Investors need to keep an eye on the storm

12 Comments

1. 

   Aaron Somner
   April 25, 2015 at 9:53 pm:

   Actually they have. If you check the research of people such as Sally Baliunas you will see a view that is independant. The main idea, as in life, is to be objective and not be predudiced or biased. As I stated earlier the sun just like the economy is not linear, it is dynamic. The thermal output from the sun fluctuates.This is the same problem that plagues economic thinking. The view that the economy is linear and that man can control the fluctuations. The Maunder Minimum was a period from 1645-1715 that was also known as the little ice age. Why did this drop in temperature occur? Why did the temperature rise from this period without the carbon emmisions that we see today? If you do a little reseach you will see that it was due to solar activity. The temperature’s we are experiencing today is nothing extreme compared to the past as long as you extend your scope past 1880. This is the same problem in economics. There is no publicly available data base that collectivley records economic history so we can remove human bias from analysis. If you could see an accurate trend of temperature recordings from the last 100 thousand years you will see that climate change has allways been with us. If you could have a data base of economic history all the way back to Babylon perhaps as a society we could see the boom bust business cycle in an objective practical manner, and we would be able to see that we have been here before and the government is making the same reactive mistakes as it has allways done, climate change included.

   • 

     Roger Montgomery
     April 27, 2015 at 10:42 pm:

     Thanks Aaron, appreciate you taking the time to articulate and clarify your view.

2. 

   Sally
   April 25, 2015 at 9:55 am:

   Putting aside anecdotes and looking at analysis of the body of peer-reviewed climate science, this might be helpful: ” ‘Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature’. In our paper, we measured the level of agreement that humans are causing global warming in peer-reviewed climate papers published between 1991 and 2011. In recent years, two studies have measured the level of agreement of human-caused warming in the scientific community.
   Both papers found that among climate scientists actively publishing climate research, 97% agreed that humans are causing global warming. But scientists have to back up their opinions with evidence that survives the scrutiny of experts in their field. In other words, peer-reviewed research.
   The first analysis of this type was by Naomi Oreskes, who in 2004 analysed publications in the Web of Science between 1993 and 2003 matching the search term ‘global climate change’. She found that out of 928 papers, none rejected the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. Our paper builds upon this research.

   We expanded the search to cover the 21 years from 1991 to 2011. In addition to ‘global climate change’ papers, we also included papers matching the term ‘global warming’. This expanded the number of papers to over 12,000. We also divided Oreskes’ six categories into two sets: the type of research and the level of endorsement of human-caused global warming. Each abstract was classified according to whether it explicitly or implicitly endorsed or rejected human-caused global warming, or whether it took no position on the cause of warming. Out of the 12,000 papers, we identified just over 4,000 stating a position on human-caused global warming.
   Among these 4,000 papers, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In the second phase of our study, we asked the scientists who authored the studies to rate their own papers. 1,200 scientists responded to our invitation, so that just over 2,000 papers in total received a self-rating. Among the papers that were self-rated as stating a position on human-caused warming, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. These results are strikingly consistent with previous surveys.
   Between 1991 and 2011, the percentage of endorsements among papers expressing a position on human-caused global warming marginally increased over time. In the abstract ratings, the consensus grew at a rate of 0.1% per year. In the self-ratings, it grew by 0.35% per year, in both cases reaching about 98% consensus in 2011.”
   See here : http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article

3. 

   Aaron Somner
   April 24, 2015 at 7:00 am:

   The climate change debate and how it effects society and economics is one that should be discussed more openly and far more objectively than it is and Roger highlights a very important fact about the sciences. The main problem that I have observed is the conflict of interest from the sciences in that they rely upon government funding to prove man made climate change in order for government to impose new taxation in the form of carbon taxes. While anyone suggesting that perhaps the climate has allways changed and the climate warmed out of the last ice age with zero help from car emmisions is ridiculed while only providing temperature readings from the last 135 years when the planet is millions of years old and ice core samples have provan that the temperature has allways changed and has been much warmer than it is today. The sun is the main driver of the climate. However just like the economy it is dynamic in its output. If you visit the NASA website you will be able to see how the magnetic poles flip every 22 years that creates an 11 year sunspot cycle that influences the thermodynamic output of the sun which in turn changes our climate. Seriously I am not making this up. The actual facts are that the last three 11 year cycles have been declining in sunspot activity and that is why you have massive chunks of ice washing up on the east coast of USA and record snowfalls in places like Boston. And when The Australian newspaper runs a story exposing the Australian bureau of meteorology for adjusting temperature readings to support climate change a much closer investigation is required and both sides of the debate needs to be heard including the scientific community that opposses man made climate change.

