wiped out the Keys. We’ve never seen anything like it, and that remains head and shoulders above any powerful hurricane that we’ve ever had in the state of Florida.”

“The deadliest hurricane the state has ever faced was the Okeechobee hurricane in 1928, which killed more than 4,000 people.”

“Fortunately, we aren’t going to have anything like that this time.”

“So, I just think people should put this in perspective there.”

“They try to take different things that happen with tropical weather and act like it’s something, there’s nothing new under the sun”.   

You know, this is something that the state has dealt with for its entire history, and it’s something that will continue to deal with.”

“I think what’s changed is we’ve got 23 million people, a storm that hits are likely to hit more people and property than it would have 100 years ago, and so the potential for that damage has grown, but what’s also changed is our ability to do the prevention, to pre-stage the assets,” 

“I mean, we never did the pre-staging of power assets until I became governor. Now, people like expect that, but that wasn’t what was done in the past.”

“That’s why people would be out with power for three weeks when we have hurricanes, we thought that that’s not good. Now we have to pay to get these guys to come in, but my view is, the quicker you get everyone hooked up, the better off the economy is going to be anyway.”

In response to another reporter’s question regarding the claim that human caused global warming was causing increasing intensification of storms Governor DeSantis noted:

“Oh, I think most people remember 2004, right, where it seemed like we had storms occur every other week”

“You know that we had no hurricanes at all from 2006 to 2016.”

“There was a time period we had a lot of hurricanes in the 1940s.”

“So, this situation has a lot of similarities to what happened in 2004.”

What a breath of fresh air from a competent political leader addressing climate science reality instead of politically contrived climate alarmism speculation and hype.    

My husband, John Abbot, has kept going with research into AI and climate forecasting.   One of his most important recent papers can be downloaded from Earth Sciences.

Some of the latest Nobel prizes in science, including in chemistry, have been for developments in artificial intelligence (AI).  Of course, John Abbot and I began working on the application of this technology for forecasting rainfall soon after Brisbane flooded back in 2011.    Back then, we had just started dating.  It would be some years before we got married.

We had a first AI model developed just a couple of months later, this included some hindcasting showing that the flooding of Brisbane could have been forecast given the temperature and pressure setup across the Pacific Ocean through 2010, and natural climate cycles.

John Abbot and I published a series of papers together through until 2017, after that I lost interest in developing the temperature series that were part of the arrays that John inputted into the neural networks.

I gave-up in 2017, in part because of the hatred that was directed at me, and John, including on Twitter with what was the publication of perhaps our most important paper, newly published in the journal GeoResJ on the application of artificial intelligence, for evaluating anthropogenic versus natural climate change (GeoResJ, Vol. 14, Pgs 36-46 published in July 2017).  This research was pilloried on Twitter, and we were defamed by Graham Readfearn in The Guardian.  Meanwhile, the editor of the journal was under intense pressure for the paper to be retracted.   And some time was expended in writing what seemed like endless letters in its defence.    The paper was never retracted, but the journal was closed.

I also gave-up, because I lost confident in the integrity of the actual temperature measurements being recorded by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.   Previously I put a lot of work into ensuring that we inputted unhomogenised data.  Then, when I realised the extent to which the new platinum resistance probes could be calibrated to basically measure up or down relative to a mercury thermometer and in fact, they were being recalibrated to measure hotter – well I gave up, in tears.  My focus then become getting the parallel data to better understand the relationship between the two different types of temperature measuring.

I put a lot of effort into this until last April 2023, that was after the Administrative Appeals Tribunal Hearing, a front-page story in The Australian, and an understanding that not even the Conservative side of politics had any interest in holding the Bureau to account on this fraudulent remodelling.

Timing is everything they say, if one is to be successful at forcing change and it is not a secret that there is absolutely a need for reform of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology – then it will need to be a team effort, we will need to be supported.

Meanwhile, John Abbot, who tends to be less affected by the politics, and the injustices, has continued to run the AI.  Instead of relying on me for long continuous temperature series, he began using much longer, and already published temperature series.  And from both those who believe in the existence of Medieval Warm Period and those who dispute its existence.

He had an important paper published in 2021, further showing the application of AI for distinguishing natural from anthropogenic climate change.  This research concludes:

The presence of oscillatory characteristics within proxy- temperature reconstructions across a range of time-scales, including millennial, centennial and decadal, has been reported in many investigations. The present study examines oscillations from spectral analysis applied to eight published multi-proxy temperature records, including examples representing both hockey stick [catastrophic recent warming] and MWP_LIA* cycles [it was warmer in the past during the medieval warm period].

