Confusing climate with weather

Propaganda war is being waged

Graham Lloyd (“Latest forecast: climate of fear”, 9-10/2) tells a tale all too true. The anthropogenic global warming industry is winning the propaganda war through various deceitful tactics, not least of which is the mendacious change from “global warming” to “climate change” as world temperature data fail to match alarmist predictions.

It is time for properly informed scientists, uncorrupted by grant money, to mount a counter-attack. First, they should be ceaselessly pointing out that the vast forces of nature vastly outweigh any anthropogenic contributions to temperature change. Second, they should be pointing out that unlocking our vast coal deposits and burning them to form carbon dioxide is one of the kindest things humans can do to the biosphere and could be called anthropogenic global greening.

Of course, coal will run out one day, by which time even Australia will have joined the community of nations relying on clean nuclear energy.

Brian Chapman, Drouin, Vic

The debate about (what is now called) climate change is going nowhere because there is confusion between weather and climate. Climate relates to prevailing conditions in a region over time; not the extremes of weather whose unpredictability will always be with us. There is no question that climate changes. It has changed over millennia, long before the presence of humans on earth: sometimes radically, but ongoing with extra-terrestrial and earthly impacts.

Sandra Finster, Auchenflower, Qld

Graham Lloyd raises a concern that climate and weather are being confused. Climate identifies long-term trends over a 30-year period (average temperatures) while weather shows rapidly fluctuating measurements (actual temperatures).

Even the latest IPCC report Global Warming of 1.5 degrees C is trying to dramatically redefine climate by changing “average of last 30 years” to “average of last 15 years and future 15 years”. This attempts to overcome the concern of US climate scientist Judith Curry that “climate models produce too much warming” by artificially increasing global warming It is scientifically unacceptable to mix past measurements with future guesses.

Allan Sangster, Randwick, NSW

Your environment editor Graham Lloyd questions the threat of human-caused climate change. However, in its report Catastrophe Modelling and Climate Change, Lloyd's of London states that the 20cm of sea-level rise off the tip of Manhattan increased Superstorm Sandy’s surge losses by 30 per cent and that “further increases in sea level in this region may non-linearly increase the loss potential from similar storms”.

It’s important to look to independent organisations like the insurance industry when evaluating the threat posed by climate change. Because they depend on scientific evidence to assess risk, they are less amenable to politicised science.

It just doesn’t make sense to make the long-term changes to the Earth’s physics and chemistry that we are making without looking at this closely together, across political divides, with open eyes and open hearts.

Terry Hansen, Hales Corners, US

Once again Graham Lloyd has tried to inject scepticism into the perils of climate change by trotting out minority views. One wonders how severe floods and fires have to be before he accepts that they are a result of a pattern of more extreme weather as predicted by climate scientists. One can always point to events in the past when there was another severe flood or bushfire, but the fact that these extremes are happening over the past few years is significant.

Lloyd likes to quote contrarian Judith Curry, but in her testimony to the US House committee, from which he quotes, she also stated recent droughts and heat-waves in some regions of the US have reached record intensity and that extreme precipitation has been observed to have generally increased.

It is not possible to point the finger of any single weather event at human-induced climate change, just as one cannot claim with certainty that a lung cancer in a smoker is due to their smoking. Taking a larger view of the data and the reasoning becomes compelling.

John Chapman, Nedlands, WA

Even our own Bureau of Meteorology cannot help but call everything extreme. In my 82 years it is just the Aussie summer.

Neville Wright, Kilcunda, Vic