News of the World:

Don Dowell writes: Re. “Simons: Murdoch’s UK reputation is trashed” (yesterday, item 1). Judging by the almost non-existent coverage of the biggest media scandal in years in today’s News Limited papers, it must be a “don’t mention the war” situation in their newsrooms.

Just imagine if the scandal concerned  the Fairfax media empire. Janet, Gerard, Christopher, the Bolter etc, the thunderous censorious gloating editorial. They would probably have a ten page lift out special edition .

John Goldbaum writes: Off with his masthead!

Gideon Haigh:

John Turner writes: Re. “Tips and rumours” (yesterday,m item 8). Crikey published:

“Haigh’s tongue in Rupert’s bum? Noted cricket commentator and writing all-rounder Gideon Haigh joins The Australian this week, much to its jubilation. So we couldn’t help but remember a 2006 piece Haigh wrote in The Monthly, where he referred to the ‘tongue-in-bum coverage of Rupert Murdoch in his newspapers’. It’s unclear whether Haigh maintains the view.”

Have you recycled this tip from 2009 or earlier this year?

Notwithstanding his 2006 tirade against Rupert Murdoch, Gideon Haigh and Rupert must have come to an understanding a while back, as Haigh has reported on the last two Ashes series for News Ltd’s London Times: Haigh confirms this in the introductions to his books, The Ashes 2009 and Ashes 2011.

The same sources reveal that he also reported on those series for your sister publication Business Spectator: Didn’t anyone at Crikey know this?

Climate change:

Martin C. Jones writes: Justin Templer (Wednesday, comments) outlined one of the common (political) arguments against Australian action on climate: “even if we switched off Australia the effect would be minimal.”

I have no particular political expertise (unless the masochistic bent required to follow current Australian politics counts as ‘expertise’), but that doesn’t matter: this argument isn’t primarily political, it’s an attempt to justify selfishness by focussing on a different (and, in my view, incorrect) metric.

If only being a small part of the problem were an excuse, there’d be no argument against the common man evading taxes, shop-lifting, or littering; nor would Australia have ever sent troops into war or contributed to humanitarian aid. But as such reasoning is farcical when it comes to these areas, so it is when applied to climate change.

Co-operative action requires, unsurprisingly, co-operation, and holding a “you go first” stance when the moral onus is not only upon us (as a terrible example to others), but the other side (in India, China, etc) has already started acting is… what’s the stronger form of farcical? Abbottesque?

It is not my assumption that logic and sound argument will win, but it is my hope.

I shan’t even bother with Tamas Calderwood (yesterday, comments).

Andrew Davison writes: Tamas Calderwood has to be joking! It took me all of two seconds to click the link he provided and scan the rest of the Abstract of Kaufmann’s paper (which I then bought for US$10, thanks for the tip).

The abstract makes clear that, all things considered, the hiatus in warming from 1998 to 2008 is consistent with the existing understanding of global warming. So what “has been unclear” is now clear.

Joking, or desperate, Tamas is definitely trying!

Chris Hawkshaw writes: Presumably Tamas Calderwood didn’t read the rest of the Kaufmann et al (2011) abstract he cited yesterday, beyond the opening line which deliciously mentioned Tamas’ favourite cherry-picked dates, 1998 and 2008.  If he had he’d realise the paper offers him no comfort at all:

“we find that recent global temperature records are consistent with the existing understanding of the relationship among global surface temperature, internal variability, and radiative forcing, which includes anthropogenic factors with well known warming and cooling effects.”

The paper looks at surface temperatures only (not the global heat budget, which continues its rise unabated) and notes the negative radiative forcing of Chinese emissions of sulphates and other particulate pollutants. China is busily cleaning up its act, so the effect is going to be short lived. Particulates don’t hang around in the atmosphere for long. Carbon dioxide, sadly, resides for a very long time.

It’s unfortunate the Kaufmann paper is so easy to misrepresent as an admission of “no warming since 1998”. I would have written the abstract with a little more care. It just goes to prove that scientists are scientists and not PR operators.

Matt Saxon writes: Did Tamas actually read the article he quotes yesterday? It’s fairly obvious he didn’t since his statement “You can make that 1998-2011” in reference to his quote from the abstract about temperatures being flat between 1998 and 2008 is specifically contradicted by paper itself. It in fact states, in its introduction no less, that they have risen since 2008.

The exact quote for those interested is:

“Although temperature increases in 2009 and 2010, the lack of a clear increase in global surface temperature between 1998 and 2008 combined with rising concentrations of atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases, prompts some popular commentators to doubt the existing understanding of the relationship among radiative forcing, internal variability, and global surface temperature.”

Apparently his schedule is full to put up with the time consuming bother of cherry picking data and only allows for the quoting of scientific abstracts out of context as a bridge to his regular talking points. A more likely scenario is that he picked up the quote off some peanut blog run by a person who also is too busy to read the article.

Googling “Reconciling anthropogenic climate change with observed temperature 1998–2008” will bring up a PDF full text of the paper sitting, surprise surprise, on one of the aforementioned peanut blogs.