The witchdoctors at work: ABC FourCorners parades four farmers and a fireman who “believe” in climate change

Four Corners has become TwoCorners — it represents both sides of politics – Green And Left

Brissenden has done no research, interviewed no critics, and asked no hard questions. When it comes to serving the Australian people, protecting them, and holding our government to account, he’s AWOL — promoting his own pet interests instead, hiding the scandals and critics. What do we pay him for?

The iconic show on the ABC won’t interview skeptics that walked on the moon or won Nobel and NASA prizes, but if a cherry farmer feels the climate is changing, send in the film squad!

After years of telling skeptics that you don’t ask a plumber to do heart surgery, the ABC “Weather Alert! last Monday was 90% plumbers.

The formerly iconic FourCorners “public affairs” show crafted a 43 minute advertisement for the Renewables Industry and Carbon Trading Bankers and the Green Blob. And we taxpayers paid for it all. As usual, most of their facts were correct, but only because they barely had any. The facts apparently are that at least four farmers across Australia have the feeling that their climate has changed and are “doing something”. Yeah. Plus a whole bunch of consultants paid to solve a crisis say there is a crisis to solve.

Witchdoctors from neolithic tribes used similar techniques to the ABC so-called journalists Sarah Ferguson and Michael Brissenden. In the stone-age, a Voodoo Chief would chant a list of recent weather porn (like Al Gore does now), then loosely connect it all with the evil new type of, say, cooking pot, (brought from his competitor). He’d follow it up with some Yes-Men “witnesses” who’d nod solemnly and declare they have seen the weather change since the new pot arrived. Voila, blame the pot for the storms, “see the light” and give the man some more conch shells.

Keep your eye on the pea. All the farmers are probably right about recent changes to the weather patterns, but like the cooking pot, there’s no cause and effect link between your air conditioner and earlier grape harvests. How do we know it’s not natural? Answer, broken “climate models”.

The ABC also gave time to APRA and the RBA — both notable climate science authorities (not) — who agreed with the IPCC. They interviewed (or rather, promoted) someone from a left wing think tank, the Special Counsel for Climate Risk from Minter Ellison, a consultant from “ClimateRisk” and a spokesperson from the industry body for insurance companies. All four of these specialists, predictably, were happy to help sell the topic that brings them more business. Could we imagine an insurance agent telling us that things are not going to be worse than we expect? Or how about a Special Counsel for Climate Risk that said the risk was inconsequential and her job was irrelevant? It’s a bit rich to call these “interviews” — no hard questions were asked. Much was made of the farmers historic weather books, but Brissenden didn’t ask to see their records from, say, Jan 1896 when a long heatwave killed hundreds across Australia and temperatures hit 50C in four states. He travelled around the country “over four months”, but didn’t find half an hour to phone one skeptical scientist, businessman, or lowly blogger who could have saved him from looking like a gullible patsy.

All the alpha-plumbers, I mean “experts” in something else, were followed by a yes-man who told the audience that the APRA or RBA “don’t make these decisions lightly” as if those organisations had done what even the peer review journals never did — check the actual data, replicate the method, get the same result. Did APRA or the RBA interview any skeptics? Don’t expect the ABC to ask.

We got the reverse osmosis version of the truth…

All up, this was the Agitprop star-list of filtered factoids. We got the reverse osmosis version of the truth — where 80% of the information goes down the drain, and the mineral-free-story gets presented to at least twenty or thirty Australians, or whomever is left that still watches this Pravda type predictable stuff. No wonder few commentators cite TwoCorners anymore. Everyone knows what every show will explain before it goes to air.

But wait, I hear you say, they interviewed a real climate scientist – Karl Braganza, the visionary modeler who can “see a direct link to extreme weather” through his crystal ball, I mean climate model. With his psychic gift he can see the real pattern hidden under error bars two miles wide with a skillless model (see the refs at the end). Sure, let him speak, but a real journalist might be able to find another expert modeler who can point out the dismal failure rate of the IPCC approved models, the inconsistencies and the fact that none of the models include any solar magnetic effect, solar wind, or changes in solar spectra. They might also mention that sun spots actually correlate with our climate – with the raw measurements — and on both the “up” bits and the “down” bits for the last 5,000 years. A real journalist might have asked Braganza how well his models predict all those past turning points? Australian voters who pay something like $600 a year per household for Renewable Targets might like to know that from the dawn-of-civilization up until 1979 his climate model’s success rate is “zero”.