The analysis shows that each record can be represented by a set of 4-11 sine curves from spectral analysis that include a dominant millennial oscillation and several centennial and decadal oscillations. The apparent divergence into either a hockey stick or MWP_LIA* cycles can be derived from the phase alignment of the centennial and decadal oscillations with respect to the millennial oscillation. The maximum temperature of the dominant oscillation at around 1000 AD is increased by superimposing the centennial/decadal oscillations for MWP-LIA* cycles, whereas it is reduced and the profile flattened for the hockey stick. This may explain why current temperatures may exceed any in past 1,000 years with hockey stick profile.

Forecasting through projection of pre-industrial temperature oscillatory patterns beyond 1880 AD by applying spectral analysis to generate input to train ANNs show that current atmospheric temperatures can be largely explained on basis of continuation of natural oscillations. This is the case irrespective of whether the hockey stick or MWP_LIA* cycles are operative. This process could give rise to temperatures higher that past 1000 years without major contribution from anthropogenic influences.

*Medieval Warm Period – Little Ice Age.

It is surprising that these important findings are not of more interest to those who claim to care about science and especially climate science.

Back in 2011, in fact right up until 2017, John and I were laughed at, including by our colleagues for suggesting the relevance of AI for elucidating natural climate cycles and using these same cycles to forecast monthly rainfall.

But perhaps the time is coming when it will be realised that we were just a bit ahead of the times.

Of course all our work was, and continues, to be funded by the B.Macfie Family Foundation through the Institute of Public Affairs for which we are grateful.

Relevant and related blog posts

1. Fake justifications for rubbish temperature series:

https://jennifermarohasy.com/2023/05/averaging-last-seconds-versus-bureau-peer-review/

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/05/13/fake-analysis-by-greg-ayers-and-jane-warne-because-end-justifies-means/

2. Holding Bureau to account:

 https://jennifermarohasy.com/2016/02/rainfall-forecasts-should-be-benchmarked/

3. Confused and misguided colleagues:

https://ipa.org.au/ipa-today/cyclone-jasper-bom-forecasting-getting-to-the-truth/

By Jo Nova

Lesson #457 in how to lie with science

File this lesson away in the Decline and Fall of Enlightenment Science. Nature, formerly known as the esteemed science journal, is now achieving everything a captured tabloid industry sales mag could hope for.  They’ve squeezed a disaster out of a tiny change in a short record, and from a good news story. Let’s not forget, for the last 100,000 years most humans would have been happy that a bit of Antarctica was greening.

But seriously, the only people who call this lush are penguins:

https://ift.tt/BcKfPZ8

To appreciate the Black Belt level of naked exaggeration going on here, consider the opening hyperbole:

A fast-warming region of Antarctica is getting greener with shocking speed. Satellite imagery of the region reveals that the area covered by plants increased by almost 14 times over 35 years — a trend that will spur rapid change of Antarctic ecosystems.

“It’s the beginning of dramatic transformation,” says Olly Bartlett, a remote-sensing specialist at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, UK, and an author of the study¹, published today in Nature Geoscience, that reports these results.

All this shock and drama arise from an area of  “less than a square kilometer” expanding all the way up to “nearly 12 square kilometers”. These numbers “shocked us” say the PR team, I mean, the scientists, who continue on in their best Agony-Aunt impression: “It’s simply that rate of change in an extremely isolated, extremely vulnerable area that causes the alarm.” Sob sob, and Boo hoo too. It’s a lonely peninsula, can we find it a friend?

Everything about this shows the pathetic decay of Western Science. We’re talking about 12 square kilometers of more habitable land on a continent with 14 million square kilometers of ice. The horrible affliction of unexpected tundra now covers 0.00009% of Antarctica.

It could get worse, the mosses might make … soil:

The research is “really important”, says Jasmine Lee, a conservation scientist at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK. Other studies^2,3 have found evidence that vegetation on the peninsula is changing in response to climate change, “but this is the first study that’s taken a huge-scale approach to look at the entire region”, she says.

Previous visits to the peninsula led the authors to think that most of the vegetation is moss. As mosses spread to previously ice-covered landscapes, they will build up a layer of soil, offering a habitat for other plant life, Roland says. “There’s a huge potential here to see a further increase in the amount of non-native, potentially invasive species,” he says.

It is, of course, climate change:

The researchers point to climate change as the driver of the landscape’s shift from white to green. Temperatures on the peninsula have risen by almost 3 °C since 1950, which is a much bigger increase than observed across most parts of the planet.

Don’t mention the 91 volcanoes they discovered there  seven years ago which line up with the warmest parts of Antarctica.

https://ift.tt/TOrslFU

Quick, someone build a wind farm to kill off this feral moss!