PORT Albert, on Victoria’s southeast coast, is a pretty-as-a-picture fishing village that is at war with the science of climate change.

Residents in the village have been told that because of rising sea levels, new housing has to be built on stumps almost 1.5m above ground level, despite the fact many of the town’s original colonial buildings have withstood time and tide on ground level without ill effect since the 19th century.

At the same time, a heritage overlay in the village, introduced more than a decade ago, prevents roof lines being built higher than the roof of the local pub, which is claimed to be Victoria’s oldest continuously licensed hotel.

Residents have seen land values plummet by 38 per cent in the past year under the weight of the overlays. Investment in the town has stalled. And Port Albert Progress Association president Donna Eades says that, with rising floor levels and roof lines limited by the height of the pub, “the next generation of Port Albert residents will have to be pygmies”.

Ms Eades says Port Albert residents have been made the “guinea pigs” for rising sea-level predictions, while the charm and character of the historic township has been sacrificed to climate change fashion.

“We’re sick to death of the climate change issue and how it’s impacting our community,” she says.

“We were the first port in Gippsland. We had the tall ships in our harbour offloading people and cattle into the gold fields. We’re proud of our maritime heritage and we like how the town looks.”

Ms Eades says the Gillard government’s proposed carbon tax will also hurt the township through rising power costs affecting farming and jobs being lost in the neighbouring Latrobe Valley.

The Wellington Shire Council says that new building requirements on the black soil floodplains of Port Albert are in line with “a number of studies and projects” by Gippsland water management authorities as well as state policy requiring the council to plan for a 0.8m sea-level rise by 2100.

Flood predictions have been based largely on a 2009 CSIRO report, The Effect of Climate Change on Extreme Sea Levels along Victoria’s Coast.

Ms Eades was born in Port Albert and spent 20 years in the Australian navy before returning to the town to raise her family.

“It’s just a shame, because we have so much potential here,” Ms Eades says. “We are a tranquil, beautiful little coastal hamlet, we’re a lovely community, and we just want to move ahead.”

Progress Association secretary Gayle Maher, whose family moved into the town five years ago, says the C33 amendments - introduced by the former Labor government and adopted by Wellington Shire in April, but now under review by Planning Minister Matthew Guy - risked turning Port Albert into a ghost town.

Ulla Killury and her husband, Rob, have run the post office and garage for the past 11 months. Ms Killury says she and her husband are now uncertain about staying.

Poring over voluminous correspondence with Wellington Shire and charts showing flood and inundation projections swamping the town, they say the people of Port Albert are furious by the uncritical adoption of climate change predictions that 1:100 year flood levels will rise from a present 1.75m to 2.68m in 2100.

New housing is required to have floor levels at 2.98m against an approximate ground level of 1.5m, while roof lines are held under heritage overlays at the Port Albert Hotel’s 10.57m.

Port Albert, according to the women of the Progress Association, flooded twice last century, the water rolling in over sandbanks and mangroves, long before a sea wall was built in the 1960s.

Deputy Premier Peter Ryan, who, while in opposition last year, tabled a petition asking for Port Albert to be removed from Labor’s C33 amendment, said a Coalition government would look at the feasibility of a new sea wall.

Here is the tide gauge nearest this port. You can see why the residents are furious at the climate criminals that advise the government and their enviro and media toadies.

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UPDATE: ONE of Australia’s foremost experts on the relationship between climate change and sea levels has written a peer-reviewed paper concluding that rises in sea levels are “decelerating”. See Australian story here. 

Here’s the global average sea surface temperature (SST) update from AMSR-E on NASA’s Aqua satellite, updated through yesterday, July 7, 2011:

Enlarged.

The anomalies are relative the existing period of record, which is since June 2002.

As can be seen, the SSTs have not quite recovered from the coolness of the recent La Nina.

Something else I track is the ocean cloud water anomalies, also from AMSR-E, which I have calibrated in terms of anomalies in reflected sunlight based upon Aqua CERES data:

Enlarged.

Why I watch this is it often predicts future SST behavior. For instance, the circled portion in 2010 shows a period of enhanced reflection of sunlight (thus reduced solar input into the ocean), and this corresponded to strong cooling of SSTs during 2010 as seen in the first graph.