The show opened by blaming the intransigence of the political system, which translated, is the ABC confession that after all these years of propaganda, the voters still picked the wrong people.

Rob Rogers, Deputy Fire NSW Fire service, conveniently said that modern records are so unprecedented there are “no records” of weather existing on that scale. Which — as we have seen from hundreds of historic weather reports is false — see the drought and death in 1896, and 1878, 1939 the fires of 1851 and the news of “Australia cooling” that came out in the 1950s...

Only a few weeks ago the BOM said the same thing about warming in Sydney and scored a lot of headlines, but had to retract it the same day when they realized it had still been hotter in Richmond in 1939. Not so unprecedented.

Don’t ask about the Australian one-second record scandal:

Jennifer Marohasy points out that Sarah Ferguson and Michael Brissenden are withholding important information. New hot records are set on electronic equipment which can pick up one-second noise, unlike historic records done in old fashioned thermometers:

Braganza [BOM] explained that it is really only since the 1990s that we have started to see the extreme heat. What he didn’t mention is that a totally new method of measurement came into effect on 1 November 1996 – with the transition continuing, so each new year, additional weather stations have their mercury thermometer replaced with an electronic probe taking one-second spot readings.

Brissenden has done no research, interviewed no critics, and asked no hard questions. When it comes to serving the Australian people, protecting them, and holding our government to account, he’s AWOL — promoting his own pet interests instead, hiding the scandals and critics. What do we pay him for?

See the worst place on Earth for global warming — but hide bumper crops, cool summers and good rain

South West WA and Perth was made out to be the global posterchild for climate panic — “the changes here have happened faster and earlier than anywhere else on the planet”. ABC viewers won’t know though that the horrors of climate change mean we’ve had one of the coldest summers in two decades, a record surplus on a bumper grain harvest, and that our dams are fuller than they’ve been for years. These things are just “weather”, but so are most of the heatwaves and the storm surges that the ABC is pretending are prophetic “signs” of our guilt. Why is it OK to mention one kind of weather but hide the other kind?

Warwick Hughes calls this ABC FOUR CORNERS MAYBE WORST SHOW EVER. –

“ what a pageant of old wives tales mixed with assorted lies and exaggerations.”

Starting with the “Braidwood drought” was a dud move due to rain and floods a week or so ago in the region – so that should have been cut. Surely the show has staff that are half awake?? I mean Canberra flooded!!

ABC enables virtue signaling “free advertising” for companies that say the right message:

Mark Valencia, sustainable growing blogger at SelfSufficientMe was scathing:

One of the farmer interviewees, the multimillion-dollar corporate winemaking dynasty Brown Brothers, cited climate change as the reason for its decision to buy into Tasmania in order to “climate-proof” their business. …

I guess spending 32 million acquiring vineyards in Tassy had nothing to do with this “poor Aussie battler” expanding their business hey… wink wink. Sorry, but call me cynical if I think their appearance on Four Corners was nothing more than a publicity stunt aimed at toffee nosed left wing wine guzzlers residing in inner-city Melbourne.

Another farmer (I heard speaking on the ABC Radio promo) said climate change has made him “change” his farming method drastically! For example, he now rotates crops and cattle on his property… well, duh… shouldn’t you be doing that anyway? You are a farmer, for goodness sake, crop rotation and moving your cattle to prevent scorched earth makes sense, doesn’t it!?

Four Corners then introduces its resident scientific talking head, Karl Braganza from the BoM. Braganza wastes no time in saying things are going to get worse, temperature, storms, the lot. Braganza is amazing. Here he is back in 2016 claiming storms will decrease, albeit become more powerful in the future. That claim about storms becoming worse, albeit less frequent, is thoroughly rebutted here. In fact, all extreme weather is reducing: droughts, storms, rainfall, as even the IPCC and other prominent alarmists like Professor Muller concede.

UPDATE #2: Reader Peter P writes that the farmer’s numbers don’t make sense:

MARTIN ROYDS: Yes we have 130 years of rainfall and temperature graphs

Since 1985 to now, the temperatures have been increasing .8 of a degree per decade.

