the interpretOr

On a contrived interview on the “Bolt Report” Andrew Bolt and his guest Liberal MLA Denis Jensen worked as a two man comedy act to convince viewers that global warming is a myth.

Bolt and Jensen attempted to give us a comedic assassination of the world’s climate scientists. In fact they managed to be as funny as a banker cutting off your overdraft. Furthermore their claims about global warming were less believable than Monty Python’s parrot news.

Bolt played a clip of Tim Flannery saying that Australia was drying up and the world heating up and juxtaposed this with clips of floods in Queensland and of the heavy snow covering parts of Europe. Bolt and Jensen claimed this was proof that the world’s climate scientists had got it wrong and the Labor Government wasting money on carbon reduction and on buying back water rights for the Murray Darling river system.

Denis Jensen, a Liberal Party MLC, was presented to viewers as being a scientist, implying that this meant he is an expert on climate science. In fact Jensen has scant knowledge of climate science as he is a nuclear physicist. Denis has either not bothered to read IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) reports or he is deliberately lying about what the reports have consistently stated about rainfall in Australia.

“To summarize the rainfall results, drier conditions are anticipated for most of Australia over the 21st century. However, consistent with conclusions in WGI, an increase in heavy rainfall also is projected, even in regions with small decreases in mean rainfall. This is a result of a shift in the frequency distribution of daily rainfall toward fewer light and moderate events and more heavy events. This could lead to more droughts and more floods.” (IPCC)

(This has proved to be very accurate)

The IPCC report also predicted that some Australian regions, like the South Western Australia, suffer greater reductions of rainfall while more rain could fall in some Northern regions.

Bolt and Jensen correctly claim the IPCC predicts that Europe will get hotter but they incorrectly assumed this meant there will be less snow in Europe? In fact the IPCC actually predicts that while summer precipitation will be lower in most areas, winter precipitation increases in some regions. Bolt and Jensen’s scoffing was based on their own ignorance or failure to read the report.

“ Mean winter precipitation is increasing in most of Atlantic and northern Europe (Klein Tank et al., 2002). In the Mediterranean area, yearly precipitation trends are negative in the east, while they are non-significant in the west.” IPCC Fourth Report

(Snow is a large part of winter precipitation in Europe.)

Check out the following graphs and see for yourself how Jensen’s claim that the last 15 years show declining temperatures is a blatant lie.

htt

Each successive decade since 1950 warmer than the last, with 2010 being one of the warmest individual years on record.

Chart shows where the last 11 years have rated against the hottest days recorded.

Jensen should also have looked at Perth’s stream flows chart ( http://www.csiro.au/Outcomes/Climate/Reducing-GHG/~/media/CSIROau/Divisions/CSIRO%20Marine%20%20Atmospheric%20Research/A

The second half of the 20^th century has had less than half of the usable water than the first half and it is still declining. As Jensen represents a Perth electorate it would help if he could avail him with the facts that southern areas and particularly the Southwest, has and will continue to have huge water problems. His and Bolt’s proposal that we need to build more dams not spend money reducing carbon is no joke it is appalling ignorance as Perth’s dams have not been full for decades.

Channel 10 is doing this nation a disservice in giving Bolt time to present his ignorant, wacky and untruthful anti-environmental rants. He should be pulled into line for claiming climate scientists were manipulating data unless he can provide evidence.