Edwards v Ibbotson - Round One Thousand & One

John Ibbotson of 24 Rosella Road, Gulmarrad (author of a ‘vanity press’ book denying climate change) has a heavy dose of irony poured over his head in a letter to the editor in The Daily Examiner  on 28 December 2013:

Ice storms in 'hoax'

News from the US (December 24) provides more evidence to the Gulmarrad branch of the Flat-Earth Society, allowing them to expose the clever hoax being perpetrated on the human race by climate change advocates.

News from the US read: "Ice storms wreak Christmas travel chaos from Canada to US mid-west with dangerous storms stretching from Texas to Nova Scotia, leaving 15 killed and more than a million without power. This extraordinary winter weather brings deadly ice storms, flooding and tornadoes, caused when a bitterly cold air system from the west smashed into an unseasonably warm bubble of air moving up the Atlantic coast, creating a swath of dangerous storms."

"This is truly one of the worst ice storms we have ever seen here in Ontario," said Anthony Haines, chief executive of Toronto Hydro. New York governor Andrew Cuomo declared an emergency upstate as a result of the winter ice storm.

Meanwhile, a woman was killed when a "rare winter tornado zipped through Arkansas" with 130mph winds. Five were killed in flooding in Kentucky, and six people perished on the icy roads.

Just to make the hoax even more imaginative, the conspirators arranged well-above-average temperatures in the Mid-Atlantic states, where "New York City and Washington DC experienced unseasonably mild weather, with temperatures hitting a record 71 and 72 degrees Fahrenheit respectively in those cities".

Those tricksters, hundreds of top climate scientists from around the world, even came up with an imaginative explanation for it all, saying it was the result of changing jet streams.

Aren't we lucky there are some level heads around to alert us to this hoax.

John Edwards

South Grafton

Ibbotson replied with his usual farrago of half-truths on 3 January 2014:

Altered mindset

VIV Forbes' "Termite generation" (DEX, 28/12) was a to-the-point letter, which described where Australia has been and where it is going.

We've gone from having a mentality of working hard and productively, developing resources and industries, and building a country to be proud of to a land where the only productive thing being done is to destroy this legacy and put us on the scrapheap.

Whether we like it or not, we need to be working on how we are going to provide for a healthy, wealthy, society of 50million people (including our future generations as the warmers like to remind us).

Paradoxically, the other letter, John Edwards's rambling ice-storm in "Hoax" (DEX, 28/12) was nothing but a weather report of a typical NE US December. I lived in New York City for a number of years and the kind of weather John described is typical of December in the US.

The US is subject to wild extremes of weather because it can have hot +30C winds blowing up from Mexico and -30C winds blowing down from Canada. Where the winds meet, the temperature differential over a few miles can be amazing.

Next John will be telling us that the research ship stuck in ice is just a figment of the sceptics' imagination or just another example of anthropogenic global warming. How could this be when Douglas Mawson's ship, a wooden schooner with auxiliary engine power made its voyage in 1911, but a modern ice-strengthened ship full of global warming advocates is stuck in 3m of ice, when the world has supposedly warmed?

Not only that, but the ice was too thick for a Chinese icebreaker to reach them, so rescue is now up to an Australian icebreaker, which is designed to go through only 1m of ice and had itself been trapped in ice for three weeks in November.

Maybe all this is really due to the fact that the Antarctic ice has been increasing for 30 years, sea ice has increased by one million square km and is currently +2 standard deviations (which is a lot), above the 1980-2010 average and last year they measured the coldest ever world temperature of -138.8C. .

John Ibbotson

Gulmarrad

NOTE

Department of the Environment Australian Antarctic Division, last modified 6 December 2013:

The western Antarctic Peninsula region has shown a decline in sea ice extent, particularly in the Bellingshausen Sea, consistent with the recent change to more northerly winds and surface warming observed there. In contrast, sea ice in the Ross and Weddell seas is expanding. These changes involve both changes in sea ice extent and in the length of season during which sea ice is present each year......

An ensemble of numerical climate models predicts that Antarctic sea ice area will reduce by a third by 2100. Such reductions will be a result of feedback changes between the sea ice and oceanic and atmospheric circulation. Changes in sea ice seasonality (the timing of annual sea ice advance and retreat) are also expected, which will impact on the ecosystems of the Southern Ocean including its wildlife......

In the western Antarctic Peninsula, sea ice decline has largely been driven by an intensification of more northerly winds during autumn-spring, leading to wind-induced ice compaction. The sea ice changes are also coincident with an increase in average winter air temperature of 5.8°C between 1950 and 2005, attributed to climate change.

In the western Ross Sea region the increase in sea ice has been attributed to both a strengthening of westerly winds and a more frequent southerly outflow of winds from the continent, associated with the persistence of a deep low-pressure anomaly in the Amundsen Sea.

Intensive research is continuing using both modelling and observations to better understand changes in the large-scale patterns of atmospheric circulation around Antarctica, their complex impacts on observed changes in sea ice, and possible feedback mechanisms involved, as well as connections with atmospheric processes in other parts of the world.

UPDATE

The Australian 11 January 2014:

Satellite and aerial reconnaissance by the British Antarctic Survey shows that four colonies of emperors have been forced to forgo the usual sea-ice breeding grounds and repair to firmer ice shelves that jut from the continent.