So, the recent new enhancement of cloudiness (smaller circle) suggests a fall of SST in the next month or so. After that, it generally takes another month or so before ocean changes are transferred to the global oceanic atmosphere through enhanced or decreased convective overturning and precipitation.

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Icecap Note: See also Roy take on the lack of deep ocean warming here. That is the missing heat that Kevin Trenberth says is a travesty that AGW theory can’t explain (maybe it is because it is not there). Other say the heat is hiding in the deep oceans. The question is how it bypassed the top oceans which show no warming going on a decade and in the tropics for half a century.

Enlarged.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. - “Outrage of the Year” - that is what U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, is calling the distribution of tax dollars to China by the Obama Administration, through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to promote its climate change agenda.  This information comes from a report released by Congressman Fred Upton, Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. 

“As the White House calls Congressional leaders to a meeting to address our nation’s debt and spending crisis, a report recently released by Congressman Fred Upton shows that the Obama EPA has been spending millions of taxpayer dollars in places like China - a country we already owe 1.2 trillion - to promote its liberal climate change agenda,” Senator Inhofe said.  “This is truly the outrage of the year.

“When I became Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in 2003, I made it a priority to provide greater oversight over how EPA spends our tax dollars. By 2004, EPA was required to implement a new competition policy for awarding funds and maintain a Grants Award Database so that taxpayers could view EPA’s spending information online.

“Chairman Upton’s report makes use of this database: it shows that EPA has awarded $718,000 to China’s EPA to assist with control of air emissions, $700,000 to Thailand to collect methane from pig farms and $150,000 to Interpol for climate change programs.  Since 2009, $27 million in taxpayer dollars has been sent to foreign countries.”

Video Transcript:

When I became Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in January 2003, I laid out a number of goals.  As the committee which oversees the work of the Environmental Protection Agency, I made it clear that we would regularly conduct oversight of EPA regulation, to ensure EPA was not wasting our tax dollars.

One of the ways I identified that we were going to ensure EPA was a good steward of taxpayer dollars was in the way EPA awards grants to a variety of recipients because EPA was awarding millions of dollars to extremist environmental organizations.  These are the same organizations who regularly sued the EPA and were awarded attorneys fees.  On one hand they were suing EPA and getting taxpayer money.  On the other hand they were getting grants from EPA.  The situation needed exposed.  And I exposed it.

Of EPA’s approximately $10 billion annual budget, did you know that it awards about half of that every single year in grants?  EPA awards grants to recipients such as state, local, tribal governments, non-profit organizations, foreign recipients, and educational institutions to brainwash our kids.

On March 3, 2004, the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held its first oversight hearing into grants management at the EPA.

I said at that hearing, “I want to announce to all of you today that this Committee is going to take this oversight responsibility seriously in regards to grants management.  I am going to make a personal commitment that it is going to change this time.  We are going to have accountability.”

The Committee heard testimony from the Inspector General, the Government Accountability Office, and Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Through investigations, reports, and hearings, I discovered big problems.

The problems included a general lack of oversight of the grantees, a lack of oversight of the Agency personnel, a lack of any measurement of environmental results, and a lack of competition in awarding grants.

In fact, at the March 2004 hearing before my Committee, the EPA Inspector General testified about an audit conducted of one discretionary grant recipient, a non-profit organization that received a total of almost $5 million in five grants.  EPA’s oversight was so bad that the Inspector General’s audit concluded with the finding that federal grant dollars were making their way to liberal lobbying organizations.  Let me read to you the short conclusion of the OIG’s report from her testimony, “Therefore, although EPA funds were awarded to a 501(c)(3) organization, in actuality, a 501(c)(4) lobbying organization performed the work and ultimately received the funds. This arrangement clearly violates the Lobbying Disclosure Act prohibition on a 501(c)(4) organization which engages in lobbying from receiving Federal funds.”

In other words, unelected bureaucrats were using our tax dollars for lobbying.

So we started changing things, we forced EPA to implement a new competition policy for awarding funds.

One of the major changes that continues to exist to this day is new transparency.  I forced the EPA to start the Grants Award Database which is still featured on EPA’s website.  It used to be more prominently featured on EPA’s main page.  Now, you have to look for it further.  However, it’s still there.  It provides you with a database of all EPA grants for the past number of years and it updated many times each year.  This allows the general public to see what EPA is awarding with their taxpayer dollars.