   • 

     Roger Montgomery
     April 24, 2015 at 5:16 pm:

     Interesting. why haven’t hundreds of climate scientists not factored this in?

     • 

       xiao fang xu
       April 29, 2015 at 3:29 pm:

       Self interest –no global warming or cooling – no money simple as that.

       “Prediction of the sufficiently distant future is impossible by any method, unless the present conditions are known exactly.”
       “One certainly cannot predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely.”

       The problem of complexity is at the heart of mankind’s inability to predict future events with any accuracy. Complexity science has demonstrated that the more factors found within a complex system, the more chances of unpredictable behavior. And without predictability, any meaningful control is nearly impossible.  Obviously, this means that you cannot control what you cannot predict. The ability ever to predict long-term events is a pipedream. Mankind has little to do with changing climate; complexity does.

       Consider the vast numbers of climatic determinants other than mankind: ocean currents, cosmic rays, magnetic fields, sun spot activity, solar radiation, axial tilt, earth’s wobble, vegetation coverage, solar winds, humidity, cloud cover, water vapors, ocean memory, hothouse emissions, aerosol particles, dust storms, evaporation, convection, volcanoes, and unknown unknowns to name just a few.
       There are so many interlocking and overlapping systems and subsystems that a computer model would be hard-pressed to pinpoint any one overwhelming factor for global increases or decreases in temperature.

       Of course, mankind’s industrialization of the world must have some effect on climate. But according to complexity science, where so many variables are in a constant state of flux, the probability that one factor has primary responsibility for a particular reaction is remote. Mankind has little effect on weather or climate since there are simply too many factors and unknowns caught in a perpetual and evolving chaotic state that borders on infinity.
       Sure, the climate of the earth has warmed—we are in an interglacial warming period—
       but nothing out of the ordinary. The prominent physicist Freeman Dyson came to the same conclusion, saying that the rate of earth’s warming is normal. He, like many chaologists, understands that when it comes to climatology there is too much uncertainty to permit any accurate prediction.
       But for some who are engaged in the old ploy of myth-making and political shenanigans, anthropogenic climate change has become their means to a political end. That may suite their fancy, but it has nothing to do with the real science behind climatology.

       Australia, sometimes known in technical contexts by the names Sahul, Australinea or Meganesia, to distinguish it from the Australian mainland, is a continent comprising mainland Australia, Tasmania, New Guinea, Seram, possibly Timor, and neighbouring islands.
       It is the smallest of the seven traditional continents in the English conception. The continent lies on a continental shelf overlain by shallow seas which divide it into several landmasses—the Arafura Sea and Torres Strait between mainland Australia and New Guinea, and Bass Strait between mainland Australia and Tasmania. When sea levels were lower during the Pleistocene ice age, including the Last Glacial Maximum about 18,000 BC, they were connected by dry land. During the past ten thousand years, rising sea levels overflowed the lowlands and separated the continent into today’s low-lying arid to semi-arid mainland and the two mountainous islands of New Guinea and Tasmania. Geologically, a continent extends to the edge of its continental shelf, so the now-separate islands are considered part of the continent.

       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_(continent)

       The Sahul Shelf /səˈhuːl/ is part of the continental shelf of the Australian continent and lies off the coast of mainland Australia. The Sahul Shelf proper stretches northwest from Australia much of the way under the Timor Sea towards Timor, ending where the seabed begins descending into the Timor Trough. Another part of the Sahul Shelf is known also as the Arafura Shelf and runs all the way from the northern coast of Australia under the Arafura Sea to New Guinea. The Aru Islands rise from the Arafura Shelf. The Sahul Shelf is sometimes taken to also include the Rowley Shelf which runs out under the Indian Ocean from the northwest coast of Australia as far south as North West Cape.
       When sea levels fell during the Pleistocene ice age, including the last glacial maximum about 18,000 years ago, the Sahul Shelf was exposed as dry land. Evidence of the shoreline of this time has been identified in locations which now lie 100 to 140 metres below sea level.[1] A useful interactive timeline of sea level changes has been developed by Monash University.[2] The Arafura Shelf formed a land bridge between Australia, New Guinea, and the Aru Islands, and these lands share many marsupial mammals, land birds, and freshwater fish as a result. Lydekker’s Line, a biogeographical line, runs along the edge of Sahul Shelf where it drops off into the deep waters of the Wallacea biogeographical area. Wallacea sits in a gap between the Sahul Shelf and the Sunda Shelf, part of the continental shelf of Southeast Asia.[3]
       The name “Sahull” or “Sahoel” appeared on 17th century Dutch maps applied to a submerged sandbank between Australia and Timor. On his 1803 map, Matthew Flinders noted the “Great Sahul Shoal” where Malays came from Makassar to fish for trepang (sea cucumber).[4]
       The existence of the much larger Sahul Shelf was suggested in 1845 by G.W. Earl who called it the “Great Australian Bank” and noted that macropods (“kangaroos”) were found on Australia, New Guinea, and the Aru Islands. Earl also suggested the existence of the Sunda Shelf which he called the “Great Asiatic Bank”.[5] The Sahul and Sunda shelves were given their present names by G.A.F. Molengraaff and Max Wilhelm Carl Weber in 1919.[4]

