The Age (of alarmism)

It's Saturday, so it must be Fairy-tale Facts™ alarmism day (actually this is from Friday, but I've had a rather busy week, so blogging has taken a back seat - back to normal next week I hope!). No surprise that The Age comes up with some more incredible fantasy about ocean temperatures, screaming:

"Rising ocean temperatures near worst-case predictions"

followed by acres of doom and gloom-mongering:

The ocean is warming about 50 per cent faster than reported two years ago, according to an update of the latest climate science.

A report compiling research presented at a science congress in Copenhagen in March says recent observations are near the worst-case predictions of the 2007 report by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In the case of sea-level rise, it is happening at an even greater rate than projected - largely due to rising ocean temperatures causing thermal expansion of seawater.

Guess who one of the report's authors is? None other than head shrink at the Penny Wong Memorial Climate Re-programming Facility, Will Steffen, who notes that the top 700 metres of water had warmed just 0.1˚C in a half a century:

"While that looks like a modest figure [nothing is ever how it looks in the alarmists' worldview - Ed], that would correspond to something like 15 to 20 times more heat going into the ocean than has gone into the atmosphere," Professor Steffen said.

Where do they get all this from? The ocean heat content is falling, sea-surface temperatures are also falling, and the network of buoys measuring sea level show it stable or falling as a result. The article (and the report) is nothing but pure alarmist fantasy, most likely from selective, cherry-picked data.

But hey, who cares about the facts? We're Fairytale-Facts™!

Read it here.