In the House, Chairman Upton recently provided a list of grant awards on EPA Grant Award Database to foreign governments.  Let me provide a couple of examples:

- EPA awarded $700,000 to Thailand to collect methane from pig farms.

- EPA awarded $150,000 to Interpol (an international police agency) for climate change programs

Chairman Upton found another $27 million in examples.

Why is this important today?  As you know, I was the guy who stopped the Senate from passing global warming cap and trade legislation.  It took 10 years.

Now you also know that President Obama is trying to pass, through EPA regulations, what he couldn’t pass legislatively.  That would be a $300-400 billion tax increase.

But, what you don’t know is that the Obama EPA is sending out grants to countries to implement cap and trade that he couldn’t get done in this country.

Are you ready for this...The Outrage of the Year:

- EPA awarded $718,000 to China’s EPA to assist with control of air emissions. Keep in mind that this is the same China we already owe $1.2 trillion.

- We are sending your tax dollars to China to promote the liberal climate agenda that he couldn’t pass here at home.

And now some of our Republicans running for the Presidential Nomination are getting wobbly on the global warming issue.  I believe the global warming issue will be one of the major issues - if not the major issue - in determining who will be the Republican nominee for President.

In the meantime, during our fiscal crisis, the Obama EPA is sending our tax dollars to China.  It’s not believable, but it’s true.

Outrage of the Year?  Yea!

Climate scientists in the consensus camp are scrambling to find a reason for the slowing of the global temperature rise in the last decade. According to their models, in which climate sensitivity is very high and positive feedbacks rule, temperatures should have continued rising with CO2.

Solar effects are to all intents and purposes ignored, since as the IPCC states in AR4, changes in solar irradiance are too small to affect the climate, and other methods such as cosmic ray modulation are “controversial” [translation: they don’t fit our agenda - Ed]. So they are simply glossed over.

Just yesterday, we read that the additional aerosols from burning coal have “offset” the greenhouse warming over the past decade and are actually cooling the planet, and today, we read that solar effects may cause UK winters to become colder, as the BBC reports:

Britain is set to face an increase in harsh winters, with up to one-in-seven gripping the UK with prolonged sub-zero temperatures, a study has suggested.

The projection was based on research that identified how low solar activity affected winter weather patterns.

However, the authors were keen to stress that their findings did not suggest that the region was about to be plunged into a “little ice age”. [Note the essential caveat - don’t anyone start thinking this is some kind of global effect - Ed]

The findings appear in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

“We could get to the point where one-in-seven winters are very cold, such as we had at the start of last winter and all through the winter before,” said co-author Mike Lockwood, professor of space environment physics at the University of Reading. (source)

There is a clear double standard at work here. The IPCC and the consensus scientists are terrified of investigating solar links to climate change too closely, since it may blow their CO2 driven cash cow out of the water. In their book, virtually none of the current warming is linked to increased solar activity or other solar-related phenomena, it’s all down to man-made CO2. That’s despite the fact that by their own admission, the level of scientific understanding of forcing by solar irradiance is “low” and that of cosmic rays “very low” [translation: “virtually zero” and “zero” - Ed].

But suddenly, as soon as there is a need to find a reason for cooling, the fog clears, as it were, and they invoke the sun as a cause.

Either we understand enough about the sun to link it to regional or global changes in climate or we don’t. You can’t have it both ways.

WITH the planet threatening to turn into a ball of fire, it’s a relief to find the Gillard Government may have a solution: Kill the camels.

Yes, shoot the buggers. From a car, from a helicopter. Exterminate.

As you know, we have herds of camels roaming the outback, but only now have they been revealed as a menace to the planet.

In a proposal the Department of Climate Change has released for consultation, the Northwest Carbon company notes these cud-chewers burp clouds of methane.

“Methane is a potent greenhouse gas,” it warns.

These camel burps are baking the planet. And so, under this proposal, we must shoot the camels to save ourselves.

It’s plans like this that make me wonder who the planet is actually being saved for. Certainly not for the camel.

But has anyone calculated whether the gain is worth the camels’ pain?

So I looked in this detailed proposal to discover by how much the world’s temperature would fall if we wiped out our camels.

Strangely, that figure is missing. Indeed, it’s always missing.