       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahul_Shelf

       The last glacial period, popularly known as the Ice Age, was the most recent glacial period within the current ice age occurring during the last years of the Pleistocene, from approximately 110,000 to 12,000 years ago.[1] Scientists consider this “ice age” to be merely the latest glaciation event in a much larger ice age, one that dates back over two million years and has seen multiple glaciations.

       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_glacial_period

       http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2014/09/19/australian-meteorologists-caught-fudging-numbers

       Today we face an ideology every bit as pitiless and messianic as Marxism. And like socialism a hundred years ago, it holds the moral high ground. Not as the brotherhood of man, since we live in post-Christian times, but as the brotherhood of bugs. Like socialism, environmentalism combines an atheistic religion with virulent statism. But it ups the ante. Marxism at least professed a concern with human beings; environmentalism harks back to a godless, manless, and mindless Garden of Eden.
       If these people were merely wacky cultists, who bought acres of wilderness and lived on it as primitives, we would not be threatened. But they seek to use the state, and even a world state, to achieve their vision.
       And like Marx and Lenin, they are heirs to Jean Jacques Rousseau. His paeans to statism, egalitarianism, and totalitarian democracy have shaped the Left for 200 years, and as a nature worshipper and exalter of the primitive, he was also the father of environmentalism.
       During the Reign of Terror, Rousseauians constituted what Isabel Paterson called “humanitarians with the guillotine.” We face something worse: plantitarians with the pistol.

       Gaia was an earth goddess worshipped by the ancient Greeks, and James Lovelock, a British scientist, revived the name in the mid-1970s for “the earth as a living organism,” an almost conscious self-regulating “biosphere.”
       GREENHOUSE: On the first Earth Day in 1970, environmentalists warned that we faced a new ice age unless the government took immediate and massive action. Today, using much of the same data, they claim we are endangered by global warming. These are the same climatologists who can’t tell us whether it will rain next Friday, but who are certain that the earth’s temperature will be x degrees Celsius higher in 2,011 than today. Increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will melt the polar icecaps and coastal areas will flood, we’re told. As temperatures increase, Dallas will become a desert and Baked Alaska more than a dessert.

       Let’s examine just how fragile the earth is.
       The 1883 eruption of the Krakatoa volcano, in present-day Indonesia, had the force of 200 megatons of TNT. That’s the equivalent of 13,300 15-kiloton atomic bombs, the kind that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. Preceding that eruption was the 1815 Tambora eruption, also in present-day Indonesia, which holds the record as the largest known volcanic eruption. It spewed so much debris into the atmosphere, blocking sunlight, that 1816 became known as the “Year Without a Summer” or “Summer That Never Was.” It led to crop failures and livestock death in much of the Northern Hemisphere and caused the worst famine of the 19th century. The A.D. 535 Krakatoa eruption had such force that it blotted out much of the light and heat of the sun for 18 months and is said to have led to the Dark Ages. Geophysicists estimate that just three volcanic eruptions, Indonesia (1883), Alaska (1912) and Iceland (1947), spewed more carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere than all of mankind’s activities in our entire history.

       What about the impact of earthquakes on our fragile earth? There’s Chile’s 1960 Valdivia earthquake, coming in at 9.5 on the Richter scale, a force equivalent to 1,000 atomic bombs going off at the same time. The deadly 1556 earthquake in China’s Shaanxi province devastated an area of 520 miles. There’s the more recent December 2004 magnitude-9.1 earthquake in the Indian Ocean that caused the deadly Boxing Day tsunami, and a deadly March 2011 magnitude-9.0 earthquake struck eastern Japan.
       Our fragile earth faces outer space terror. Two billion years ago, an asteroid hit earth, creating the Vredefort crater in South Africa. It has a radius of 118 miles, making it the world’s largest impact crater. In Ontario, there’s the Sudbury Basin, resulting from a meteor strike 1.8 billion years ago, which has an 81-mile diameter, making it the second-largest impact structure on earth. Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay crater is a bit smaller, about 53 miles wide. Then there’s the famous but puny Meteor Crater in Arizona, which is not even a mile wide.

       Occasionally, environmentalists spill the beans and reveal their true agenda. Barry Commoner said, “Capitalism is the earth’s number one enemy.” Amherst College professor Leo Marx said, “On ecological grounds, the case for world government is beyond argument.” With the decline of the USSR, communism has lost considerable respectability and is now repackaged as environmentalism and progressivism.