So, in that thirty year period, it’s gone up 2.4 degrees, maximum temperature. [my bold]

I was interested in this quoted rapid temperature increase, so I checked out the temperature figures for Braidwood on the BOM site. It appears that you can get an average max temp for the period 1907-1975 from a recording station in one of the main streets of Braidwood – my reading of the data shows the average annual maximum for that period to be 19.0C. After that period there are the records from an AWS at Braidwood Racecourse for 1985 – 2018. They show an average annual maximum of 19.2C, barely changed from the earlier period. And this is (roughly) the 30 year period of rapid temperature increase claimed by Martin Royds in the program. – -Peter

UPDATE #3: The great Ruairi

Many media, duped and misguided,

Have on climate-change, long since decided,

To report with great zeal,

The fake climate spiel,

From the Left and keep it one-sided.

–Ruairi

This is the ABC speaking to the fence sitting and ignorant, and the 2% of the population who need affirmation that they are smart, caring, and deserve their junkets, jobs or solar subsidized electricity bills.

On skillless models

I’ve said it before…

The models not only fail on global decadal scales, but on regional, local, short term, [1] [2], polar[3], and upper tropospheric scales[4] [5] too. They fail on humidity[6], rainfall[7], drought [8] and they fail on clouds [9]. The hot spot is missing, the major feedbacks are not amplifying the effect of CO2 as assumed.

If FourCorners wants to represent the four corners, and get some relevancy back, it needs to generate actual controversy by interviewing the best of both sides of this debate.

*Regarding the ABC interviewing those “paid to find a crisis” — the ABC should interview them — along with the skeptics who question them. And may the best argument win.

REFERENCES [1^] Anagnostopoulos, G. G., D. Koutsoyiannis, A. Christofides, A. Efstratiadis, and N. Mamassis, (2010). A comparison of local and aggregated climate model outputs with observed data’, Hydrological Sciences Journal, 55: 7, 1094 — 1110 [PDF] [2^] Koutsoyiannis, D., Efstratiadis, A., Mamassis, N. & Christofides, A.(2008) On the credibility of climate predictions. Hydrol. Sci. J. 53(4), 671–684. changes [PDF] [3^] Previdi, M. and Polvani, L. M. (2014), Climate system response to stratospheric ozone depletion and recovery. Q.J.R. Meteorol. Soc.. doi: 10.1002/qj.233 [4^] Christy J.R., Herman, B., Pielke, Sr., R, 3, Klotzbach, P., McNide, R.T., Hnilo J.J., Spencer R.W., Chase, T. and Douglass, D: (2010) What Do Observational Datasets Say about Modeled Tropospheric Temperature Trends since 1979? Remote Sensing 2010, 2, 2148-2169; doi:10.3390/rs2092148 [PDF] [5^] Fu, Q, Manabe, S., and Johanson, C. (2011) On the warming in the tropical upper troposphere: Models vs observations, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 38, L15704, doi:10.1029/2011GL048101, 2011 [PDF] [Discussion] [6^] Paltridge, G., Arking, A., Pook, M., 2009. Trends in middle- and upper-level tropospheric humidity from NCEP reanalysis data. Theoretical and Applied Climatology, Volume 98, Numbers 3-4, pp. 351-35). [PDF] [7^] Anagnostopoulos, G. G., D. Koutsoyiannis, A. Christofides, A. Efstratiadis, and N. Mamassis, (2010). A comparison of local and aggregated climate model outputs with observed data’, Hydrological Sciences Journal, 55: 7, 1094 — 1110 [PDF] [8^] Sheffield, Wood & Roderick (2012) Little change in global drought over the past 60 years, Letter Nature, vol 491, 437 [9^] Miller, M., Ghate, V., Zahn, R., (2012) The Radiation Budget of the West African Sahel 1 and its Controls: A Perspective from 2 Observations and Global Climate Models. in press Journal of Climate [abstract] [PDF] Belated H/t to Robert Rosicka, DonS, MurrayShaw, Tony Thomas, toorightmate, Pat, Dave B, Original Steve, Another Ian, el gordo, Chris G

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