The Government never tells you by how much its global warming schemes—even its $11 billion a year carbon dioxide tax—will cut the expected temperature.

Is it embarrassment that stops it from saying? After all, the real answer is virtually zero.

Or is it just a symptom of a mass delusion, in which no one stops to ask why are we doing all this. Let me give you an example from a Senate estimates committee hearing early this month.

Here’s Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce questioning Meghan Quinn, who runs the climate change models Treasury uses to work out the effect of government schemes to cut greenhouse gases.

Joyce: So, of all the other things, did you model how much the climate was going to change; and, if so, how much will it change?

Quinn: The Treasury looks at the economic implications of climate change mitigation. We have not looked at the implications of climate impacts on the Australian economy.

Joyce: Do any of these models give any sort of prediction about any sort of change in the climate?

Quinn: That is a question you would have to ask a climate scientist.

Joyce: Why do you call it “climate change modelling”, if you have no idea of what it is going to do to the climate?

Quinn: We call it “climate change mitigation modelling”.

Joyce: So how much is it mitigating the climate by? ... It just seems peculiar to go through all of these things and they do not actually do anything for the climate.

Spot on. Yet here the global warmists are again, planning the slaughter of camels in a week of hysterics over Indonesians killing our cattle, and no one even asks how this cuts any warming.

Mad.

A very interesting presentation. Based on prior patterns of solar magnetic field, the predictions are that this Solar Cycle Maximum will come between 2013 and 2014, will be about 40 to 60 sunspot number, and then we will enter a Grand Minimum until perhaps as late as 2100 AD. See video.

I’m not so good at Dutch, so here’s a Google Translation with some cleanup:

In de Volkskrant and NRC Wednesday, June 15 (and perhaps even more newspapers) there was an article derived from a U.S. press release, the sun will have about a ten year period of prolonged inactivity, we will have little or no sunspots to see, nor solar flares, explosions.... In the NRC, this appears as a new discovery and has failed to report that this expectation has been published for several years before in the scientific literature by De Jager and Duhau. See page so the Sun-Earth publications of this website.

In early 2011 started, at last, after three years of silence, the new 11-year solar cycle number 24. This happened some years later than expected under the ‘normal’ behavior of solar cycles. Based on the measured magnetic field at the poles several years ago we could predict that cycle 24 will be weak, weaker than we had experienced the last century. We also reported that two large magnetic fields of the Sun in 2009, the sun’s activity, had passed the Transition Point in the phase diagram, which means that a new episode of major change of the sun’s activity has come. The previous passage was in 1924 and was the exceptional Grand Maximum of the 20th century. The new episode is a deep minimum. It will look similar to the Maunder Minimum, which lasted from 1620 to 1720. (The NRC is the beginning year 1645 but said that based on outdated and inaccurate information). This new Grand Minimum will last until approximately 2100.

(I was pointed at this site by R. De Haan. At any rate, I finally got time to watch it, so “H/T to R. de Haan”. It is a very nice presentation. IMHO, attributes a bit too much to water feedback as a GHG, not enough to volcanic linking, but that some “feedback” or “multiplier” is needed seems clear, and as long as it IS linked, knowing exactly which one is not as important as know that one does exist and has about that magnitude. You still get the same result. Headed to colder.)

This is now a third major scientist, from a third line of evidence, all ending up at the same conclusion. This one from solar magnetic history. One based on a Fourier Transform analysis of past solar cycles. And Habibullo Ismailovich Abdussamatov based on observations of changes of the solar size (the diameter changes slightly with activity).

IMHO “Third Times The Charm"…

With this much all stacking up the same way, the present “cold winter” aint nothin’ yet. We’re only 1/2 way into the Major Minimum and still have about a dozen years of “dropping” to go. At that point, we’re one large volcano away from The Year Without A Summer.

Plan accordingly…

Jim Salinger, one of the scientists suspected of criminal misconduct in the Climategate scandal has been elected to the prestigious role of President of the Commission for Agricultural Meteorology of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Climate skeptics are aghast at the news.

Salinger remains a suspected accomplice in the tight knit international clique of climatologists involved in the data corruption scandal at the University of East Anglia (UEA), England. Commenting on that ongoing criminal probe, Senior Investigating Officer (SIO), Detective Superintendent
Julian Gregory said:

“This has been a complex investigation, undertaken in a global context and requiring detailed and time consuming lines of enquiry. Due to the sensitivity of the investigation it has not been possible to share details of enquiries with the media and the public and it would be inappropriate for us to comment any further at this time.”