       GlobalChange.gov gives the definition of climate change: “Changes in average weather conditions that persist over multiple decades or longer. Climate change encompasses both increases and decreases in temperature, as well as shifts in precipitation, changing risk of certain types of severe weather events, and changes to other features of the climate system.” That definition covers all weather phenomena throughout all 4.54 billion years of Earth’s existence.

       You say, “Williams, that’s not what the warmers are talking about. It’s the high CO2 levels caused by mankind’s industrial activities that are causing the climate change!” There’s a problem with that reasoning. Today CO2 concentrations worldwide average about 380 parts per million. This level of CO2 concentration is trivial compared with the concentrations during earlier geologic periods. For example, 460 million years ago, during the Ordovician Period, CO2 concentrations were 4,400 ppm, and temperatures then were about the same as they are today. With such high levels of CO2, at least according to the warmers, the Earth should have been boiling.
       Climate change predictions have been wrong for decades. Let’s look at some. At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.” C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, “The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.” In 1968, Professor Paul Ehrlich predicted that there would be a major food shortage in the U.S. and that “in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people (would) starve to death.” Ehrlich forecasted that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989 and that by 1999, the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million. Ehrlich’s predictions about England were gloomier. He said, “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”
       In 1970, Harvard University biologist George Wald predicted, “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” Sen. Gaylord Nelson, in Look magazine in April 1970, said that by 1995, “somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all the species of living animals (would) be extinct.”
       Climate change propaganda is simply a ruse for a socialist agenda. Consider the statements of some environmentalist leaders. Christiana Figueres, the U.N.’s chief climate change official, said that her unelected bureaucrats are undertaking “probably the most difficult task” they have ever given themselves, “which is to intentionally transform the (global) economic development model.” In 2010, German economist and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change official Ottmar Edenhofer said, “One must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.” The article in which that interview appeared summarized Edenhofer’s views this way: “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.”
       The most disgusting aspect of the climate change debate is the statements by many that it’s settled science. There is nothing more anti-scientific than the idea that any science is settled. Very often we find that the half-life of many scientific ideas is about 50 years. For academics to not criticize their colleagues and politicians for suggesting that scientific ideas are not subject to challenge is the height of academic dishonesty.

   • 

     Sally
     April 25, 2015 at 10:31 am:

     Hi Aaron in the peer reviewed analysis of published climate science research of 11 944 papers written by 29 083 authors and published in 1980 journals, 0.7% (78) rejected human caused global warming. Of the authors of the paper that took a position on the causes of global warming, 1.2% of the authors rejected human caused global warming, 98.4% endorsed human caused global warming and 0.4% were unsure.
     See here:
     http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article

4. 

   Brodie Nicholson
   April 23, 2015 at 10:35 am:

   9.55 billion by 2050?

5. 

   Raymond Lundie
   April 23, 2015 at 12:31 am:

   David, may be we can all shade under Tony Abbots ears.

6. 

   Tony C
   April 22, 2015 at 9:07 pm:

   Hi David

   We are constantly told that this is the hottest year ever, yet ask the people living there and they say it was a cold summer with below average hot days
   Then you check the facts and it was a cold year but when you add a bit of this and average out a bit of that combined with the temperature in the deep ocean It was a red hot summer even thou you wore a jumper all summer
   In what other part of science are you allowed to adjust your figures to fit into a secret model other than climate change ?

   • 

     Roger Montgomery
     April 23, 2015 at 3:48 pm:

     People saying they had a hot summer or that they wore a jumper are anecdotes. Asking people? You talk about checking the facts. Hasn’t scent presented some facts? Are you selecting which facts you prefer? I always find it interesting how many people rely on hard sciences to argue, for example, the absence of a Creator, but reject the same sciences when it points to something else they don’t like.

7. 

   Adrian Totols
   April 22, 2015 at 5:30 pm:

   Dear David,

   The perfect storm is approaching. I note the gentleman who is the lead actor in the movie “The Perfect Storm” now sells coffee machines. The issue of running a coffee shop in the Greek Islands, watching the economic mess in Athens as the weather warms up in the Cyclades.

   The Japanese population has been an ageing population not like our own. The Japanese has been notorious savers, the envy of the Australian treasurers for many years till recent times in Australia, when high residential loan values caused households to divert much cash to these loans. The introduction of SGC ( Compulsory Super) and the hiking in rate to the current 9.5% and the journey to 12% of AWOTE earnings has seen Australia become a nation of savers. I note there is talk of taxes on SGC contributions on persons earning in excess of $250K from 15% to 30%. A much need grab for revenue to cover future budget black holes.