Pointedly, Salinger had been an employee of the UEA before his appointment at the New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA). But was fired after the Climategate scandal hit the headlines. In an ironic twist it’s the Kiwi government department now trumpeting his new WMO appointment on the NIWA website.

Joe Olson of the Slayers group of skeptics was quick to comment, “This is how the greens recycle their ‘waste’ - it gets turned into valuable ‘compost.’ Can he possibly be embarrassed into retirement? “

Legal Defeat for Global Warming in Kiwigate Scandal

After the UEA scandal broke Salinger was named and shamed by the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition (NZCSC) in its article ‘NIWA Challenged to Show Why and How Temperature Records Were Adjusted’ (February 7, 2010) in a second climate data-rigging calamity dubbed ‘Kiwigate.’

Anomalies in the NZ temperature records appear eerily similar to those in Climategate.

NZSSC took NIWA to court and exposed Salinger and his accomplices for creating a warming trend for that nation’s climate that is not borne out by the actual temperature record.

Unperturbed by his fall from grace the WMO have welcomed Salinger into their fold. Salinger also still maintains his position as a lead author for the discredited Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that was found to have fraudulently relied upon Greenpeace reports and not ‘peer reviewed literature’ as it had claimed.

The ex-UEA man will now take responsibility for WMO’s developing of early warning systems for natural hazards - floods, windstorms, droughts, landslides, and heat waves.

Birds of a Feather Fly Together

According to NZCSC, Salinger and other crooked climate con artists cooked the books by using the same alleged ‘trick’ employed by British and American doomsaying scientists. This involves subtly imposing a warming bias during what is known as the ‘homogenisation’ process that occurs when climate data needs to be adjusted.

Rather than face utter humiliation in a court of law NIWA bailed out before the trial. NIWA’s statement admits it kept no official New Zealand Temperature Record (NZTR) but somehow managed to maintain an acronym for it and used it to acquiesce with politicians to promote the raising unfounded climate taxes. Disgruntled Kiwi voters thus learned they were duped into believing there existed unprecedented global warming when it was all the invention of shady Jim Salinger’s doomsaying imagination.

According to NZCSC the NZ authorities, “formally stated that, in their opinion, they are not required to use the best available information nor to apply the best scientific practices and techniques available at any given time. They don’t think that forms any part of their statutory obligation to pursue “excellence.”

Perhaps this is precisely what the WMO had in mind when hiring Salinger? 

Don’t you just the love the way that warmists get to have it every which way? Whatever happens they have every base covered, so they can point to any trend as proof of man-made global warming.

Case in point: cyclones. In 2009 Grist ran a piece telling us why global warming would mean more cyclones. Citing “our favorite meteorologist and hurricane blogger,” Jeff Masters of Weather Underground (not surprisingly he piciked the name of a radical leftist group from the 1960s with Obama mentor Bill Ayers and Jennifer Dorn), it warned:

More intense storms will be seen earlier and later in the season. The 2005 hurricane season was the most striking example of that trend, with Emily “the earliest-forming Category 5 hurricane on record in the Atlantic,” in July, and Zeta, the longest-lived tropical cyclone to form in December and cross over into the next year, where it became the longest-lived January tropical cyclone.

Quite unequivocally, the article stated that global warming would lead to more cyclones, and we could expect to see this trend continue, as Jeff Masters and others had forecast.

Fast forward to 2011 and The Guardian, which ran a picture article citing Jeff Masters of the Weather Underground which declared 2010 “the year of global weirding”. The effects of global warming could be seen in the strange weather phenomena illustrated in the photographs, among which was a satellite picture of a cyclone with the caption:

Each year, the globe has about 92 cyclones - called hurricanes in the Atlantic and eastern Pacific, typhoons in the western Pacific and tropical cyclones in the southern hemisphere. In 2010, we had just 68

That’s right, the process of “global weirding” could be seen in the dramatic fall in the number of cyclones. Global warming, you see, leads to more cyclones. And fewer cyclones. It depends on what’s happening at the time. All part of “global weirding”.

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